Author: 2br-2b

In Defense of Abstract Art

Modern art. When shown to a student of the classics, these words may fill him with despair. Whatever happened, he will ask, to the beauty that came through the great artists like Michelangelo and Rembrandt? The artist will weep, lamenting the bygone days where an artist needn’t sacrifice beauty in order to survive in a modern world. The he will mourn for the times when art depicted something, anything, and was actually intelligible.

If this is how the student responds, however, he will have made a grave mistake. While not always, abstract art can be meant to depict something intangible.

Let us say that an you want to draw the concept of hope. How would you go about depicting hope? You could depict a scene with hopeful people. You could depict a scene were people are fighting, struggling for their freedom against all odds, knowing that they will not win but hoping that their message will live on. The soldiers know that they will not survive the battle, but they hope that one day their side will prevail and their children will know the freedom they are striving for.

Robert Jenkins Onderdonk, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

This is one way of trying to depict hope, but this isn’t really depicting hope. Yes, it is depicting hopeful people, but this is different from depicting hope. It’s the same point Socrates brings up in the Meno: “Suppose that I […] ask of you, What is the nature of the bee? and you answer that there are many kinds of bees”. While an individual example of hope has been painted, hope itself has not yet been shown.

While hope could be personified and shown as a person, again this is not a real depiction of hope. Hope is not a person; hope is a concept, an idea. While hope could be depicted in this way, it would not be an accurate depiction.

Thus, hope cannot be depicted in a traditional way. While the intangible concept of hope cannot be physically depicted on a canvas, perhaps the best way to depict hope, an abstract concept, would be through art which is itself abstract. As Michel Henry says in regards to Wassily Kandinsky, “[…] the abstract content that painting seeks to represent is ultimately a content entirely foreign to the world“.

Thus, abstract art seems unintelligible because it is trying to make tangible an intangible concept. While this by no means makes out abstract art as beautiful, it at least shows that the art is not always completely meaningless.

If you’re interested in more content like this, feel free to subscribe to my blog, The Codegito!

Sources:

  • Seeing the Invisible: on Kandinsky by Michel Henry, page 21. ISBN 978-1-84706-447-9
  • Inspired by this blog post

Why VR Should be Illegal (According to a 2000-Year-Old Dead Guy)

My incredible photoshop of Plato wearing a VR headset

Notice: this post was originally made on my blog, The Codegito. Check it out here for the full version! I had to cut a whole lot from the post to fit it under 750 words, so if you want a more updated, better version of this post, check it out! As long as you’re there, you might as well subscribe (at the bottom of the page). I’ll be posting regularly with fresh, new, original content you won’t want to miss!

We often fantasize about what people from the past would think of our current technology. What would Hannibal have done if he had tanks instead of elephants? What would Ghandi do if he had access to nukes? While some of these fantasies may never be answered, it can still be fun to imagine how different historical figures would react to modern technological developments.

One such question is what would Plato, the famed philosopher, think about virtual reality? We will examine Plato’s writings in his Republic and see how his ideals would apply to virtual reality.

Plato’s Theory of Forms

Before we can discuss Plato’s potential thoughts on virtual reality, we have to launch into a quick summary of how Plato views art and the world.

In Book X of his Republic, Plato speaks about different levels of existence that can be possessed by an object.

What exists most of all is the form of an object. For Plato, the form of a table exists separately from any individual physical table. When you decide to create a table, you shape the wood so that it participates in the form of table-ness.

For our next step, let us take a painter. The painter can also be said to create a table, yet there’s a difference between this table the painter produces and the table made by a carpenter. Instead of creating something which participates in table-ness, the painter is creating an imitation of something participating in table-ness. In fact, his painting is not even a direct imitation of the table – it is an imitation of his perspective on the table. If he were to move to a different angle, his perspective would change and so would his image. His perspective, according to Plato, is merely another imitation of reality. The painter thus creates an imitation of an imitation of an imitation of reality.

Plato’s Thoughts on Imitation

Plato, however, seems to be against such imitations. He calls imitative art, or art made to look like something else, “an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring.” Why is this? Plato says that, at this point, the art is too “far removed from truth […] and [it has] no true or healthy aim.” The art is so far removed that it no longer relates properly to the truth, but rather it feeds our passions. According to Plato, art (and other similar practices like poetry) are made not to help us with logic, but rather to feed our passions and appetites. Plato points out that there has been a struggle between poetry and philosophy for many years, and as a philosopher himself, Plato is biased against in this struggle. He thinks that “hymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be admitted into our State,” as all other modes of poetry will corrupt society.

Virtual Reality

Now, let us apply this logic to virtual reality. Plato would almost certainly be against virtual reality, claiming that it corrupts society. Plato would likely put VR in the same category as art: It’s an imitation of a perspective you could view a given object from. It is again three steps removed from the world of the forms and thus is far removed from the truth.

He would likely argue that VR is made solely to satisfy our irrational appetites and that it has no practical, real-world value.

Ultimately, Plato would think that virtual reality is too far removed from the truth to be used for good.

Sources: