Plato

A Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, Founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. "Platonism" is a term coined by scholars to refer to the intellectual consequences of denying, as Socrates often does, the reality of the material world. In the Republic, Socrates inverts the common man's intuition about what is knowable and what is real. While most people take the objects of their senses to be real if anything is, Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses . In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality. Plato central doctrine The world that appears to our senses is in some way defective and filled with error, but there is a more real and perfect realm, populated by entities (called forms or ideas) that are eternal, changeless, and in some sense paradigmatic for the structure and character of our world. Entities or forms or ideas Among the most important of these abstract objects (as they are now called, because they are not located in space or time) are goodness, beauty, equality, bigness, likeness, unity, being, sameness, difference, change, and changelessness. Platos allegory of the cave Plato imagines a group of people who have lived chained in a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to Plato, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to seeing reality. The theory of Forms Beyond the world of physical things there is a higher, spiritual realms of Forms, or Ideas, such as the Form of Beauty or Justice.

 The physical world, perceived with the senses, is in constant flux and knowledge derived from it restricted and variable. The realm of forms apprehensible only by the mind, is eternal and changeless. Yet the things of this world are only imperfect copies of these perfect forms. Platos two worlds: 1. a world accessible with the spirit/ intellectual 2. a world accessible with the senses Senses Opinions Subjective Shadow Changeable Variable Temporarily Acting Everyday environment/life

Spiritual Thinking/ratio/intelectual The truth Forms, or Ideas Entities Changeless Eternal Philosophy Art

Conclusion: Men is a prisoner of his culture, Think for yourself. Art can help you in this process. Pythagorous Harmonious sounds, that men could make, were an approximation of a larger harmony that existed in the universe, also expressed by numbers; the music of the spheres. Plato, the music of the spheres rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful. Music induce spiritual harmony in the soul. This was meant literally.

Augustinus and Descartes

Externalization of the inner self Aurelius Augustinus (354 430) - What we need lies intus Ren Descartes (1596 1650) - I think therefore I am Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) - Everyone has his own measure Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone (1958 ) - Express yourself Augustinus Confessions ( 354 430 ) Crucial role mother Monica, father absent North-Africa / short stay in Rome and Milan / baptized in 387 (by Ambrose) Ordination to priest (reluctantly), later bishop (395/396) Part 1: Manicheism and sensuality, repentance and illumination, conversion

Part 2: Here I can stay, but would not; there I would, but cannot spiritualization, interiorization, spritual meaning memory Part 3: Let him that is able, hear Thee inwardly discoursing out of Thy oracle. Explanation book Genesis, deliberate ambiguity: Bible is the Book for everybody Augustinus and Art Christianity for centuries the main source of inspiration and the main patron of the arts Sin and salvation, self-willed versus obedient existence Personal turn to God Condemnation of sensuality, empty pleasure Disapproval especially of theatre: deceitful, untruthful, untrue Function allowed forms of art: call God to mind, incite to devotion Gregorian music, but moderately Yet when it befalls me to be more moved with the voice than the words sung, I confess to have sinned penally, and then had rather not hear music. (Confessions) In the visual arts: symbolism as road to the divine

Simplicity, no decoration Natural language, the Bible is for everybody Sincerity more important than eloquence, what matters is the fire of the heart Four layers of interpretation: historical metaphorical allegorical metaphysical

Key influence: pictorial language in the Middle Ages, and European art as such In stead of harmony, order, finiteness via Augustine beauty as infinity, disorder, sublimity (see Kant, Lyotard) And: quality of art work depends especially on the sincerity of the artist (see Romanticism)

Ren Descartes (1596 1650) This quartet of facts encouraged me to take my own situation as a basis for judging how things stood for other people and other times, and to think there was no knowledge in the world such as I had previously been led to hope. (Discourse on Method) I realized that if I wanted to establish anything in the sciences that was stable and likely to last, I neededjust once in my lifeto demolish everything completely and start again from the foundations.(Meditations)

Father of modern philosophy Rationalism, individualism Cogito ergo sum Ego, thinking for oneself, independence Discours de la methode Experiment of doubt

Platos two worlds Reason dominates the senses Man is a thinking thing Res extensa, res cogitans Meditation = releasing the mind from the senses and from all preconceptions PROJECT of the Enlightenment Learn to think methodically, with the aim to become matres et possesseurs de la nature Mathematics, science, certitude clair et distinct Cogito ergo sum

Taylor: Enlightenment and Romanticism universality, detachement, objectification of nature versus particularity, expressiveness, externalization of the inner self Montaigne, Rousseau, Herder, Novalis, Schelling

Immanuel Kant

1724 1804 was an 18th-century German philosopher from the Prussian city of Konigsberg. Kant's "Copernican revolution" placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of inquiry into our knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they are independently of us or of how they are for us.

Kant and Time time does not refer to any kind of actually existing dimension that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead an intellectual concept (together with space and number) that allows humans to sequence and compare events. This view, in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, holds that space and time "do not exist in and of themselves, but ... are the product of the way we represent things", because we can know objects only as they appear to us. Kant the theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind; This view, in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, holds that space and time "do not exist in and of themselves, but ... are the product of the way we represent things", because we can know objects only as they appear to us. Thinking Thinking allows beings to model the world and to represent it according to their objective, plans, ends and desires. Cognition, sentience, consciousness, ideas and imagination Transcendental philosophy an important function of mind is to structure incoming data and to process it in ways that make it other than a simple mapping of outside data. Kant argues, essentially, that incoming data must be organized into a form that human minds can process. Kant argued that there are synthetic a-priori truths. He reasoned that statements such as those found in geometry and Newtonian physics are synthetic a priori knowledge and wanted to establish how this could be possible.

Categories of the Faculty of Understanding Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments.

Time and space quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity)

Kant Kant showed that the mind, through its innate categories, constructs our experience along certain lines (space, time, causality, self, etc.). Thus, thinking and experiencing give no access to things as they really are. We can think as hard as we like, but we will never escape the innate constraints of our minds.

Ding an sich (Thing-in-itself) a thing as it is independent of any conceptualization or perception by the human mind, postulated by practical reason but existing in a condition which is in principle unknowable and unexperienceable.

Beauty In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure which attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Judgments of beauty are based on feeling, in particular feelings of pleasure Judgments of beauty have, or make a claim to, universality or universal validity Unlike judgments of the good, judgments of the beautiful do not presuppose an end or purpose [Zweck] which the object is taken to satisfy Judgments of beauty involve reference to the idea of necessity, in the following sense: in taking my judgment of beauty to be universally valid, I take it, not that everyone who perceives the object will share my pleasure in it and (relatedly) agree with my judgment, but that everyone ought to do so.

The sublime Kant distinguishes two notions of the sublime: the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In the case of both notions, the experience of the sublime consists in a feeling of the superiority of our own power of reason, as a supersensible faculty, over nature

Friedrich Nietzsche ( 1844- 1900 )

1844 born as preachers son in Rcken (Sachsen) 1864 study theology and classical philology in Bonn and Leipzig 1868 acquaintance with Richard Wagner 1869 professor of classical philology in Basel, Switzerland 1872 Die Geburt der Tragdie aus dem Geiste der Musik 1879 Resignation professorship University of Basel 1883-85 Also sprach Zarathustra 1886 Jenseits von Gut und Bse 1887 Genealogie der Moral 1888 Der Fall Wagner, Der Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner 1889 Mental breakdown in Turin, Italy 1900 death Nietzsche in Weimar

there is no truth there is no higher, spiritual, eternal, true world

Angle of life Platos two worlds: sensory/deceptive versus spiritual/true Nietzsche Our culture is ill It suffers from Platonism The philosopher as doctor

Nietzsche: Christianity is Platonism for the people Devaluation of Platonism/Christianity it doesnt do the trick anymore

Gott ist tot ( God is dead ) Nihilism

passive form (e.g. Romanticism) versus active form (re-valuation) Crisis as opportunity Overcoming of humanity: ber-mensch rebirth of the presocratic world

Wagner Die Geburt der Tragdie: Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk as revival of the early Greek Trauerspiel/Festspiel( celebration of life) ? Tristan und Isolde (Vorspiel 3rd act) Ring des Nibelungen (Die Walkre - Vorspiel 3rd act)

Arthur Schopenhauer - Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1818 / 1844 / 1859)

Dionysus and Apollo as twofoldness

music whirl rapture chaos passion

image dream form order reason

Derailment of the Dionysian or the Apollinian: Barbarism or Socratism Is a recovery of the original conflicting twofoldness at hand?

Perspectivism Life as bodily interplay of forces reason is appendage Every force has its own perspective Regain this conflict No Cartesian ruler, but no rudderless being either; no Romantic intoxication, but selfconquest, selfimprovement, selftranscendence, Wille zur Macht Camel lion child

Nietzsche and (post)modern culture der letzte Mensch consumerism hedonism is Lebensverneinung as well: flight from the depth of life, from the tragic-Dionysian

From: Also sprach Zarathustra Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss. Mankind ends in the last man, to whom applies: We have discovered happiness- say the last men, and blink thereby. They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one's neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth. () They have their little pleasures for the day, and their little pleasures for the night, but they have a regard for health. "We have discovered happiness,"- say the last men, and blink thereby.-

Consumerism Martina Parr

M. Heidegger (1889-1976 )
art is the becoming and happening of truth Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it means for something "to be", tending to approach this question in terms of a being, rather than asking about being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their properties, or have treated being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis of which beings are already understood", or that which underlies all particular entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place.

Question of being Philosophy has forgotten to ask what "being" itself is. Being and Time ( German: Sein und Zeit, 1927 ) 'Being' is not something like a being. Being, Heidegger claims, is "what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood." Heidegger is seeking to identify the criteria or conditions by which any specific entity can be at all.

The question is not what is a being, but what is being? The meaning/essence of Being. Most of the time it was compared with something that you can see, something that is available, to study as a science, finally as the most important or highest being) Idee; Plato God; Augustines Ratio; Kant Science money media

Dasein: "(human) existence" or, more literally, "being-there. Time: Finally, this question of the authenticity of individual Dasein cannot be separated from the "historicality" of Dasein. Dasein and Time On the one hand, Dasein, as mortal, is "stretched along" between birth and death, and thrown into its world, that is, thrown into its possibilities, possibilities which Dasein is charged with the task of assuming. The origin of the work of art In his article, Heidegger explains the essence of art in terms of the concepts of being and truth. He argues that art is not only a way of expressing the element of truth in a culture, but the means of creating it and providing a springboard from which "that which is" can be revealed. Works of art are not merely representations of the way things are, but actually produce a community's shared understanding. Each time a new artwork is added to any culture, the meaning of what it is to exist is inherently changed.

Truth, aletheia, is disclosedness Dasein is discloseness and it is to the extent it discloses itself to itself. The discloseness of Dasein also points to Dasein as a "thrown-project": as always already belonging to a definite place and time and as always disclosing its own possibilities.

Truth a-ltheiac struggle to dis-close or un-conceal (a-ltheia) that which conceals (lthe) itself, an essential strife between two interconnected dimensions of intelligibility (revealing and concealing)

Farmer shoes Van Gogh The farming woman wears her shoes in the field. Only here are they what they are. They are all the more genuinely so, the less the farming woman at work thinks about the shoes, or senses them at all, or is even aware of them.

Great art works Great art works work in the background of our historical worlds, in other words, by partially embodying and so selectively reinforcing an historical community's implicit sense of what is and what matters. In this way, great artworks both (1) first give to things their look, that is, they help establish an historical community's implicit sense of what things are, to humanity their outlook on themselves, that is, they also help shape an historical community's implicit sense of what truly matters in life (and so also what does not), which lives are most worth living, which actions are noble (or base), what in the community's traditions most deserve to be preserved, and so on. It is the temple-work that first joins together and simultaneously gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline obtain the form of destiny for human being. The temple first gives to things their look and to humanity their outlook on themselves.

Mood First the mood, than thinking Dasein is being-in-the-world State-of-mind is mood. Mood is our most fundamental awareness that we are alive and in the world. mood is the general realization that we are alive and exist now in our "world. Mood is the most fundamental awareness that persons have of their being in their worlds.

Stimmung, means "being attuned" One term, Stimmung, means "being attuned" or "attunement," as a musical instrument is tuned and ready to sound a musical note. Mood is, therefore, a general realization of one's self being in the world in the presence of other Beings and objects and having readiness to perform specific cognitive functions.

Mood Heidegger wrote, somewhat more clearly, "In a state-of-mind Dasein is always brought before itself, and has always found itself, not in the sense of coming across itself by perceiving itself, but in the sense of finding itself in the mood that it has." In Being and Time, Heidegger described anxiety as a "Basic State-of-mind".

Anxiety is the fundamental mood of existence.

Perspectivism (einen Schritt zurck) - 99 ways to tell a story. Exercises in style By Matt Madden

Die Technik und die Kehre Heidegger described the essence of modern technology as Gestell, or "enframing." Waterfall: tourism, rafting, swimming, canoeing, turbine, central, wood industry, etc. Heidegger does not unequivocally condemn technology: while he acknowledges that modern technology contains grave dangers, Heidegger nevertheless also argues that it may constitute a chance for human beings to enter a new epoch in their relation to being.

Foucault and Lyotard ( post-modernity )

( Post ) modernity Project of modernity Rationality / science / technology Individuality / freedom / democracy Modernity Stories Post-modernity - multiformity / fragmentation / end of Grand

Industrial/post-industrial Industrial Revolution / ICT-revolution Modern/post-modern art - intertextuality/intermediality (interconnectedness)

- eclecticism - irony (or cynicism?)

La condition postmoderne Lyotard (1979) : end of Grand Stories subject (Cartesian ego) questioned structuralism, post-structuralism influence Nietzsche and Heidegger

Michel Foucault (1926 1984) French psychologist/philosopher Les mots et les choses (1966)

- An archaeology of the human sciences End of the book: man is only a recent invention and will probably disappear

- Content of the book: three eras, three epistmes - analysis Las Meninas Power and knowledge; discipline Negative and positive concept of power Art and insanity The later Foucault: The care of the self, life as a work of art

Las Meninas Perhaps there exists, in this painting by Velazquez, the representation as it were, of Classical representation, and the definition of the space it opens up to us. And, indeed, representation undertakes to represent itself here in all its elements, with its images, the eyes to which it is offered, the faces it makes visible, the gestures that call it into being. But there, in the midst of this dispersion which it is simultaneously grouping together and spreading out before us, indicated compellingly from every side, is an essential void: the necessary disappearance of that which is its foundation - of the person it resembles and the

person in whose eyes it is only a resemblance. This very subject - which is the same - has been elided. And representation, freed finally from the relation that was impeding it, can offer itself as representation in its pure form. Foucault The Order of Things

Jean-Franois Lyotard (1924-1998) French philosopher La condition postmoderne (1979) The artist as philosopher, the philosopher as curator: Les Immatriaux (1985) Raise a (new) sensibility

Lyotard Photography/journalism versus Painting/literature The scientific-technological world of industrial and post-industrial capitalism hardly needs painting anymore, but it does need photography; likewise it rather needs journalism than literature.. That clears the way for the sublime The works of avant-garde painting dont appeal to the community spirit of a shared pleasure. In public taste they rather are experienced as monstrosities, shapeless objects, utterly negative things. Task of the avant-garde painter: The main issue of the art work is to show that in the visible something invisible is hidden. Avant-garde art completes Romanticism and leaves romantic desire behind No longer the attempt to present the unrepresentable in the painting as a lost origin or a far goal, but close by, in the conditions of the artistic effort itself. Caspar David Friedrich is romantic, Czanne much less and Mondriaan no longer at all Its all about the immanent sublime.

Barnett Newman (1905-1970) - The sublime is now Mark Rothko (1903 1970) The painting as temple

Temple of mysteries The Irish writer John Banville on the Rothko room: The room is one of the strangest, most compelling and entirely alarming experiences to be had in any gallery anywhere. The violence of these images is hardly tolerable as Rilke has it: Beautys nothing / but beginning of Terror were just able to bear.

Derrida, Baudrillard French philosophy: from existentialism to deconstructivism Derrida: margins of philosophy, the truth in panting Baudrillard: hyper-reality and fatal strategies French versus/versus German philosophy: Adorno, Habermas, Sloterdijk

Winterson: art and cultural criticism

art is a formal pause in the relentless and chaotic flow of events art is memory, the personal place that connects us as people, not simply as observers art as a sharp and bladed counter-attack to the real dangers of the information epoch art is the best we can do as human beings art offers us a value system that puts human beings right in the centre art by its very nature reveals and celebrates the inside of life art is a rebalancing remedy

Art awakens us something real is found in such moments