Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte - Volume 115, Issue 4, 2023

Schopenhauer’s pessimism, aesthetic contemplation and the value of art

According to Schopenhauer, the aesthetic contemplation of art temporarily offers some kind of redemption: art is valuable because of its liberating effect on the spectator’s will, i.e. his or her urges, strivings and desires. He also acknowledges that works of art have cognitive value, since they offer insight into timeless Platonic Ideas. I argue that Schopenhauer is right to acknowledge the cognitive value of art, but that his aesthetic Platonism is flawed and thus cannot offer a solid foundation for the envisaged redemption, let alone for human happiness. By confronting Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory with some aspects of Kant’s, I aim to show that by disentangling Schopenhauer’s theory from Platonism and focusing on his psychology of aesthetic contemplation we can provide a more plausible view of aesthetic contemplation, which is compatible with Schopenhauerian pessimism as well as with the possibility of human happiness.

The Immersive Experience of Art: Deception or Emancipation?

The immersive experience plays an increasingly important role in the contemporary experience of art. Digital and multimedia technologies are used to make works of art accessible to a broad and diverse audience. In popular discourse, this evolution is often framed in a narrative of democratization and social emancipation through the participation in art. In the background of that narrative resounds the Schillerian ideal of aesthetic Bildung, which regards the experience of beauty as a necessary condition for achieving individual and political freedom. The question, however, is whether the contemporary immersive art experience is not fundamentally different from the pre-digital aesthetic experience, and what the repercussions of this would be for its emancipatory potential. This contribution examines the aesthetic characteristics of the immersive experience, including a case study of the work Sleep by the post-classical composer Max Richter, in order to assess the extent to which the contemporary immersive art experience can be understood as a continuation or, on the contrary, a departure from the Schillerian vision of art.

Aesthics: Art and moral attuning.

Art can help us understand everyday moral deliberation. Better perhaps than ethics. People don’t just act randomly in moral situations nor do they argue internally about which ethical principle to follow before deciding what to do. We built our moral sensitivity whilst living our lives, adhering to aesthetic norms of interaction. Regular engagement with works of art educates our moral sensitivity.

Genderism and Realism. A Reading of Émile Zola’s The Masterpiece

Does sexual morality play a role in our perception of reality? This contribution explores the rise of modernity as a radical change of perception. This is done by reading an 1886 novel on painting, Émile Zola’s L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece). The Masterpiece is a novel that meticulously explores the relationship between reality and representation in which the genderism implications become clear. Zola comments implicitly on the paintings of Éduoard Manet, on which naked women are depicted without any symbolism, which makes them ‘scandalous’. Contrary to Zola’s essayistic work on naturalism, the novel makes clear that the revolution of ‘naturalism’ in painting takes place within a gendered framework. The nakedness of the female model, which represented in the first half of the nineteenth century the highest ideal of beauty in a predominantly male culture, becomes the nakedness of reality, understood as a transgression of a gendered moral order. In The Masterpiece, painting comes to nothing, depicted by the suicide of the painter who fails to create his masterpiece. In doing so, Zola bids farewell to his initial enthusiasm for Manet’s work, and in the form of a novel he describes the ultimate consequence of naturalism, namely that ever-changing life cannot be depicted at all. In this article, The Masterpiece is interpreted as an ‘iconoclastic’ novel, in which the real protagonist is Christine, who resists Claude’s gaze fixed on her as a model. In doing so, Zola creates a triumph of literary naturalism over painting, but does not get beyond an essentialist genderism; the difference between man (representation of reality) and woman (presence of real life).

Escapism as artistic politics: propaganda in Black Panther (2018)

Escapism is omnipresent in contemporary mass art, even though it has a bad reputation. This article traces that reputation back to a pragmatist conviction that art should give expression to experiences, and morals, from everyday practical life. Through a philosophical conversation with two pragmatist aestheticians, W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul C. Taylor, and an art-critical discussion of an escapist film, Black Panther (2018), I provide a pragmatist defence of the use of escapism as political-aesthetic motif. Works that set themselves the task of communicating standards of radical equality (among which: standards of racial equality applicable to white supremacist societies), cannot appropriately express what they want since they necessarily fail to appropriately address their audience. The only utopian course that remains is to react negatively to, by trying to escape, the norms that a present audience necessarily imports from white supremacist society.

The time of art: Negri and Virno on kairòs, language, and creation.

Negri and Virno aim to establish a concept of art that demonstrates a difference within a contemporary society that they see as completely dominated by the market. A time regime presenting the spheres of work and non-work as separate, structures human life. Yet in fact, work today stretches beyond the borders of both spheres. Labor power consists mainly in creativity, communication, and cooperation. Virno and Negri state that a market-oriented time regime that perpetuates a divide between labor time and non-labor time presents itself as a dismeasure. It attempts to objectively measure and structure something that is really a dynamic and intersubjective matter, namely the immaterial traits that are also potentially productive of life in general, and that are productive of art. When Negri and Virno call the work of art a singular mode of labor power, they imply that it deploys the elements of labor power in a manner that is different from market-oriented labor, that it exploits their capacity to produce life itself in a meaningful way. Yet neither Negri nor Virno puts forth a broad concept of art that embodies the potential that they attribute to it. This article aims to extend Negri’s and Virno’s proposals and present a conceptualization of the nature of the artwork that would posit the difference in relation to dismeasure of the market as Negri and Virno conceive it.

Envy, jealousy, and covetousness

Envy, jealousy, and covetousness are three similar phenomena that people commonly refer to by using one word: ‘jealousy’. Can they be distinguished, and if so, how? More specifically, in which way(s) is envy different from jealousy proper and covetousness? In this article I argue that these three phenomena are intimately related because they all exhibit a ‘triangular’ structure: each involves an I, an object that is valued, and another person. The differences between envy and jealousy proper, and between envy and covetousness, can be illustrated by looking at these triangular structures. I will argue that a key difference between envy and jealousy proper is that in envy I desire the valued object that is currently possessed by the other person, whereas in jealousy proper I myself (believe to) possess the valued object and want to protect it from being taken from me by the other person. A key difference between envy and covetousness concerns the role and meaning of the other person: in envy I perceive the other person as someone who makes me feel inferior because (s)he possesses the valued object, whereas in covetousness the other person is virtually absent in my experience – I perceive him or her as being merely the ‘accidental’ possessor of the valued object.