Reflection Paper No.

1:
ART, NATURE, AND RATIONALITY
Man as a rational animal is an artificial definition. We need to suppress the animal in us,
thus it is an imperative for us to sublimate our inner desires and affections to something socially
productive. It was discussed that man himself is defined by rationality. This means that to be
defined by reason is an attempt to be a true man.
In psychology, sublimation is a mature type of defense mechanism where socially
unacceptable impulses or idealizations are consciously transformed into socially acceptable
actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse. It allows
people to function normally in culturally acceptable ways. It is also a process of deflecting sexual
instincts into acts of higher social valuation, being "an especially conspicuous feature of cultural
development; it is what makes it possible for higher psychical activities, scientific, artistic or
ideological, to play such an important part in civilized life. It can also be the unwitting
substitution of a partial satisfaction with social approval for the pursuit of a direct satisfaction
which would be contrary to one's ideals or to the judgment of social censors and other important
people who surround one. The substitution might not be quite what we want, but it is the only
way that we can get part of our satisfaction and feel secure, too.
Thus, the moment that the good suppresses evil, as what is happening in sublimation,
creativity takes place. Well for some reasons, that is happening in the essence of art, since art is
the focus of aesthetics. When one makes use of his time instead of doing such unproductive and
evildoings, in creating something visual entertaining, it is a great triumph for him to be rational.
Philosophers began to say that reason by itself could not explain beauty. Beauty may have some
rational properties, such as order, symmetry, and proportion, but it is really an experience not
explained by reason alone. It is understood through intuition and experienced with human feeling
and emotion. An aesthetic experience could include a mixture of feeling, such as pleasure, rage,
grief, suffering, and joy. Aesthetics has a long history, going back at least to the eighteenth
century, where philosophers sought, among other things, to produce accounts of taste, then
understood as a cognitive faculty, much like imagination or memory, which appreciated beauty.
Along the way, key aesthetic terms were introduced and explored, such as the notion of art
having special formal qualities that distinguish it from non-art, and the aesthetic as a special kind
of experience or even an attitude.
Nietzsche now calls philosophy as a Gay Science where he presents a series of
aphorisms on women. The Gay Science is Nietzsches answer to the nineteenth centurys disease
of nihilism. As Nietzsche puts it in the Preface: The trust in life is gone: life itself has become
a problem. But in the very next sentence he reveals his response. Yet one should not jump to
the conclusion that this necessarily makes one gloomy. Even love of life is still possible, only
one loves differently. The Gay Science then proceeds to diagnose the disease and offer
suggestions as to how to learn to love life differently.
Immanuel Kant interpreted aesthetics as a field giving priority to form over function.
Beauty, he said, was independent of any particular figure with which it was attached. A horse

might be beautiful apart from whether it raced well. He asserted that knowledge is not something
that is created merely by outside institutions but also by our natural constitution. The seat of
judgment now moved from medieval reasoning toward the idea that human intuition could be a
source of knowing.
If we will see, we can say that, Art is an imitation of nature. The imitation theory is
traditionally alleged to maintain that the artist copies or reproduces things, people, and events
from reality, making an image which is an imitation of them. It is natural enough, perhaps, for
nave reflection to center first of all round the relationship between an image and its object; and
equally natural to treat a picture, statue, or a graphic description as an imitation of reality. The
problem of imitation, or reproducing the appearance of a model, has harassed philosophers
ever since Plato censured art as a copy of a copy.
Plato said that art makes a copy of nature. This would seem simple enough, but it is really
complex. A copy can mean a re-presentation of nature or an interpretation of nature. Plato
argued that artists make copies of nature, but nature is a copy of great Forms. Forms refer to
great Ideas or Principles hidden from sight, indeed, behind the creation of things as we perceive
them. In other words, the things that people perceive in the material world are shadows of great
Ideas that cannot be witnessed by human eyes.
Both Plato and Aristotle saw in mimesis the representation of nature. Plato wrote about
mimesis in both Ion and The Republic (Books II, III, and X). In Ion, he states that poetry is the
art of divine madness, or inspiration. Because the poet is subject to this divine madness, instead
of possessing "art" or "knowledge" (techne) of the subject (532c), the poet does not speak truth
(as characterized by Plato's account of the Forms). As Plato has it, only truth is the concern of the
philosopher. As culture in those days did not consist in the solitary reading of books, but in the
listening to performances, the recitals of orators (and poets), or the acting out by classical actors
of tragedy, Plato maintained in his critique that theatre was not sufficient in conveying the truth
(540c). He was concerned that actors or orators were thus able to persuade an audience by
rhetoric rather than by telling the truth (535b).
Similar to Plato's writings about mimesis, Aristotle also defined mimesis as the perfection and
imitation of nature. Art is not only imitation but also the use of mathematical ideas and symmetry
in the search for the perfect, the timeless and contrasting being with becoming. Nature is full of
change, decay, and cycles, but art can also search for what is everlasting and the first causes of
natural phenomena. Aristotle wrote about the idea of four causes in nature. The first formal
cause is like a blueprint, or an immortal idea. The second cause is the material, or what a thing is
made out of. The third cause is the process and the agent, in which the artist or creator makes the
thing. The fourth cause is the good, or the purpose and end of a thing, known as telos.
Aristotle revised this notion slightly. In the art of playwriting, for example, a specific
work of art represented a higher idea. A tragic play exemplified the more elevated idea of
someone falling from a higher to a lower estate. The play gives particularity to this abstract idea.
Aristotle also saw the higher Form in nature itself, as the form of an oak tree is hidden in its seed.
Reflection Paper No. 2:

PLATO: First to Concede Aesthetics

Art cannot be justified in words. It goes from feeling to feeling, unobstructed by explicit
measures of value. It is measured entirely by its effect, which is neither quantifiable nor
definable. This does not mean that art is just a matter of taste. Taste is not the determinant of
goodness; it is the pathway to it. When you get there you dont have to say why something is
good art. All you have to do is point and say, That is.
In Book II of The Republic, Plato labels Socrates' discourse with his apprentices.
Socrates advises we should not utterly esteem poetry as being proficient of getting certainty. He
also adds that we who heed to poetry should be on our watch alongside its seductions, since the
poet has no place in our idea of God. In developing this in Book X, Plato told of Socrates'
metaphor of the three beds: one bed exists as an idea made by God (the Platonic ideal); one is
made by the carpenter, in imitation of God's idea; one is made by the artist in imitation of the
carpenter's.
So the artist's bed is twice removed from the truth. The copiers only touch on a small
part of things as they really are, where a bed may appear differently from various points of view,
looked at obliquely or directly, or differently again in a mirror. So painters or poets, though they
may paint or describe a carpenter or any other maker of things, know nothing of the carpenter's
(the craftsman's) art, and though the better painters or poets they are, the more faithfully their
works of art will resemble the reality of the carpenter making a bed, nonetheless the imitators
will still not attain the truth (of God's creation).
Dwelling upon this, art represents things we recognize. But maybe it goes deeper than
that. When realistic images or patterns are seen in an abstract painting, they are often parallels
brought about by processes in painting which echo processes in nature. Furthermore, I have
noticed that procedures in art-making resemble those in nature, particularly evolutionary nature.
Certainly the aesthetic attitude reflects the specialized, simultaneous attention to the whole and to
minute detail that nature insists on for all life. Everything around us, everything we are, and
everything we do have evolved together for millions of years. We have more in common with a
rock than we think.
The realist/abstract distinction in visual art is a useful one, but it is not precise. The
most realistic photographic representation is abstracted (taken from) the thing represented,
and the extent of representation is always a matter of degree. Non-representational visual art is
new to our civilization and remains controversial. It is less a matter of discarding realism than a
condition of change caused by intrinsic demands of modernist innovation. It confirms Walter
Paters contention that All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. Eventually it
will no longer be an issue. When you have made a good painting it is tempting to start a new
painting in the same mode. But things change. What you have brought over from the first
painting may not be in sync with what is happening in the new painting. Try starting not with the
visible forms of the successful picture, but with a memory of the process, what your attitude was,
what you were thinking and feeling. The new picture will not end up looking like the earlier one,
but it may end up better.

We can also say that good art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by
emulating the best of the past. Good art looks new because the artist has recombined something
old to make something better. Modernism seems to tell us that art has to be new to be any good,
but artists who strain to make art that looks new usually make art that looks like other artists who
are trying to make art that looks new. This is why most of the art of any time looks dated. New
art is not always good art, but good art is always new art. An art writer once wrote that stale
artifacts of the past are irrelevant because they are not active components of the present
moment. But stale artifacts of the past are always active components of the present
moment when they are experienced in the present moment. To an art historian, a Giotto is a 14th
century painting. To an art lover it was painted yesterday.
Art is either good or not. Relevance has nothing to do with it. Postmodernism shuns
useful rules and conventions and rationalizes inferior art by wrapping it in wordsa suit of
armor with no one inside. It thrives in the academy, where language abandons reality to serve
ambition, and reputations rise on hot air. It is silly and joyless at the same time. Postmodernism
seems to be fading away. Lets hope! But when it comes to trendy intellectual nonsense,
academia is infinitely resourceful. What will it come up with next?
Art represents the inner life of the artist. Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man
consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through,
and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them. Many artists are in
concord with this theory. The nineteenth-century expressionists and post-impressionists (e.g.Van
Gogh, Gauguin, and Munch) took this position as they opposed the Realist and Impressionist
tendency to copy nature.
Plato had a love-hate relationship with the arts. He must have had some love for the arts,
because he talks about them often, and his remarks show that he paid close attention to what he
saw and heard. He was also a fine literary stylist and a great story-teller; in fact he is said to have
been a poet before he encountered Socrates and became a philosopher. Some of his dialogues are
real literary masterpieces. On the other hand, he found the arts threatening. He proposed sending
the poets and playwrights out of his ideal Republic, or at least censoring what they wrote; and he
wanted music and painting severely censored. The arts, he thought, are powerful shapers of
character. Thus, to train and protect ideal citizens for an ideal society, the arts must be strictly
controlled. Plato's influence on western culture generally is a very strong one, and this includes a
strong influence on the arts, and on theories of art. In the case of the arts and aesthetic theory that
influence is mostly indirect, and is best understood if one knows a little bit about his philosophy.