"The other part consists of applying his knowledge -- i.e., evaluating the facts of reality, choosing his goals and guiding his actions accordingly. To do that man needs another chain of concepts, derived from and dependent on the first, yet separate and, in a sense, more complex -- a chain of normative abstractions.
"While cognitive abstractions identify the facts of reality, normative abstractions evaluate the facts, thus prescribing a choice of values and a course of action. Cognitive abstractions deal with that which is; normative abstractions deal which ought to be (in the realms open to man's choice).
"Ethics, the normative science, is based on two cognitive branches -- metaphysics and epistemology. To prescribe what man ought to do, one must first know what he is and where he is -- i.e., what is his nature(including his means of cognition) and the nature of the universe in which he acts...
"Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair?Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life -- or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil? These are metaphysical questions, but the answers to them determine the kind of ethics men will accept and practice; the answers are the link between metaphysics and ethics....
"Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life -- and that his metaphysical value-judgments are involved in every moment of his life, in his every choice, decision and action.
"Metaphysics, the science that deals with the fundamental nature of reality -- involves man's widest abstractions. It includes every concrete he has ever perceived, it involves such a vast sum of knowledge and such a long chain of concepts that no man could hold it all in the focus of his immediate conscious awareness. Yet he needs that sum and that awareness to guide him -- he needs the power to summon them into full, conscious focus.
"That power is given to him by art.
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments."
" By a selective re-creation, art isolates and integrates those aspects of reality which represents man's fundamental view of himself and of existence. Out of the countless numbers of concretes -- of single, disorganized and (seemingly) contrary attributes, actions and entities -- an artist isolates the things which he regards as metaphysically essential and integrates them into a single new concrete that represents an embodied abstraction."
"Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man's concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts...
"This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man's life."
And because we see and understand reality thru percepts, THAT is why all art needs be representational - and if is not, then while it may be decorative, it is NOT art...
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