Aesthetics: Crash Course Philosophy #31

How do art and morality intersect? Today we look at an ethically questionable work of art and discuss R. G. Collingwood’s view that art is best when it helps us live better lives. We’ll go over Aristotle’s concept of catharsis and how it can resolve the problem of tragedy. We are also exploring the paradox of fiction and the debate between autonomism and moralism.

--

Crash Course Philosophy is sponsored by Squarespace.

--

Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet?

[joshuajones]

Don’t mind me, just keeping the chom chom trend alive

[razatsutradhar]

Is anyone going to question the monkey's name? Naruto

[kaelobmiller]

That one hair that stood out of place on Hank’s head was art.

[AdamService]

I love that Hank calls out his brother John for not agreeing with Aristotle though he came up with Catharsis-an emotion many, many people felt while reading or watching John's own art, A Fault in Our Stars.

[thebonesaw..]

At some point during the 1960s, someone (possibly an employee of EMI) obtained a recording of birds singing for EMI's sound catalog. Later, that recording of those birds was used by the Beatles for the song "Blackbird". Later still, Pink Floyd used those same birds for "Goodbye Blue Sky". Now, the sound artist for EMI didn't cue the birds when to sing or prompt them in any manner whatsoever. All he did was place a recording device in the area and that device eventually picked up the sound of those birds. Just like David Slater (who had to turn on his camera), the only action taken by the sound engineer was turning on his recorder. After that, the engineer had no more control than Slater did when it came to what ended up being recorded. By the copyright office's logic, does that mean the descendants of those birds are owed back royalties from both the Beatles and Pink Floyd?

[verdatum]

I so love catharsis. I have moments where it feels like I need that feeling more than just about anything. I can't say I know what that means. But if there weren't those forms of art, I fear there'd be times where I'd snap like a bowstring.

[QuarterMoonRachel]

I was never very interested in philosophy before I started watching these crash course vids and now I look forward to every new episode. Thanks crash course for giving me a fun and interesting way into this subject :D

[Zeldaschampion]

So blending a goldfish is animal cruelty but boiling a live lobster isn't.

[amused]

"Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." - Banksy

[NawidN]

"Stick-with-it-ness"? You mean "perseverance".

[icarusnote]

No fish were harmed in the making of this episode.

[szotyaGD]

i'm doing a minor in aesthetics at uni and still had learned so much from just one short video.. amazing how you can compress knowledge into 10 mins :O thanks for the experience <3

[shostycellist]

I am in the arts - I have a doctorate in cello performance - and I always chuckle at some of the philosophers' comments on art. There has been an "aesthetic Puritanism" among some philosophers that have a problem with a person simply having a pleasurable experience with art, and feel the need to give art some higher "purpose" beyond just a wonderful encounter with the beautiful. It's all quite silly. They feel they have to justify art as having some higher purpose such as a moral purpose and so on. I like what Kant said; to have an aesthetic experience you have to *put aside* all scientific explanations or ideas of the utilitarian purpose of the object and simply enjoy it for it's beauty. If you approach art from the standpoint of the utilitarian or scientific you will miss the beauty. Take for example a beautiful piece of land with a river running through it surrounded by mountains with a host of trees; if you look at it and think about its purpose such as, "This would make a great place for my farm. I could put the chickens there, and the cows over there" or a scientific explanation as to how the valley came into being, or even "This would make a great financial investment", you will miss the beauty.

[lukaslambs]

That goldfish blender exhibit is twisted, but genius

[tobi]

I really do think about Helena (the goldfish installation) as amazing art but it's also incredibly scary and not directly because of the potential death of the goldfish (although that's also not a nice thought) but rather because of the reflections it questions not only us as individuals but even our whole society and the concept of living.

[thomasr.jackson]

One of the most prominent features of human cognition is the ability to treat make believe objects as real. Countries, money, laws, these are all abstract inventions. I see nothing different about our ability to experience emotional responses from fiction or other art, or any good reason to assume without evidence that our emotions aren't "real", whatever that means.

True, people do tend to process and react to a death on the big screen differently than one on the sidewalk. But even that distinction is blurred. Your Uncle Tom's Cabin example is a case in point, with readers acting more appropriately to the fate of fictional characters than they did to the conditions of real human beings.

Goodness, badness, or morality of art is a different matter, but as for its actions on our minds, there is no reason to imagine and invent some special mechanism at play different from our reactions and interactions to the world in general. They both manipulate the same neural machinery in similar fashions.

Philosophy should not abandon science or think of itself as some separate discipline unrelated to its "higher" concerns. A great error of the nineteenth century.

[dawn]

I'm interested in the question "Do we have an obligation to consume certain media/art in order to improve our outlook?" I've had many friends try to pressure me into watching certain movies that I'd rather not, and their reasoning is that it changes the way you think. I would love to know what philosophers have said about this.

[cavejohnson]

And here I thought Ａｅｓｔｈｅｔｉｃ were all about vaporwave and Ｍｅｍｅ

[maldoran]

This somehow quickly became my favorite crash course series. Unexpected and very welcome, thank you!

[littlchikrt]

I came for the art and thought process behind it just to be mindblown that an actual primate is named after an anime character created by Kishimoto.

we have come far. What a great time to be alive.