Continuing a series on secular values, this article is on whether art can redeem an existentially absurd life, despite art's trivialization due to its proliferation in digital form on the internet and social media.
Continuing a series on secular values, this article is on whether art can redeem an existentially absurd life, despite art's trivialization due to its proliferation in digital form on the internet and social media.
Hi, Ben!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed your article!
you finish it with the thought: "When we can appreciate the artistic merit even of natural disasters, we’ve likely been enlightened, detached from our parochial concerns and lost in dumbfounded appreciation that nothing really matters because, at best, everything’s only beautiful"
I think a writer who emphasizes this point, with wit, elegance and humor is De Quincey in his "On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts" I really recommend it.
Thanks for the recommendation. I've just read it, and indeed it's a great satire. Wonderful use of the language. I take the point of this satire to be that the aesthetic perspective is abhorrent from the moral one.
DeleteBut the conflict between them is well explained by Thomas Nagel in The View from Nowhere, although he puts it in terms of that between the objective and subjective perspectives. Morality pertains to the latter, aesthetics to the former, and the existential problem is that we're forced to live with both perspectives in mind, which makes for cognitive dissonance--unless we manage to see through the charades of subjectivity and anthropocentrism, as in the case of enlightenment, I imagine.