It is crucially important to acknowledge that art needs ethics, but it is equally significant to realize that ethics needs art. Neither art or ethics or anything else, it appears, can go it on its own. Dialogue will bring us closer to what’s real and true, unveiling the avant-garde, while monologue, even though in vogue, cuts us off from the surplus of that which is.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
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9 comments:
Great posting, Greg! I entirely agree with you in that ethics and art need each other, both from a Judeo-Christian, biblical standpoint and from a philosophical perspective. It seems that the great mistake of simply reducing ethics to aesthetics (as Wittgenstein did in the Tractatus 6.421: "Ethics and aesthetics are one") or vice –versa must be avoided if one still wants to make sense of a cognitivist, universalizable discourse against ethical, moral relativism, otherwise right and wrong would turn out to be just a matter of taste. It seems to me that the great challenge for a sound interpretation of Judeo-Christian, biblical ethics remains to avoid both cognitivist, Platonic realism (unfortunately spoused by most Calvinist evangelicals and Neo-Thomists) and noncognitivist, antirealist subjectivism (as most existentialist and postmodern evangelicals seem to embrace) as extremes that fail to account for the beauty and diversity of G-d’s creation, revelation and redemption: "And G-d saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good saw that it was good" (Genesis 1:31) וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים אֶת-כָּל-אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה, וְהִנֵּה-טוֹב מְאֹד
Nita!,
Thanks for your helpful comment. Great way of putting it. These extremes to be avoided leave out so much in their failure to account for so much more.
A comment on this post on FB.
But I just read this today, from "Art, Language and Hermeneutic Aesthetics": "Ethics has its function to orient action, while in aesthetics there is a suspension of action, and therefore, by the same stroke, of the permitted and the prohibited, of the obligatory and the preferable. I believe we must maintain the category of the imagination, which is a good guide. The imagination is the non-censurable." Thoughts?
Another comment on FB
"What we must not do is to draw an ethics from an aesthetics, which is the counterpart of the liberation of aesthetics in respect to ethics. From this point of view I would say with the Medievals that we must maintain the perfect autonomy of each of the great Transcendentals: The Just, the True, the Beautiful. The Beautiful is neither just nor true. I agree that Being is said by the beautiful, but precisely it is not said in the truth-functional (veritative) mode, nor in the injuctive mode."
My Reply.
Glad to hear you're reading that Ricoeur piece. As is probably apparent, I would say that I think Ricoeur is too distinct (Kantian?) on this. I guess it depends on how one "sees" aesthetics. Might aesthetics also be considered an "action" of some sort? At any rate, I would wager there's a necessity to also relate ethics and aesthetics, so that there's a dialogue between them. True, they're not the same, but neither are they entirely unrelated. I'm not sure why a relation - distinction formulation of this would under signify imagination - it can't go it alone either - so it's still very much in play with regard to both ethics and aesthetics - the ethical and aesthetic imagination.
Second Reply.
Concerning the second quote from Ricoeur, I think I would wager something similar to what I wrote about the first quote. Ethics and aesthetics must draw from each other, but not in an exclusive manner. Dialogue will not reduce to a synthesis sameness nor to opposite differentiation. True "The Beautiful is neither just nor true," but I would wager is not less than these, while being a whole lot more. In other words, just and true do enter the discussion, but beauty cannot finally be reduced to them. If Being is said by the beautiful, then it seems to me this "saidness" cannot be bracketed out and left in some autonomous mode of its own.
Hi, Greg! I am very interested in this whole problematic re: imagination, esp. in light of recent neuroscientific findings and conjectures in neurophilosophy about image (broadly construed, as Damasio and Prinz conceive of it for both consciousness and subjectivity in the formation of representations and concepts) and neuroimaging (esp. fMRI, which we use a lot in most experiments nowadays). It's very interesting that Kant (according to Ricoeur, one of the best allies for reconstructing a sound, Reformed theology) did develop many instigating ideas re: imagination, esp. for theoretical reason (e.g. constructivism in mathematics) and aesthetics (in the third Critique, Kant argues that pleasure in the beautiful depends on the "free play" or "free harmony" of the faculties of imagination and understanding). However, most Kantians deny any role for imagination to be played in practical, moral philosophy. Given the growing amount of thought-experiments in moral, legal & political philosophy nowadays, I think we should revisit this possibility. Some Kantians fear that by assigning a central role for imagination in Kant's philosophy overall (as Heidegger famously did) we might end up with moral nihilism or decisionism (Heidegger's Nazi fiasco just attests to this danger). Still, I think that if we carefully distinguish between reproductive (as in geometry) and productive (as in artistic creation and creativity) imagination, we might come up with some interesting conception of imagination for moral praxis & ethics (I think Rawls tried to do something like that, sub species aeternitatis ("Thus to see our place in society from the perspective of this position is to see it sub specie aeternitatis: it is to regard the human situation not only from all social but also from all temporal points of view." A Theory of Justice, p. 587) I also found this interesting book review on imagination in Kant
Hi Nita,
Great to hear of your interest in this topic. There's so much fantastic stuff coming up in neuroscience. Exciting! And how quickly the changes come down the pipeline. Yes, Kant's work is a major turning point in imagination. I agree that imagination has often been ignored in moral - practical philosophy (and theology too), and that it's a good time to bring it back in to these discussions. I was pleasantly surprised in reading Rawls to discover how significant a role imagination played in his theory. Thanks for the book review piece.
Thanks, Greg! I'm posting this on FB
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