/lit/ - Literature

'The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis'. That's what Wittgenstein said about the connection between art and ethics.

Sub specie aeternitatis: 'from the lens of God'; 'in the aspect of the eternal', it means something like that, at least according to Google. To see the world through the lens of God is to see the world rightly - to separate what it eternally good and true from superfluous bullshit.

Wittgenstein is falling into a trap he warned of at the end of his own Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; trying to speak of a silence 'thereof one cannot speak'. We can't even begin to imagine what the world through the lens of God might be like. I was tempted to write that 'if there is a God, his perspective of the world must be beautiful in a way far beyond our imagination', but even that's presumptuous - maybe God's view of the world is grotesque by our standards, maybe he doesn't have the same concepts of beauty and the ugly as we humans do.

Art imitates it's creators and spectators. We're bigoted and shallow and cruel. Our art reflects this. How can it ever show us the world seen rightly, when our perspective on the world is inherently clouded by circumstances and the limits of our senses? Art is grotesque. It's built on human suffering and misery. For: if we had all of our desires fulfilled by the world, what need would we have to try and expand it through art?