Unit 4: Truth

Do artworks communicate truth?

            I think the answer to this question is yes, but must be qualified with a certain definition of truth and also with a description of what qualifies an artwork as an artwork. I think the kind of truth that artwork communicates is something that gives one a sense of being enlightened—of seeing something or making some connection one had never considered before, of developing understanding, of disclosing something about the experience of life, of directing thoughts towards something people generally miss or avoid, of revealing meaning in a place where one hadn’t looked before or where one had looked before but had come out empty-handed. Perhaps this is too many ways to rephrase “being enlightened,” but perhaps they can all be grouped under the concept of “understanding”. Understanding is more than just knowledge, it is knowledge about how different pieces of information relate to each other. It connects basic “facts” to one another by some sort of rule that can be universal (reveal something about how things typically/always relate) or particular (reveal something about a specific situation of relation). There are a few qualities of different types of works of art that, according to our authors, cause people to gain some sort of understanding from them.

            Aristotle talks about the imitative quality of artwork and how we as humans use imitation to learn and gain understanding. Imitation, then, in plotline or subject matter, is not inferior to experience because it is in a way “fake”; instead, imitation in art supplements experience. When Aristotle goes over what he thinks makes a particularly good tragedy (or, perhaps, a tragedy most effective in enlightening viewers in some way), he lists order and unity, which draw us in because they mean that the story in intelligible. But he also says that good tragedies produce pity and fear, which stretch our emotions in a way that we would not want in regular circumstances. Finally, good tragedies embody possibility, as opposed to what is actual or what is necessary. In this final point, we can see that what makes tragedy good art is that it draws you into it and makes itself relevant to you, then forces you to think differently about the ideas it presents by stretching your imagination and surprising you. Similarly, the ideal main character is one who strives to be good and is easy to identify with, but then must err in judgment. This motif of being able to identify with a part of an artwork at the same time as being pulled down a path of mere possibility by the art continues in Nietzsche and Heidegger.

            Nietzsche says explicitly that he thinks that art is about relieving people of the burden of “truth”, but here I think that the truth he refers to which we can never acquire is a kind of definitive version of truth instead of a constantly-reaching-for-understanding kind of truth. He says that art imitates the world in a particular way: a way that distorts the incoherent and meaningless world and makes it palatable to people. But his praise of Greek tragedies actually suggests that they uncover the tension between the desire to live, experience, find meaning, and the constant resistance in the world that continuously suggests that death always conquers life, that experience is only ever relative and insignificant, and that any meaning that might be found is artificial. I would like to suggest here, though, that while these devastating “truths” may or may not be objectively true, the very basic fact that life itself consists of this tension can be brought to our attention through art, perhaps particularly in Greek tragedy, and this seems to me to be a kind of revealed understanding of such opposition, though not a solution to it. The revealed opposition that art has the power to convey could also be discussed in the Nietzschean terms of the Apollonian desire to distance ourselves from the world and the Dionysian desire to be included in the world.

            Finally, Heidegger, too sees some sort of dual purpose in art, in that it brings together earth—the mere physicality of things which is important but conclusive—and a world—that which is built from earth but that turns into something above and beyond it in that it is open, unfixed, open to possibilities. Heidegger thinks that a certain unrevealing happens when we view something not as an object, and not as a piece of equipment, but as a work of art. When art is framed as art, it opens up interpretations and ideas unique to that kind of presentation, and when this opening up leads to feelings of enlightenment and understanding, we uphold such works as art. But if the works seem to only appeal to basic sensation or fail at being interesting or meaningful beyond mere physicality, then we just call this cheap entertainment.