/lit/ - Literature

>If we wish to imagine a true paradise for the productivity of the human spirit we must transfer ourselves to the time before writing on parchment or paper was invented. That is where we will find that the whole of the cultural life was born which is now preserved only as the object of refection or some practical application. For poetry was here none other than a real invention of myths, i.e., of ideal processes in which human life was reflected in accordance with its varying character with objective reality in the sense of direct spectral apparitions. We see a capacity for this as belonging to every noble people until the moment when it acquired the use of writing. From then on it loses its poetic strength: its living language hitherto formed by a constant natural development degenerates into a process of crystallisation and petrifies; the art of poetry becomes the art of embellishing the old myths which are no longer capable of reinvention and finally becomes mere rhetoric and dialectic.
>If neither the Greeks at their prime, nor any later great nation of culture, such as the Italians and Spaniards, could win from passing incidents the matter for an epic story, to you moderns this will presumably come a trifle harder: for the events they witnessed, at least were real phenomena; whilst ye, in all that rules, surrounds and dwells in you, can witness naught but masquerades tricked out with rags of culture from the wardrobe-shop and tags from the historical marine-store. The seer's eye for the ne'er-experienced the gods have always lent to none but their believers, as ye may ascertain from Homer or Dante. But ye have neither faith nor godliness.

A simplified summarisation:
>1. The era of great art in ancient Greece (prior to any systematisation, or artificial re-creation of art; there is great art such as of Homer and Aeschylus and so on)
>2. Plato and Aristotle (mostly self-explanatory, though it should not be asserted whether art and culture began this direction as a response to Plato and Aristotle, or the opposite; what is certain is that they coincided)
>3. post-Cartesian (the creation of aesthetics, "great art" begins to decline, the dominating effect of aesthetics on the creation of art for the use of ego as preconception increases)
>4. Hegel (declares the "death of art" no longer as the sensual manifestation of the Absolute, and has been mostly replaced by philosophy and religion, though art as individual enjoyment has every potential to continue)
>5. Wagner (His "total work of art" is the one possible counter claim to Hegel's "death of art" thesis, as well as very closely precedes Heidegger's and Nietzsche's ideas on art such as in the effort to rebirth the Greeks, their Tragedy being the product of Apollonian and Dionysian elements or the utter rejection of commercialised art; but, at least according to Heidegger, though being "essential to the historical position of art," "necessarily had to fail" because of the dominance of music in the artform, which he traces as only possible under modern aesthetics)
>6. Nietzsche (paving the way for a new response to "aesthetic Socratism", but ultimately falling within the mistakes of the tradition he was attempting to critique, containing both Wagner and Plato)

It's interesting that he makes the parallel between art-thought and aesthetics haunting the West down the centuries, to Western metaphysics doing the same. And the reason being, at least in part, for the current lack of the creation of true art, and how it would get only worse in that sense. The ridiculous modern art of today being the final, empty product of modern aesthetics. It also seems apparent that that eternal battle of the philosopher and poet as described by Plato continues under Heidegger, though the poet be moved over to philosopher and musician take the place of artist.

I highly recommend you all to read this essay on the topic:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265426422_Heidegger_Wagner_and_the_History_of_Aesthetics


Can music ever achieve the status of great art? Or is any complex musical artform seemingly, while not necessarily being the result of modern aesthetics, only to be a lower-artform in its pleasure-giving? Heidegger one assumes only cares for music in art as the greater articulation of the poetic (though it is very arguable Wagner was doing this), such as in Greek theatre, Carl Orff's Carmina Burana or Japanese Noh plays.

>>15682986
>>15683185
>To people harassed by the arrogance of our chemists and physicists, and who begin to hold themselves for weak of brain if they shrink from accepting a resolution of the world into "force and matter,"—to them it were no less an act of charity, could we shew them from the works of our philosopher what clumsy things are those same "molecules and atoms." But what an untold boon could we bring to men affrighted on the one hand by the thunders of the Church, and driven to desperation by our physicists on the other, could we fit into the lofty edifice of" Love, Faith, and a vivid knowledge of the ideality of that world our only present mode of apperception maps out by laws of Time and Space; then would each question of the troubled spirit after the "when" and "where" of the "other world" be recognised as answerable by nothing but a blissful smile. For if there be an answer to these so infinitely weighty-seeming questions, our philosopher has given it with insurpassable beauty and precision in that phrase which [261] he merely meant, in a measure, to define the ideality of Space and Time: "Peace, rest and happiness dwell there alone where is no When, no Where."

I think it would help you greatly, even if lack of highest ideal in this particular expression, it would help all in its purely human pity.