What Is Beauty ? Croce came to philosophy from historical and literary studies; and it was natural that his philosophic interest should be deeply colored by the problems of criticism and aesthetics. His greatest book is the Esthetic. He prefers art to metaphysics and to science: the sciences give us utility but the art give us beauty; the science take us away from the individual and the actual, into a world of increasingly mathematical abstractions, until ( as in Einstein ) they issue in momentous conclusions of no practical importance; but art takes us directly to the particular person and the unique fact, to the philosophical universal intuited in the form of the concrete individual. "
Knowledge has two forms : it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge;
Knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal; of individual things or of the relations between them; it is the production either of images or of concepts." The origin of art, therefore, lies in the power of forming images. " Art is ruled uniquely by the imagination. Images are its only wealth. It does not classify objects, it does not pronounce them real or imaginary, does not qualify them, does not define them; it feels and presents them-nothing more." Because imagination precedes thought, and is necessary to it, the artistic, or image - forming, activity of the mind is prior to the logical, concept - forming activity. Man is an artist as soon as he imagines, and long before he reasons.
The great artists understood the matter so. " One paints not with the hands but will the brain." Said Michelangelo; and Leonardo wrote: " The minds of man of lofty genius are most active in invention when they are doing the least external work."
Everybody knows the story told of da Vinci, that when he was painting the " Last Supper," he sorely displeased the Abbot who had ordered the work , by sitting motionless for days before an untouched canvas; and revenged himself for the importunate Abbot’s persistent query - When would he begin to work ? - by using the gentleman as an unconscious model for the figure of Judas.
The essence of the esthetic activity lies in this motionless effort of the artist to conceive the perfect image that shall express the subject he has in mind; it lies in a form of intuition that involves no mystic insight, but perfect sight, complete perception, and adequate imagination. The miracle of art lies not in the externalization but in the conception of the idea; externalization is a matter of mechanical technique and manual skill.
" When we have mastered the internal word, when we have vividly and clearly conceived a figure or a statue, when we have found a musical theme, expression is born and is complete, nothing more is needed. If , then, we open our mouth, and speak or sing . . . what we do is to say aloud what we have already said within, to sing aloud what we have already sung within. If our hands strike the keyboard of the pianoforte, is we take up pencil or chisel, such actions are willed " ( they belong to the practical, not to the esthetic, activity ), " and what we are then doing is executing in great movements what we have already executed briefly and rapidly within."
Does this help us to answer that baffling question. What is beauty ? Here certainly there are as many opinions as there are heads; and every lover, in this matter, thinks himself an authority not to be gainsaid. Croce answers that beauty is the mental formation of an image ( or a series of images ) that catches the essence of the thing perceived. The beauty belongs, again, rather to the inward image than to the outward form in which it is embodied. We like to think that the difference between ourselves and Shakespeare is largely a difference in technique of external expression; that we have thoughts that lie too deep for words. But this is a fond illusion : the difference lies not in the power of externalizing the image but in the power of inwardly forming an image that expresses the object.
Even that aesthetic sense which is contemplation rather than creation is also inward expression; the degree in which we understand or appreciate a work of art depends upon our ability to see by direct intuition the reality portrayed, - our power to form for ourselves an expressive image. " It is always our own intuition we express when we are enjoying a beautiful work of art . . . It can only be my own intuition when, reading Shakespeare, I form the image of Hamlet or Othello." Both in the artist creating and in the spectator contemplating beauty, the esthetic secret is the expressive image. Beauty is adequate expression; and since there is no real expression if it be not adequate, we may answer very simply the ancient question, and say, Beauty is expression.
Frankfurt School From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist social theory, social research, and philosophy.
The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930.
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's alleged followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist Parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions. Max Weber exerted a major influence, as did Sigmund Freud (as in Herbert Marcuse's synthesis of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1954 work Eros and civilization). Their emphasis on the "critical" component of theory was derived significantly from their attempt to overcome the limits of positivism, crude materialism, and phenomenology by returning to Kant's critical philosophy and its successors in German idealism, principally Hegel's philosophy, with its emphasis on negation and contradiction as inherent properties of reality. A key influence also came from the publication in the 1930s of Marx's Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology, which showed the continuity with Hegelianism that underlay Marx's thought.
Hegelian dialectic Although Hegel never used such a classification himself, Hegel's dialectic is often described as consisting of three stages: a thesis, an antithesis which contradicts or negates the thesis, and a synthesis embodying what is essential to each.
In the Logic, for instance, Hegel describes a dialectic of existence: first, existence must be posited as pure Being (thesis); but pure Being, upon examination, is found to be indistinguishable from Nothing (antithesis); yet both Being and Nothing are united as Becoming (synthesis), when it is realized that what is coming into being is, at the same time, also returning to nothing (consider life: old organisms die as new organisms are created or born).
It was claimed that like Socratic dialectic, Hegel's dialectic proceeds by making implicit contradictions explicit: each stage of the process is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. For Hegel, the whole of western history is one tremendous dialectic, the largest moments of which chart a progression from self-alienation as slavery to self-unification and realization as the rational, constitutional state of free and equal citizens. The Hegelian dialectic could not be rigorously applied or defended: for any chosen thesis, the selection of any antithesis, other than the logical negation of the thesis was subjective. If the logical negation were used as the antithesis, there was no rigorous way to derive a synthesis. As applied in practice, where an antithesis was selected to suit the users subjective purpose, the resulting "contradictions" were rhetorical, not logical and the resulting synthesis was not rigorously defensible against a multitude of other possible syntheses.
Chris: You know, there's a word for people who think everyone is conspiring against them. C.W.: I know, perceptive. ________________________________________ C.W.: A lot of women have passed through this apartment. I can't say they were all winners, but... ________________________________________ C.W.: It's a match made in heaven... by a retarded angel. ________________________________________ Betty Ann: You don't have a kosher bone in your body. ________________________________________ C.W.: They all look the same upside down. ________________________________________ C.W.: I hate her just like I hate that German Chancellor with the moustache. ________________________________________ Betty Ann: You're searching my desk! C.W.: I wasn't searching I was rummaging. ________________________________________ Jill: Gosh, all this passion in a lousy insurance office! ________________________________________ C.W. Briggs: They say, I always get my man. Laura Kensington: Me too.
-He is really good and friendly with young girls. He tell them what beautiful eyes they have how beautiful so on and so forth. -I did not know flirting is a human evolutionary successful strategy. -Or should it be? -If we want to pass on our genes.
James Joyce: A portrait of the artist as a young man
-Let us take woman, said Stephen.
-Let us take her! said Lynch fervently.
-The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty. That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see however two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so. The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture room where MacCann, with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours.
-Then MacCann is a sulphur yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.
-There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.
-To wit? said Lynch.
-This hypothesis, Stephen began.
A long dray laden with old iron came round the corner of sir Patrick Dun's hospital covering the end of Stephen's speech with the harsh roar of jangled and rattling metal. Lynch closed his ears and gave out oath after oath till the dray had passed. Then he turned on his heel rudely. Stephen turned also and waited for a few moments till his companion's ill humour had had its vent.
-This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that, though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas for another penny worth of wisdom.
