Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Space and Time', 'The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800' and 'Preface to 'Dorian Gray''

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5 ideas

21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 6. Value of Art

7276	All art is quite useless [Wilde]
	Full Idea: All art is quite useless.
	From: Oscar Wilde (Preface to 'Dorian Gray' [1891])
	A reaction: Echoes Kant's thought that art is 'purposive without purpose'. Although I find Wilde's claims that morality has nothing to do with art to be naïve, I find this remark sympathetic. Art may play with moral feelings, but is unlikely to affect actions.

21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 7. Art and Morality

7274	Books are only well or badly written, not moral or immoral [Wilde]
	Full Idea: There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
	From: Oscar Wilde (Preface to 'Dorian Gray' [1891])
	A reaction: This is simply false. Novels that are viciously (or subtly) racist, sexist, homophobic, or egotistical can obviously be immoral. I could write a nasty story about Oscar Wilde. It might, though, be very well written. If life is moral, so are novels.

7275	Having ethical sympathies is a bad mannerism of style in an artist [Wilde]
	Full Idea: No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
	From: Oscar Wilde (Preface to 'Dorian Gray' [1891])
	A reaction: This has a Nietzschean suggestion that the artist is 'beyond good and evil', and operates on some higher level of values, which in Wilde's case seem to be purely aesthetic. You can't justify a callous murder by executing it beautifully.

26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 11. Against Laws of Nature

5470	The idea of laws of nature arose in the Middle Ages [Hall,AR, by Ellis]
	Full Idea: According to A.R. Hall, the idea that nature is governed by laws does not appear to have existed in the ancient Greek, Roman or Far Eastern traditions of science, but arose from religious, philosophical and legal ideas in medieval Europe.
	From: report of A.R. Hall (The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800 [1954]) by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.5
	A reaction: This is a very illuminating point, which gives good circumstantial support for questioning the existence of external laws which are imposed on a passive nature. Modern essentialism suggest the 'laws' are the intrinsic results of properties.

27. Natural Reality / C. Space / 6. Space-Time

14014	Space alone, and time alone, will fade away, and only their union has an independent reality [Minkowski]
	Full Idea: Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.
	From: Hermann Minkowski (Space and Time [1908], Intro)
	A reaction: Notice the qualification that it is a 'kind of' union. Deep confusion arises from exaggerating the analogy between space and time. Craig Bourne remarks (2006:157) that this shows independence of measurement, not of reality