“Language has always been important in politics, but language is incredibly important to the present political struggle. Because if you can establish an atmosphere in which information doesn’t mean anything, then there is no objective reality.
– Stephen Colbert
‘There are lots of definitions of science, but I’ll say it’s is a body of knowledge and a method of how we learn that knowledge.
Science tells us that the stuff we think we know may not be perfectly known; it may be partly or entirely wrong. We need to watch the universe, see how it behaves, make guesses about why it’s doing what it’s doing and try to think of ways to support or disprove those ideas.
That last part is important.
Science must be – above all else – honest, if we really want to get to the bottom of things. Understanding that our understanding might be wrong is essential, and trying to figure out the ways we may be mistaken is the only way that science can help us find our way to the Truth.
Or at least, the nearest approximation to it.
Science learns. We meander a bit as we use it, but in the long run we get closer and closer to understanding reality. And that is the strength of science. And it’s all around us.’
– Plait. P. (2015, January 15) Introduction to Astronomy: Crash Course Astronomy #1
‘Heidegger believed that art was an alternative way of discovering the truth about the world and Nature.
[Heidegger]
“Art is the happening of Truth. It discloses Being without making it into a classifiable entity.”
In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935). Heidegger turned to a painting of shoes by Van Gogh to explicate his point about art as “the happening of truth”:
“A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet – From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth … In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field.”
Heidegger’s argument is that Van Gogh’s painting re-creates the lived context of the peasant’s life. Because the painting achieves this, Heidegger concludes:
[Heidegger]
“Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in Truth.”
Heidegger’s reading of Van Gogh’s painting is part of the tradition of hermeneutics, in which the work of art is seen as a clue or symptom for a wider sense of reality.’
– Kul-Want. C. (2012) Aesthetics London, United Kingdom: Icon Books p. 98-100
“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
– Stephen Colbert
Galene
Dear Lysandra, do you think there are things “we are aware of” about both ourselves and the outside world that are ‘unexpressable’ in terms of words or anything similarly conventional?
Lysandra
I think there are. It seems probable that these unexpressable things may only be expressed (or perhaps merely approximated) by something unconventional – something out of the ordinary, unique even.
Galene
Perhaps these things can be rightly called Art?
Lysandra
Quite, with this in mind I prefer Heidegger’s view “Art is the happening of truth”. That is to say, Art can establish that which is implicit; it is the disclosure of intelligibility in time.
See other: Philosophical Conversations
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