"The course of mankind's progress is not a straight, automatic line, but a tortuous struggle, with long detours or relapses into the stagnant night of the irrational. Mankind moves forward by the grace of those human bridges who are able to grasp and transmit, across years or centuries, the achievements man has reached --- and to carry them further. Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example: he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance, spanning the infamous detour of the Dark and Middle Ages."
Ayn Rand is a bridge as well, "...between the aesthetic achievements of the 19th century and the minds that chose to discover them, wherever and whenever such minds might exist."
"Those who feel that art is outside the province of reason would be well advised to leave this... alone. Those who know that nothing is outside the province of reason will find in this... the base of a rational aesthetics. It is the absence of such a base that have made today's obscenely grotesque degradation of art possible."
"Our day has no art and no future. The future, in the context of progress, is a door open only to those who do not renounce their conceptual faculty; it is not open to mystics, hippies, drug addicts, tribal ritualists -- or to anyone who reduces himself to a subanimal, subperceptual, sensory level of awareness."
from The Psycho-Epistemology of Art -
"The position of art in the scale of human knowledge is, perhaps, the most eloquent symptom of the gulf between man's progress in the physical sciences and his stagnation [or rather] retrogression in the humanities. The physical sciences are still ruled by some remnants of a rational epistemology..., but the humanities have been virtually abandoned to the primitive epistemology of mysticism. While physics has reached the level where men are able to study subatomic particles and interplanetary space, a phenomenon such as art has remained a dark mystery, with little or nothing known about its nature, its function in human life, or the cause of its tremendous psychological power. Yet art is of passionately intense importance and profoundly personal importance to most men -- and i9t has existed in every known civilization, accompanying man's steps from the early hours of his prehistorical dawn, earlier than the birth of written language."
"While in other fields of knowledge, men have outgrown the practice of seeking the guidance of mystical oracles whose qualification for the job was unintelligibility, in the field of aesthetics this practice has remained in full force and is becoming more crudely obvious today. Just as savages took the phenomena of nature for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed, as the exclusive domain of unknowable demons -- so today's epistemological savages take art for granted, as an irreducible primary not to be questioned or analyzed as the exclusive domain of a special kind of unknowable demon: their emotions."
"One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man's culturally induced selflessness -- his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (the non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt."
"The Cognitive neglect of art has persisted precisely because the function of art is non-social... Art belongs to a non-socializable aspect of reality, which is universal... but non-collective, to the nature of man's consciousness."
"One of the distinguishing characteristics of a work of art is that it serves no practical, material end, but is an end in itself -- it serves no purpose other than contemplation -- and the pleasure of that contemplation is so intense, so deeply personal that a man experiences it as a self-sufficient, self-justifying primary and, often, resists or resents any suggestion to analyze it -- the suggestion, to him, has the quality of an attack on his identity, on his deepest, essential self."
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