Kierkegaard argues that our primary access to reality is not through critical detachment, but in involved commitment. How can we get meaning and commitment back into our lives once we have gotten into the passionless, reflective attitude we are now in? If you can commit yourself unconditionally – in love for instance – then that becomes a focus for your whole sense of reality. Things stand out or recede into insignificance on the basis of that ultimate concern… when you define yourself by your dedication to that concern, your world acquires seriousness, and significance…. As our culture comes more & more to celebrate critical detachment, self-sufficiency, & rational choice, there are fewer & fewer shared commitments. So, commitment itself beings to look like craziness…. when there are no shared examples of greatness that focus public concerns and elicit social commitment, people become spectators of fads & public lives, just for the excitement. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology & Politics”
July 6, 2012
July 3, 2012
Cézanne & Merleau-Ponty
- Merleau-Ponty, Maurice “Cezanne’s Doubt,” in Sense & Non-Sense, trans. by Hubert Dreyfus & Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964, pp. 9–25
Alexander, Sandra “Beyond ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’,” Journal of Visual Art Practice 4 (2005) 2
Bond, Bruce “An Essay on ‘Homage to Paul Cézanne’,” The Point Where All Things Meet: Essays on Charles Wright. Ed. Tom Andrews. Oberlin College Press, 1995
“I would love to believe the world is Platonic, but I think it’s Aristotelean” (Wright, Charles. Halflife. Ann Arbor: Univ of Michigan Press, 1988, p.130).
Pissarro, Joachim “Cézanne’s Very Particular Truth,” Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006
Shortly before his death in 1906, Cézanne said to Émile Bernard: “I owe you truth in painting, and I will communicate it to you” (Je vous dois la vérité en peinture, et je vous la dirai)…. In fact, the question of “truth” (or of the “ideal formula”) for painting had long been on Cézanne’s mind. This had even been the subject of a fierce battle (that almost ended in a physical fight) between Cézanne & Paul Gauguin in 1881… In the end, Cézanne can be described as having coined a new conception of “truth”… the sources of this conception of truth originally derived from the group of Jena artists, critics, and philosophers who worked together in Germany in the 1790s (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
Tuma, Kathryn A. “Cézanne’s Failure,” Cézanne’s Provence, National Gallery of Art lecture May 6, 2006
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