F. Self, Meaning, and Culture
F.2 Art and Aesthetics
Course description
Art is a different mode of knowing: it works through form and subjective experience rather than argument, and it rewards close attention the way a proof does. Gombrich's The Story of Art, or Smarthistory, a free online art history whose global range goes beyond Gombrich's largely Western canon, traces the arc from cave painting through Renaissance humanism to modern abstraction, and is worth reading against actual images rather than as text alone. Kant's Critique of Judgment treats aesthetic response as disinterested, a pleasure taken in a thing without wanting to possess or use it, and distinguishes the beautiful from the sublime, a distinction Edmund Burke had already drawn in 1757. Read enough of Kant to test the disinterest thesis against your own experience of something that actually moved you. Set against it the rasa theory of Indian aesthetics, laid out in the Natyashastra, which treats art as the deliberate evocation of a specific emotional flavor in an audience rather than a disinterested judgment at all: the two accounts disagree about what is even happening when art works.
Practice a craft rather than only studying one. Continue an instrument if you play one, or start drawing, or keep a regular habit of writing fiction or poetry; none of it needs to be publishable; the point is to do it badly at first and watch what changes. Literature deserves the same direct treatment: Shakespeare's Hamlet, Goethe's Faust, Orwell's 1984, and something outside the European tradition, a handful of Rumi's poems in translation. Joseph Campbell's comparative work on myth is useful as a writer's template for how stories are built; folklorists reject his monomyth as a claim about all myth everywhere, so read it as a tool rather than as evidence of a human universal.
Checkpoints
Each checkpoint is tagged with the stage of the cycle it tests.| Stage | Checkpoint | Attempts |
|---|---|---|
formalism | Write a formal analysis of one painting or piece of music using vocabulary from Gombrich or Smarthistory, before reading any commentary on it. | Post the first attempt |
skepticism | Test Kant's disinterest thesis against a work that moved you, and say where it fails to describe what happened. | Post the first attempt |
abstraction | Compare Kant's disinterested judgment with rasa theory on what happens when a work moves you. | Post the first attempt |
intuition | Keep a practice log for a creative skill for three months and record one thing the practice taught you that reading did not. | Post the first attempt |