display all the ideas for this combination of texts
6 ideas
52 | We choose things for their fineness, their advantage, or for pleasure [Aristotle] |
Full Idea: (roughly) Three pairs of factors cause choice or avoidance: fine/base, advantageous/harmful, pleasant/painful. | |
From: Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1104b29) | |
A reaction: I love the Greek idea that we choose actions for their 'fineness' [kalos, nobility, beauty]. We sometimes celebrate fine deeds in the media, and even award honours for them, but we don't talk about them much. |
22709 | We should first decide what are the great works of art, with aesthetic theory following from that [Murdoch] |
Full Idea: Our aesthetic must stand to be judged by great works of art which we know to be such independently. …So let us start by saying that Shakespeare is the greatest of all artists, and let our aesthetic be the philosophical justification of this judgement. | |
From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.205) | |
A reaction: She offers this view in specific contradiction of Tolstoy, which says we should first have a theory, and then judge accordingly. I take Murdoch to be entirely right, but it means that our aesthetic theory will shift over time. |
22715 | Great art proves the absurdity of art for art's sake [Murdoch] |
Full Idea: The work of the great artists shows up 'art-for-art's-sake' as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. | |
From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
A reaction: She keeps referring to tragedy (as the greatest art), but it is hard to see how we learn love and morality from a great pot or a great abstract painting. Wilde makes the doctrine frivolous, but I think it contains a degree of truth. Music. |
22714 | Because art is love, it improves us morally [Murdoch] |
Full Idea: It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were, accidental. | |
From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.218) | |
A reaction: Is an enhancement of one's love necessarily a moral improvement? Love is a fine feeling, but how does it motivate? Has no wickedness ever been perpetrated in the name of love? 'All's fair in love and war'. |
22712 | Art and morals are essentially the same, and are both identical with love [Murdoch] |
Full Idea: Art and morals are (with certain provisos) one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. | |
From: Iris Murdoch (The Sublime and the Good [1959], p.215) | |
A reaction: The idea that art, morals and love are all just a single thing seems unhelpful. What about satire? What about duty without love? What about pure abstract painting? What about Stravinsky's highly formal view of his music? |
3044 | Stoics say that beauty and goodness are equivalent and linked [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Stoics say the beautiful is the only good. Good is an equivalent term to the beautiful; since a thing is good, it is beautiful; and it is beautiful, therefore it is good. | |
From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.1.59 |