Leo Tolstoy on the Purpose of Art

Philotheos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
Predrag Čičovački ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
Works Of Art

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was one of the greatest artists of all time, but also one of the harshest critics of the contemporary art. In the conclusion of his controversial book, What is Art?, Tolstoy claimed: “The purpose of art in our time consists in transferring from the realm of reason to the realm of feeling the truth that people’s well-being lies in being united among themselves and in establishing, in place of the violence that now reins, that Kingdom of God – that is, of love – which we all regard as the highest aim of human nature.” In my paper I want to examine what Tolstoy means by that, and also how his understating of the purpose of art applies to his own works of art, as well as how it applies to some other contemporary works of art.

Persons Together

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan L. Mittleman
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Image Of God ◽  
Jewish Tradition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Market Relations ◽  
The Image Of God

This chapter moves into the political and economic aspects of human nature. Given scarcity and interdependence, what sense has Judaism made of the material well-being necessary for human flourishing? What are Jewish attitudes toward prosperity, market relations, labor, and leisure? What has Judaism had to say about the political dimensions of human nature? If all humans are made in the image of God, what does that original equality imply for political order, authority, and justice? In what kinds of systems can human beings best flourish? It argues that Jewish tradition shows that we act in conformity with our nature when we elevate, improve, and sanctify it. As co-creators of the world with God, we are not just the sport of our biochemistry. We are persons who can select and choose among the traits that comprise our very own natures, cultivating some and weeding out others.

Calvin's legacy for contemporary Reformed natural law

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (4) ◽  
pp. 414-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer A. Herdt
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Moral Knowledge ◽  
Empirical Science ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Fair Dealing ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Moral Quality ◽  
Careful Distinction

AbstractRecent scholarship has done much to uncover a continuous tradition of distinctively Reformed natural law reflection, according to which knowledge of the natural moral law, though not saving knowledge, is universally available to humanity in its fallen state and makes a stable secular order possible. A close look at Calvin's understanding of natural law, and in particular of conscience and natural human instincts, shows that Calvin himself did not expect the natural law to serve as a source of substantive action-guiding moral norms. First, Calvin held that conscience delivers information concerning the moral quality even of individual actions. But he also thought that we often blind ourselves to the deliverances of conscience. Second, he argued that our natural instincts predispose us to civic order and fair dealing insofar as these are necessary for the natural well-being or advantage of creatures such as ourselves. But he also carefully distinguished the good of advantage from the good of justice or virtue. The modern natural lawyers eroded Calvin's careful distinction between conscience as revealing our duty as duty, and instinct as guiding us towards natural advantage. They also turned away from Calvin's insistence on the moral incapacity of unredeemed humanity. The modern natural lawyers saw their task as one of developing an empirical science of human nature to guide legislation and shape international law, bracketing questions of whether this nature was fallen and in need of redemption. When Scottish Presbyterian Reformed thinkers, such as Gershom Carmichael and John Witherspoon, tried in diverse ways to restore eroded Reformed commitments to the science of human nature, about which they were otherwise so enthusiastic, they were not particularly successful. A science which could derive moral norms from an examination of human instincts, and a conscience which could deliver universal moral knowledge, proved too attractive to decline simply because of the transcendence of God or the fallenness of humankind. Those who wished to preserve an account of natural law which remained faithful to a fully robust set of Reformed theological commitments could do so only by refusing to regard the natural law as a positive source of moral knowledge.

Angus Fletcher’s Other Literary Darwinism

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Joseph Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Psychological Effects ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Negative Judgment ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Literary Darwinism ◽  
Patent Medicine

Abstract Angus Fletcher pitches his book to general readers. Though it consists of literary criticism, it is designed as a psychological self-help manual-literature as therapy. Fletcher's thera­peutic program is presented as an alternative to the kind of literary Darwinism that iden­tifies human nature as the basis for literature. He acknowledges the existence of human nature but aims at transcending it by promoting an Aquarian ethos of harmony and un­derstanding. He has some gifts of style, but the dominant voice in his stylistic blend is that of the shill hawking a patent medicine. He presents himself as a modern sage who reveals an ancient but long-lost technique for using literature to boost happiness and well-being. Each of his 25 chapters identifies a distinct literary technique and uses popularized neuro­science to describe its supposedly beneficial psychological effects. Fletcher’s chains of rea­soning are habitually tenuous, and his exposition is littered with factual errors that betray ignorance of the books, genres, and periods he discusses. Despite its shortcomings, Fletch­er’s book has received encomiums from prestigious researchers, including the psychologist Martin Seligman and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. In evaluating Fletcher’s rhetor­ical style, analytic categories, Aquarian ethos, historical self-narrative, pattern of reasoning, and literary scholarship, this review essay reaches a more negative judgment about the value of his book. As an alternative to Fletcher’s book, I recommend a few evolutionary literary works for general readers.

The Virtues of Justice: Toward a Moral and Jurisprudential Psychology

2021 ◽  
pp. 0306624X2110668
Author(s):  
Christopher Williams ◽  
Bruce Arrigo
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Virtue Ethics ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Crime Control ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Offender Therapy ◽  
Psychological Structure ◽  
The Common ◽  
Over Time

Within the theoretical literature on crime control and offender therapy, little has been written about the importance of virtue ethics in the experience of human justice and in the evolution of the common good. As a theory of being, the aretaic tradition extols eudemonic existence (i.e., excellence, flourishing) as a relational habit of developing character that is both practiced and embodied over time. What this implies is that virtue justice depends on a set of assumptions and predispositions—both moral and jurisprudential—whose meanings are essential to comprehending its psychological structure. This article sets out to explore several themes that our integral to our thesis on the virtues (i.e., the being) of justice. We reclaim justice’s aretaic significance, critique the common conflation of justice and law, discuss how the dominant legalistic conception of justice is rooted in a particular view of human nature, suggest how justice might be more properly grounded in natural moral sensibilities, and provide a tentative explication of the psychological character of justice as a twofold moral disposition. Given this exploratory commentary, we conclude by reflecting on how individual well-being, system-wide progress, and transformative social change are both possible and practical, in the interest of promoting the virtues of justice within the practice of crime control and offender therapy.

Huang Yong Ping and the Power of Zoomorphic Ambiguity

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Kleutghen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
One To One ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
French Citizen

Born in China but now a French citizen, the contemporary artist Huang Yong Ping (b. 1954) prioritizes the contradictions and ambiguities that arise from overlapping motifs that signify differently in different cultural settings. Juxtapositions of Chinese and Western zoomorphic symbolism characterize his work since the mid-1990s, seen across diverse pairings and groupings as well as strange hybrid single creatures. Rather than resolving the disjunctions that arise from these works, however, the shape-shifting nature of Huang’s animals emphasizes their polysemy and the profound lack of one-to-one symbolic correspondence in global contemporary art. The power of his zoomorphic works derives from his comfort with ambiguity: although often derived from Chinese ideas, Huang’s works are globally applicable in their complexity of transnational experience and their reflection of human nature as both instinctual and rational.

The Perfectionist Turn

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas J. Den Uyl ◽  
Douglas B. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Living Things ◽  
Good For

This chapter argues against the claim advanced by Daniel Haybron, Daniel C. Russell, and Mark LeBar that human self-perfection is ultimately based on notions of well-being and human flourishing that we bring to our understanding of human nature and in favor of the idea that it is human nature itself that ultimately grounds our understanding of human well-being or human flourishing. In doing so, the question of whether there is some gap between (a) what it is to be a good human being and (b) what is good for a human being is addressed. It is shown that the arguments on behalf of a such a gap fail and that the version of perfectionism that is advanced—that is, individualistic perfectionism—is ideally suited to not only avoid such a gap but also to display their unity, especially when perfection is understood as a process of living things and not as some cosmic or metaphysical process.

Epicureanism

2021 ◽  
pp. 115-140
Author(s):  
Christopher W. Gowans
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Fear Of Death ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Physical Pain ◽  
Ideal State ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Ideal

The chapter argues that ancient Epicureanism (mainly Epicurus, Lucretius, and Philodemus) is plausibly interpreted as a self-cultivation philosophy. The existential starting point is a life of irrational fears and frustrated desires. The ideal state of well-being is a life of pleasure, understood primarily as the absence of physical pain and mental distress (more tranquilism than hedonism). This ideal life is free of fear of death and the gods, and it is devoted to friendship, moral virtue, and the pursuit of desires only if they are natural and necessary. The philosophical foundation is a materialist, atomistic theory of nature and human nature that entails that death is nothing to fear, the gods are unconcerned with us, and only natural and necessary desires are important. We achieve this ideal through spiritual exercises that involve learning Epicurean philosophy, modifying desires, and cultivating virtue in a community of like-minded people.

An Uneasy Accord: LA Museums Open Their Walls to Comics as True Works of Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 264-270
Author(s):  
Scott Timberg
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
Art Spiegelman ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Future ◽  
Comic Art ◽  
Museum Of Contemporary Art ◽  
Art School

This chapter contains an in-depth exploration of the issues surrounding comics and museums written by cultural journalist Scott Timberg for the Los Angeles Times in 2005 during the opening of the Masters of American Comics exhibition at the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This chapter includes interviews with Ann Philbin, Art Spiegelman, John Carlin, and Brian Walker about the organization of the show. This chapter discusses the valuation of comic art versus fine art, the disillusionment some cartoonists feel about art school and contemporary fine art, and opinions on the future of comic art shows from curators at other museums.

scholarly journals The Soul’s Need to Connect with God through the Language of Art: Analysis from an Islamic Perspective

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Recep Dogan
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Islamic Perspective ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
Important Means ◽  
Art Analysis ◽  
The Way

Human beings express their emotions through the language of art; it is therefore both the spirit of progress and one of the most important means of developing emotions. Consequently, those who cannot make use of this means are incomplete in their maturation. Ideas and other products of the imagination can be given tangible form with the magical key of art. By means of art, humanity can exceed the limits of the earth and reach feelings beyond time and space. Beauty in the realm of existence can be recognized through art. Moreover, the great abilities inherent in human nature can be understood and witnessed in works of art. However, from an Islamic point of view, there are some restrictions on certain fields such as sculpture and painting. It is therefore imperative to analyse the notion of art in Islam and its philosophy and then reflect upon the need of the spirit to connect to God through the language of art while meeting some religious obstacles on the way.

scholarly journals The consummation of the kingdom of God. Reflections on the final victory of Christ as portrayed in Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians

2001 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Potgieter
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Son Of God ◽  
Open Question

Reflections on 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 raise the question whether eschatology should be focused on Christ, or should rather be viewed theocentrically. A study of the mediatory reign of Christ clearly favours the notion of an intermediate kingdom, during which He will subjugate and destroy the “powers” and the enemies of the kingdom. Having achieved the final victory over death itself, the need for an intermediate rule of Christ no longer exists. However, the office of Mediator is unquestionably linked to Christ’s humanity. This again brings to the fore the question whether Christ will retain his human nature after the consummation of his kingdom. Although it remains an open question in Reformed theology whether Christ will relinquish his human nature at the end of this dispensation, it is argued that in the next dispensation He will no longer serve in the office of Mediator, but that He will reign as the Lamb of God in the stature of the eternal Son of God.

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