Art (and Philosophy) and the Ultimate Aims of Human Life

[Philosophy Now]

Raymond Tallis is hungry to expand human consciousness through art.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/57/Art ... Human_Life

[marjoram_blues]

Interesting 'Note to Readers' who might be suspicious of the argument set out in the article.

Wonder if there were any takers...

[A_Seagull]

Certainly this article is more art than philosophy. I can happily say that I disagree with almost all of it.

I get turned off when people start talking about others being half-awake: "Half-awakened, we are constantly engaged........" , you can be pretty sure that most all of what follows will be BS.

[marjoram_blues]

Certainly this article is more art than philosophy. I can happily say that I disagree with almost all of it.

I get turned off when people start talking about others being half-awake: "Half-awakened, we are constantly engaged........" , you can be pretty sure that most all of what follows will be BS.

I would say that the writing is colourful and well-structured. So, perhaps it is artful philosophy ? I still have to unravel the main argument.
Perhaps you can offer an illustration, or two, of specific objections - otherwise you too could stand accused of BS. Your cut-off quote is not being fair to the author [ I have placed emphases showing the context below ].

I'm not sure whether others can access this article, so I've pulled out some paragraphs. Some artists, philosophers, arty bull-shitters might want to contribute their thoughts, after careful analysis.

Art has often been used to glorify, divert or pleasure those who commission or pay for it. This has made people cynical about the claims of art to express transcendental values.

Artists know they must follow the dinner pail or end up dead next to an empty one. But the extraordinary thing about great artists is that they have produced works that are many times more beautiful, profound and complex than their contract required…

Art, I want to argue, addresses a fundamental hunger arising out of the human condition.

Humans have three obvious hungers: for survival; for pleasure; and for positive acknowledgement by real or imaginary others (internalised as self-esteem at being loved, lusted after, or knowing that one is not, or is not thought to be, useless or a shit). But there is a fourth hunger and it is this that art addresses – and in the future will do so more explicitly and exclusively. What is this hunger? Where does it come from?

The fourth hunger – like the third – arises from our curious condition of being animals that have woken to a greater or lesser extent out of the state of an organism. Half-awakened, we are constantly engaged in making explicit sense of the world and of our fellow humans. This sense remains tantalisingly incomplete and stubbornly local. We go to our deaths never having been fully there – except perhaps in our final agonal moments when we are reclaimed by our bodies – or never having fully grasped our being there because we never quite close the gap between what we are and what we know, our ideas and our experiences, and because our knowledge is permeated by a sense of the ignorance that surrounds it.

For most people throughout most of history, the fourth hunger has scarcely been an issue. The starving, the oppressed, the frightened, the aching, the itchy, and the bereaved, find the local, unchosen, meanings that they have to contend with quite sufficient. Affluence, born of technological advance, however, has resulted in increasing numbers of people for whom economic survival is a less continuously pressing concern…

…They have sufficient leisure to think beyond means to Ultimate Ends. For them, the incompleteness of the sense of the world, the vacuum in the present moment, may become a problem….

…The artwork of the future will have to combine the special virtues of music and of literature. And the literary work of the future will bring together the strengths of fiction; of lyric poetry, with its ability to encompass a whole world in a small space through implying more than it says and unpeeling what it celebrates; and, possibly, philosophy.

Oh yes, philosophy. Philosophy at its best combines the toughest, most rigorous sense of reality with the most tingling sense of possibility. And its most fundamental aim – to enlarge and clarify our understanding of the world; even to make the world mind-portable – overlaps with that of art. It, too, strives to bring us closer to rounding out the sense of the world, and to helping us to escape the Dominion of Eternal And, and the endless ‘fugitive impressions’ of Humean being.

Unfortunately philosophy tends to X-Ray rather than see the world, looking straight past or straight through it. That is why we have to agree with Nietzsche that “the creation of art is the only metaphysical activity to which life still obliges us.” Such a metaphysical activity is one in which we shall truly experience our experiences.

…We must also acknowledge that we shall continue to experience art at many other levels than those which touch upon fundamental hungers. Curiosity, the need for distraction, love of entertainment, snobbery, the chance of meeting others, the excitement of being at great occasions, the desire to make oneself more interesting or attractive – these are, and will remain, the commonest reasons for engaging with the arts. We will not always arrive at a symphony concert on a Saturday night in the grip of a metaphysical hunger and leave with that hunger satisfied…

…Artists are more continuously and explicitly aware of the fourth hunger that is only intermittently felt and often unrecognised by others. If artists are able to withstand an almost unbearable awareness of the flaw in the human condition it is because they also experience the intense joy of creation…

…Art offers an intermission in the otherwise permanent condition of never having been quite there. Useless and necessary, art – like holidays – is about experience for its own sake – but – unlike holidays – such experience perfected. So let there be art, extending and deepening, if not rounding off, the sense of the world, celebrating the wonderful and beautiful uselessness of our half-awakened state.

© Prof. Raymond Tallis 2006