The presentation will be divided into four parts.
PART I will discuss the range of meanings of the word "art."
PART II wil cover two topics. The first is ambiguities in the definition of "art." One ambiguity concerns art as a cause, as opposed to art as an effect. Another ambiguity concerns art vs. science. The second topic will be the role of art in the scientific method.
PART III will cover two topics. The first topic is analytic models of art such as art compared with nature, or art compared with reproduction. The second topic is the classification of the arts, particularly the seven liberal arts.
PART IV will cover the dichotomy of fine arts versus useful arts. It will also cover two major issues. The first is whether art is an imitation of nature or something deeper. The second is state control of the arts.
The word "art" has a range of meanings which may be obscured by the current disposition to use the word in an extremely restricted sense.
In contemporary thought, art is most readily associated with beauty; yet its historic connections with utility and knowledge are probably more intimate and pervasive.
The prevalent popular association reflects a tendency in the 19th century to annex the theory of art to aesthetics.
This naturally led to the identification of art with one kind of art‹the so-called "fine arts," "beaux arts," or "Schöne Künste" (arts of the beautiful).
The contraction of meaning has gone so far that the word "art" sometimes signifies one group of the fine arts, painting and sculpture, as in the common phrase "literature, music, and the fine arts."
This restricted usage has become so customary that we ordinarily refer to a museum of art or to an art exhibit in a manner which seems to assume that the word "art" is exclusively the name for something which can be hung on a wall of placed on a pedestal.
A moment¹s thought will, of course, correct the assumption.
We are not unfamiliar with the conception of medicine and teaching as arts.
We are acquainted with such phrases as "the industrial arts" and "arts and crafts" in which the reference is to the production of useful things.
Our discussions of liberal education should require us to consider the liberal arts which, however defined or enumerated, are supposed to constitute skills of the mind.
We recognize that "art" is the root of "artisan" as well as "artist."
We thus discern the presence of skill even in the lowest form of productive labor.
Seeing it also as the root of "artifice" and "artificial," we realize that art is distinguished from and sometimes even opposed to nature.
The ancient and traditional meanings are all present in our daily vocabulary.
In our thoughts the first connotation of "art" is fine art; in the thought of all previous eras the useful arts came first.
As late as the end of the 18th century, Adam Smith follows the traditional usage which begins with Plato when, in referring to the production of wool he says:
"The shepherd, the sorter of wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser, with many others, must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production."
In the first great conversation on art; that presented in the Platonic dialogues, we find useful techniques and everyday skills typifying art, by reference to which all other skills are analyzed.
Even when Socrates analyzes the art of the rhetorician, as in the Gorgias, he constantly turns to the productions of the cobbler and the weaver and to the prodecures of the husbandman and the physician.
If the liberal arts are praised as the highest, because the logician or rhetorician works in the medium of the soul rather than matter, they are called arts "only in a manner of speaking" and by comparison with the fundamental arts which handle physical material.
The Promethian gift of fire to men, which raised them from a brutish existence, carried with it various techniques for mastering matter‹the basic useful arts.
Lucretius, writing in a line that goes from Homer through Thucydides and Plato to Bacon, Adam Smith, and Rousseau, attributes the progress of civilization and the difference between civilized and primitive society to the development of arts and sciences.
"Ships and tillage, walls, laws, arms, roads, dress, and all such like things, all the prizes, all the elegancies too of life without exception, poems, pictures and the chiselling of fine-wrought statues, all these things practiced together with the acquired knowledge of the untiring mind taught men by slow degress as they advanced on the way step by step"
At the beginning of this progress Lucretius places man¹s discovery of the arts of metal-working, domesticating animals, and cultivating the soil.
"Metallurgy and agriculture," says Rousseau, "were the two arts which created this great revolution"‹the advance from primitive to civilized life.
The fine arts and the speculative arts come last, not first, in the progress of civilization.
The fine arts and the speculative sciences complete human life.
They are not necessary‹except perhaps for the good life.
They are the dedication of human leisure and its best fruit.
The leisure without which they neither could come into being nor prosper is found for man and fostered by the work of the useful arts.
Aristotle tells us that is "why the mathematical arts were founded in Egypt, for there the priestly caste was allowed to be at leisure.
In PART II of the presentation we will cover two topics.
First we will cover two ambiguities concerning art.
The first ambiguity concerns art as a cause versus art as an effect.
The second ambiguity concerns art versus science.
Second , we will cover the role of art in the scientific method.
Sometimes "art" refers to works of art‹effects produced by human workmanship.
Sometimes "art" refers to the cause of things produced by human work.
Art can be the skill of mind that directs the hand in its manipulation of matter.
The more generic meaning of art appears to be that of cause rather than that of effect.
There are many fields to which the artist produces no tangible product.
Guy Murchie, a navigator in a World War II transport plane wrote Song of the Sky.
In his book, he compares the art of a navigator to the art of an alchemist.
The sight of the landing lights of the airfield in the pilot¹s window was equivalent to the alchemist¹s gold.
The art of a general is victory, and the art of a doctor is health.
Aristotle made a distinction between art and science.
Art consists of knowing how to make something.
Science consists of knowing that something is the case.
"Even in speculative matters," writes Aquinas, "there is something by way of work; e.g., the making of a syllogism, or a fitting speech, or the work of counting or measuring."
"And it is not enough to know simply that cheese is a bad article of food, as disagreeing with whoever eats of it to satiety, but what sort of disturbance it creates, and wherefore, and with what principle in man it disagrees . . . "
As a science, medicine involves knowledge of the causes of disease, the different kinds of diseases and their characteristic courses.
As a science, medicine involves knowledge of the causes of disease, the different kinds of diseases and their characteristic courses.
Without such knowledge, diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy would be a matter of guesswork-of chance, as Hippocrates says-or at best the application of rule-of-thumb in the light of past experience.
Now we get to the role of art in the scientific method.
Although science is required to originally develop an art, an individual can acquire the habit of an art and still be ignorant of the underlying science.
I once heard the U.S. military described as "a system designed by geniuses to be run by morons."
According to Kant, "every art presupposes rules which are laid down as the foundation which first enables a product if it is to be called one of art, to be represented as possible."
Kant distinguishes fine arts from other types of arts.
Kant claims they arise only from "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given."
Given that there is no art without science, is the reverse true? Is science possible without art?
This leads to two subquestions.
First, are there arts particularly indispensable to the development of science?
Second, does every science generate a correlative art and through it work productively?
Traditionally the liberal arts have been considered indispensable to science.
This is particularly true of logic.
Aristotle's Organon, the first systematic treatment of logic, was intended to serve as the instrument, or the art of all sciences.
Bacon's Novum Organum served to renovate the sciences by the experimental method.
experimental method.
The scientific method is the art of getting scientific knowledge.
Scientific experimentation employs many auxiliary arts-arts controlling equipment.
The experiment, a work of art itself, uses many products of arts: the water-clock, the inclined plane, and the pendulum of Galileo.
also the prisms, lenses, and mirrors of Newton.
The second subquestion, whether sciences generate arts and work productively, raise a great issue about the nature of scientific knowledge.
At the beginning of the Novum Organum Bacon declares: "Knowledge and human power are synonymous since the ignorance of the cause frustrates the effect; for nature is only subdued by submission, and that which in contemplative philosophy corresponds with the cause, in practical science becomes the rule."
This distinction between science and art is often called the distinction between pure and applied science.
Bacon valued knowledge by its productivity.
Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand used the word "practical" for those sciences which concern moral and political action.
The sciences Bacon called "practical," Plato and Aristotle called "productive."
Aristotle claimed that the uselessness of the theoretic sciences was a mark of their superiority.
Bacon condemned the notion of knowledge which is merely contemplation of truth.
Bacon started a revolution which, for John Dewey, ushered in the modern world.
The pragmatic theory of knowledge began from a conception of science at every point fused with art.
PART III of the presentation covers two topics.
The first is analytic models. Art can be compared with nature. It can also be compared with reproduction.
The second is the classification of the arts.
When a man makes a house or a statue, he transforms matter.
To the ancients a number of different causes or factors seemed to be involved in every artistic production-material to be worked on; the activity of the artist at work; the form in his mind which he sought to impose on matter; and the purpose which motivated his effort.
Harvey consciusly compares the activity of nature in biological generation to that of an artist.
"Like a potter she first divides her material, and then indicates the head and trunk and extremities; like a painter, she first sketches the parts in outline, and then fills them in with colors; or like the ship-builder, who first lays down his keel by way of foundation, and upon this raises the ribs and roof or deck: even as he builds his vessel does nature fashion the trunk of the body and add the extremities."
Some have compared art to reproduction. Aquinas considers both of them and then distinguishes then in his analysis of divine creation:
"In some agents the form of the thing to be made pre-exists according to its natural being, as in those that act by their nature;"
"as a man generates a man, or fire generates fire."
"Whereas in other agents the form of the thing to be made pre-exists according to intelligible being, as in those that act by the intellect;"
"and thus the likeness of a house pre-exists in the mind of the builder."
"And this may be called the idea of a house, since the builder intends to build his house like to the form conceived in his mind."
In biological procreation the progeny have the form of their parents-a rabbit producing a rabbit, a horse producing a horse.
In artistic production, the product has, not the form of the artist, but the form he has conceived in his mind and which he seeks to objectify.
The question arises whether or not nature itself is a form of art.
"Let me suppose," the Eleatic Stranger says in The Sophist , "that things which are said to be made by nature are the work of divine art and the things which are made by man out of these are human art."
"And so there are two kinds of making and production, the one human and the other divine."
If we suppose that the things of nature are originally made by a divine mind, how does their production differ from the work of human artists, or from biological generation?
One answer, given in Plato's Timaeus, conceives the original production of things as a fashioning of primordial matter in the patterns set by eternal archetypes or ideas.
In consequence the divine work would be more like human artistry than either would be like natural reproduction.
Now we consider the classification of the arts.
Three classification schemes will be covered-one by Plato, one by Kant, and one by Aristotle.
The seven liberal arts are discussed by many authors. The first three are called the trivium (three roads). The last four are called the quadrivium.
The trivium consists of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.
The quadrivium consists of arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.
Plato analyzes the quadrivium in The Republic but not the trivium.
The principles of classification of the fine arts are laid down by Kant from "the analogy which art bears to the mode of expression which men avail themselves in speech, with a view to communicating themselves to one another as completely as possible."
Since such expression "consists in word, gesture, and tone," he finds three corresponding fine arts: the art of speech, the formative art, and the art of the play of sensations."
In these terms he analyzes rhetoric and poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting and landscape gardening, and music.
Art is divided in a different manner in the opening of Aristotle's Poetics.
Aristotle claims that art is an imitation of nature. He classifies the arts by the object imitated and by the medium and manner in which it is imitated.
Color and form are used by some, and voice is used by others.
A dancer uses rhythm alone without harmony.
Prose or verse use language alone without harmony.
Are such arts as shoemaking and housebuilding imitations of nature in the same sense as poetry and music?
In PART IV of the presentation we cover three topics.
First we cover the distinction between the fine arts and the useful arts.
Second we discuss whether art is an imitation or whether it has a deeper motivation.
Third we discuss state control of the arts.
Some of man's creations are intended to be used, others are intended to be contemplated.
The products of useful arts imitate a natural function. A shoe imitates the protective function of calloused skin.
Products of useful arts imitate nature by use. Products of fine arts imitate nature by form.
There is a more subtle distinction between the arts which, although always implied, is seldom discussed plainly.
Some arts create a product which nature would have created anyway.
Fruits and grains would grow even without the aid of a farmer. A doctor assists the process of nature when he heals a patient.
Socrates compared the art of education with the practice of midwifery.
This stands in sharp contrast to the arts where man produces an object impossible in nature.
Nature cannot change a tree into a chair or a gravel quarry into a concrete structure.
Industrial arts are mostly of the second sort.
One art works with living matter and the other works with dead matter.
Although the distinction is a valid one, Adam Smith cuts right through it.
Smith divides labor into productive and non-productive.
A farmer directly produces wealth, according to Smith, but a teacher and a doctor do not.
There is also the distinction between liberal arts and servile arts.
Some arts, such as painting or sculpture, cannot create their products except by shaping matter.
In different systems of classification, poetry and sculpture are distinguisned from logic and carpentry. The former are fine arts, and the latter are useful arts.
Logic, grammar, rhetoric, and mathematics are distinguished from poetry and sculpture. The distinction is between liberal arts and fine arts.
When "liberal" is used in this sense, its meaning narrows. It signifies only speculative arts, or arts concerned with processes of thinking and knowing.
The Great Books trace out some of these threads. Some can be quite consistent.
Second we will discuss the imitative nature of art.
A drama may remind us of situations we have experienced.
Wagner's music may portray the northern lights or the waves of the ocean.
Nevertheless, the motive of artistic creation lies deeper.
According to Tolstoy, the arts serve primarily as a medium for spiritual communication.
The line "Alle Menschen verden Bruder" from Beethoven's Ninth means "All mankind shall be as brothers." Is this an imitation of nature or a spiritual concept?
According to Freud, the deepest spring of art is emotion or subconscious expression, rather than imitation or communication.
The poet or the artist "forces us to become aware of our inner selves in which the same impulses are still extant even though they are suppressed."
Theories of communication, expression, or imitation attempt to explain art.
There is a conception of art, however, that these theories do not explain.
It is the spontaneous product of inspiration, of a divine madness, the work of unfathomable genius.
We encounter this notion, first but not last, in Plato's Ion.
Third we will discuss the regulation of arts by the state, pursuant to the general welfare.
Two issues arise from this-regulation of the fine arts and regulation of the industrial arts.
Karl Marx favors regulating the industrial arts, and Adam Smith opposes it.
Plato favors regulating the fine arts, and John Milton opposes it.
In The Republic, Plato argues that all peotry but "hymns to the gods and praises of famous men" must be banned from the State; (not just kicked!)
"for if you go beyond this and allow the honeyed muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of mankind, which by common consent have been deemed the best, but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State."
In The Republic, Socrates makes reference to many passages from The Iliad where the behavior of the gods is immoral.
He deems these passages inappropriate for young minds.
Is "corruption of the young" an impeachable offence?
Milton and Mill concede that the peace and the public safety must be protected.
Nonetheless, Mill says, "Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience above all liberties."
Milton and Mill expouse the cause of freedom-for the artist to express or communicate his work and for the community to receive from him whatever he has to offer.
Source: Philosophy-irc.org.
Source: Philosophy-irc.org.
