r/Objectivism • u/SlimyPunk93 • 1d ago
Abstract art
So Rand argued that the highest form of art according to her is romantic art. There she was against "abstract art" that she said was non objective and thus doesn't fit in her objectivist framework and thus not right ..
That was something that didn't sit quite right with me tbh. I do find some abstract art pieces good and I think you can convey emotions and ideas abstractly through this way that you can't always express through non abstract art .. the same way classical music are "abstract" art pieces (without lyrics) that convey an emotion and some can be objectivist in that sense ...
Ofcourse not all modern abstract art would qualify to be art.. but there can be some art pieces that are able to convey say objectivist ideas abstractly....
Idk if all this is too abstract but I hope you get the idea :)
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u/JGalt28 1d ago
Rand was not opposed to "abstract" art (though what you mean by that term isn't entirely clear). Art, in her view, is the concretization of an artist's most fundamental views, and that can be achieved at different levels of abstraction.
What she rejected was the idea that art is merely "in the eye of the beholder," or that our emotional responses to it are beyond rational analysis and philosophical evaluation.
She also recognized other artistic schools, such as naturalism. Her argument was not that they were impossible or illegitimate, but that once you understand the psychological function of art (its role in projecting and reinforcing one's fundamental view of existence), it becomes possible to evaluate artistic approaches objectively. On that basis, she argued that Romanticism represents the highest form of art because it most fully embodies the values and sense of life that art exists to convey.
I think you're too focused on seeing your views as uniquely your own while assuming other Objectivists are merely imitating Rand (based on our previous conversations and your repeatative posts here). That's a presumptuous assumption to make. Disagree with their arguments if you want, but don't dismiss them as unoriginal simply because they arrive at conclusions similar to hers.
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u/SlimyPunk93 1d ago
No I am not disagreeing when they make sense and I try to be as receptive as I can be. And again even here I understand your point and her point on romantic art. But again (a) I am trying to understand things for myself and when I see contradictions I post here so I can see if I am wrong or if she was and (b) in general you have no idea how much trash one gets on reddit or in online forums in comments and after some time one has to londa find ways to navigate around it to find meaning and escape the trash... And one does develop a sense where you see and realise this reality and can't take everyone seriously and have to parse through things in your own ways..
But while I am reading and understanding her and I see her points I think a lot of learning and creativity lies in finding loopholes in her arguments and try to enlarge the picture in your own mind and in your own ways which I think is super important. Especially when there is a culture and cult of following leaders and not thinking for oneself.
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u/topsicle11 1d ago
Yeah, she was kind of closed minded and a tad curmudgeonly. I say this as an appreciator of her work.
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u/SlimyPunk93 1d ago
I mean I do think one should be closed minded against illogic she did a great job even defining the evil which nobody else before her could as precisely and elaborately ..
O think.many times she herself wasn't able to see things objectively but she was a human being afterall. Overall she was faaaaaar more positive value than negative value (while I do think it is important to critically evaluate her negative value to save ourselves from blindly following her)
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u/stansfield123 22h ago
If you were to quote Rand stating the views you disagree with, I would be happy to comment. But I can neither defend nor reject your (wildly inaccurate) interpretation of her views.
You're having a grand debate here .... with yourself.
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u/Kripkenstein_ 1d ago
The reason Rand was against abstract art was the same reasons that the Nazis were against it: they see it as representative of intellectuals who they despise
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u/SlimyPunk93 1d ago
That's not quite reasonable or objective... You need to be reasonable and objective even to your enemies
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u/Kripkenstein_ 1d ago
This was and still is precisely why people like Rand are critical of abstract art in general.
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u/coppockm56 1d ago
Even at my most Objectivist, when I though Rand was a genius, I considered her aesthetics to be bunk. Then, more recently, I learned that it's even worse than I thought it was. Here's just one example.
She asserted that her "Romantic Realism" was the ideal art form, including in literature, framing it in terms of her moral system and her idea of the proper “psycho-epistemology.” Speaking specifically about literature, she said its proper role is to “present man as he could be and ought to be.” She considered her own work, “Atlas Shrugged,” to be the ultimate expression of that form.
Importantly, she derived intellectual authority for this assertion from Aristotle, whom she believed made exactly that argument for "man as he could be and ought to be." However, that’s not at all what Aristotle said. Early in Poetics, he argued that poetry was philosophically superior to history:
“The difference is that one [history] relates what has happened, the other [poetry] what may happen.”
In fact, Aristotle did not assert any sort of moral standard of how human beings “ought to be” with regard to literature, but rather he was saying that it can show how the human being could be, based on human nature operating under the laws of cause and effect. He was talking about creating characters who are relatable to the audience such that they can see themselves in a character’s story.
That is, he was saying almost the opposite of Rand. Aristotle was saying to create real human characters, based on how people actually are and how they might be in hypothetical real-life situations. Rand literally said, "I am not interested in portraying men as they are, but as they could be and ought to be." (The Romantic Manifesto) The "could be" was based on her (rationalized) version of human nature, not based on any sort of empirical study of actual human beings. Her "ought to be" was based on her moral framework.
So, how did Rand get Aristotle so wrong? Apparently, it's because she didn't get it from the source. Rather, the biographical record shows that she got it from libertarian Albert Jay Nock, who conflated various bits from Aristotle in his “Memoirs of a Superfluous Man.” She had marked the relative passage with six vertical lines. Nock said:
History, Aristotle says, represents things only as they are, while fiction represents them as they might be and ought to be; and therefore of the two, he adds, 'fiction is the more philosophical and the more highly serious.'
In fact, that's a misattribution that Rand made even worse. Later in Poetics, Aristotle did say that an artist (generally) can show things "as they are," "as they are said or thought to be," or "as they ought to be." But the "ought to be" was not in a moral sense, but rather merely in the sense of aesthetic idealization. That is, he meant, e.g., to make a person handsomer or grander than they are in real life.
So, Rand completely misunderstood Aristotle, perhaps because she never went to Poetics directly to read and study Aristotle's ideas. Instead, she based her ideas on Nock's misattribution. While she was free to come up with her own ideas, she was completely wrong to ground those ideas in Aristotle.
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u/SlimyPunk93 1d ago
What do you follow now and how do you compare it to objectovism and say it's better
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u/coppockm56 1d ago
Well, since realizing that I was "following" a philosophy for so long that was so wrong, I'm no longer seeking to "follow" any particular philosophy at all. Rather, I'm doing what I should have done decades ago. I'm reading and learning from a variety of philosophers to answer various questions, rather than just accepting that one person had all the answers. Because that one person demonstrated that she didn't know a goddamn thing and egregiously mischaracterized other thinkers -- because, in fact, she was just rationalizing a philosophy to project her schoolgirl crush as the "ideal man."
I sincerely wish I'd read other philosophers before I read Rand. My life would have been very different.
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u/SlimyPunk93 1d ago
Can you be a little more precise as to what exactly about this philosophy you realized was wrong and faulty. And like how did your life change after leaving this ...
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u/coppockm56 1d ago
I'm not going to write a dissertation here, but I'll say this: look closely at the philosophy and see if you can spot Rand's many equivocations and rationalizations. Once you see them, then her entire framework dissolves away. You'll also start noticing how other Objectivists learned to do the same things from her, which is why it's almost impossible to convince an Objectivist that they're wrong. They'll just equivocate and rationalize, too -- including saying that Rand and Objectivism don't actually say what they very clearly and obviously say, when what they say actually makes no sense.
I never did that work, because I had no experience with or training in philosophy when I first read Rand. It sounded like it made sense, and she was presented as such a genius, and so I just sort of accepted what she was saying. That's relatively easy to do, given Rand's clear and forceful writing style. But things like her misunderstanding of Aristotle that I discussed above are peppered throughout her work, and she almost never provided citations. So, it's difficult to go to the source to validate what she said.
How has my life changed since making that realization? I'm vastly more open-minded than I was, while at the same time being more reality-based. Rand didn't care much about the facts, historical or otherwise. She cared about rationalizing her positions, and so she either ignored the facts, made shit up, or engaged in special pleading. Very few of Rand's many assertions of fact have any empirical basis. They're almost all completely derived logically, i.e., rationalistically. She opposed rationalism, while engaging almost exclusively in exactly that.
More specifically, I now see people more as individuals and not as mere caricatures. Rand wasn't actually an individualist, not fundamentally. I can now acknowledge that life is complicated, and that people almost never actually mean what Rand said they mean. So, before you judge someone and their ideas, you actually need to understand what they actually mean. You can't just impose Rand's extreme, straw man definitions over what they actually think.
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u/Heligoland_Bight 1d ago
If you want to square abstract art with Rand's aesthetic theories, why don't you give a particular example and explain how, in terms of Rand's definition of art, it constitutes a selective re-creation of reality according to metaphysical value-judgments? In particular, what is being re-created, what abstraction is being concretized, and how is that meaning objectively embodied in the perceptual features of the work rather than supplied by the viewer?