Leo Tolstoy to Leon Tolstoy Term Paper

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So art is not necessarily a means of throwing light upon reality, but even a means that will intentionally make things more obscure to our perceptions, so that we might understand the truth beyond the immediate reality. Truth may very well reside therefore in the confusion or the unfamiliarity of perception that modern art puts forth.

Also, it is obvious that art should be first of all free, and not submitted to rules that will constrain its form and content, and that will make it express not the truth but something that "should be." I think that the ideas about art that you express are about what good art should be like, but this is exactly what will drive us farther away from an understanding and a definition of art, because we should search for its essence in its sources and in the things that make artistic creation possible.

In postmodern theories art has lost even its representational value, so much as it is not even supposed to represent reality, or to express something coherent:

One philosophical legacy that has proved especially vulnerable to postmodern skepticism is the representational model of knowledge, the view that true beliefs represent or correspond to reality. Once metaphysical essences and epistemological certainties are discredited, reality no longer offers foundational security. In its place, a variety of alternative views have become influential, including coherence and pragmatic theories of truth, social constructivist theories of reality, conventional theories of meaning, and cultural relativist theories of rationality. What unites each of these alternatives is the assumption that there is no uniquely proper foundation for knowledge and meaning to represent. Rather, knowledge and meaning can only be given contextually rational, pragmatically useful, and epistemically fallible justifications. When so emptied of ontological and epistemic privileges the representational notions of knowledge and meaning strike many as obsolete.

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" (Suckla, 113)

The denial of meanings and content has itself a meaning in contemporary art, that of pointing to the relativity of what has been so far accepted without questioning. Finding meanings in reality is actually the main task that art has, and thus it can not be considered as something useless because unintelligible.

The process of creation is a complex one that, if understood, speaks about the nature of human mind and imagination, as well as of the world surrounding us. John Dewey observed for instance in his book Art as Experience that any kind of conscious process has some kind of imaginative quality, insofar as conscious observation and understanding can only be made on the basis of previous experience or understanding. So, it would be wrong to deny imagination its freedom, since we use it in all of our conscious perceptions:

Esthetic experience is imaginative. This fact, in connection with a false idea of the nature of imagination, has obscured the larger fact that all conscious experience has some degree of imaginative quality. For while the roots of every experience are found in the interaction of a live creature with its environment, that experience becomes conscious, a matter of perception, only when meanings enter it that are derived from prior experiences. Imagination is the only gateway through which these meanings can find their way into a present interaction." (Hofstader, 640)

Saying that art is only supposed to express the religious idea of good, will actually deny the most important quality of art-that of imagination, that is precisely the human faculty that most contributes to the our making sense of our universe. The process of creation and perception are always connected, so it is impossible to deny imagination without denying true knowledge about reality as well.

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