Posted on: September 29, 2009
Immanuel Kant. Artist Unknown
Susan Neiman’s book, Moral Clarity, continues to impress. It’s wide ranging, but she points to other books for further, more in-depth study. A writer I had not heard of previously sounds like a great place to go for a comprehensive study of the Enlightenment, Jonathan Israel. Huge books for a huge topic. His Radical Enlightenment (2001) and Enlightenment Contested (2006) are 2/3rds of a planned trilogy on the subject.
The strikes back part. Strikes back because the Enlightenment has been under attack for nearly two centuries. It was always attacked from the right, especially on religious grounds, but now from the left as well. It’s a veritable cottage industry to sift through the works of its key philosophers to find precursors for the horrors of the 20th century, from communism to fascism, from the gulag to right wing totalitarian rule.…
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Posted on: September 25, 2009
Moral Clarity, by Susan Neiman. 2008
Am about 100 pages into Moral Clarity, Susan Neiman’s defense of the Enlightenment. So far, so good. I’m reading this along with Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice, which tackles John Rawls and his A Theory of Justice. Neiman’s book is written more for the general reader, and keeps the book closer to the surface. But she is very good at using topical and literary examples to make her case, to make several cases, in fact. Judging from the first 100 pages, I think her main point is that ideas matter, ideals matter, and we shouldn’t be afraid of them, or afraid to talk about “ought” along with “is.” For her, no place on the political spectrum has a monopoly on ideals or values, nor does religion. She sees ideals and values and morality as existing outside as well as inside organized religions, and preaches inclusion, rather than either/or.…
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Posted on: September 20, 2009
Composition X, by Kandinsky. 1939
Composition as Cipher, or Number. The work after his ninth, or a painting to represent all paintings. Whatever his intentions regarding the title, the painting strikes me as musical, like pretty much all of his art, and he wanted that music to come from within all viewers so that they could become seers like Kandinsky. The inner artist meeting the work on the wall and turning it into a tunnel back to themselves. A tunnel with ears.
In your works, you have realized what I, albeit in uncertain form, have so greatly longed for in music. The independent progress through their own destinies, the independent life of the individual voices in your compositions is exactly what I am trying to find in my paintings.
– letter to Schönberg, 1911, after the performance of Schönberg’s second string quartet and the “Three piano pieces.”
George Spencer brings us a new poem below about things that perhaps shouldn’t have a name, like poems, and things that could or should populate those works.…
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Posted on: September 20, 2009
No Title
You can’t say it that way any more. / Bothered about beauty you have to/Come out into the open, into the clearing,/ And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you/ Is OK
– And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name, John Ashbery
The greatest problem in the arts today is the title; this tag that tells us what something is about: Battle of…, Portrait of…., Bowl of… Of course this gives even the most humble subject a coat of arms, presto a seigniorial dwelling, white picket fence and garden, all the dignity it deserves and Sunday painters so admire. But is this good? This, I would argue, has infected poetics, this aboutness, this supernatural force like it can’t be escaped. It’s the tongue lolling like a lazy sunflower tropistic by default. But now I’m bored with this riff and need to take off in another direction which reminds me that most people can read maps, understand the conventions.…
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