Write short essays to answer the following questions.
Philosophy of Art
Ph 2113: Spring 2020
Write short essays to answer the following questions.
Part One: Answer the following questions (each answer should be about 80-100 words)
1. What distinguishes Kant’s “critical” approach to aesthetics and art from the “metaphysical” ones of Schelling, Hegel, or Nietzsche?
2. Explain the different between an “artistic” culture and an “aesthetic” one and how that applies to the modern (post-Enlightenment, democratic) age.
3. Explain the idea of “absolute Art” as it crystallizes in Schelling, Hegel, or Nietzsche (any one of them is enough).
(Art with a capital A refers to the idea of absolute Art throughout these prompts.)
4. How does modern aesthetics from Kant on reflect ancient tensions of iconophilia and iconoclasm, and of art as imitation and as communication with the beyond, the dead, the invisible, the transcendent?
Part Two: Answer question for each of the three thinkers, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche. Each answer should be about 250-300 words.
Schelling
5. What is the fundamental paradox or contradiction in Schelling’s argument for the philosophical superiority of Art to philosophy? What are the implications for Art and for philosophy?
Hegel
6. Explain Hegel’s thesis of the “end of Art” in the modern age—why (and in what sense) Art “for us” is a “thing of the past.”
7. Explain Hegel’s distinction between and sequence of Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic types of art.
8. How does Hegel transform or replace the idea of art as “imitation” with the idea of expression (or spirit as self-objectifying, self-externalizing, or self-creating)?
Nietzsche
9. Explain Nietzsche’s distinction between Apollo and Dionysus as symbols of artistic drives, forms of experience, and modes of culture or civilization.
10. Why does the rise of philosophy with Socrates signify the end of the “tragic age” of the Greeks for Nietzsche?
11. Why does Socratic-Alexandrian culture ultimately lead to a moral crisis that can be resolved, for Nietzsche, only by a rebirth of tragic myth (in the form of Richard Wagner’s music)?
12. Explain how Nietzsche plays off the visual image and musical imitation or representation against each other (in the Apollonian and the Dionysian) such that music “imitates” reality (or gives us a re-presentation of being or existence), while the artistic image is the “appearance of an appearance,” an illusion of perfection.
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