Relation to the world· Aesthetics
Truth
Axis: Purpose of art — What is art for: to give pleasure, to reveal truth, or to transform the world?
Art is a path to knowledge: it discloses a truth that the concept cannot reach, the essence of the world, the opening of being, or time regained. Its greatness lies in what it lets us see, not in the pleasure it gives or the cause it serves.
Movements 1
Romanticismexplicit
If art creates rather than imitates, it is because it reaches what neither concept nor science can utter: the absolute, the infinite, the lost unity of spirit and nature. The work is neither ornament nor diversion but an organ of truth, the highest one, there where discursive philosophy fails. crowns art as the completion of the system; seeks to « romanticize » the world so as to give it back its mystery.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism · Novalis, Pollen
Philosophers 4
Hegelexplicit
Art's sole end is not pleasure: it gives the Idea a sensuous form, and is thus one of the three ways, with religion and philosophy, in which absolute spirit knows itself. But because modern inwardness overflows every sensuous form, art, on the side of its highest vocation, is for us "a thing of the past": not that we stop making it, but that it is no longer where the highest is uttered.
Lectures on Aesthetics, Introduction (Lectures)
Schopenhauerexplicit
Art delivers a knowledge that science cannot reach: , become a pure subject of knowing, grasps the Ideas, the eternal forms of things, and communicates them. This contemplation is at the same time deliverance, for beauty suspends the will and the wrests us from it by main force. Music holds a place apart: a copy not of the Ideas but of the will itself, it is the metaphysics of the world made audible.
The World as Will and Representation, Book III, §§34-52
Platoexplicit
Art is never judged by the pleasure it gives but by its truth and its moral effect: mimetic poetry is condemned for flattering the soul's lower part and straying from the truth. Conversely, the admits a regulated music and stories that shape character and tune the soul to harmony, making art an instrument of formation.
Republic, X, 605a-608b · Republic, III, 398c-401d
Show inferred positions (1)
Aristotleinferable
Poetry yields pleasure, but it aims above all at truth: more philosophical than history, it speaks the universal and the possible rather than the particular. The catharsis of the passions, a purgation of fear and pity through tragedy, adds a transformative function, hence a shared weight tilted toward truth.
Poetics, 6 (1449b) and 9 (1451b)