e._,
Refuge in the common sense attitude, and practically the giving up of
philosophy. The outcome of all the brain work on philosophy, since the
time of the Greeks, is that despair has entered into our minds of ever
achieving any knowledge of the _Real_, beneath and beyond Phenomena,
of a knowledge which _commands_ assent. Can even a Hegel write a
convincing Philosophy of Art--which implies a philosophy of complex
knowing and feeling; the feeling or emotion, or sensation, which
vibrates in music and colour and poetry. Could Hegel himself answer
this objection: that poetry eludes all tests--that that which you can
thoroughly explain in any way is not poetry, as Swinburne has said? It
is the inexplicable, then, which lies at the essence of art and it is
this, which if there is to be a Philosophy of Art must be its object.
The Inexplicable must be the object for the thinker with his orderly
sequences, his logical search for causes and results. It is not that
artistic feeling is too subtle as a subject; it is that we cannot get
hold of it at all. It is where? Here, in our emotion, our feeling, our
imagination; it flies from us and it comes again.
We do not ask for a philosophy of artistic _creations_ (whatever they
may be, in music, painting, or poetry), for a Philosophy of Art must
be a philosophy of the artistic _faculty_ that creates, and that
admires and understands and is absorbed in the creations.
Pages:
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56