Trinity iThink 2022 by trinityschoolcroydon

AESTHETICS

iThink

Editors' Note

This edition of iThink covers an extremely wide range of discussions, ideas, and debates. ‘Aesthetics’ is a very broad term; sometimes breadth can be intimidating and too challenging to delve into. However, the breadth of this theme was one of the reasons we were so drawn to it, since a huge variety of concepts and deliberations were bound to arise from the many questions this topic poses. Aesthetics can concern questions of beauty and taste, also broadly overlapping with the Philosophy of Art. Our contributors have provided thought-provoking and unique articles, dealing with a variety of different subject matters. From exploring the criterion of ‘Aesthetics’ itself and its historical past, to tackling the topical debates of today’s world, this edition is a collaborative investigation into the way we perceive the world. Whether focused on the past, present, or future, each article has its own voice and encourages us all to question both society and reality, as well as our own eyes. We are extremely grateful to all of our contributors for their dedication and stimulating ideas, and hope the readers of this edition find these articles as inspiring as we do. We are also very thankful to Mrs Beresford-Miller for her support along the course of our iThink journey. We hope you enjoy!

Henry Bishop and Safiya Tiotto-Smith

CONTRIBUTORS Joe Greenway Aidan Keogh Joe Marvin Dhyan Ruparel Ethan Sun Abdul Wasay

David Aisa Miller Kiran Bacchus Jack Byatt Mrs Carey Amy Clarke Oscar Clarke Ben de Sousa

2022

iThink

Contents

2022

CONTENTS ISSUES IN AESTHETICS

TOPICAL

Do you consider yourself an artist?

Mystification, beauty and science

The Paradox of Fiction

Mrs Carey

Joe Marvin

Dhyan Ruparel

Creation, innovation and regulation

NFTs: scam or art?

Cultural oversaturation

Ben de Sousa

Kiran Bacchus Henry Bishop

HISTORY OF AESTHETICS Nietzsche, nihilism and tragedy

A Kant rant

Joe Greenway

Oscar Clarke

Is art really subjective? David Aisa Miller

Why do people enjoy art?

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

Ethan Sun

Safiya Tiotto-Smith

Hobbesian beauty

Amy Clarke

Junior Philosophy Club

iThink

Do you consider yourself an artist?

DO YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF AN ARTIST? MRS CAREY “One of two things is usually lacking in the so-called philosophy of art: either philosophy or art” Friedrich Schlegel This article attempts to combine a bit of both… I remember vividly a particular assembly at my first teaching post when I was still quite a new to the job. We arrived on a sleepy winter morning to hear a science teacher discuss modern art. The premise of his assembly was that modern art had 'gone too far'. The teacher described how the Tate Gallery had promoted a 1964 replica of Duchamp’s Fountain, which exhibits a standard urinal found in many public toilets, set in the gallery and signed ‘R. Mutt 1917’. Duchamp had coined the term ‘readymade,’ where an ordinary manufactured object was displayed by the artist as a work of art.

The teacher went on to discuss how years later Tracey Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize for ‘My Bed’, a messy disarray of objects which was put into a gallery space and captured people’s imagination. The teacher claimed these objects could not be considered beautiful and therefore were ‘not art’. He held modern art in some contempt and declared it was all rubbish. To illustrate his point further, he revealed he was an amateur photographer and displayed some of his own accidental pictures interspersed with other artworks shown in a gallery or sold at a high value. He asked students to guess which were his pictures and which were ‘modern art’ by raising their hand, and in doing so hoped to ridicule some artworks.

2022

iThink

Do you consider yourself an artist?

The assembly progressed until Head of Art at the time could listen any longer in silence as subject area was undermined angrily interrupted:

the not her and

“Mr X, do you consider yourself an artist? Well…no. Then your pictures are not art.” Who is to say what an aesthetic judgement is, and who decides what is art? Like any good Socratic philosopher, I will start by asking you some questions.

Trust your gut... Does art have to be beautiful? Tracey Emin has said “Art is for feeling not for looking.” Arguably, art can push us to consider something which is not beautiful but instead something shocking or confronting. The Handmaid’s Tale and Kafka’s Metamorphosis are not easy to read but they move us. So perhaps we should replace the word beautiful with impactful, or pleasurable?

Does the setting matter? Compare the same item of fashion seen on the catwalk or on the high street. Or the same object hung on a gallery wall to be admired, or in the background of a stately home. Would Banksy’s street art be the same if it was chiselled out of its original position and put somewhere else? In a paid gallery? Can ordinary objects be art? Take a moment to think about the Tube map. This is arguably a phenomenal piece of design. Consider the way the scale is compressed as we enter the suburbs; all lines are either horizonal, vertical or at 45 degrees to each other. It is an elegant solution to a design problem, but is it art?

Does art have to reflect things that are good? Could a photograph of an atomic bomb be praised as art? How about a racist novel?

Is nature art? A cow looks across a field and takes an interest in their environment but not in the view. To us a landscape is beautiful, but is it art? If you were to walk through a gallery of paintings of the countryside, would you experience beauty in the same way as walking in the countryside itself?

2022

iThink

Do you consider yourself an artist?

Like any good philosophy class, this may have left you with more questions than answers and following these questions will tempt you to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. Whatever art is, many philosophers revere it. Hegel thought that art grabs at the absolute - it might reveal something to us and a level of reality we had not known before. Mary Mothersill in Beauty Restored considered that great works of art stand the test of time: “the beauties of eloquence and poetry…maintain a universal, undisputed empire over the minds of men”. Even Nietzsche saw the ideal life of human beings as centred on aesthetics.

I dream that, just like the Tube map, some inspired artist will design an iconic electric car charging point that matches up to some of Gaudi’s designs in Barcelona. Finally, whatever our personal tastes, I agree with many a philosopher who has also concluded that:

"Love of Art for its own sake is an expression of the highest wisdom"

What do you think? Pick one (or more!) of the questions above and try to reach an opinion on it. As you read more articles, consider whether your view changes.

2022

iThink

Has the mystique of beauty been destroyed by scientific development?

HAS THE MYSTIQUE OF BEAUTY BEEN DESTROYED BY SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT? JOE MARVIN (LOWER SIXTH) With religious belief being questioned and contradicted with a barrage of new scientific developments, many people are left wondering if there is anything that separates us from the other animals that inhabit our world. If a rapidly growing number of people no longer consider us to be built in God’s image and we are instead just a product of evolution, then what evidence is there to suggest we are superior or at the very least unique within the animal kingdom? When faced with this question, perhaps the most obvious response is to look at a human’s mental capabilities. Even the most militant atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, have admitted that they have struggled with the concept of human flourishing. Human flourishing can be described as anything that goes beyond the need to survive. Throughout human history, even before the rapid spread of Christianity and the belief in ‘imago dei’, it has been what separates us from our primitive ancestors, with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle coining the term ‘eudaimonia’ which he believed was the secret to happiness.

Out of all aspects of human flourishing, the appreciation of beauty is one of the most mystifying and satisfying ideas because it appears impossible to define why we find things beautiful, yet there are things such as the ‘Mona Lisa’ or even the colour of somebody’s hair that are almost universally appreciated. So as more and more seemingly unanswerable questions have been conquered by scientific progress:

Will the fascination of beauty be able to withstand the onslaught of science? Well, science once again looks to have solved the dilemma. To explore how the appreciation of beauty is linked to natural selection and evolution I will first explore its effect in the animal kingdom. Let’s use the male peacock as our case study. Their burdensome and extravagant tails seem to conflict with the Darwinian idea of evolution as they doesn’t seem to be advantageous for the bird's survival.

2022

iThink

Has the mystique of beauty been destroyed by scientific development?

However, there is a branch of evolution called sexual selection which indicates that, as the extravagant feathers are so effective in attracting females to mate with, the peacocks gain more from keeping the beautiful tails compared to having a slightly more useful tail. Therefore, what first can appear unnecessarily beautiful have in actual fact evolved in such a way that maximises their beauty for the purposes of survival.

Although we have established there is a link between beauty and evolution, the question as to why these things are deemed beautiful still remains. We know that some characteristics are effective because they are beautiful but does this mean everything that has purpose should be deemed beautiful? Sure, we can all appreciate the usefulness of a good healthy set of lungs, but there are very few people who have that feeling of deep fulfilment and appreciation when staring at a picture of the human anatomy. Furthermore, biologist Richard Prum published a book in 2017 called The Evolution of Beauty and the key finding in his research is that evolution does not always have to be beneficial.

In essence, Prum’s idea is that somewhere along the line of evolution animals developed arbitrary preferences about who they mated with and over the generations evolution pushed these preferences to the extreme. This theory is called runaway selection. Sometimes these adaptations can be beautiful like the peacock, but Prum states "birds are beautiful because they find themselves beautiful", and for every beautiful peacock there’s a less elegant blobfish with a standard of beauty that doesn’t align with the human perception of beauty.

So if effectiveness isn’t the benchmark of beauty and the measure of beauty for each animal is arbitrary, then has scientific development actually unearthed anything useful about the concept of beauty? This conclusion can be extremely unsatisfactory for many people as it feels like we have all the pieces to solve the puzzle of beauty yet hundreds of biologists, psychologists and philosophers have tackled the problem of what is beauty and why are things beautiful, yet no one has been able to answer both questions adequately. And although this results in a frustrating article to write, it is quite fitting that beauty is yet to be fully comprehended and arguably we live in a better world for it.

2022

iThink

Has the mystique of beauty been destroyed by scientific development?

If we knew the exact reasons behind why certain paintings or sculptures or even certain people evoked these wide ranges of feelings then perhaps it would ruin the uniqueness of these emotions. This isn’t to say that science might never figure out the complexities of our responses to beauty because, like I mentioned earlier, all the pieces are there.

So in conclusion, I haven’t unearthed the secret to beauty and it doesn’t look like science will crack the code anytime soon, which arguably only adds to the mystique of how and why we appreciate beauty. So maybe the question isn’t when will science reveal the science behind aesthetic appreciation, but instead:

Is it worth removing the mystery of our preferences and the individuality of our emotions in the name of scientific development?

It’s not unrealistic to foresee a future where scientists will work out how all the chemicals and electrical impulses control our brain, and no doubt unlock the key to the human psyche and pinpoint the exact reason we believe things to be beautiful. Until then, we can find solace in the idea that perhaps the unknown aspect of beauty enhances our appreciation. I’ll use the analogy of a magician to demonstrate this point. When a magician is performing a trick, you know that they are trying to deceive you. However, the enjoyment comes from understanding that what you’re watching must have a logical explanation but nevertheless leaves you totally bamboozled. If we were to understand how each trick works then the excitement and wonder would be lost.

Is there something unique about seeing red or experiencing something beautiful that science could never find out?

Similarly, if your appreciation of beauty can be scrutinised and rationalised then there is an intangible quality that is removed and the process becomes as formulaic as 1+1=2.

2022

iThink

Are we really scared by horror movies?

ARE WE REALLY SCARED BY HORROR MOVIES? ON WALTON’S MAKEBELIEVE THEORY. DHYAN RUPAREL (FOURTH FORM) “Wendy? Darling? Light of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.” Stephen King (The Shining) Reading such horror from King’s infamously terrifying novel, you may believe that you are experiencing emotions of fear, or shock. Yet, in a 1975 paper, aesthetic philosophers Colin Radford and Michael Weston propose the Paradox of Fiction, suggesting that it is logically impossible for us to experience real emotions whether it be fear, or sadness, or any other human emotion - in reaction to works of fiction. The Paradox of Fiction consists of three premises: (1) that we have emotional reactions to fictional occurrences and entities; (2) that, in order for us to emotionally react to something, we must believe that it exists; and (3) that we do not actually believe that fictional entities exist. The paradox arises from these premises being jointly inconsistent and yet commonly held, in isolation, to all be true.

Many philosophers have proposed solutions to this paradox - indeed, Radford suggests six solutions in the original paper - but one of the most interesting and popularised solutions was proposed by American philosopher Kendall Walton in his 1990 book Mimesis as Make-Believe. Walton rejects the first premise of the paradox, proposing that the emotions which we experience when we react to fiction are “quasi-emotions,” instead of “genuine” emotions (the prefix “quasi” comes from the Latin for “as though,” and means “somewhat” here). Essentially, he believes these emotions are imaginary and make-believe, and Walton argues that they are unique in nature to “genuine” emotions. By separating these emotions in this way, Walton undermines the power of fiction, since the emotions evoked as a result are no longer as real, or as powerful.

2022

iThink

Are we really scared by horror movies?

Because of this, many aesthetic philosophers raced to evaluate his theory after its publication, in order to see whether the theory is valid enough to change our views of fiction in this way. I believe that:

Walton’s makebelieve theory is ultimately flawed, and emotional responses to fiction are, indeed, genuine emotional responses, as opposed to “quasiemotions”. Some scholars have drawn upon the similarity between emotions and quasi-emotions, using the lack of differences in their structure and qualities to question whether quasiemotions exist at all. To understand whether “fictional” emotions are genuine, it is first important to define the qualities and nature of an emotion itself. In his 2005 paper What are emotions?, psychologist Klaus R. Scherer described the five components of an emotional episode: cognitive appraisal and judgement, bodily symptoms, action tendencies, expression (facial or vocal), and feelings.

2022

Using this “component process model”, which has become standard, some may highlight that a “fictional” emotion shares such similar components to a “normal” emotion that we should question the necessity of quasi-emotions altogether. There is no component of this model which is not displayed in response to fiction - when watching a horror movie, for instance, each would be displayed or felt in some way. As Noël Carroll states in his 1991 paper The Nature of Horror,

“when I am arthorrified by Dracula, I am in a genuine emotional state, not a pretend state.” Noël Carroll Quasi-emotions, resultantly, seem nonexistent - when we are frightened by a horror movie, the emotional episode caused is genuine. As well as this, while Walton’s quasiemotions could be deemed applicable for some emotional responses, the theory is not universally suitable. In Mimesis as Make-Believe, Walton takes the example of Charles, who watches a horror movie, and experiences “quasi-fear” in reaction to an on-screen monster.

iThink

Are we really scared by horror movies?

As Walton writes, “Charles’s realization that make-believedly he is in danger produces quasi-fear in him”. In his 1991 paper, Alex Neill interprets that “Charles’s ‘quasi-fear’ results from his making-believe that he is threatened” this idea of the quasi-emotion as a result of a make-believe threat is plausible. Walton suggests, however, that the example of Charles, and the resultant understanding of quasi-fear, can be “a model for understanding other psychological attitudes”. When applying this model to envy, pity, concern, or hatred, there is no longer a need for a “physiological element” (as Neill describes) such as threat - thus is there a quasi-emotion at all? Walton’s quasi-emotions appear to only be plausible in certain scenarios, with certain emotions. It is evident from this failure that Walton’s make-believe theory is flawed, and it seems therefore unlikely that quasi-emotions are at all existent. Conversely, Walton’s theory has been supported by the idea that, although each of the components of an emotion are displayed in response to fiction, they would be shown or felt in slightly different ways compared to a “genuine” emotion. For example, take Walton’s hypothetical example of Charles, who showed “quasi-fear” in reaction to the film monster. If Charles had, perhaps, seen this monster in real life, some would argue that the emotional episode displayed would have a different nature to the reaction displayed in reaction to the fictional movie.

One key component (using Scherer’s model) by which it may differ is “action tendencies”. In the real-life encounter, Charles would have likely felt the urge to perhaps run away, scream, or even fight the monster. Although he may have had some urge to action in this way when watching the movie, it is probable that he did not feel this urge to such a large extent, thus altering the nature of the whole emotional episode. Although this defence is logically valid - the episodes are, indeed, different - I believe that there is not sufficient difference between the two emotions to justify the creation of “quasi-emotions”. Indeed, this could be evidenced by the varying reactions which we have to real-life terrors – in response to a real-life monster, some may scream and stay put, while others may run away. Both reactions are an experience of the same genuine emotion, fear, even though one component of the episodes (action tendencies) is different in each. It is reasonable and, in my opinion, more accurate to simply define the “fictional emotions” as genuine emotions in another context. Charles, for example, could experience fear in response to both stimuli (fictional and real), but the nature of the episode adapts to the situation in which the reaction occurs - Charles does not attempt to fight the monster, since he is seated in a cinema. By viewing this apparent difference in this way, Walton’s quasi-emotions become redundant. It seems to be a reasonable conclusion, therefore, that Walton’s quasi-emotions which he theorises to be the emotions experienced in reaction to works of fiction, as opposed to genuine emotions - do not exist.

2022

iThink

Art: subjective or objective?

Although there are some differences between a “genuine emotion” and a “fictional emotion” - of course, reaction to fictional horror varies incredibly to real-life horror - it seems both unreasonable and unnecessary to class such emotions as quasi-emotions. They display the same components as genuine emotions, and Walton’s idea of a quasi-emotion is only truly applicable to some emotions, therefore weakening the argument for its existence. Indeed, the number of responses to Walton’s Mimesis as MakeBelieve has significantly declined in recent years - very few papers have been written about quasi-emotions since 2000, a clear acknowledgment of its flaws and logical failures.

I resolve the paradox of fiction by instead rejecting the second premise – real emotions can be experienced from things which we do know are fictional, they simply vary in quality and degree to those experienced in reaction to things which are real. I perceive this conclusion to be a testament to the power of fiction, and its ability to evoke strong, genuine emotions from humans since the beginning of time as well as validation that horror fiction truly is terrifying.

Boo!

ART: SUBJECTIVE OR OBJECTIVE DAVID AISA MILLER (LOWER SIXTH) Art can be defined as the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power. It can be seen in two ways: either subjectively, implying it is based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, and opinions; or as objective, suggesting that it is not influenced by personal feelings or opinions, but rather considers and represents facts. In my opinion, art is subjective because it is in its nature to be subjective, so if it is not subjective then it is not art.

Art must be subjective, as it relies upon the opinions of its viewer which are all unique, as they are generated from humans which are likewise unique. Therefore, the way we categorize art is subjective as everyone has a different definition or characterization of art, because we all hold individual sentiments. Humans are singular because we all experience the world differently. Consequently, this impacts a variety of valuable components of someone’s identity, including their perceptions, beliefs, relationships, personality, ambitions, intuition and confidence.

2022

iThink

Art: subjective or objective?

Moreover, the genetics that we obtain from our parents predominately influence our physical appearance but also, to some extent, some of the abstract traits mentioned above. It is this exclusive nature of the beholder which explains how art causes a great deal of discussion, and as a result many contrasting points and perspectives. On the other hand, there are many clear examples which we can see in society of people having common preferences, which suggest that art or beauty isn’t entirely subjective. This is because, if there are certain qualities and aspects that all humans incline towards or disfavour, then art should be described as objective, as it reflects universal human nature. For instance, there are many examples of films in which characters are portrayed with very stereotypical features so that it is clear what their persona is.

To give a specific example, almost all villains often have ominous clothing or extensive bodily deformations because as humans we are generally fearful of people who have appearances which are not normal to us, or don’t suit our tastes.

A more pleasant example is a poll created by BMG, who are a leading independent provider of market research services, which revealed that nine out of ten people in Britain liked pets, which again shows how similar our desires are. Other data which raise a similar point are those from a ‘Morning Consultant’ poll of 6,609 Americans: 82% favoured the Dwayne "THE ROCK" Johnson, whilst 56% found Kim Kardashian West unfavourable. This ultimately warrants the belief that beauty and art are objective because:

If we all admire and resent in the same manner, our beliefs about art cannot be subjective. However, it is also necessary to highlight that, although the significance of the beholder is very much relevant to the debate, we must remember that the type of art does affect whether it is subjective. The fact that art cannot be restricted to certain rules or boundaries implies that it must be subjective because you cannot construe what it is, and the arbitrary judgement of the nature of art is left to us. In addition, art adds a layer of situational interpretation which means that, even if it is beautiful or not, because from my stance art does not always need to be recognised as beautiful to be art, that element which makes it art isn't universal.

2022

iThink

Art: subjective or objective?

2022

Throughout most of history, art has been traditional, in that its inspiration stemmed from physical objects we can see. However, from 1910, when according to art historians the first piece of abstract art was created by Vasily Kandinsky, we have seen a large and expansive growth into novel forms of art, which has challenged our conception of its meaning further. You can see from looking at the table that abstract art has now become the focus of attention and I think it is because of this that art fundamentally must be subjective.

Moreover, throughout history and as time continues, the beliefs surrounding a piece of art will continuously change, therefore we must be able to form our own individual opinions on it, which is only feasible because of its subjective nature. To show another perspective, there is a lot of scientific reasoning and evidence that justifies the belief that art and beauty are objective because, even though our views may appear personal, they are just products of our complex physiological structure. Anjan Chatterjee, a Professor of Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that:

beauty is "sculpted by factors that contribute to the survival of the group" Anjan Chaterjee In his TED talk, entitled How your brain decides what is beautiful, he proposed that “many people find mixed race individuals attractive and inbred families less so,” and that “people generally find symmetric faces more attractive than asymmetric ones.” These might seem like wild judgements, but he justifies himself when he presents us with scans that show how “attractive faces activate parts of our visual cortex.”

iThink

Art: subjective or objective?

Not only does he produce physical evidence, but he also shares a genuine example that is still accessible today. He recalls how “In the 1930s, Maksymilian Faktorowicz recognized the importance of symmetry for beauty when he designed the beauty micrometer. With this device, he could measure minor asymmetric flaws which he could then ‘correct’ with products he sold from his company known as Max Factor.” Considering that this evidence proves we all have similar preferences, it shows not necessarily that art itself is objective, but that beauty, as a result of evolution and human biology, is.

It may appear to be objective because in some circumstances people have common likes and dislikes, but this can be explained as society influences us in similar ways. Furthermore, although scientific research does prove that evolution has shaped our ideology around the meaning of beauty, which consequently affects how we see art, I think it is impossible to characterize art as objective as, in accordance with its definition, it must be subjective because it depends upon the opinions of its viewer. I agree with Leo Tolstoy when he says that “art is the highest means of knowledge,” not only because “art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective, of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious,” but also because it yields us the ability to be creative, which is ultimately what separates us from other life on this planet.

Hot take! The nature of beauty, taste and art seem to be quite elusive, but it is agreed upon so far that, no matter the biological basis and the data which are relevant to these issues, subjectivity and uncertainity in some way remain. Therefore, aren't we just wasting our time when we try to philosophise about art?

In conclusion, I think that art is subjective because, although beauty and other responses are objective and biologically tethered, art as a practice relies on more than just those preferences being universal to be seen as objective.

2022

iThink

Why do we enjoy art?

WHY DO WE ENJOY ART? ETHAN SUN (THIRD FORM) Art is an extremely sophisticated form of expression for the human mind. Anything can be considered art, including dots and random strokes. Humans love art because they have an inquisitive nature and are inclined to delight in it. What is it about shapes, colours, and patterns that still give us pleasure thousands of years later? Several studies have been conducted over the past few years to try to figure this out. Some people believe that, despite living in a world full of modern comforts, there is still a part of our brain that strongly responds to the essentials: water, food, sunlight, etc. Some pieces of art have been seen to take the form of water and maximize its blue colours in paintings. By looking at Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, our brains may recognize the characteristics of water and resonate with the work positively. We rely on water to survive and seeing such an essential part of life on canvas makes us appreciate its beauty.

Likewise, we are drawn to the colour green. A German study concluded that creativity inspires motivation when infused with the colour green. This suggests that:

All good art engages a deeprooted obsession with needing to survive. Several other studies have strongly suggested that there is a significant connection between the 'golden ratio', or the 'golden rectangle', and superior creations. Golden ratios are used in many diverse types of construction, such as buildings, paintings, and sculptures. Those of these which employ the golden ratio tend to be more renowned and acknowledged throughout history than those who do not use them. Another study published in the journal Brain and Cognition from the University of Toronto found that the brain processes art in two ways. First, we see and process it visually. This involves thinking about how the piece works. The researchers found that, when we are shown a picture of a knife, our brains do not just see it as a shape, but also perceive how to use it.

2022

iThink

Why do we enjoy art?

This first stage takes place in the cingulate cortex of the posterior cingulate of the brain, which deals with thinking logically and understanding concepts. So, there is enough evidence to suggest we enjoy a puzzle. And art supplies a much greater stimulus to the mind than other types of puzzles. The study also goes beyond this first logical reaction to works of art. As a result of thinking about "how it works," the posterior cingulate cortex is also stimulated. In this area of the brain, we contact our innermost thoughts and emotions. Studies also show that we can experience a wide range of emotions from all types of art, whether it is fear, joy, peace, or pain. Art is also now academic. Genres like conceptual art can be intellectually stimulating and enjoyable at that level. Although these pieces essentially require analysis to enjoy, everyone experiences a primal response to them. Additionally, these studies suggest that our responses to and appreciation of art may exist as biological predispositions rather than a cultural activity that needs to be acquired through upbringing. This entails that we are all capable of creating and enjoying fine art.

1. Art helps you realize that people are fundamentally the same in any place and time. Yes, a lot is different in the world today. But pictures of pets and pretty landscapes have a universal appeal. There is a desire in people of all cultures to capture those things and preserve them, to remember them, because art lasts longer than most things. 2. Art can express things that words alone cannot. Words cannot convey how a sunset looked 300 years ago, how people dressed a thousand years ago, or how they carried themselves. 3. Art makes you think. For example: I thought about what the artist was trying to say; I thought about how the artist did that; I thought about why I like some things and not others. Even art that does not appeal to me makes me think about why it doesn’t. While we do not require art to thrive, our lives would be very different if it did not exist. The arts are a sort of meaningcreation as vital as science in making sense of and understanding ourselves and others.

Some feel that the best art comes from a place of suffering. How does this connect to the arguments made here?

Various reasons can make art appealing to us, but none of them is more valuable than any other. Here are some of the reasons:

2022

iThink

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

THE PHENOMENON OF SYNAESTHESIA SAFIYA TIOTTO-SMITH (UPPER SIXTH) In the 5th Century BC, Plato argued that the human senses were deceptive and made us prone to belief in the illusory, and were thus the incorrect way to gain a true understanding of the world. As brilliant as Plato was, in the contemporary world it feels more sensible to recognise that the senses are very much omnipresent, and that trusting them can achieve great things in the realms of art. There is an underrated phenomenon that has existed for years and years, touching only a select few people and undoubtably changing their experience of human life and the world around them. This phenomenon is called synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a neurological condition that enables a person to experience one sense through another, often described as a ‘cross-wiring’ of the brain. In Ancient Greek, ‘syn’ means union and ‘aesthesis’ means sensation, so the terms come together to mean the union of the senses, or ‘to perceive together’. This abnormal intertwining and tangling of sensations is immediate and uncontrollable for the synaesthete.

One of the most common instantiations is seeing letters, numbers, or sounds as colours. One might also: see or hear a word and taste food, hear sounds and see shapes or patterns, hear sounds after smelling a certain scent, hear sounds and taste food, feel an object with one’s hands and hear a sound, or feel a touch when seeing someone else being touched (known as mirror touch). Though abnormal and uncommon, synaesthesia isn’t a disease or disorder, but is often incorrectly perceived as one. Some people, however, do struggle with it; children claim it can hinder their reading, or prove difficult when they see colours that other people cannot relate to. However, most synaesthetes interpret their condition as a ‘sixth sense’, not a drawback, and I feel it can be recognised as a creative and aesthetically stimulating gift. Synaesthetic art: the subjectivity of style For synaesthetes, colours are predominantly experienced in the mind, enhancing their standard sensory experiences of the world with this additional component that cannot be derived from experience.

2022

iThink

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

However, many have come to embrace living so intimately with colour by projecting what they experience into physical forms in the real world. No artist produces the same type of piece, nor experiences colour in the same way, but this is the beauty of it all.

The subjectivity of the senses that Plato tried to warn us about is in fact something beautiful that encourages individuality and uniqueness. Melissa McCracken is an artist from Missouri with chromesthesia, the ability to hear music and see colours. McCracken summarises her condition in the following words:

The concept of every song and genre generating wholly different sensations in the mind is incredibly intriguing, as if her synaesthetic soul is being poured out onto the canvas to capture a moment in time. Synaesthesia therefore behaves as a creative catalyst that threedimensionalises the experience of art and music as individual fields, uniting them to form a unique fusion of sound and vision. By sharing her experience through the medium of paint, it also allows other people – both synaesthetic and nonsynaesthetic people – to engage with her ideas and put themselves in her sensory shoes. Here are some of McCracken’s paintings, which were created through her sensory experiences when listening to different songs. What is fascinating about hearing these songs whilst viewing the art is that not all of the works, perhaps none, will make sense to you.

“Basically, my brain is crosswired. I experience the ‘wrong' sensation to certain stimuli. Each letter and number is coloured and the days of the year circle around my body as if they had a set point in space. But the most wonderful ‘brain malfunction' of all is seeing the music I hear. It flows in a mixture of hues, textures, and movements, shifting as if it were a vital and intentional element of each song.”

Scan the QR codes to hear the songs which influenced the paintings.

Melissa McCracken

2022

iThink

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

This is how McCracken describes her personal experience of sounds and styles:

“Expressive music such as funk is a lot more colourful, with all the different instruments, melodies, and rhythms creating a highly saturated effect. Guitars are generally golden and angled, and piano is more marbled and jerky because of the chords.”

Melissa McCracken

Though McCracken is able to justify some of the connections between the music she hears and the art she creates, she has expressed that there are still some connections that she struggles to understand, which “proves the subjectivity of sense experience as well as aesthetic experience.” Not all synaesthetic art is limited to a canvas of smoothly blended colours and/or sporadic smudges and splatters of paint. Some artists and their brains tend to translate sound into more distinct shapes and patterns. A particularly unique and interactive example of this style can be seen in the works of Reyes Padilla, an artist from New Mexico with a passion for jazz music. In 2018, Padilla participated in Eras of Jazz: The Visual, a site-specific installation that transforms the room into a visual experience of jazz.

As expressed by the Mesa Arts Centre, “by painting what he sees, Padilla captures what seems like a natural dance between two worlds.” The shapes and patterns flow across the room as a live score of music, veering off in different directions and exploring different shapes. Not only does this represent the personal journey that jazz takes the artist on, but it also immerses the viewer by providing a visual trail and three-dimensional experience for people to engage with. As we have established, for many people, colour is much more than a wave of light, or a ‘thing’ to look at – it is an experience. For a synaesthete, colour can be lifechanging. With there being such a close link between sound, music and art, it is no surprise that this ‘sixth sense’ can also touch musicians in an impactful and creative way. American guitarist, singer and songwriter Jimi Hendrix excited his audiences in the 1960s with his outrageous electric guitar playing skills and his experimental sound, and Hendrix has his synaesthetic experience of colour to thank for his innovation. Hendrix admitted that he could not read sheet music, instead learning from a young age to play by ear and use words or colours to communicate and express his ideas. Hendrix thought that “some feelings make you think of different colours,” and that “jealousy is purple – ‘I’m purple with rage’ or purple with anger.” Not everyone would agree with Hendrix’s associations, but this is simply because we are not him. A lack of relatability does not detract from the creativity and uniqueness of the works that these ideas have fuelled, proving that the subjectivity of human experience is something fascinating, not frustrating.

2022

iThink

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

The spiritual, synaesthetic experience of art Another realm of synaesthetic art places less focus on the visualisation of pre-existent external musical sources, but rather on letting the art itself create the music. It is about the musical characteristics of colours themselves. It is as if one hears what they paint, like composing a score of music. For the famous Russian artist and synaesthete Wassily Kandinsky, this fusion of art and music was the key to his work. Though a cellist and pianist in his lifetime, it can definitively be said that Kandinsky’s main musical instrument was his paintbrush. He could hear colours and shapes like many other synaesthetic artists but had a more spiritual perception of the artistic process. Kandinsky himself asserted that colours have musical and spiritual properties, and, more accessibly, aural qualities: no one would associate yellow with low notes nor deep blue with high notes. Subjectively, he heard yellow as trumpets, red as violins, and blue as a heavenly organ, each colour representing a different note that creates “vibrations in the soul.” His unique geometric style can also be attributed to music, with his lines and points forming an artistic equivalent to rhythm.

Colour is all around us, not just in the arts but in everyday life. Being human is being an active engager with the world we live in: seeing, touching, tasting, feeling. We often forget how special subjectivity can be – your own personal lens for seeing the world. Aesthetic experiences shouldn’t always be about relatability; they should be about connecting with yourself, finding what you love. For McCracken, Padilla, and Kandinsky, synaesthesia led them to art and music. If these aren’t your thing, tap into your senses and find what speaks to your soul, what gives you purpose. In the wise words of Kandinsky, by contributing to and creating things:

“you will further the cause of humanity” Wassily Kandinsky These articles have all focused on how we experience things and how we can classify what we experience. The subjectivity of our experiences, as exemplified by synaesthesia, makes this highly enriching, if very complex.

One of Kandinsky’s most resonant and well-known teachings is to “approach colour as a window into the human soul.” Artist or not, synaesthesia or no synaesthesia, there is something to be taken from this poetic phrase by everyone.

2022

iThink

Creation, innovation and regulation

CREATION, INNOVATION AND REGULATION: HOW CAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS BE PHILOSOPHICALLY JUSTIFIED? BEN DE SOUSA (UPPER SIXTH) Art was described by Peter H. Karlen in his 1986 article Worldmaking: Property Rights in Aesthetic Creations as:

"the shaping of the exterior world to reflect man's inner nature" Peter H. Karlen This perceptive statement illustrates the relevance of the law of ‘intellectual property’, that protects the rights of creators to own their intellectual products, which, it could be argued (as by Hegel) are indeed reflections of their “inner nature”. In UK law, protection of these rights is achieved through the three main intellectual property protections of trademarks, patents and copyrights. On a legal level, the idea of intellectual property is well established, but it is worth considering its justifiability by assessing the philosophical arguments for and against it.

I will therefore begin by expanding on the title of this article. What, exactly, is ‘intellectual property’? Under customary international law, as laid down in Article 27(2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it is established that “everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary, or artistic production of which [they are] the author,” which constitutes a right to owning ‘intellectual property’ in vaguely the same way a pen or a car could be owned. This definition also describes the philosophical concept of intellectual property, which differs only in its focus on more abstract (moral and often deontological) reasoning than the legal concept, which is also grounded in practical and economic arguments.

2022

iThink

Creation, innovation and regulation

One of the most influential theories of intellectual property is the ‘Labour Theory,’ that is based in John Locke’s idea of natural property rights. In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke wrote how an individual, by their “labour does, as it were, enclose [property] from the common." Though Locke was discussing ownership of unowned tangible land, his underlying idea of exclusionary rights, that people deserve control of the results of their voluntary labour and resultant contribution to society, can be extrapolated and applied to intellectual labour and its products. Intellectual property, then, can be seen as a morally justifiable entitlement for creators. Locke did impose some restrictions upon his proclamation, such as the ‘non-waste requirement,’ which ensures that someone taking ownership of land is not claiming more property than they can utilise without waste. Another of Locke’s restrictions is described by Adam Moore in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the “enough and as good proviso,” which aims to prevent such acquisition of property from affecting fellow members of society negatively by taking away property they could have used to ‘flourish.’ Justin Hughes describes this provision as indicating that “each person can get as much as he is willing to work for without creating meritocratic competition against others,” and so aiming to maintain equality. However, these restrictions imposed by Locke on his theory of tangible property are less effective for the intangible concept of intellectual property,

as it cannot normally be wasted like products of the land, and ownership of intellectual products cannot directly detract from others negatively by deprivation, as conceptually they are not finite. Yet, Locke’s “enough and as good” provision, when applied to intellectual property, does link to a criticism of it. It can be argued that, as intellectual property is a ‘non-rivalrous’ form of property, in that the products it covers can be ‘consumed’ without prohibiting simultaneous ‘consumption’ by others (as illustrated by a flame of a candle, which can be divided without losing its own strength), it cannot be restricted justifiably. This argument, as written in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, does assume that “maximal access and use should be permitted” if the property in question is non-rivalrous. This is the weak point of this critique, with Adam Moore and Kenneth Einar Himma pointing out the logical jump between establishing ‘non-rivalrousness’ and assuming a moral right to fully access such work exists. Examples of confidential information, like personal financial statements or information related to national security are cited as demonstrating how maximal access to intellectual work should not always be granted.

2022

iThink

Creation, innovation and regulation

The assumption made in this criticism of intellectual property is similar to that made in the argument that information should be free, without intellectual property rights restraining it. A rather compelling case can be made for this, on the basis that intellectual property rights of ownership can lead to artwork and information that should be publicly accessible being monopolised for financial or other reasons. In many countries, such as France, museums can claim perpetual rights to a creator’s work with the aim of them acting as custodians to remove damaging reproductions. However, this has met with much criticism, especially if the museums are simultaneously promoting commercial reproductions of such artworks. Dr Grischka Petri told The Guardian that museums risk being seen as “hypocritical” for exercising their intellectual property rights in this way. Another instance where intellectual property has dubiously restricted public access is with the famous ‘Bullingdon Club photo’ of senior politicians like David Cameron and Boris Johnson whilst at Oxford University. The right to republish this picture, which arguably was in the public interest considering the prominence of its subjects, was revoked by the portrait photographers who held the copyright, leading news agencies to commission an oil painting of it to circumvent the intellectual property restrictions. This does indicate that intellectual property rights can be a negative, unjustifiable force, but I do not think this criticism is particularly damaging overall.

Though it is essentially valid, it suggests a need for better balance between the rights of creators and the good of an informed society, rather than the removal of the rights of creators altogether, meaning that intellectual property rights remain justifiable.

A slightly different approach to justifying intellectual property is taken by G.W.F. Hegel, through his ‘Personality’ theory. Hegel argued that "every man has the right to turn his will upon a thing or make the thing an object of his will, that is to say, to set aside the mere thing and recreate it as his own". The implication of this is that control over our physical and intellectual objects is essential for defining our identity and creativity. By controlling and manipulating tangible and intangible objects, we allow our will to come into being in the world, which is roughly similar to Locke’s idea of a right to ownership proceeding from labour. Additionally, Hegel saw intellectual works as a reflection of the ‘personality’ of the creator, so uniquely entitling them to control the works to ensure the protection of reputation and dignity. This approach, summarised by the notion that an intellectual product is an extension of oneself and of one's personality, has also been adopted as a key idea of European intellectual property law.

2022

iThink

Creation, innovation and regulation

However, Hegel’s theory has faced criticisms for being unnecessarily reductionist in its conflation of personality and creation, in that it intuitively appears to over-emphasise changes effected in the world rather than anything internal when assessing personality. It is also difficult to identify this personal element in more technological intellectual property, such as a specific code or machine. Despite this, if we focus on the idea of artistic intellectual property, it is significantly easier to find a reflection of personality, with many pieces of art, from painting to music, being shaped primarily by and easily identifiable with the artist, demonstrating a degree of intuitive strength in Hegel’s theory, and justifying intellectual property at least in the realm of aesthetic creation.

With a balance maintained between the right of the individual creator to control their intellectual products and the benefits that arise from a societal right to information, intellectual property rights and laws certainly can be philosophically justifiable.

Overall, though neither Locke nor Hegel’s justifications are flawless, they have considerable strengths that have significantly influenced intellectual property legislation across the world. Yet, many critiques of the restrictions imposed by intellectual property rights are still valid, and there are instances, considered above, where such a balance has not been achieved in accordance with philosophical justifications. However, these instances do not necessarily indicate that intellectual property rights are unsalvageable.

How much does an article need to be edited before the editor can be called an editor, or even a co-author?

2022

iThink

NFTs: scam or art?

NFTs: SCAM OR ART? KIRAN BACCHUS (UPPER SIXTH) Two million, nine hundred and fifteen thousand, eight hundred and thirty-five dollars and forty-seven cents ($2,915,835.47). That's the amount of money the first tweet ever in the history of Twitter was sold for by Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter.

Transactions like these spark up the debate over NFTs, and whether they are the equivalent of a rising hot air balloon filled with pure speculation and excitement carrying the upper class, primed to eventually burst, or whether there is some aura of legitimate art behind the crypto-craze. But first, what actually is an NFT? NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. Non-Fungible means non-replaceable, which is a key feature of most esteemed artworks, such as the Mona Lisa. Before explaining Token, it might be useful to explain the ‘blockchain,’ which, simply put, is a public record, powered by thousands of computers, tracking every transaction made between two users (getting rid of the so-called ‘middleman’ function of banks which already do this).

So, if Person A wanted to purchase Person B’s tweet for close to three million dollars, the blockchain would only care to see if Person A actually had close to three million dollars in cryptocurrency to buy that tweet, or to buy that ‘token,’ resulting in the transfer of an NFT.

Of course, the biggest elephant in the room about NFTs is: what's the point? After all, NFTs and digital art are not truly non-fungible in the modern age, where a simple click of the ‘save image as’ button renders any potential rarity null. However, if NFTs were truly null and void, how is it possible that they sell for so much? One potential, and arguably cynical, answer is that it is just pure speculation. Finance and business content creator Coffeezilla claims that the "endless speculation on what’s gonna be the next NFT [is] where the scam is." One way in which this speculation manifests itself is by two or more people buying each other’s NFTs to increase their perceived values.

2022

iThink

NFTs: scam or art?

For instance, if Person A owns an NFT, they could sell it to Person B for $1000. Person B could then sell back the NFT for $1100, and then Person A buys it back for $1200. This cycle continues with both parties ultimately losing little or no money and making a larger profit when selling the NFT at a high perceived value.

Thankfully, due to the public nature of the blockchain, wallet addresses can be tracked and traced to find out these scams. However, with Crypto and NFT scammers using dozens of wallets to hide their activity on the blockchain, the majority of the public still remain blind and naïve on which NFTs, and which artists, are scammers or not.

The media and influencers have also played a part in increasing the general ‘FOMO’ (fear of missing out) of the public, with paid advertisers often promoting NFTs without publicly disclosing that they were paid to advertise it, alongside media outlets covering highly successful NFT stories making the average uninformed person believe that they have the same chance of having the same success.

However, some have argued that NFTs can serve some legitimate purpose as they provide an option for modern, digital artists who don’t use anything physical. CGI animators can create immersive, detailed 3D environments which aren’t as valued highly as there is no scarcity. NFTs may provide the solution for artists, as they allow them to make limited, certified copies of their art to sell on for higher prices reflective of the works’ worth. Art Station, a prominent website for people to showcase their portfolio of digital art, can often be limiting for newer artists due to the volume of already pre-established work and artists there, hence NFTs can be another viable option.

Even some social media influencers, such as Logan Paul, are creating their own projects such as ‘CryptoZoo,’ which was later exposed to be poorly edited stock photos of two animals together (hence the name of a ‘zoo’ but on the blockchain), eventually netting $1,300,000 worth of Ethereum at the time. In fact, Coffeezilla himself recreated the NFT images in Adobe Premiere showing how unoriginal the artwork for the NFTs were. Nate Chastain, an executive at OpenSea (the largest NFT marketplace) is alleged to have partaken in insider trading, which is using non-public information to buy low, and sell high, an illegal practice which could have aided in the eventual accumulation of $539,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

However, Art Station themselves had planned to release NFTs on their platform but quickly cancelled their plans due to public backlash, which labelled the practice environmentally unethical.

2022

iThink

NFTs: scam or art?

In fact, a digital artist, Akten, has analysed 18,000 NFTs, finding out that the average NFT has a carbon footprint equivalent to a month’s worth of electricity for a person living in Europe. The environmental effects of NFTs can certainly limit the availability.

Therefore, a more reliable and sustainable income can be attained by aspiring NFT artists, ultimately serving some potential use that traditional art lacks, whilst also arguably being more detailed due to the increased use of technology allowing for more immersive and advanced effects.

However, NFTs and cryptocurrency in general are looking to become more eco-friendly in the future (Such as ‘Solana’ – claiming that one NFT transaction on Solana is less impactful than two Google searches) in order to reduce public backlash on NFTs, with renewable energy dampening the environmental impact.

At best, NFTs appear to be a temporary plaster to cover the deep wounds of unfairly compensated artists and, at worst, NFTs appear to be the cause of some people’s injuries. Whilst NFTs can provide a form of legitimate, accessible income, the overwhelming majority of value surrounding NFTs is solely derived from speculation drummed up by media headlines, the top 1% and influencers pushing out and advertising NFTs to the public and their audiences. The degradation of the environment and the physical world via thousands of computers chewing through acres of code to uphold the blockchain is yet another issue that’s only been skimmed through. There are countless issues not just with the functionality of NFTs, but also the negative impacts that follow even when they work properly that make them appear to be a scam for most.

More advantages of NFTs can be their low barrier of entry, which can allow thousands of unique digital collectives to be founded, with NFT projects such as CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, MoonCats and Flurks (having thousands of NFT variations) all available to browse on OpenSea. The obvious concern is that there are too many projects fighting for people’s wallets, but perhaps NFTs should be viewed under the same broadly positive light as eBooks and selfpublishing, which allow more people to become authors. Moreover, compared to traditional art, NFTs can be programmed to carry a royalty, allowing them to make money even after they’ve been traded past the first sale. For instance, a piece of work sold for $1,000, then $100,000 and after that $1,000,000. The creator who initially received $1,000 would accrue $111,000 with a 10% royalty after their work was traded multiple times in the digital market.

NFTs could be described as being 'positional goods', or having 'scarcity value'. Why are NFTs different to other commodities like this?

2022

iThink

Cultural oversaturation

IS OUR CULTURE BECOMING OVERSATURATED? HENRY BISHOP (UPPER SIXTH) Capital “has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies […] of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation”

Intense aesthetic appreciation has never been so chimerical. Extinct are those moments in which we are truly taken aback by art, music or literature – a gripping sense of amazement has been usurped by “that’s nice”. The commodification of culture has much blame for this – if you can’t make money from shoving people in front of it, then what value does it have? As the archetype of this, which is more appealing to a film studio, the divergent film from an unproven, eclectic new filmmaker, or the reiterations and spin-offs of the same “property” which have burrowed their way into popular agreeableness? The observation of Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto that:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is expressing itself in increasingly novel and insidious ways. We are all instantiations of Mark Fisher’s neologistic concept of the “consumer-spectator”, having artistic products/output (the language of capitalist production has invaded its next territory) placed before us, for our monetary approval. These products have to compete with each other (neoliberal logic in a realm previously untainted) in a technologically driven attention lottery to be delivered en masse on the shovels of platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the new instigators of fleeting cultural trends.

2022

iThink

Cultural oversaturation

Once again, content that has been proven to pacify viewers for the most milliseconds is that which is deemed best for the chosen end of retaining the stultified punters. The worth of (to use a loose term) content is now determined by how many people have seen it and for how long, as opposed to whether they actually enjoyed it or gained anything from it. The more time taken absorbing this content, the more targeted it becomes.

Just as any distinctions over the quality of content have evaporated, so have any geographical impediments to the flow of cultural merchandise. Not only can you have paraded in front of you dissected and packaged memes from your own culture, but also cherrypicked and distilled granules from others. You are no longer learning about other enriched ways of life, but you are instead shown the trinkets of past and present which can most easily be cloned, packed, and sold.

2022

The return of a bronze cockerel to Benin by Jesus College, Cambridge made clear, by sheer contrast, the standard attitude that even unique artefacts have no special status, but are simply prize assets to be hoarded at all costs, just like a car or wads of cash.

The oversaturation of our spatiotemporal worlds with the most unrealistic, amped up, shiny distractions means there can no longer be any room for the truly aesthetic – anything genuinely beautiful or aweinspiring drowns in the sea of colours. It is even questionable whether we could identify the truly aesthetic anymore. Our standards are slipping away from our grasp, if we even have any, and we are irrecoverably heading towards the end of culture. *** The above comes across as a satirical and dystopian hyper-critique of our society. We may no longer experience intense moments of aesthetic appreciation as frequently as previously but, if they are only sparse highlights in a barren landscape, then it isn’t unreasonable to not desire this.

iThink

Cultural oversaturation

We instead inhabit a vast and varied cultural plane which allows for more consistent enjoyment. We may not be taken aback by, for example, landscape panoramas or space photography anymore, but that is because there are so many beautiful and rich examples of these to which we now have access at any time of our choosing.

Whilst big-budget franchise movies may be more predictable, they are part of a broader tapestry of content on which spending reached a record high in 2020, thanks in no small part to subscription streaming services. Because there are simply so many artistic ideas being represented, franchises and live-action remakes can afford to do some recycling, but it is also disingenuous to suggest that this is all they manage, as even the most financially successful franchises can evolve and be vehicles for novel expression, as exemplified by the changing roles of female characters in the James Bond franchise or the increasingly diverse and allegedy realistic roster of characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

2022

The same social media platforms which vie for attention also make it incredibly easy for new creatives to release their content to wider audiences, but the hosting of this content is expensive, which means it requires advertisement revenue, which requires more viewing hours. Current cross-cultural dialogue and sharing are not tokenistic, but are appropriate bearing in mind they can only be enjoyed to the extent to which cultural hegemony does not result – unique forms of life are to be respected and maintained rather than aped. ‘Exploring’ a culture to the fullest extent would just be to become a copy of that culture, so sharing (put more positively than copying) is the only feasible approach which ensures diversity but also mutual gain. *** Depending on the weight and success afforded to these arguments, pessimism or optimism may seem more appropriate. Nevertheless, all facets of our culture are increasingly at the whim of ‘market forces’, which certainly financially benefits burgeoning new services and types of content but risks too quickly leaving lower volume, traditional media behind. For a cultural pessimist, the huge increase in content corresponds to decreasing quality and eventual burnout. For a cultural optimist, this increase corresponds to the appetite of audiences/consumers, and more output can only be a good thing.

iThink

Nietzsche, nihilism and tragedy

No matter the stance taken, awkward concerns persist around just how much we should put in front of ourselves.

These three articles have discussed issues around the transfer and trade of artworks. What do you think the future of art is, and how does this affect artists, platforms, dealers, galleries and museums, and others?

Given our current unbridled enthusiasm and fatalistic attitude, we won’t stop in our pursuit of more to ask questions - it seems we will only realise if oversaturation has occurred when it already has.

As production ploughs on, it is at least worth more deeply considering these issues before it’s too late.

TRAGEDY: A NIETZSCHEAN SOLUTION TO NIHILISM JOE GREENWAY (UPPER SIXTH) “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, we murderers of all murderers?” Friedrich Nietzsche Or so proclaimed Friedrich Nietzsche famously in his work The Gay Science. Predominant in Nietzsche’s work is this despair over what he sees as the decadence of modern culture.

He argues that, with the emergence of scientific rationality in the Enlightenment, religion and its morality have been ‘killed’. The universal law of God that has given so many people purpose in life has been destroyed and we are left with nihilism – the rejection of all traditional values and beliefs and the acceptance that life is meaningless. So how are we to live in such a world? How are we to reinvigorate our culture? And above all, how are we to find meaning and purpose in such a bleak existence? Rivers of ink have been spilled debating these questions, focusing primarily on Nietzsche’s later works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra,

2022

iThink

Nietzsche, nihilism and tragedy

whereby he prophesizes the coming of the Overman (Übermensch) who will commence a ‘revaluation of all values’ that will conquer nihilism. Less known is a solution Nietzsche proposed in his first professional work, The Birth of Tragedy – namely, tragedy. Looking beyond the fact that this was a book that was ‘effectively to end his career as a professional classicist,’ the arguments raised in this book, behind the jungle of metaphors, are fairly persuasive.

If Nietzsche’s argument here can be summed up in one quote it is that ‘only as an aesthetic phenomenon is existence and the world eternally justified.’ Given the immensity and ubiquity of suffering in the world, human life cannot be given moral justification. It cannot be judged it within a moral framework – if we try to, then we reach the very bleak and miserable conclusion of nihilism, that ‘what is best is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing.’ Existence, Nietzsche argues, can only be affirmed in an ‘aesthetic’ sense.

Central to defeating nihilism – to regenerating contemporary culture and finding purpose in life, is the creation of art. Art alone justifies existence – not science, not morality, not religion: ‘Life is worth living, says art, the most beautiful seductress; life is worth knowing, says science.’ But surely, one would argue, we’ve had art for millennia – surely Nietzsche need only look back a century, to the Renaissance and its distinctive artistic rebirth? Well, this is the wrong kind of art according to Nietzsche, and the answer as to why lies in the very birth of art – ancient Greek tragedy. Nietzsche argues that art has its origins in the twin impulses of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian drive is named after the Greek god of light, dream, and prophecy: Apollo, and represents rational knowledge, moderation, individuality, and visible form. By contrast, the Dionysian drive is named after Dionysius, the god of intoxication, and strives for mysticism, excess, union, and lack of form. Nietzsche sees representation art forms like painting and sculpture as embodiments of the Apollonian, while non-representation art like music is primarily Dionysian. The perfect art and the ideal culture are comprised of a shifting yet balanced fusion of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The best example of this, for Nietzsche, is the Attic tragedy of the 5th Century B.C. Nietzsche exhibits a shameless admiration for what he sees as the free and spontaneous creativity of Greek tragedy.

2022

iThink

Nietzsche, nihilism and tragedy

He, like many other so-called ‘German Hellenists,’ painted a picture of Ancient Greece as an idyllic lost world of harmony and innocence – a world of ‘serenity’ (Heiterkeit). Greek tragedy is satirical of nihilism – it comes to terms with the suffering caused by life, and in doing so, conquers nihilism. When Greek spectators watched the majestic tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, they witnessed the full spectrum of the human condition and thus affirmed it – they accepted the suffering inherent in life, yet the tragedy provided ‘metaphysical consolation’ that there remained pleasure in life, and most importantly, aesthetic value. Contemporary culture is vastly and horrifically different. For starters, gone is the teary-eyed, nostalgic Nietzsche and his beloved Greek tragedies. Instead, we have a passionately enraged Nietzsche, scathing of what culture has become. He argues that the aggressive scientific rationalism that began with Socrates has suppressed the Dionysian spirit and attempted to reconstruct art on a purely Apollonian basis. This hollow culture of reason and science has created an art devoid of true meaning – it has become transparent, logical and realistic: boring and useless in Nietzsche’s opinion. Having lost both the aesthetic value of existence, and the religious value of existence, we are left in a truly nihilistic age. The solution to all this is a rebalancing of the Apollonian and Dionysian movements within the modern age. Wherever one impulse has dominated over the other, Nietzsche argues there has been cultural calamity.

Primacy of the Apollonian produces a disciplined, secular, and militaristic culture like that of Rome, whereas the sole rule of the Dionysian gives what Nietzsche sees as the pessimism and passivity of Buddhism, wholly focused on the fundamental futility of individual existence. To revitalize modern culture, which represents an excess of Apollonian and rationalist influence, we must cultivate the Dionysian and its nonrepresentational arts like music. Above all, we must rediscover the nature of Greek tragedy, this ‘redeeming and healing seductress’; this perfect mixture of the Apollonian and Dionysian; this perfect antithesis to nihilism. In doing so, we must capture this Hellenic ‘will’ and spontaneous creativity at the heart of tragedy to truly save ourselves. Yes, Nietzsche argues, ‘God is dead,’ but ‘dare now to be tragic men, for ye shall be redeemed!’

Do you think...? a) Life reflects art b) Art reflects life c) They both reflect and develop upon each other d) Art is a feature of life, but doesn't play too significant a role 37

2022

iThink

A Kant rant

A KANT RANT: DO YOU UNDERSTAND KANT? NEITHER DO I! OSCAR CLARKE (UPPER SIXTH) Immanuel Kant, contrary to the Python adage, was an incredibly stable and clear-headed individual. So regimented and regular were his walks, in fact, that the townspeople of Königsberg used to set their watches by his movements. He only ever missed his daily constitutional twice: once whilst being infatuated with Rousseau’s latest philosophical hot take, Émile, and the other to obtain news about the French Revolution - so I think we can forgive him these but two discrepancies. This obsessively organised Prussian also has quite a lot to say about philosophy, and aesthetics in particular. He is probably the greatest philosopher of all time and the father of modern aesthetics and, if you disagree with me, you can run away and hide under your copy of The Republic - let’s hope the Form of the half rate philosopher saves you! Now Kant, like every other philosopher, liked to talk about beauty. What it is. Why we are invariably drawn to it. How things possess it (if they do at all). As the final instalment in his famous trilogy, Kant published the Critique of Judgment (1790), following on from his Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and his magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Despite all of his genius, he really was not a creative book title-er (anything is a word if I try hard enough).

The Critique of Judgment was, as final instalments usually are, slightly less well received than the original - although topping the Critique of Pure Reason is hard to do, considering it is modern philosophy’s most seminal work. Now, the 3rd Critique focused on aesthetics (aesthetics being the branch of axiology – the study of value - that focuses on beauty, art and taste) which was a break from tradition, with the others focusing on metaphysics and epistemology.

Kant begins this arduous, impenetrable, verbose, and generally unreadable 450page brick* of fancy German words by setting out how he analyses a judgement of beauty under four headings called ‘Moments’: *To prospective Kant readers: This is not an exaggeration for comedic effect. Trying to read the Critique of Pure Reason gave me a migraine and I only got 60 pages in… you have been warned!

2022

iThink

A Kant rant

The First Moment Kant asserts that judgments of beauty are primarily based on ‘feelings of disinterested pleasure.’ Now, when Kant says ‘disinterested,’ he means that beauty is not dependent on the subject having a desire for the beautiful object, but instead that judgments of beauty are based off feeling and sensation. The Second Moment Judgments of beauty are claims of “universal validity.” Kant wrote at some length about ‘universalisation,’ most famously in The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), but also here - as consistent with principles then as with his walks. Here Kant means that when we make a judgment about the beauty of an object, we expect everyone else who perceives that object to also find it to be beautiful, and consequently to share in the pleasure of seeing it. Simply put, we expect our subjective pleasure to be the objective pleasure. It’s why I’m always immensely disappointed when someone doesn’t like the music I like and am forcefully subjecting them to. There is, then, a recognition here that beauty is not in fact an objective standard, as much as we recommend our judgements of it to others. This is of course not entirely true, as Crocs put with socks are objectively not beautiful and I can state this with categorical and apodictic certainty. To quote the old Platonic aphorism, “the form of the Croc is not with the sock.”

Perhaps thinking about comfort, breathability, inferred intent and aesthetic sensibilities, to what extent do you agree that Crocs and socks are objectively not beautiful? And, is such a sweeping statement too grandiose?

2022

iThink

A Kant rant

The Third Moment Kant likes to distinguish judgements of ethics from judgements of aesthetics. Judgments of beauty, according to Kant, do not ascribe a purpose to the subject. To elucidate this, he argues that beauty has no purpose in and of itself as beauty is self-generating we “perceive in it without the concept of a purpose.”

“I remove the thinking subject, the whole material world must at once vanish because it is nothing but a phenomenal appearance in the sensibility of ourselves as a subject, and a manner or species of representation.”

The Fourth Moment Kant returns to the Second Moment and argues that judgments of beauty are statements of “necessity”. In this, Kant means that when we make a judgment of taste, we expect it to be universally true, we also accept that someone who perceives our beautiful object may not share in the pleasure it elicits. However, we feel like they ought to do so, even if they don’t. Kant’s Four Moments then appear to me to be very much in harmony with his transcendental idealism. In brief (and I cannot stress how brief this explanation is), transcendental idealism is the belief that space and time are subjective features of how we perceive objects, rather than being independent of us. The perceiver (us) only recognises objects of experience (everything else) in the way they appear to us under the limits of our perception. We do not perceive an object ‘in and of itself’. Perhaps it is best to let Kant explain this as I am struggling:

2022

Immanuel Kant

Did that actually make it any clearer? I have to beg you not to take my explanation of Kant’s idealism as accurate - it is not. In fact, no one really understands exactly what Kant means and it has been a subject of incredibly heated debate. The unfortunate by-product of German continentalism really is its unending ambiguity. But, in essence, Kant synthesises empiricism (using our senses) and rationalism (treating reason as primary) to argue that space and time are empirically real but transcendentally ideal.

iThink

A Kant rant

Now, when I say his Moments are fitting with his idealism, I mean that Kant is arguing that, when we make a judgement of beauty, we empirically perceive an object in a transcendentally ideal way. That is to say, we perceive all objects in the way they appear to our limited perceptions and make judgments based on that. To me, this explains nicely why we all have separate, but often somewhat similar, ideas of beauty and aesthetic value. "Why is this of import?" you may ask. It is because transcendental idealism is the crux of Kant’s - and his followers’ (including but not limited to: Schopenhauer, Strawson, Allison, Schelling, Fichte, and Husserl - but his idealism did more generally influence all subsequent western philosophy) philosophies. His idealism can clearly be seen as the basis for his aestheticism in the way in which he recognises that the material world i.e. art and objects of beauty, are perceived not in the material world but in the phenomenal world i.e. our own individual minds.

We perceive objects through our limited and fallible faculties as they appear to us. We have an emotional reaction to said objects. We expect this reaction to be objective and universal, or at least believe this ought to be the case. If you wish to punish yourself and explore Kant further, I would highly recommend the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s summation of his philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s chapter on Kant in A History of Western Philosophy, but please do not subject yourself to his tracts of poorly translated jargon.

If you're feeling contrarian and now want to go and challege yourself on Kant, the advice to look at secondary literature first is sound. Only someone who really didn't know what they were doing would read the Groundwork as the first even remotely philosophical text they had ever read...

Kant is an immensely complicated philosopher. His ambiguities and unwieldy writing style have not made interpreting and separating the granules of sense from his work easy, but his view on aesthetics is surprisingly straightforward: Beauty is not purposive. We do not perceive these objects in and of themselves.

2022

iThink

Hobbesian beauty

IN REFERENCE TO THOMAS HOBBES’ ‘LEVIATHAN,’ HOW AND WHY DO HUMANS CONCEPTUALISE BEAUTY? AMY CLARKE (LOWER SIXTH) To understand the human conception of beauty, we first have to understand how thoughts are formulated within the human mind from sense phenomena. Thomas Hobbes explores his materialistic view on how thoughts are formulated in his renowned novel Leviathan, which is influential in the realms of both literature and political philosophy. However, it also (less famously) explores the realms of aesthetics.

The Leviathan is created by a covenant to protect the people from harming one another due to the natural desires of the human condition. This is achieved by instituting and imposing harsh laws. By understanding the reasoning behind Hobbes’ famous doctrine through exegesis of Leviathan, we can analyse the desires of humans and what we find pleasurable and beautiful.

Hobbes was an English philosopher who lived during the period of the English Civil Wars (1588-1679), which shaped many of his arguments. He wrote his best-known work Leviathan in 1651. Leviathan means “sea monster” in Hebrew, and appears in the Bible as a terrifying sea creature. Hobbes proposed that the state can be metaphorically represented as the Leviathan, the sovereign person or group of people which rules over the Commonwealth, an artificial body which has the Leviathan at its head and the Leviathan's subjects as its body. Hobbes believed that without law exercised by an all-powerful sovereign, humans will murder each other due to “the life of man [being], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, i. xii, 9).

2022

iThink

Hobbesian beauty

Hobbes adopts a mechanical, materialist view that everything in the world is in a constant state of flux, or motion, and interacts with our sensory organs to create thoughts. Hobbes teaches that thoughts are produced when an amalgamation of sensory aspects produces images in our mind which we then subjectively interpret. The origin of all these thoughts he believes, “is that which we call sense, for there is no conception in a man’s mind, which hath not … been begotten upon the organs of sense”. This is a ‘tabula rasa’ empiricist view (the belief that we are born with a ‘blank slate’ and all knowledge is learned from experience) that all perception comes from the physical world in a state of motion and interacting with our sensory organs to produce thought.

Like Hobbes, Aristotle thought that everything is in a constant state of motion. However, Hobbes’ materialism points him in a different direction from that of Aristotelian scientific thought, which Hobbes mocks and accuses of being “insignificant speech” and the proposition of “absurd doctrines”. This is due to Aristotelianism, and the “philosophy-schools,” proposing that every physical object has an essence and is being attracted by a Prime Mover, or an “intelligible-being” which causes this very state of movement.

Hobbes vehemently rejects this nonsensical proposition which delves into the realms of metaphysics (a branch of philosophy that studies concepts and objects beyond physical reality), which, as Immanuel Kant asserts, is a “is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.” Hobbes says that the Prime Mover is absurd as the schools ascribe an appetite for self-preservation to inanimate objects, and consequently it is incoherent in nature. Not only do humans not know the desires of objects, they also don’t fully understand their own desires and thus there are inherent inconsistencies with anthropomorphising these inanimate objects. A key example of this very fallibility is when philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, see the reason why an object falls downwards as an intelligence guiding it, which therefore proves the existence of a divine creator who is God, for example in Aquinas’ 'Five Ways' (Quinque Viae) cosmological arguments which attempt to prove God’s existence. Contrastingly, Hobbes fervently argues that the objects fall downwards due to impersonal physical forces i.e., gravity, which move the object downwards, abiding to the laws of nature and not emotion. “The Schools say, heavy bodies fall downwards, out of an appetite to rest, and to conserve their nature in the place which is most proper to them”; Hobbes asserts that humans have a tendency to anthropomorphise the physical world and see its entirety in human terms, thus, it is an inherently false proposition.

2022

iThink

Hobbesian beauty

Hobbes stresses in Leviathan (i. ii) that people get things wrong when they use their imagination, as they fall into a way which feels most natural to imagine. When something first makes an impression on us, we see it due to our senses. “After the object is removed… we still retain an image of the thing seen”; this “decaying sense” is our imagination. Imagination can be both simple (familiar things being imagined) and compound (mashing multiple images together – for example, a human and a horse to make a centaur). Dreams are simply imaginary because the rest of our senses are numbed so we see and hear things that aren’t there. Hobbes gives the example of Marcus Brutus thinking he had a vision because he was unaware that he had been asleep and thus he perceived his imagination to be the truth. Carolyn Korsmeyer, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo in New York, emphasises in Relativism and Hutcheson's Aesthetic Theory that Hobbes’ framework addresses how artwork achieves its desired effect. Hobbes argues that:

2022

pleasure and “all action is motivated by desire or aversion and that human beings, having both a selfish nature and insatiable appetites, always act in ways calculated to maximise their self-interest.” Thomas Hobbes He argued that moral justification is focused on those actions which one believes will satisfy their own desires and appetite. “Good” becomes a term which is applied to the objects of our desire or appetite, and “beautiful” is used to signify the objects which promise the satisfaction of our desires. Therefore, pleasure emerges from both real and imagined satisfaction of desire. If every person is driven by the overarching goal to maximise their own personal selfinterest, and if the set of objects perceived by a person to be beautiful is a manifestation and a reflection of that very self-interest, each judgment made of beauty is consequently an expression of individual desires and thus is a matter of subjectivity (no absolute truths). Hobbes’ reduction of beauty to interest involves relativism (the concept that knowledge, truth, and morality are not absolute and objective and instead exist in relation to cultural, societal, and historical factors) due to the subjective nature of interest.

iThink

Hobbesian beauty

Instead of beauty mirroring an objective (uninfluenced by opinion) quality in an object, Hobbes believes that beauty only involves the perceiver’s pleasure.

Think back to the questions encountered throughout this edition. Perhaps you still aren't confident you have answers to them. Nevertheless, aesthetic preferences, such as what we consider beautiful and the art which affects us most deeply, no matter what that includes, are incredibly influential on our lives. Here we have outlined persistent quandries in aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, topical issues in these areas, and some thoughts from previous influential thinkers, but the impact of these topics reaches far beyond these pages. Next time you are attracted, repulsed or enthralled, remember that much ink has been spilled over that very reaction, and hopefully this edition has brought you in touch with key themes in these debates and inspired you to more carefully consider your own unique everyday experiences.

Hobbes appeals to the biological similarity of human beings: being living organisms, humans are in need of many of the same things which they all perceive as ‘beautiful’. The coinciding perception of beauty might not substantially differ in regard to the base necessities to sustain human life and thus this may lead to human’s competitive nature which drives their “selfish, brutish” lives which Hobbes examines in detail in Leviathan.

Conclusively, the quality of beauty is assumed, if something is in our self-interest, when our sensory organs are incidentally affected by different objects in motion and form our thoughts.

2022

iThink

Junior Philosophy Club

Some of Trinity's younger students have been discussing questions about art at Junior Philosophy Club:

Barnett Newman’s painting sold in 2013 for $43.8 million. Is this art or any piece of art worth that price? Zayn Jafar (JP) – Anything is art. But it is the individual opinion about it that counts. No matter how bad or good, it is still art. Marley Andoh-Philips (1H) – Anything can be worth anything, it just depends on what the buyer thinks it is worth. Rishan Patel (JP) – people are buying it for the artist even though it is lots of money but it also depends how much thought and effort went into the art piece.

Yousuf Mortimer (JP) – Even though it looks like just some blue it would be hard to create it because of the shading but I don’t think anything you hang on a wall should cost more than £1000. George Clubbs (1H) – Every object around us is art, but people only consider beautiful or detailed work on canvas to be art and don’t consider 'ugly art' to be art, but it still should be thought of as art. Art only sells for a high price because people drive up the high prices, and people are as determined as their bank account allows them to be. Alex Trevena (1H) – I don’t think this is art as it is so simple and anyone can make it.

2022

iThink

Junior Philosophy Club

'Comedian' by Maurizio Cattelan. Is this worth anything? (three editions have generated $390,000)

For example, the precision. Though this piece could ruin your wall and the banana rots!

Harry Speight (1H) – Everything is art but this shouldn’t be that expensive. Art is sometimes not intentional but the price should depend on how much effort you put into it.

Alex – I don’t think this should be worth much because you can get a roll of tape and a bunch of bananas for, say, £2 and anyone can make that.

Rangoli designs are meant to be destroyed: they often allow the wind to blow away the beautiful designs as a reminder of the law of impermanence. George – Having attachments to objects isn’t worth it, you should attach yourself to something that can love you back. Harry – Being attached to something can be good as it can make you feel better. Alex – I think it is totally find to have attachments to possessions as they mean something to you.

2022

Trinity iThink 2022

Articles inside

Junior Philosophy Club

A Kant rant

Nietzsche, nihilism and tragedy

Cultural oversaturation

Why do people enjoy art?

Creation, innovation and regulation

Mystification, beauty and science

The phenomenon of synaesthesia

Do you consider yourself an artist?

NFTs: scam or art?