Art and Sch. etc. Part 2

The thing that struck me in this barely 2-page chapter was the reminder that “the object of the mind, as such, is simply and solely knowledge.” yes, yes, of course, of course, that’s the main thing I use my mind for, definitely…

How does that fit into the current way of things? Do we think of our minds having knowledge as it’s simple and sole object and live accordingly? Well, yeah, what else is a mind for? We like knowledge, we look stuff up all the time. We went to school to stock up on knowledge units, and we read articles and posts and books to get more knowledge units. I mean, 21st century Westerners are probably the knowledgeyest peoples ever, with our incredible amount of leisure time and insanely convenient access to basically an infinity of things-to-know [oh yes, we know sooo much. Just don’t make me take a 1900 8th grade final exam…]

BUT. Something still seems off to me.

Trying to think through exactly what that something off is, I remembered a very interesting course I took in grad school. I think it was called Environmental Ethics, but the first half of the semester was really a phenomenology of the body- thinking about what it is to be an incarnate creature, a soul-body-mess-of-a-thing. One of the highlights, besides the professor reaaally wanting to encourage us to not feel guilty about taking naps [never a problem for me, but I guess some personalities tend to think it a waste of time. Weird.] one of the highlights that I remember was the professor talking about beer [of course a highlight for the hobbit].

Specifically, good traditional beer versus American ‘beer’.

Traditionally, this prof argued, one was tempted to overindulge in a good thing, let the animal-pleasure-drivenness of fallen humanity take over. A man, who is definitely meant to enjoy a good ale, becomes an animal when he has too many. Today’s super-messed-up man, however, because of all kinds of post-Puritanical issues and other misguidedness and bad formation, doesn’t even make it to animal level, his sin is more machine-ish. He doesn’t overindulge in too much of a good thing, like a dog who busts open the kibbles bag–  he robotically inputs x number of Natty Lites into his system to get the desired effect. There’s no enjoyment, it’s crazy disordered from the start, from the moment the ingredients of the ungodly swill are thrown together.

So I wonder if our Wikipedia rabbit-hole adventures and constant trivial looking-things-up is a legitimate respect for the knowledge-orientation of the mind, or a mechanical, desperate reaction of a half-starved and malformed faculty…

Maritain quotes the Aristo-Thomistic understanding that in knowing stuff, “the mind becomes, itself, in a way, all things.” There’s a semester’s worth of Latin argumentations and explanations and guesses as to what exactly that means, what exactly goes on in the mind knowing a thing, BUT, Medieval Epistemology, with its phantasms and intellectual vision beams, was one of the primary reasons I failed out of PhD school. I’m sorry I just can’t caaaarrreeee.

That being said, it does make sense to me that the mind, in some sense, becomes what it knows. Hence the close connection between knowledge and love…

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In other news, it has been beautiful outside and for some reason, everyone who goes by wants to take a picture of the little purple flowers that have popped up in our yard. They are nice, and I’m cool with people instagraming my mystery flowers planted by the previous tenant’s sister-in-law [shout out to Sue] but I’m not sure what the big deal is. Winter wasn’t that long this year…

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Oh, also, the chapter was actually about the distinction between the speculative (deals with knowledge) and the practical (deals with doing and making, i.e. action)

“Art belongs to the Practical Order. Its orientation is towards doing, not to the pure inwardness of knowledge.”

“wherever you find art you find some action or operation to be contrived, some work to be done.”

Basically, Art is practical work.

Art & Scholasticism, Scholasticism & Art Part One

As mentioned in the last post, this early work of Maritain is a rejection of the silly Romantic views of Art and the Artist which have come to the modern world via the Renaissance and Enlightenment, namely that art is “self-expression” and the artist is a wild demi-god among men, and art is completely subjective and merely a vehicle for some contrived political message. The truth is much more humble, as Jacques will explain.

[Sidenote: kind of funny to hear a refutation of Romanticism from a guy who literally had a suicide pact with his wife (Raissa) — if they didn’t find the meaning of life within a year, there would be nothing left but to end it all. Luckily, they found the Church, entered it, and determined a better direction for their intensity.]

So, Chapter I.

Herein, Maritain basically explains his 20th century Thomist mission: go back to Thomas and the Schoolmen [ha, band name] and, from the questions they did directly address, and from all the implications, logical consequences, definitions, exceptions, etc., piece together what their answer to other questions would have been. For the Scholastics, Maritain says, were primarily absorbed by the demands of teaching, they didn’t have time or good reasons to wonder about stuff outside of their syllabi and lesson plans.

So it happens that the Scholastics argued a lot about Art in general, which included things like shipbuilding, and they of course talked about Beauty, but the Fine Arts as a distinct, beauty-oriented thing to work out and debate wasn’t really on their radar. But they talked about a lot of stuff that’s relevant to the discussion; the Scholastics were so good, they answered questions they hadn’t even thought of yet.

Here, one could say, “well dammit, if it’s not in the Summa, I don’t need to know about it!” 

Wellll, Thomas Aquinas thinks that’s dumb, so we’re not going to do that.

PRUDENCE, that virtue that judges how best to realize the ideal in particular circumstances, here and now, is kind of the key thing here, I think (which Maritain talks a lot about a couple chapters later).  I imagine if you told Thomas that you were going to mostly dismiss questions of your time because he didn’t happen to think of them first and give you an outline of how to address them, or they just don’t quite fit into the Scholastic framework, he would be pretty annoyed.

Or, more likely, he’d laugh a jolly Lewis-Chestertonian heavenly laugh and remind you that it’s all straw anyway- Love God and do what you will, says Augustine!

True, you could do much, much worse than only reading St. Thomas. But still.

Anyway, getting off track; I really just wanted to point out that in Chapter I Jacques talks about the “neo”-Thomist [he would prefer plain ol’ Thomist] way of running scholastics’ genius insights through the circumstances and difficulties of the situation today, [again, sounds like prudence…] and getting even more of their genius insights.

JM ends the chapter saying:

 [he hopes] that, despite their inadequacy, these observations apropos of and concerning the maxims of the Schools will draw attention to the utility of having recourse to the wisdom of Antiquity, as also to the possible interest of an exchange of views between philosophers and artists, at a time when the necessity of escaping from the vast intellectual confusion bequeathed to us by the nineteenth century and finding once more the spiritual conditions of work which shall be honest is everywhere felt.

Friggin 19th century.

That confusion, like a lot of confusions, comes down to a lack of proper context. “Art” in a world where nothing is transcendent and Beauty is subjective and meaningless, is going to be pretty messed up. A return to scholastic ideas brings back the proper context and orientation [i.e., God], enabling us to make some sense of things. So says Maritain.

I have some notes ready to go on the also very short chapter 2, but it shifts into totally different thought and this seems like enough for a late Saturday night and a dying laptop.

This post brought to you by:
~a lot of time in the sun- shine                                                                                    ~Winehaven Stinger Mead

p.s. I am hoping to fix up the layout and stuff around here soon. I just went with what I had while I was inspired before I got distracted away again.