As I can see, you are enlightened ... ... ...:shrug:
The Paradox of Atheistic Art Appreciation
- Thread starter wynn
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As I can see, you are enlightened ... ... ...:shrug:
Enmos
Valued Senior Member
And it's just atheists that do such things? How do those two things tie into each other?? :bugeye:
There's a difference between being closed-minded and just not being convinced.
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
That's simply not true. I don't know where you live, but here in the USA our private charities collect enormous amounts of money and use it to send food to the Third World. I collected $2,000 from my co-workers for the famine in Ethiopia 25 years ago, in just a couple of days, and turned it over to World Vision International, one of the most efficient institutions.
America's rich, taken in aggregate as a demographic, are outstanding philanthropists and have no reason to apologize for also being patrons of the arts.
To get back to those food shipments, do you know what happens to them? They are intercepted by agents of their despotic leaders and sold on the black market. The proceeds are used to buy champagne, hookers, Land Rovers, Mediterranean villas, and of course lots and lots of guns to make war on the despot in the next country.
The solution to poverty, disease and hunger in the poor countries is far more complicated than pointing one's noble finger at prosperous people and telling them to be ashamed. They need government leaders who actually care about their people, but in many places they also need to stop feuding among themselves and making their homelands ungovernable.
If you want to blame the developed nations for the Third World's problems, there is plenty of blame to go around, but it has very little to do with the cost of private art collections. Start with colonialism. Rather than leaving sub-Saharan Africa and other premodern societies to evolve at their own pace and find their own way into the modern community of nations, the European powers stomped in, shoved aside their Paleolithic and Neolithic cultures and replaced them with Iron Age or Industrial Era cultures.
This is a maturation that takes thousands of years when done indigenously, because each of the hundreds of technological changes that comprise it requires a cultural adaptation that may take more than a generation to work itself out. Instead, the Europeans expected tribal people who were living in either small bands of nomadic hunters or small farming villages to learn to live in harmony and cooperation with total strangers, to understand the economic concepts of transactions, wages, shopping, and saving, to accept the need for formal education, to submit their tribal autonomy to a government so many levels deep that they'll never meet the people at the top, to become comfortable and proficient with a bewildering array of technologies based on principles that took the rest of us millennia to grasp... to instantly perform a list of adaptations that is a hundred times as long as this excerpt and far more detailed.
Worst of all, the colonial overlords drew lines on a map that deliberately tore tribes into fragments and threw fragments of disparate tribes together into a "nation," who had nothing in common except mutual hatred.
Oh yeah, and I almost forgot: in a kind-hearted but ironically disastrous attempt at charity, we gave them modern medicine, so their Neolithic infant mortality rate transformed into a doubling of their populations every decade or two.
Oh yeah #2, during the Cold War between the Good Guys and the Bad Guys (I think we've all forgotten which was supposed to be which any more), we used their countries as our own private chessboard and treated them like pawns.
Is it any wonder that so many of those artifical "nations" are dysfunctional? And that simply writing "To Africa From America With Love" on the side of a ship loaded with food doesn't accomplish anything?
I'm sure you can't be referring to tens of millions of hungry people in America, since the biggest nutritional problem among our poor is obesity.
It's 'eternal' or 'transcendent' because it deals with emotions all human have thus all humans understand it.
Nothing supernatural there.
Nothing supernatural there.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Even the value of gold is a human value that has no basis in the materialist paradigm. Animals see no difference between gold and granite.
Live on in the 'heart'???
Again, you are borrowing principles derived from outside the dead zone of materialist man.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Humans derive most of their emotion from the self evident intuition of an eternal transcendent dimension.
What was the largest most beautiful architecture of all history prior to the fairly recent dawn of scientific materialism...the church, mosque, temple.
J.S. Bach wrote a postscript at the bottom of every musical manuscript...'For the glory of God'.
Thats it.
You apparently have imagined a "paradigm" of "materialism", and ascribed it to "science", that few would recognize or bother with.carcano said:
There may be some paradox involved in such a "materialism" combined in the same person with an appreciation for art, but I've never met anyone living in such a state - certainly few atheists would resemble such a description. Maybe a few autistic people, of certain kinds.
No one is arguing that belief in God doesn't inspire people to create works of great artistic beauty. It isn't necessary though.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
On the contrary, most recognize that science deals exclusively with materialism...in that it views matter/energy as the exclusive reality.
How many realities are there? Can I fly in any of them (I mean in the manner of Superman)?
But not a materialism in which gold has no value different from, say, thorium. Not a materialism in which no value exists except that which would be recognized by dogs and cats.carcano said:
You say the word "materialism", but you pretend to exclude transcendencies and metaphors and abstractions that are perfectly real and no small part of scientific endeavor or theory.carcano said:
Patterns of matter or energy, and patterns of those patterns, are ordinary and unexceptional features of scientific explanation, inquiry, investigation, and analysis.
Mrs.Lucysnow
Valued Senior Member
Anyone who has 65 million for art must also have a lot of money besides. Why do you assume that a portion of their funds are not allocated towards fighting hunger, poverty or disease? The wealthy often give money away (and they often get a tax break for doing it to
Or maybe you're just a socialist who doesn't believe the wealthy are allowed to spend their money as they please:shrug:
Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Well if you want to take philosophy to the level of being completely ridiculous (which isn't difficult if you ask me) then nothing has any "intrinsic value" because the universe doesn't give a shit about anything. It just goes trudging along in its mindless way in accordance with its fundamental laws.
"Value" is a judgment, so it can only be assessed by organisms with sufficiently complex cogitation to be capable of judgment. Most people would say that sunlight has intrinsic value to a tree, but in your model, since the tree cannot think or judge and so doesn't "care" if it lives or dies, that statement would be false. The sunlight has intrinsic value to us because the tree does.
In any case you disingenuously took my remark about intrinsic value out of context. You led me to believe that we were talking about intrinsic value from the point of view of humans, since this thread is about art and we are the only animals who can appreciate art. From our point of view all metals and many minerals have intrinsic value because of their rarity and/or difficulty of refining.
Well forgive me for using metaphors that are common in English-speaking communities. You must be religious because religious people, in my observation, have great difficulty with the concept of metaphor: everything to them is either true or false.
My point (again from the perspective of humans because I'm quite sure that is the universe of discourse in this discussion) is that we all continue to be influenced by people after they die. The influence of a work of tangible art (as opposed to music, etc.) diminished greatly when it can no longer be seen. Obviously holography will change that, as electronics has made musical compositions immortal, photography for painting, and cinema for theater.
To say that a dead human or a lost artwork "lives on in our heart" is a metaphor for the more prosaic fact that they are remembered in our cerebral cortex. Is that drier rhetoric okay with you now?
Even if that were true, intuition is no guarantee of truth.
Your history does not go back very far. The tallest buildings always belong to the institution with the most power. In ancient times they were the palaces of political rulers or the fortresses of military rulers. Then as Christianity seized control of Europe they were replaced by churches. After the Industrial Revolution caused explosive growth in surplus wealth or "capital," the banks took over. As electronics increased the reach and efficiency of business, corporate buildings became the tallest. Today they have all been surmounted by communication satellites, the harbingers of the Post-Industrial Era. Who knows what will be next.
Bach wrote in an era when virtually everyone in Europe was a Christian or at least said they were. Within a couple of hundred years it became fashionable to dedicate works of art to real people.
You've just contradicted your own hypothesis by admitting that energy is just as important as matter or "material." If you'd like to deconstruct the universe to a deeper level, you end up with a triad: quarks, leptons and bosons are the building blocks of both energy and matter.
Not exactly, it's just that there is no evidence yet of anything else.
That's only because the church has dominated human events until recently.
Bowerbirds do.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Right, matter/energy doesnt give a shit, and because the materialist believes that is all there is, he aligns himself with that 'nothing matters' nihilism.
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On the contrary, material things, like mammals, do indeed care about a great many things. Of course, ultimately nothing has meaning unless considered within some frame of reference. In your case, the context is perhaps an all knowing, all powerful God. In the case of atheists or materialists, the context is ourselves, or our families, or our society, or some context you invent yourself.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
There are a few metals much rarer than gold that are nevertheless cheaper because they dont have the qualities humans value in gold.
Its reflectivity, its colour, its inertia.
The question is why those specific qualities are important to humans, as there are no utilitarian reasons for it.
Similar questions revolved around why humans like sound with reverb and vibrato.
Carcano
Valued Senior Member
Its not a question of being OK with me...its a question of being consistent with your own materialist world view.