essays from this year: what is beauty?

 Since the semester is well and truly over and my grades are on their way, I thought I might show some extracts of my essays from the first half of the semester, just to mix it up in here.

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  'What is Beauty?' from my Philosophy of Aesthetics class:

      Beauty as a form of longing is a very old argument, existing in some form or another throughout much of western thought and for many poets may be the truth intrinsic to artmaking (Nehamas 2007). Longing and love itself has a hallowed place in human consciousness and like beauty, debates about the objectivity of them are rife in psychology, neuroscience and philosophy alike. Love and longing are not necessarily pleasurable or enjoyable to experience but they are compelling emotional states to exist in, they seem to have the ability to evoke deeper emotions such as nostalgia and a deeper level of thoughtfulness but then there is the problem of defining what it is we love and long for.

 

The Sun (1911) by Edvard Munch

     Edvard Munch’s The Sun (1911), one of 12 mural pieces commissioned by the University of Oslo may be a piece where we can see the tension between imagery and beautiful artwork, even in what may seem to be relatively conventional piece and how those connotations can be both steeped in physical experience and also adopt symbolism developed over decades or centuries which themselves arouse emotions within the audience (Neginsky 2010).  Though simple in subject matter, indeed you could say that there is really only one subject of the painting, Munch is able to suggest to the audience something grander and vaster than a mere landscape, in part by composition, the size of the piece but also by embodying something inherent to the experience of observing the sunrise. 

    However, the Sun cannot be removed from its context, as a mural in the University of Oslo’s Aula Hall and commissioned by the University itself, there is a necessary expectation for the subject matter to express ideals the University also wishes to express about itself (Martin 2011). The symbolism of The Sun, its own associations and the emotions it evokes within the viewer, is therefore what the University wishes to align itself with in the mind of the audience, that being anybody who could visit the Aula Hall.

     There is a conscious appeal to the emotions that the sunrise tends to suggest within our cultural contexts, whether that is by Munch himself, the University or the audience, the effect is strong and memorable. Cultural institutions have a vested interest in taste-making in as much as artists have an interest in accumulating cultural knowledge to appeal to our associations (Martin 2011) so even in a piece this straightforward is imbued with depth and cultural character.

 

References:

Martin, MW 2011, ‘Of Mottos and Morals’, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, vol. 25, Philosophy Documentation Center, no. 1, pp. 49–60.

Neginsky, R 2010, Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 9–13.

Nehamas, A 2007, ‘?ONLY IN THE CONTEMPLATION OF BEAUTY IS HUMAN LIFE WORTH LIVING? PLATO, SYMPOSIUM 211d’, European Journal of Philosophy, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1–18.

Sartwell, C 2012, Beauty, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

 

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I didn't do amazingly well in this reflective assignment and this is obviously truncated for brevity's sake, I mean I could literally feel myself slipping and sliding around the question somehow trying to herd all my thoughts back to answering the daunting and insurmountable question of What Is Beauty? 

    This question might be one of the oldest in the book of aesthetics and even after a whole semester mulling it over, I still don't think I've come to an answer. In saying that, take a squiz at Sartwell's entry over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 

    In hindsight, I wouldn't have chosen The Sun (1911), the surrounding context (being a mural in the University of Oslo) is simply too loaded and too important to the existence of the work to be ignored and it's how I ended up with this weird hybrid essay that started out discussing the subjectivity of beauty, Hume and folk philosophy to the power of beautiful symbolism in crafting institutional identity and institutional taste-making. My conclusion is a real stretch to say the least. 

    In saying that: the art of connecting two ideas is a rich and hallowed tradition in philosophy so I don't feel too bad and I still nabbed a 70% so I must've said something interesting.