Fiction - Free Arts & Philosophy

Opening access to the world of philosophy

- "Tell me, somebody will read this here about poetry and philosophy? Why should he do it?" -

- "Leonardo da Vinci was curious and opened up the human body, to see how this part of the real world is constructed. Goethe's Faust wanted to know, what held the world together and, to do so, he devoted himself to the occult powers. Hogarth wanted to discover the essence of beauty through revelation in art. His "serpentin line" and "line of beauty" only needs to be mathematically approximated and pressed into a formula, to make the curve of female beauty calculable." -

- "Listen, isn't it easier to evaluate the images from a security camera at an airport, for example, and to put the data of the women, you find beautiful, into comparative statistics, this way the algorithm of female beauty will be quickly calculated, aesthetic will be mathematized?" -

- "You will get as a result, what you have put into the machine, not the thing itself, the absolute formula of aesthetics. Your personal projections, that guided you in your selection, will be included, and the general opinion of the population in that particular era may also shine through." -

- "The absolute formula of the aesthetics does exist? A recipe to find the ideal woman regardless of place and time?" -

- "The young Wittgenstein believed that through the logical structure of the image - in this example our ideal image of a woman - we could arrive at the structure of its object in the world itself, that is, at the absolute aesthetic model of the intended woman. Here in the book, it would be the propositional component of the fiction, that "intends" the structure of things in the real world. Later, it seems, he resigned. The intended thing in the world, made of language, depends, on how we tend to use words, in our example the ideal woman. Here in the book it would be the presuppositional component of the fiction." -

- "OK, but what does all this have to do with a lyrical poem? Are you going to dissect poems like corpses, to achieve what, doing this?" -

- "To stay with the example, a woman's beauty is not just anatomical. She also has a certain grace and elegance in her behavior. Such characteristics are formed in a process, that depends on assimilating the "real world", on feeling, on recognizing and on expressing. Here in the book it would be the projectional component of the fiction." -

- "In this case, women would be like a work of art, a fiction?" -

- "When processed in a literary work, they become part of a fictional structure, that is anchored in the real world, and thus they become analyzable. The Song of Songs in the Old Testament and the poetry of the troubadours, to name just a few, have women as their main subject. And they also show the anatomy of love in the real world of the corresponding era." -

- "The literary sources can be of good or bad quality, kitsch or works of art, pornography or eroticism of a high standard. How do you want to measure the truth content?" -

- "Goethe distinguishes between a work of art, that merely seeks to imitate nature, and one, that captures the immanent essence of the object or person depicted and allows it, to shine through in the image. Something like the paintings of the era of Leonardo da Vinci. Maupassant tells, how he learned to create a novel character. He first examined the existential foundations, the essentials of a person's profession, their living conditions, before fictionalizing them in his short stories." -

- "And what does knowledge-oriented literary interpretation consist of?" -

- "To find out, there is no better advice, than to read the book to the end." -