Cassirer, Langer, and Dilthey on the Distinctive Kinds of Symbolism in the Arts

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf Makkreel

AbstractThis paper examines the ways in which Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer place the arts in the spectrum of symbolization. Langer claims that Cassirer is wrong to consider artistic symbolism as a more concrete mode of linguistic symbolism. Instead, artists create presentational symbols that are just as capable of formal articulation, i. e., of complex combinations, as words are. According to Langer, the presentational modes of articulation of music and the visual arts are altogether different from the syntactical mode that governs language. I argue that the way Langer imposes her presentational model on the literary arts goes too far in decontextualizing them from the real world. Thus I propose a more inclusive artistic spectrum which proceeds from Langer’s presentational symbolism to the typifying mode of symbolization suggested by Wilhelm Dilthey to Cassirer’s more ideational linguistic mode.

AKSEN ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31
Author(s):  
Andrey Caesar Effendi ◽  
LMF Purwanto

The use of digital technology today can be said to be inseparable in our daily lives. Digital technology isslowly changing the way we communicate with others and the environment. Socialization that is usuallyface-to-face in the real world now can be done to not having to meet face-to-face in cyberspace. Thisliterature review aims to see a change in the way of obtaining data that is growing, with the use of digitaltechnology in ethnographic methods. The method used in this paper is to use descriptive qualitativeresearch methods by analyzing the existing literature. So it can be concluded that the use of digitalethnography in the architectural programming process can be a new way of searching for data at thearchitectural programming stage.


Author(s):  
Ita Mac Carthy

This introductory chapter analyses the April fresco depicting the three Graces of classical tradition in the Salone dei mesi (Room of the months) of Ferrara's Palazzo Schifanoia. The Allegory of April transforms the abstract qualities of grace into an eloquent verbal language that is read from top to bottom by following the line of their spiritual passage from the heavens to deserving mortals below. Close allies of beauty and faithful escorts to Love, these qualities inspire the arts of love, poetry, and music. Through the sign of Taurus, they infuse the powers of liberality into the hearts of the elect. An ideal rather than a realistic portrait of universal grace and sociability, though, the fresco also conveys the real-world dearth of its qualities. For although the fresco's painter, Francesco del Cossa, paints grace with grace, he fails to receive grace in return. He shares in a problem that fifteenth-century poets, artists, male courtiers, and court ladies knew well: the problem of what happens when the grace personified and idealized in the figure of the three Graces meets with nothing but ingratitude.


spontaneously invented a name for the creature derived from the most prominent features of its anatomy: kamdopardalis [the normal Greek word for ‘giraffe*]. (10.27.1-4) It is worth spending a little time analysing what is going on in this passage. The first point to note is that an essential piece of information, the creature’s name, is not divulged until the last possible moment, after the description is completed. The information contained in the description itself is not imparted directly by the narrator to the reader. Instead it is chan­ nelled through the perceptions of the onlooking crowd. They have never seen a giraffe before, and the withholding of its name from the reader re-enacts their inability to put a word to what they see. From their point of view the creature is novel and alien: this is conveyed partly by the naive wonderment of the description, and partly by their attempts to control the new phenomenon by fitting it into familiar categories. Hence the comparisons with leopards, camels, lions, swans, ostriches, eyeliner and ships. Eventually they assert conceptual mastery over visual experience by coining a new word to name the animal, derived from the naively observed fea­ tures of its anatomy. However, their neologism is given in Greek (kamdopardalis), although elsewhere Heliodoros is scrupulously naturalistic in observing that Ethiopians speak Ethiopian. The reader is thus made to watch the giraffe from, as it were, inside the skull of a member of the Ethiopian crowd. The narration does not objectively describe what they saw but subjectively re­ enacts their ignorance, their perceptions and processes of thought. This mode of presentation, involving the suppression of an omniscient narrator in direct communication with the reader, has the effect that the reader is made to engage with the material with the same immediacy as the fictional audience within the frame of the story: it becomes, in imagination, as real for him as it is for them. But there is a double game going on, since the reader, as a real person in the real world, differs from the fictional audience inside the novel precisely in that he does know what a giraffe is. This assumption is implicit in the way the description is structured. If Heliodoros* primary aim had been to describe a giraffe for the benefit of an ignorant reader, he would surely have begun with the animal’s name, not withheld it. So for the reader the encounter


Inception ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
David Carter

This chapter looks at the specific artistic references in Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010). One artist is referred to by indirect reference and visual simulation of some of his works, and another is paid homage to by the inclusion of one of his works in a scene. The artists in question are M.C. Escher and Francis Bacon. The Dutch artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, famous for his works featuring constructions which would be impossible in the real world, is not directly named in the film, but he is referred to indirectly by the mention of a phenomenon which he utilised in his work: the so-called 'Penrose Steps'. Meanwhile, in a sequence in which Cobb is talking to Mal, there is a painting visible on the wall of the room, Bacon's Study for a head of George Dyer, 1967. Nolan clearly shares some perspectives on the world with Bacon: a fascination with distorted reality, a sense of horror as in a nightmare, and, in some cases, the real world being actually torn apart.


Author(s):  
Hanna Przybysz

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein are the authors of the concept of a work of art understood as an exaggerated stimulus in the creative process. The aim of art, according to them, is (a) to show the essence of something in a perceptually accessible way, and (b) to evoke a strong reaction from the recipient. Scientists say that the aim of art is not to perfectly reproduce reality, but to present the very essence of an object, scene or event by exaggerating its most characteristic features, while ignoring non-essential features. The effect of this treatment is a super stimulus, which is a supernatural stimulus that does not exist in the real world. Researchers have proposed seven universal – evolutionarily and culturally – neurological laws of aesthetic experience in relation to the visual arts (painting and sculpture). I propose to extend the tool apparatus of neuroaesthetics from the area of unimodal arts to a work of film art. It is an interesting tool for research into film aesthetics and masterpieces. In this paper, I will discuss these laws and make a representative analysis of them in a visual case study of Michael Almereyda’s film Nadja (1994). The main goal of my work is to show the stricto naturalistic position. Man is not aware that the first stages of cognitive perception have a significant impact on his interest in art, what he pays attention to, and on aesthetic experiences on a sensual, unconscious level. It is an interdisciplinary attempt to provide consistency of research approaches in the humanities with the naturalistic one in the area of natural sciences, which shows that on some levels we are very similar to each other and only in the process of ontogenesis do we acquire individuality – that we are governed by universal laws, not only those related to ourindividual interests and tastes.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 157-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Wayne Cecil

This article shares the motivation, process, and outcomes of using humorous scenes from television comedies to teach the real world of tax practice. The article advances the literature by reviewing the use of video clips in a previously unexplored discipline, discussing the process of identifying and selecting appropriate clips, and introducing and reviewing fair use guidelines for copyrighted video materials in the classroom.


2020 ◽  
pp. 3-14
Keyword(s):  
The Real ◽  

By the term “library awareness,” I refer to the way in which the library is understood in a given text and, extrapolating from the text, in a given period or place.1 It can also signify the various answers to a question about the meaning of a library: in other words, the awareness of the principal and practical meanings of libraries, the perception of them as an aggregate, and the understanding that an aggregate of books is equivalent to an aggregate of knowledge and is even connected to other perceptions of holism. This awareness is connected, naturally, to the real-world existence of libraries and collections of books, but the two are not identical. In Jewish culture (as well as in other cultures), library awareness is a diverse and fluid concept that changes with time and place. Differentiating stages or types of library awareness can contribute to an understanding of the historical, cultural, and intellectual trends of various periods. In this essay I will concentrate on the last two centuries, while touching as well on previous stages of Jewish culture....


1969 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. M. Hafner

We are often told, and it is easy to believe, that the images of abstract art are not drawn from the real world. In the most conventional view of the modern school, abstract painting is a search for free expression of the artist's own vision. The non-representational painter works as he pleases and is pleased by little that he sees. A humorous drawing in a sophisticated magazine shows a studio full of wild canvases, with the artist gazing through the window at a magnificent sunset. He says to a friend, ‘Yes, old man, I admit that it's beautiful. Sometimes I'm sorry it's not the sort of thing I do.’ Authority for the establishment of a public attitude that makes such a joke possible is to be found in the writings of many critics and in the words of artists themselves. Harold Rosenberg: ‘The big moment [in art] came when it was decided to paint—just to paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from value, political, aesthetic, moral.’ André Malraux: ‘What then was painting becoming, now that it no longer imitated or transfigured? Simply—painting.’ Sheldon Cheney: ‘I cannot do better, in trying to help you to an understanding of modernism, than to point out the devastating effect the realistic movement had on the arts as a whole.‘ Piet Mondrian: ‘In order that art … should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance.’ Clive Bell: ‘Creating a work of art is so tremendous a business that it leaves no leisure for catching likenesses.’ Kasimir Malevich: ‘From the supremist point of view, the appearances of natural objects are in themselves meaningless. … The representation of an object … is something that has nothing to do with art.’ Laurence Binyon, in 1911: ‘The theory that art is, above all things, imitative and representative, no longer holds the field with thinking minds.’ Ortega y Gasset: ‘Painting completely reversed its function and, instead of putting us within what is outside, endeavored to pour out upon the canvas what is within: ideal invented objects.’


2012 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Patrick Craddock

I approached this special edition of Dreadlocks with caution and apprehension. I saw two interpretations for the title: did it mean embracing science with creative political decisions for change, or did it mean using creativity through the arts as a symbol for approaching climate change? There is little hard science in these published papers, although there is a view from Richard Dawkins that makes an iconic appearance in a paper by Briar Wood from London Metropolitan University. This emphasises the Dawkins view that scientists must reach out to ‘…for want of a better word, poets’ and that there is a mismatch between science and the metaphorical language used to describe the real world. Improving communication and understanding is a good point to make, although where does climate science meet the arts?


Author(s):  
J.Z. Garrod

Although it is still in early stages, many commentators have been quick to note the revolutionary potential of next-generation or Bitcoin 2.0 technology. While some have expressed fear that the widespread application of these technologies may engender the rise of a Terminator-style Skynet, others believe that it represents the coming of a decentralized autonomous society (DAS) in which humans are freed from centralized forms of power through the proliferation of distributed autonomous organizations or DAOs. Influenced by neoliberal theory that stresses privatization, open markets, and deregulation, Bitcoin 2.0 technologies are implicitly working on the assumption that 'freedom' means freedom from the state. This neglects, however, that within capitalist societies, the state can also provide freedom from the vagaries of the market by protecting certain things from commodification. Through an analysis of (1) class and the role of the state; (2) the concentration and centralization of capital; and (3) the role of automation, I argue that the vision of freedom that underpins Bitcoin 2.0 tech is one that neglects the power that capital holds over us in both organizing the structure of our lives, and informing our idea of what it means to be human. In neglecting these other forms of power, I claim that the DAS might be a far more dystopian development than its supporters comprehend, making possible societies that are commodities all the way down.


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