Philosophical Foundations

From Where We've Come

David Hume

1711-1776

Hume Tenets:

Argue but really agree

The eye of the beholder

Confine the right to stretch the truth is afforded

Longer endurance of admiration = validity

Passions pleased

Propositions

See the self

Plato

424-328 BC

Plato’s three objections to art are that it isn’t ethical, philosophical, or pragmatic. He believed that art promotes undesirable passions, that it does not provide any true knowledge or educational value. He believed makers of art were imitators, who knew nothing of true existence (archetype), just of appearance. Plato believed that poetry appealed to the irrational, emotional part of the soul, seducing readers and causing undesirable emotions.

Aristotle

384-382BC

Aristotle espoused that the main function of art is not always to teach, but to communicate experience and emotion. Aristotle agrees with Plato on his point that poets are imitators, but imitators of beauty/significance. He believes that the pleasure in imitation is natural for man, such as a baby learning to speak. Aristotle disagrees with Plato on poetry being twice removed from reality and an illusion of truth. He argues that just as history describes “what has happened”, poetry describes “what may and ought to have happened” which would be the ideal. Regarding Plato’s point that poetry makes man weak/overly sentimental with the principle of catharsis, Aristotle believed that art purges the passions and ennobles/humbles man.

Jacob Lawrence

1917-2000

An artist reveals their individualism as well as their humanism in their artwork.

“If at times my productions do not express the conventionally beautiful, there is always an effort to express the universal beauty of man’s continuous struggle to lift his social position and to add dimension to his spiritual being.” — Jacob Lawrence

Teddy Harris