Benjamin R. Mitchell: Phil 306 Blog Posts
Benjamin R. Mitchell: Phil 306 Blog Posts
09/05/2019: Experiences of Beauty
I’m particularly interested in the way in which we are approaching aesthetics this semester, that being by way of Phenomenology. I was just as thrilled as everyone else when I saw there was an assignment due the first day of class, but alas, I found the assignment to be rather fun. I had been dwelling on the three experiences I wrote on for a while, and I found it to be refreshing to work towards “experiencing” them again (in my mind at least) in the way in which they first presented themselves. Timid as I am, I wanted to share one of my experiences in particular, but I felt uncomfortable sharing with the class (as I am wont to do). However, I would like to share it now, if I may.
I experienced beauty during a bout of emotional distress in high school. I had retreated to a small access to the James River near my house to sit in the sand and be alone with my thoughts. When I looked out over the river, my eyes caught an incredible image of the sun setting behind the trees across from me.
This experience gave me an internal feeling of solace. I had gone to the river to seek peace, and peace did I find. The weather in that moment was warm with no breeze, and I was alone. The thoughts that I had gone to address quieted down, and for a brief moment, everything was wholly still; the water did not flow, the sun did not move, and my mind went blank. In that moment, everything was constant and I felt removed from the world. I came back to earth with a clearer mind and a weary sense of calm.
Aside from the view of the sunset, which was impressive in its own right, the beauty in this experience manifested itself as a specific engagement of each of the senses. Were the temperature much warmer or colder, other people present, or some domineering scent present, the experience itself would neither have been the same, nor as beautiful. Further, what I perceive to make this experience unique from merely pleasant and elevate it to beauty is the emotional intrusion. To be more specific, this experience was beautiful because it forced me to stop; it was powerful enough to make both myself and the world around me be still for a moment.
Like I said before, I am thoroughly excited to jump into this class!
09/13/2019: On Art as Ritual
I found a great deal of what Jane Ellen Harrison wrote on to be intriguing. Particularly so, I find it an interesting note that she argues that art and ritual arise from a common impulse. In some way, we may consider many “rituals” themselves to be art as well. In much the same way that pieces of representational art often attempt to re-create or re-present an idea, thing, or emotion, so too does ritual attempt to re-create an emotion. But what is an impulse other than a particular kind of emotion? Is impulse not some sort of non-rational drive towards something, much like emotions are? When we respond to an impulse, we just do it. We don’t think about it or try to calculate the best response thereto, we simply respond. Isn’t this how we experience emotion as well? Emotions befall us. We don’t “think” about something to know how to feel about it, we simply become attuned to things as they appear, and then (if we choose to) justify our emotions after the fact. In this way I can see the relationship between impulse and emotion. It could be the case that when such an impulse befalls us, we are then driven to recreate the emotion within it, and our recreation thereof manifests itself as “art” or “ritual.” Where I struggle from here is what distinguishes art from ritual. Could we not consider rituals to be a form of art which dons a special meaning for particular people?
09/16/2019: On ecstasy
I quite enjoyed today’s discussion of ecstasy/ ecstasis. Within the section on dance in van der Leeuw’s Sacred and Profane Beauty, there seems to be a strange tension with regards to what happens to the self when one dances. On the one hand, one is overtaken by rhythm, overtaken by the powers of the world (page 15). Such power is intoxicating, so much so that one seems to “lose themself” in the act of the dance (page 26). However, at the same time, van der Leeuw also describes ecstasis as a hovering above the world, being completely beside oneself (page 24). This appears to be a contradiction, but I would like to try and settle this. Perhaps both of these are valid descriptions of the same emotion. After all, art and ritual are both attempts at resurrecting some past emotion (as Harrison noted). Perhaps, in being overtaken by the powers of the world, one seemingly becomes one with the world. If one is one with the world, and the world is all there is, then one is both “selfless” in the sense that they are unified with the world, while simultaneously being “beside oneself,” as they realize that they are unified with all that there is, and as such there is nothing which is beyond them. Such a thought is difficult to express or even think of, but I will admit that I was encouraged toward such thought by the Hindu idea of all being one.
09/26/2019: A challenge to Aristotle
In preparation for this week, we were to read a selection from Aristotle’s Poetics. I was surprisingly underwhelmed by what all was included in this selection; most of what I got from the reading was Aristotle’s assertion of the narrative arc and justifications for each piece within it. He briefly mentioned the value of the comedy, albeit as lesser than the drama/ tragedy. Regardless, I would like to challenge Aristotle’s asserted “necessity” of each part of the narrative arc. I don’t think that there necessarily must be a beginning, some conflict, or any cathartic resolution for there to be an excellent artwork present. Now, Aristotle is particularly writing on drama, but my objection broadens this argument to any narrative, be it in writing, a play, a song, or in film. For instance, there are artworks which have no true end/ conflict resolution; take Sarte’s No Exit or just about any particularly suspenseful horror film like The Collector. Not every story must have a specific beginning. Take Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Yes, there is literally a timestamp 00:00 of the film, but the story/ message that Malick shows is one which transcends time, or quite literally begins before time exists (if we are to take a Heideggerian understanding of Being).
10/03/2019: Lewis and Heidegger
In yesterday’s class, Dr. Redick brought up a quotation from C.S. Lewis in his discussion of the truthfulness of the “history” in Terrence Malick’s The New World. The quotation was something to the effect of “you must have art before you can have truth.” In this, one may understand that taking on an artistic representation of true events which happened in the past may more accurately portray the experience/ emotion of those events. But, if this is the case, would not the artwork itself then possess some kind of truth? Martin Heidegger, in his piece The Origin of the Work of Art, within the section entitled “The Work and Truth,” writes “So it is, too, with the sculpture of the god which the victor of the athletic games dedicates to him. The work is not a portrait intended to make it easier to recognize what the god looks like. It is, rather, a work which allows the god himself to presence and is, therefore, the god himself.” Such a sentiment as espoused here seems to say that art itself is truth, rather than something which leads to truth (as plato argues) or as something which is prior to truth (Lewis). Perhaps, were I to take a close reading of Lewis, I would be able to find that what he posits is similar to what Heidegger poses- that the artwork sets up a world which thematizes the existence of the things within it, and in that world there are certain truths. In that way, maybe the artwork can simultaneously be prior to truth and be truth at the same time.
10/06/2019: An Experiment With an Air Pump
I just finished watching the CNU production of An Experiment With an Air Pump. I found it to be incredibly thought provoking and rather entertaining. One of the big thoughts that I couldn’t help but dwell on throughout the entirety of the show was that of the painful struggle between modernism and postmodernism. Half of the play takes place at the dawn of the enlightenment, while the other lives in the 21st century, and each act devotes a great amount of time to both these periods of history. Outside the Fenwick household broods the flames of revolution, while inside he and his fellow thinkers dwell on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment,” surely indicative of the enlightenment and the promises of modernity. In contrast with this, we have a 21st century couple contemplating employment and the death of the humanities, subject to the hands of technoscience and capitalism; these are the products of modernity. It is rather ironic that Tom says that he can’t hold his lecturer position because he doesn’t “give a damn about postmodernism,” while he simultaneously lives in a postmodern world, subject to the failures of the modern project.
10/17/2019: American Psycho
Last night I rewatched American Psycho with one of my peers from this class, with the intention of using some of the elements of the film for my paper. My first viewing was simply to enjoy it as a piece of entertainment, but I walked away from it having an uncanny feeling as though there was more to it . Now, I am thankful to have the opportunity to view it as a piece of artwork in order to derive some meaning from it, and to receive criticism for it. What I find interesting about the film in particular is the very mechanical way in which the main character, Patrick Bateman, approaches life. He claims to have “no discernable human emotion,” which has allowed him to approach life in a direct ends-means way. We can imagine that that is how he was able to make it through Harvard Business School and make it to a rather prestigious position at a wall street bank. Regardless, the philosopher(s) that I know speak to this type of lifestyle project it as the normal way in which we operate, as machines, are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work Anti-Oedipus. I look forward to writing this paper and delving deeper into their thoughts (and maybe even watch American Psycho again).
10/23/2019: Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry
Today in class, Dr. Redick mentioned the line “... Poetically, man dwells…” and I couldn’t help but think back on a reading from my course on Heidegger. The title of this piece is “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” and in it Heidegger analyzes 5 selections from Holderlin’s poetry. My favorite of the five selections is the fifth, which reads "Full of merit, yet poetically, man/ Dwells on this Earth." Poetry, for Heidegger, is the founding of beings, that which tells us that something is the way that it is. And I think that with the latter idea in mind, we can better understand this line from Hölderlin; it seems to follow that if poetry is that which reveals beings as beings, that the way that Man would navigate the earth could be described as poetic. After all, Man as Dasein are thrown into a world, and it is a consequence of their thrownness that they have to figure out what something is, that it is, and what it means to be. As such, in his exploration and meditation of/ on beings in the world, Dasein would have to go about naming and recognizing them (read: name them), which seems most certainly to align with what Heidegger has argued poetry/ poesy does in this piece.
10/30/2019: Heidegger’s Own Poetry
In my last post I wrote on Martin Heidegger’s analysis of a selection from Holderlin, and since then I have been tasked with reading another work of his, entitled “The Thinker as Poet” wherein Heidegger himself writes in poetic form. I'm particularly fond of the section of this work which reads: "... The world's darkening never reaches/ to the light of Being./ We are too late for the gods and too/ early for Being. Being's poem,/ just begun, is man..." Outside of the context of Heidegger's thought, I think there are several types of people with whom this selection would resonate. However, I would say the same for far fewer people when we consider what we know of Heidegger's philosophy. "The world's darkening," for someone who does not study Heidegger, may sound like some sort of "degeneration" of society or some impending moral panic. But for Heidegger, the situation is far more grave; Man has, through his modern science, strayed ontologically away from Being. There is no longer anything which tells man what he is. Instead, those identifiers and themes have been replaced with empty secularism and consumerism (in that the earth gets "used up"). This is what is meant, I think, when the piece reads "We are too late for the gods;" those gods which demonstrated what it meant to be have passed. Their world is dead. "... And too early for Being" suggests that we are far from having unwound the history of metaphysics in order to plainly and authentically address the question of Being.
11/01/2019: Emotive Poetry
I’ve recently run across some rough ground in my life, and in my search for solace, I found respite in poetry. Rather than seek answers in a reasoned, nearly mechanical way, I turned to art, and it has proved helpful. I’d like to add one of the poems I’ve written here:
What you’ve lost.
Why do you do this
To yourself?
You’re going to make this
Kill you.
But why?
I thought you were
Strong.
I thought you were
Better.
Apparently not.
You were,
But no more.
You’ve lost yourself,
Lost your mind,
Lost your senses,
Lost control.
Without control,
You are not.
And since you are not,
You are dead,
And you remain dead.
While this bit may sound to be rather dramatic, I assure all that I am well. However, the apparent extremity of my words does much to reflect the truth of the matter in my mind, how i truly felt in such a low time.
11/07/2019: Das Ding
One of the assignments I had for this week was to read The Thing by Martin Heidegger. In this piece, Heidegger discusses what it means for things to be as such. He gives an infamous example of a jug which is used to hold wine. A jug is not simply a jug, but rather it is a collecting of the fourfold into the unified one, or onefold. When we pour from the jug, we come to know its holding capacity: the jug provides a space. Further, the jug is the place from which we must always pour the wine, and as such, when we do so, there is this repetitive. In this way, we have a consistent, almost ritual relationship with the jug. This, of course, is a patently phenomenological experience of a jug, and from it one can learn much more than otherwise, were one to approach the very same theoretical jug in a more common/ conventional way.
11/16/2019: Meditations on Meditations
I recently reread Descartes’ first and second meditations, and I would like to posit a thought I had in my doing so. Would not his wax example be an early example of the phenomenological approach? He perceives the wax with his senses, touch, scent, sight, and taste. He then notices that when he places it near the fire that it appears to fundamentally change. The color fades, the scent dissipates, it loses its shape and texture, yet the wax remains wax. Descartes’ says that he knows this to be the case because of intellect alone, but I would posit that, given the way he has described the situation, his knowledge would come from experience primarily, experiencing the wax as it appears from moment to moment.
11/23/2019: Music and Dance
I mentioned in a previous blog post Gerardus van der Leeuw’s thoughts with regards to dance being the most concrete, intoxicating form of art. However, through our reading of the selection for Schopenhauer, we find another answer: music. I think that I can reconcile these two things. Van der Leeuw cites dance as being the most “concrete” form of artwork because of the internalisation of rhythm. From that rhythm, we can feel the impulse of the dance and respond accordingly. However, where we find rhythm elsewhere in art is music. Music, I would posit, thematizes the rhythm. Music is what makes the rhythm “speak” to us such that we can then feel it. While dance does possess this same rhythm, we do have to note that dance must be inspired. One does not only feel the impulse to dance; they must also have a reason to dance, and through such dancing does one concretely feel the rhythm. Music, on the other hand, forces one to experience the rhythm. Music impresses its rhythm on the mind, which then may call one to dance.
11/26/2019: Nietzsche
Zach’s brief explanation of the Apolline and Dionysiac art in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy during class on encouraged me to go ahead and read the selection in our Nature of Art book. Upon my reading thereof, I can’t help but think that although both tendencies are at play with each other, that Nietzsche seems to prefer Dionysiac art over Apolline. The Dionysiac art, much like the lifestyle of the same name, affirms life. It is totally unrestrained in the way that it inspires all kinds of emotion, from lust, to terror, to joy, to hate, there is no temperance. And if I’m right in my knowledge of Nietzsche, he greatly lauded the affirmation of life, although he refused drink and abstained from sex in a seemingly hypocritical way. He says later in this selection that the naivete that we may find in artworks is the “supreme effect of Apolline culture.” It’s strange that he claims that these two are in constant relation with each other, but does not explicitly endorse one or make any normative claim which divides the two. As a final note, I would like to say that much of his description of what Apolline art does is very similar to what he ends up criticizing religion for doing (denying life) in The Antichrist.
12/04/2019: Closing thoughts
As the semester comes to an end, much like a car hurtling towards a brick wall without any brakes, I am here made to reflect in awe of what we’ve covered in this course and how much content there has been. And through this course (as well as one other) I think I have come to (vaguely) understand the phenomenological approach as well as its value. In a similar vein to what I wrote in my first blog post, I find it truly fascinating to attempt to see things as they appear rather than what I think them to be. Such an approach has already shown to have positive effects on my ability to think critically and appreciate beauty. Early today I looked over the first assignment of the semester and remembered each of those three instances of beauty on which I wrote. In conjunction with a little meditation, I was able to approach the emotions I felt in those moments and experienced them in a way very similar to the way in which they actually happened. This semester has been rather rough for me, incurring several dramatic ups and downs, but at the very least I now know that I can see beauty as it reveals itself to me.
09/05/2019: Experiences of Beauty
I’m particularly interested in the way in which we are approaching aesthetics this semester, that being by way of Phenomenology. I was just as thrilled as everyone else when I saw there was an assignment due the first day of class, but alas, I found the assignment to be rather fun. I had been dwelling on the three experiences I wrote on for a while, and I found it to be refreshing to work towards “experiencing” them again (in my mind at least) in the way in which they first presented themselves. Timid as I am, I wanted to share one of my experiences in particular, but I felt uncomfortable sharing with the class (as I am wont to do). However, I would like to share it now, if I may.
I experienced beauty during a bout of emotional distress in high school. I had retreated to a small access to the James River near my house to sit in the sand and be alone with my thoughts. When I looked out over the river, my eyes caught an incredible image of the sun setting behind the trees across from me.
This experience gave me an internal feeling of solace. I had gone to the river to seek peace, and peace did I find. The weather in that moment was warm with no breeze, and I was alone. The thoughts that I had gone to address quieted down, and for a brief moment, everything was wholly still; the water did not flow, the sun did not move, and my mind went blank. In that moment, everything was constant and I felt removed from the world. I came back to earth with a clearer mind and a weary sense of calm.
Aside from the view of the sunset, which was impressive in its own right, the beauty in this experience manifested itself as a specific engagement of each of the senses. Were the temperature much warmer or colder, other people present, or some domineering scent present, the experience itself would neither have been the same, nor as beautiful. Further, what I perceive to make this experience unique from merely pleasant and elevate it to beauty is the emotional intrusion. To be more specific, this experience was beautiful because it forced me to stop; it was powerful enough to make both myself and the world around me be still for a moment.
Like I said before, I am thoroughly excited to jump into this class!
09/13/2019: On Art as Ritual
I found a great deal of what Jane Ellen Harrison wrote on to be intriguing. Particularly so, I find it an interesting note that she argues that art and ritual arise from a common impulse. In some way, we may consider many “rituals” themselves to be art as well. In much the same way that pieces of representational art often attempt to re-create or re-present an idea, thing, or emotion, so too does ritual attempt to re-create an emotion. But what is an impulse other than a particular kind of emotion? Is impulse not some sort of non-rational drive towards something, much like emotions are? When we respond to an impulse, we just do it. We don’t think about it or try to calculate the best response thereto, we simply respond. Isn’t this how we experience emotion as well? Emotions befall us. We don’t “think” about something to know how to feel about it, we simply become attuned to things as they appear, and then (if we choose to) justify our emotions after the fact. In this way I can see the relationship between impulse and emotion. It could be the case that when such an impulse befalls us, we are then driven to recreate the emotion within it, and our recreation thereof manifests itself as “art” or “ritual.” Where I struggle from here is what distinguishes art from ritual. Could we not consider rituals to be a form of art which dons a special meaning for particular people?
09/16/2019: On ecstasy
I quite enjoyed today’s discussion of ecstasy/ ecstasis. Within the section on dance in van der Leeuw’s Sacred and Profane Beauty, there seems to be a strange tension with regards to what happens to the self when one dances. On the one hand, one is overtaken by rhythm, overtaken by the powers of the world (page 15). Such power is intoxicating, so much so that one seems to “lose themself” in the act of the dance (page 26). However, at the same time, van der Leeuw also describes ecstasis as a hovering above the world, being completely beside oneself (page 24). This appears to be a contradiction, but I would like to try and settle this. Perhaps both of these are valid descriptions of the same emotion. After all, art and ritual are both attempts at resurrecting some past emotion (as Harrison noted). Perhaps, in being overtaken by the powers of the world, one seemingly becomes one with the world. If one is one with the world, and the world is all there is, then one is both “selfless” in the sense that they are unified with the world, while simultaneously being “beside oneself,” as they realize that they are unified with all that there is, and as such there is nothing which is beyond them. Such a thought is difficult to express or even think of, but I will admit that I was encouraged toward such thought by the Hindu idea of all being one.
09/26/2019: A challenge to Aristotle
In preparation for this week, we were to read a selection from Aristotle’s Poetics. I was surprisingly underwhelmed by what all was included in this selection; most of what I got from the reading was Aristotle’s assertion of the narrative arc and justifications for each piece within it. He briefly mentioned the value of the comedy, albeit as lesser than the drama/ tragedy. Regardless, I would like to challenge Aristotle’s asserted “necessity” of each part of the narrative arc. I don’t think that there necessarily must be a beginning, some conflict, or any cathartic resolution for there to be an excellent artwork present. Now, Aristotle is particularly writing on drama, but my objection broadens this argument to any narrative, be it in writing, a play, a song, or in film. For instance, there are artworks which have no true end/ conflict resolution; take Sarte’s No Exit or just about any particularly suspenseful horror film like The Collector. Not every story must have a specific beginning. Take Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. Yes, there is literally a timestamp 00:00 of the film, but the story/ message that Malick shows is one which transcends time, or quite literally begins before time exists (if we are to take a Heideggerian understanding of Being).
10/03/2019: Lewis and Heidegger
In yesterday’s class, Dr. Redick brought up a quotation from C.S. Lewis in his discussion of the truthfulness of the “history” in Terrence Malick’s The New World. The quotation was something to the effect of “you must have art before you can have truth.” In this, one may understand that taking on an artistic representation of true events which happened in the past may more accurately portray the experience/ emotion of those events. But, if this is the case, would not the artwork itself then possess some kind of truth? Martin Heidegger, in his piece The Origin of the Work of Art, within the section entitled “The Work and Truth,” writes “So it is, too, with the sculpture of the god which the victor of the athletic games dedicates to him. The work is not a portrait intended to make it easier to recognize what the god looks like. It is, rather, a work which allows the god himself to presence and is, therefore, the god himself.” Such a sentiment as espoused here seems to say that art itself is truth, rather than something which leads to truth (as plato argues) or as something which is prior to truth (Lewis). Perhaps, were I to take a close reading of Lewis, I would be able to find that what he posits is similar to what Heidegger poses- that the artwork sets up a world which thematizes the existence of the things within it, and in that world there are certain truths. In that way, maybe the artwork can simultaneously be prior to truth and be truth at the same time.
10/06/2019: An Experiment With an Air Pump
I just finished watching the CNU production of An Experiment With an Air Pump. I found it to be incredibly thought provoking and rather entertaining. One of the big thoughts that I couldn’t help but dwell on throughout the entirety of the show was that of the painful struggle between modernism and postmodernism. Half of the play takes place at the dawn of the enlightenment, while the other lives in the 21st century, and each act devotes a great amount of time to both these periods of history. Outside the Fenwick household broods the flames of revolution, while inside he and his fellow thinkers dwell on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment,” surely indicative of the enlightenment and the promises of modernity. In contrast with this, we have a 21st century couple contemplating employment and the death of the humanities, subject to the hands of technoscience and capitalism; these are the products of modernity. It is rather ironic that Tom says that he can’t hold his lecturer position because he doesn’t “give a damn about postmodernism,” while he simultaneously lives in a postmodern world, subject to the failures of the modern project.
10/17/2019: American Psycho
Last night I rewatched American Psycho with one of my peers from this class, with the intention of using some of the elements of the film for my paper. My first viewing was simply to enjoy it as a piece of entertainment, but I walked away from it having an uncanny feeling as though there was more to it . Now, I am thankful to have the opportunity to view it as a piece of artwork in order to derive some meaning from it, and to receive criticism for it. What I find interesting about the film in particular is the very mechanical way in which the main character, Patrick Bateman, approaches life. He claims to have “no discernable human emotion,” which has allowed him to approach life in a direct ends-means way. We can imagine that that is how he was able to make it through Harvard Business School and make it to a rather prestigious position at a wall street bank. Regardless, the philosopher(s) that I know speak to this type of lifestyle project it as the normal way in which we operate, as machines, are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their work Anti-Oedipus. I look forward to writing this paper and delving deeper into their thoughts (and maybe even watch American Psycho again).
10/23/2019: Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry
Today in class, Dr. Redick mentioned the line “... Poetically, man dwells…” and I couldn’t help but think back on a reading from my course on Heidegger. The title of this piece is “Holderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” and in it Heidegger analyzes 5 selections from Holderlin’s poetry. My favorite of the five selections is the fifth, which reads "Full of merit, yet poetically, man/ Dwells on this Earth." Poetry, for Heidegger, is the founding of beings, that which tells us that something is the way that it is. And I think that with the latter idea in mind, we can better understand this line from Hölderlin; it seems to follow that if poetry is that which reveals beings as beings, that the way that Man would navigate the earth could be described as poetic. After all, Man as Dasein are thrown into a world, and it is a consequence of their thrownness that they have to figure out what something is, that it is, and what it means to be. As such, in his exploration and meditation of/ on beings in the world, Dasein would have to go about naming and recognizing them (read: name them), which seems most certainly to align with what Heidegger has argued poetry/ poesy does in this piece.
10/30/2019: Heidegger’s Own Poetry
In my last post I wrote on Martin Heidegger’s analysis of a selection from Holderlin, and since then I have been tasked with reading another work of his, entitled “The Thinker as Poet” wherein Heidegger himself writes in poetic form. I'm particularly fond of the section of this work which reads: "... The world's darkening never reaches/ to the light of Being./ We are too late for the gods and too/ early for Being. Being's poem,/ just begun, is man..." Outside of the context of Heidegger's thought, I think there are several types of people with whom this selection would resonate. However, I would say the same for far fewer people when we consider what we know of Heidegger's philosophy. "The world's darkening," for someone who does not study Heidegger, may sound like some sort of "degeneration" of society or some impending moral panic. But for Heidegger, the situation is far more grave; Man has, through his modern science, strayed ontologically away from Being. There is no longer anything which tells man what he is. Instead, those identifiers and themes have been replaced with empty secularism and consumerism (in that the earth gets "used up"). This is what is meant, I think, when the piece reads "We are too late for the gods;" those gods which demonstrated what it meant to be have passed. Their world is dead. "... And too early for Being" suggests that we are far from having unwound the history of metaphysics in order to plainly and authentically address the question of Being.
11/01/2019: Emotive Poetry
I’ve recently run across some rough ground in my life, and in my search for solace, I found respite in poetry. Rather than seek answers in a reasoned, nearly mechanical way, I turned to art, and it has proved helpful. I’d like to add one of the poems I’ve written here:
What you’ve lost.
Why do you do this
To yourself?
You’re going to make this
Kill you.
But why?
I thought you were
Strong.
I thought you were
Better.
Apparently not.
You were,
But no more.
You’ve lost yourself,
Lost your mind,
Lost your senses,
Lost control.
Without control,
You are not.
And since you are not,
You are dead,
And you remain dead.
While this bit may sound to be rather dramatic, I assure all that I am well. However, the apparent extremity of my words does much to reflect the truth of the matter in my mind, how i truly felt in such a low time.
11/07/2019: Das Ding
One of the assignments I had for this week was to read The Thing by Martin Heidegger. In this piece, Heidegger discusses what it means for things to be as such. He gives an infamous example of a jug which is used to hold wine. A jug is not simply a jug, but rather it is a collecting of the fourfold into the unified one, or onefold. When we pour from the jug, we come to know its holding capacity: the jug provides a space. Further, the jug is the place from which we must always pour the wine, and as such, when we do so, there is this repetitive. In this way, we have a consistent, almost ritual relationship with the jug. This, of course, is a patently phenomenological experience of a jug, and from it one can learn much more than otherwise, were one to approach the very same theoretical jug in a more common/ conventional way.
11/16/2019: Meditations on Meditations
I recently reread Descartes’ first and second meditations, and I would like to posit a thought I had in my doing so. Would not his wax example be an early example of the phenomenological approach? He perceives the wax with his senses, touch, scent, sight, and taste. He then notices that when he places it near the fire that it appears to fundamentally change. The color fades, the scent dissipates, it loses its shape and texture, yet the wax remains wax. Descartes’ says that he knows this to be the case because of intellect alone, but I would posit that, given the way he has described the situation, his knowledge would come from experience primarily, experiencing the wax as it appears from moment to moment.
11/23/2019: Music and Dance
I mentioned in a previous blog post Gerardus van der Leeuw’s thoughts with regards to dance being the most concrete, intoxicating form of art. However, through our reading of the selection for Schopenhauer, we find another answer: music. I think that I can reconcile these two things. Van der Leeuw cites dance as being the most “concrete” form of artwork because of the internalisation of rhythm. From that rhythm, we can feel the impulse of the dance and respond accordingly. However, where we find rhythm elsewhere in art is music. Music, I would posit, thematizes the rhythm. Music is what makes the rhythm “speak” to us such that we can then feel it. While dance does possess this same rhythm, we do have to note that dance must be inspired. One does not only feel the impulse to dance; they must also have a reason to dance, and through such dancing does one concretely feel the rhythm. Music, on the other hand, forces one to experience the rhythm. Music impresses its rhythm on the mind, which then may call one to dance.
11/26/2019: Nietzsche
Zach’s brief explanation of the Apolline and Dionysiac art in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy during class on encouraged me to go ahead and read the selection in our Nature of Art book. Upon my reading thereof, I can’t help but think that although both tendencies are at play with each other, that Nietzsche seems to prefer Dionysiac art over Apolline. The Dionysiac art, much like the lifestyle of the same name, affirms life. It is totally unrestrained in the way that it inspires all kinds of emotion, from lust, to terror, to joy, to hate, there is no temperance. And if I’m right in my knowledge of Nietzsche, he greatly lauded the affirmation of life, although he refused drink and abstained from sex in a seemingly hypocritical way. He says later in this selection that the naivete that we may find in artworks is the “supreme effect of Apolline culture.” It’s strange that he claims that these two are in constant relation with each other, but does not explicitly endorse one or make any normative claim which divides the two. As a final note, I would like to say that much of his description of what Apolline art does is very similar to what he ends up criticizing religion for doing (denying life) in The Antichrist.
12/04/2019: Closing thoughts
As the semester comes to an end, much like a car hurtling towards a brick wall without any brakes, I am here made to reflect in awe of what we’ve covered in this course and how much content there has been. And through this course (as well as one other) I think I have come to (vaguely) understand the phenomenological approach as well as its value. In a similar vein to what I wrote in my first blog post, I find it truly fascinating to attempt to see things as they appear rather than what I think them to be. Such an approach has already shown to have positive effects on my ability to think critically and appreciate beauty. Early today I looked over the first assignment of the semester and remembered each of those three instances of beauty on which I wrote. In conjunction with a little meditation, I was able to approach the emotions I felt in those moments and experienced them in a way very similar to the way in which they actually happened. This semester has been rather rough for me, incurring several dramatic ups and downs, but at the very least I now know that I can see beauty as it reveals itself to me.
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