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ARISTOTLE AND PLATO,S VIEWS ON ART.
ARISTOTLE AND PLATO,S VIEWS ON ART.
ARISTOTLE AND PLATO,S VIEWS ON ART.
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In our philosophy of art class we have looked at many different classical views on art and beauty. Such ideals as Plato’s criticisms on art, Aristotle’s idea of exemplary beauty and Plotinus’ splendor were discussed in class, and now we look at different philosophers and their attempt to create a theory that holds true for all previous philosophies and more modern ideals; modern ideals such as taste, aesthetics, and imagination. The philosopher that I think did this very well incorporating not only classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato but also modern concepts such as imagination and aesthetics is Nietzsche.
Nietzsche’s philosophy on life and on art is deceptively simple. He believes that we are all part of a large will, but at birth we diverge slightly into our own individualistic will and follow our own paths in life. This is where we go wrong as Nietzsche would have us understand. He believes that life’s greatest tragedy is leaving The Will, and falling privy to our own desires and more importantly never getting exactly what we want all the time. For Nietzsche the best thing to happen in a person’s life would be to die, for then we leave our divergent tangents and fall back into The Will; the only thing better than death would be to have never been born and left The Will in the first place.
According to Nietzsche the things that are able to make us happy, or relieve our plight as human beings who are apart from The Will are those that bring transcendence and allow for us to fall back into the will, if only for a second. These activities or objects allow us to lose ourselves and again, transcend our individualistic desires and wills to fall back into The Will. Nietzsche would argue that the reason our happines...
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...s. Nietzsche had a simple philosophy based on wills or desires of not only people but of the universe really, and how it worked. He believed in a world where man’s greatest plight is being born and that the only way we could rectify this situation is by dying. With this somber ideal on the world he did believe in happiness and beauty. He believed that things that were wonderful were those that could make us lose ourselves and become part of The Will, and I would say I would have to agree with him. I personally am happiest when “becoming” another person through television or books and music and art. I also believe that many other people would agree with me. To expand on this though, the exercise in empathy we find ourselves happiest in also leads to a larger sense of peace, for it is not only when we lose ourselves that we are happiest, but also when we find others.
We have grown weary of man. Nietzsche wants something better, to believe in human ability once again. Nietzsche’s weariness is based almost entirely in the culmination of ressentiment, the dissolution of Nietzsche’s concept of morality and the prevailing priestly morality. Nietzsche wants to move beyond simple concepts of good and evil, abandon the assessment of individuals through ressentiment, and restore men to their former wonderful ability.
Therefore, happiness is “what provokes us, incites us, need not come from our own time. Indeed, our own time may be and probably is so d
Nietzsche uses an elevated level of diction to help him achieve his purpose, he uses Latin in many passages to make the reader look to the bottom of the page and thus think about what he is proposing. His combination of elevated diction along with deductive reasoning can sometimes lose the reader, but just as fast as the reader is lost Nietzsche offers forth a formula which helps the reader follow his thinking. Nietzsche believes that a person’s "virtue is the consequence of happiness," or that a person’s emotions are the product of their beliefs. Nietzsche’s uses consequence to mean something more like cause than effect. He interchanges monosyllabic and polysyllabic - in the form of metaphors - words in connotation to sometimes differ the reader from the beaten track of thinking. He believes in a set course "that he became ill, that he failed to resist the illness," for humans and that they cannot deter from it (this is very far left in a time of conservative Europeans, late 19th century). Even in his "formulas" Nietzsche’s meaning is not as straight forward as it seems. It seems that he believes that individuals genetically are means to an end, but this is more of a metaphor for humanity, or that humanity is their own means to an end.
In summary this means that, when we synthesize happiness it’s like a game of hide and seek, where we think happiness is something that is found. An example he uses is Moreese Bickhham. Moreese Bickham. He was 78 years old who had spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn 't commit. Based on his experience Bickhham explains it as to have been glorious, filled with some nice guys, and they had a gym (hazzah!). With this example Gilbert exemplifies a scenario that someone took what life gave them lemons and they made lemonade. But what I do question is, would any other ordinary person off the streets response the same way, enlightened by an experience that didn’t have to occur? (Gilbert
In Civilization and Its Discontents (Ch. 2), Sigmund Freud argues that happiness is routed in two basic ideas: the first having to do with no pain and the other having to do with pleasure. Along with his idea of what the root of happiness is, he also describes multiple ways this happiness can be attained. Freud states that love and beauty are both means of achieving happiness. Although love and beauty cannot completely prevent all worldly suffering, they both offer a powerful explanation that can help an individual determine the true meaning of their life. In this presentation, we will argue that this argument succeeds because true happiness is difficult to come by in this life, but things such as love and beauty provide a basis for passionate strife in an individual, while also causing an intoxicating kind of sensation that may lead to a definite meaning to Earthly existence for a human being.
Nietzsche believed we create the self through our experiences and our actions, and in order to be a complete self, we must accept everything we have done. I agree with him in this sense. Although it is easy to learn from the mistakes of others, there is no greater lesson than learning from our own mistakes. He also believed there is much more to the self than we know about. This is another example about how we learn about ourselves through our experiences and actions.
The philosopher Aristotle once wrote, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” This famous quote compels people to question the significance of their joy, and whether it truly represents purposeful lives they want to live. Ray Bradbury, a contemporary author, also tackles this question in his book, Fahrenheit 451, which deals heavily with society's view of happiness in the future. Through several main characters, Bradbury portrays the two branches of happiness: one as a lifeless path, heading nowhere, seeking no worry, while the other embraces pure human experience intertwined together to reveal truth and knowledge.
When reading Nietzsche, we can pick up from him that he was very educated often better than most philosophers. Or so he thought. Although he had a very poor outlook on his culture and everyday society, he had very strong opinions when it came to humans and their actions. He made strong assumptions whether people agreed with him or not. An assumption such as, he believed most philosophers and researchers were not as educated as he was, which we pick up in his writings. Nietzsche’s main goal in his essays are to educate those on morality. First, Nietzsche believed that specific words and human actions have evolved over time to things they were never intended to become. Nietzsche
Aestheticism was a popular dogma in the late 1800s that centered on the belief that art should exist for beauty alone. This doctrine is defined as an “exaggerated devotion to art, music, or poetry, with indifference to practical matters” and “the acceptance of artistic beauty and taste as a fundamental standard, ethical and other standards being secondary” (“Aestheticism,” def. 1 and 2). In Oscar Wilde’s sole novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, aestheticism is a fashionable belief accepted by society at the time. Oscar Wilde uses the moral deterioration and ultimate destruction of Dorian Gray in The Picture of Dorian Gray to emphasize the negative effects of society’s preoccupation with aesthetics and offer a moral for the reader.
aim and end of human existence. We create our own happiness. Happiness is not something really made,
Philosophies of Art and Beauty Edited by Hofstadter and Kuhns, (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1976) chapters one and two for an overview of the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle.
For over two thousand years, various philosophers have questioned the influence of art in our society. They have used abstract reasoning, human emotions, and logic to go beyond this world in the search for answers about arts' existence. For philosophers, art was not viewed for its own beauty, but rather for the question of how art and artists can help make our society more stable for the next generation. Plato, a Greek philosopher who lived during 420-348 B.C. in Athens, and Aristotle, Plato’s student who argued against his beliefs, have no exceptions to the steps they had to take in order to understand the purpose of art and artists. Though these two philosophers made marvelous discoveries about the existence of art, artists, and aesthetic experience, Plato has made his works more controversial than Aristotle.
We place an enormous value on our happiness. .For centuries mankind has been on a philosophical quest to find happiness. Arristippus ancient philosopher, and founder of hedonism the school of philosophy, echoed this sentiment when he said "the art of life lies in taking in pleasures as they pass." Arristippus concluded that the ultimate telos or goal for humans is happiness derived from pleasure. pleasure seekers by nature; we actively seek pleasurable experiences. Conversely we run away from the bad and the painful ones.
Real happiness is more than brief positive feelings but rather a lasting state of peace or contentedness. According to Reich, a former professor of psychology at Arizona State University, happiness is “deeper than a momentary good mood” (Reich). When ordinary happiness is experienced, Jacobsen, a professor in the Department
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus defines beauty and the artist's comprehension of his/her own art. Stephen uses his esthetic theory with theories borrowed from St. Thomas Aquinas and Plato. The discourse can be broken down into three main sections: 1) A definitions of beauty and art. 2) The apprehension and qualifications of beauty. 3) The artist's view of his/her own work. I will explain how the first two sections of his esthetic theory relate to Stephen. Furthermore, I will argue that in the last section, Joyce is speaking of Stephen Dedalus and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as his art.