ONE MORE, ONCE MORE...

...assignment. For some reason, I liked this one probably the best, as it had to do with literature. Again, I could have written more, but I kept short with some main ideas on the topic.

Q: Freud wrote that art was a “palliative measure” that helped people cope with suffering. Discuss his view and how it compares with the views of art or aesthetics of one of the following authors: Baudelaire, Darwin, Nietzsche, Woolf.

A:

Art as antidote or as an expression of inadequacy with the world's ways (a ''palliative measure'' as Freud names it) in the face of suffering is nothing new to men and it shall stay with men as long as mankind exists. Ever since Cro-Magnon man painted the walls of his cave, the human spirit found ways of escaping everday turmoil. There will always be prisoners to escape the cave (see Plato's ''Allegory of the Cave'') and get away from the shadows. In what follows, I'll illustrate how Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf's artistic visions converged into an escapist ideal, a ''palliative measure'' which leads to that which we call happiness.
Happiness is an essential pursuit of mankind if not the ultimate purpose. We all set goals in order to achieve it, dream of happy times, live the moment to reach it, immerse ourselves in activities which make us happy, hope for it, feel it when making others happy - not only these are the ways, yet the aim is one only: obtain happiness and make it last. Freud's view regarding the pursuit of happiness pleads in this direction: "(...) what the behaviour of men themselves reveals as the purpose and object of their lives, what they demand of life and wish to attain in it. The answer to this can hardly be in doubt: they seek happiness, they want to become happy and to remain so. There are two sides to this striving, a positive and a negative; it aims on the one hand at eliminating pain and discomfort, on the other at the experience of intense pleasures.'' (Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1929p.8) Pain and discomfort are rooted in three main sources of unhappiness in Freud's vision: our own bodies, the external world and the others. Having to deal with these and looking for happiness, most men find themselves caught up in the web of suffering and unhappiness, which is why, one of the ways of searching for happiness is constituted by art, search enhanced also by the pleasure principle of which Freud talked about. Furthermore, Freud pointed out the importance of this search in art for happiness as well as the innate failure which might occur when doing so, yet the perseverance cannot cease, art being one of the attributes of civilisation: ''happiness in life is sought first and foremost in the enjoyment of beauty, wherever it is to be found by our senses and our judgement, the beauty of human forms and movements, of natural objects, of landscapes, of artistic and even scientific creations. As a goal in life, this aesthetic attitude offers little protection against the menace of suffering, but is able to compensate for a great deal. The enjoyment of beauty produces a particular, mildly intoxicating kind of sensation. There is no evident use in beauty; the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilisation could not do without it.'' (Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1929, p. 11)
What stands obviously in common with Freud's vision in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, is the manner in which the character Lily Briscoe (a possible self-portrayal of Woolf herself) finds the happiness and fulfillment in her search of integrity and closeness with Mrs. Ramsay through painting; the intensity which leads the character to self-accomplishment and happiness comes through her art as the following lines suggest: ''She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, what she looked it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It is in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas(...)''. (V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse) that Lily grasps happiness through art, escaping her suffering caused by the relation with the outside world, with men in particular (Charles Tansley and William Bankes) and the frustration in not succeeding to paint what she sees, not capturing the essence she can perceive, as illustrated by the author: ''It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.'' (V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse). Clearly, Lily wishes to be happy but it takes her ten years to finish Mrs. Ramsay's portrait, the one which raised such frustration in her creation. She didn't know when starting it that even much suffering has to be endured as ''time passes'' before she could be happy, before she would achieve happiness with a few strokes of her brush: ''(...) if a man thinks himself happy if he has merely escaped unhappiness or weathered trouble; if in general the task of avoiding pain forces that of obtaining pleasure into the background.'' (Sigmund Freud - Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1929).
 Bibliography:
(1) Freud, Sigmund - Civilisation and Its Discontents, 1929 ( archive.org/details/CivilisationAndItsDiscontents )
(2) ''Selected Works of Virginia Woolf'' ( To the Lighthouse), Wordsworth Limited Edition, 2005.

BE SHORT, SCRATCH THE SURFACE OF THINGS ONLY, DON'T DARE SAY MORE, MAKE IT SIMILAR TO A STATUS ON A ROTTEN SOCIAL SITE

That could be the best description of the little text which I wrote when we got the assignment with the prompt...
Q: ''Darwin wrote that: "Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin." Compare Darwin's view of the persistent effects of the past with at least one other writer covered so far in the cours'' (I chose Nietzsche).

Let your laughter begin (wonder of anyone will actually give a 2 damn minutes in reading this): 

A: 

In meeting Darwin's idea that man inherently carries his evolutionary past within himself comes the Nietzschean concept of ''animal nature'' which all men possess. Moreso, both Darwin and Nietzsche consider that we are the product of the past, yet while the first aims at the biological evolution of the mankind, the latter examins the moral evolution of mankind, that being the point where the two thinkers differ in their approach.
A more consistent difference lays in the fact that Darwin exposes in scientific terms the long evolutionary past of humans and the laws of nature which have enabled this evolution, whereas Nietzsche takes a turn on dissecting the human soul which is the product of a millenia of repressed animal instincts , of ''internalization'' as he calls it. This self denial of our instinctual nature, leads (in Nietzsche's opinion) to ideals, to frames of morality which cage humans, tames and makes them self-sufficient within those frames; he points out that once humans have lost the contact with the nature and stopped being the part of an archaic mode of living, thus internalising all those primal ways of being, they've  lived those (lost) adventures within themselves ever since. The fate of the modern man is to have his soul as a battlefield, a place ''of adventure, a place of torture'' as Nietzsche states in his Second Treatise (''On the Genealogy of Morality''); having a conscience equals pain.  What brings the two thinkers back on the same track, mildly and unviolent expressed by Darwin, yet strongly and radically pointed by Nietzsche, is the brake from the theological frames of thinking about the evolution of men.
Despite their differences of approach, i.e. scientific with Darwin and philosophical with Nietzsche, the two authors do come about  the inate instincts we carry within us, supporting the idea of the persistent effects of the past. If we choose to break from the chains as Nietzsche suggests in the ending of his Second Treatise, it's only a matter of choice.

Are you laughing still? :) 

LATEST..... 

It appears writing on here lately has been cut down, despite the fact there's been plenty food for the thought due to a formal yet unusual form of study (online courses that is), as well as artistic input (exibitions, musical events)..I could say also life in general, as there's a lot of inspiration in it. Well, all my initial intentions started with heavenly ideas, but they turned hell frozen in what concerns this blog. So let me remedy that a bit.

When I look back a bit on the assignments I had to write for my course of Modernism and Postmodernism and of which I'm not too pleased - the writings, not the wonderful course!... I realised I can pick some of them to update this ''place''... after all, the blog was born also out of my need of having  a ''reader's /speaker's corner''.  The magic of the internet, let me use it once again! With sense?  :)

Luckily, the texts/excerpts I will share have the length of a blog post, so there won't be as gruelling to read as some of the previous updates on here. I'm very much aware of the possibilities of improvement and completing these assigenments I wrote up until now, but I take my chances and let them go publicly (they were seen already by my peers,  so they're not that obscure - or so I'd like to think). Let me dwell no more and shoot the first one out:

Q: How did Kant define Enlightenment? Use Kant’s definition to discuss whether either Rousseau or Marx is an Enlightenment figure.

A:
Kant saw the Enlightenment as the fall of people's inmaturity chains, as a way of eliberation from the guidance provided by well established and accepted institutions of ''control'' of the state (being that religious or of other kind). In respect to the latter aspect, he even underlines that if one accepts this guidance without putting any effort of thought (use of reason), all that it has to be done is to replace his own ability of thinking with a ''payment'' so that others think in this one's place who's unable thus to think for himself/herself and just picks up what is told to do/act/etc. Freedom is the solution to all this and it can be achieved non-radically through the use of reason; gaining it, one earns indepenence in thinking, maturity and authority, i.e. is enlighted: ''(...) if it is only allowed freedom, enlightenment is almost inevitable.'' (I. Kant, What is Enlightenment)  Some of Marx's own ideas inscribe into the same direction as Kant's in what regards the ways to reach Enlightenment, inscribing him thus in the line of the thinkers of the Enlightened Age.

At the end of his essay What is Enlightenment, Kant states that ''(...) the inclination to and vocation for free thinking (....) it finally even influences the principles of government, which finds that it can profit by treating men, who are now more than machines, in accord with their dignity.'' This statement is perhaps the most appropiate reference to the impact which Marx's ideas had upon our world and how his philosophical principles found application in reality, so to say (the whole history of the communism being more than evocative in this sense).
In the same manner as Kant, Marx indicated that a better state of affairs can be achieved only when men would break from  being part of the machine (the capitalistic one) which makes them dependent and lacking individuality: ''In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.''(Manifesto of The Communist Party)
Marx pointed at the capital and at wage-slavery as to the yokes which kept people under opression, a state of things which altered relations in society and among people, transforming these people into commodities which served the interests of the few who held the capital and the power (''Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power'', in the Manifesto of The Communist Party). This incompatible mode of living was not seen by Marx as something to be totally destroyed, but it was aiming to a better use of capital and products of the society without intereference to an individual's liberty, somehting which yet again takes us back to Kant's own idea of personal independence and autonomy.

Thus, Marx and Kant's principles of building an enlighted society meet in the manner in which the two philosophers indicate the pursuit of freedom and breaking from any societal chains which stops an individual from being one (and not part of a controlled mass), but also in the way in which they saw this breaking as not being a radical, yet built on the remains of the old.