CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE

Abstract. Creativity is a concept far more often associated with art than with science. The creative dimension of scientific inquiry and practice is described and compared with its artistic counterpart; similarities and differences are analyzed.     

Art and intellect

Many educators persist in opposing art to intellect. This is incompatible with modern understandings of the interdependence of cognition and feeling. It also causes neglect of the value of art as one medium for presenting and exploring ideas. Historical examples add weight to the point by showing the richness of thought that has often informed visual art. The educational waste and cultural damage consequent on neglecting this aspect of art is indicated and remedial approaches are suggested.     

Eroticism for the masses: Japanese manga comiss and their assimilation into the U.S.

In this article, we describe translated Japanese comics or “manga” with sexual content. Because in the West comics have been treated as junk culture, they lack canons for critical analysis. We have developed methods for analyzing manga that focus on objective assessment of content, on reader subjectivity, and on how the emotional tenor of the artwork is created. We briefly review some history of Japanese art and culture, in which sexuality has always been a legitimate subject for art and which forms the cultural underpinnings of manga. We summarize the erotic themes and visions of manga with sexual content, including heterosexual courtship and consummation, female and male homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestitism, incest, and bestiality. Critics of manga argue that it glorifies rape, a view we could not confirm. We identified 87 stories with rape or sexual assault; 80 (92.0%) show the woman or others taking violent, often murderous, revenge on sexual attackers. We also analyze visual modalities for depicting men and women. In common with older Japanese aesthetic traditions, the manga we have seen depict women as beautiful, powerful, and erotic. Finally, we suggest that manga functions as an art form by mobilizing the reader’s involvement with the characters, especially female characters, in a complex narrative framework in which sexuality is a positive virtue for men and, especially, for women. We conclude that manage contains some of the finest erotic art being produced in the world today for sheer power, elegance, and drama. Some of this material was presented at the Western Regional Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, San Diego, CA, April 6–9, 2000.     

The Rothko Chapel Paintings and the ‘urgency of the transcendent experience’

Since the Romantic period, painters have no longer made use of traditional Christian iconography to express religious transcendence. Taking their cue from Schleiermacher’s Reden Über die Religion, painters have sought for new, personal ways to express religious transcendence. One example is Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea. Rosenblum argues, in his Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, that there is a parallel between Friedrich and the abstract expressionist Rothko with respect to the expression to religious transcendence. In this article I investigate how the experience of transcendence that Rothko’s paintings want to evoke is to be described. Is it an experience of the sublime in the Romantic tradition? Is it the evocation of the ultimate in accordance with Tillich’s broad concept of religion? Does it display affinity between Rothko and the first generation of abstract painters such as Kandinsky and Malevich? Or is it a transcendent experience that cannot be situated so easily within the options supplied? After determining Rothko’s understanding of transcendence, some issues will be brought up that could be fruitful for Christian theology.     

神经美学——艺术的神经基础

什么是艺术？它为什么能成为所有社会都能接受的共同文化？随着神经科学的飞速发展,一门崭新的领域——神经美学,用于解释这个问题。神经美学研究目标是了解艺术创造、欣赏和审美的神经基础。神经美学研究将美术、音乐等艺术形式与神经科学研究手段结合起来探索其中的奥秘,神经美学研究必将为美学的发展做出革命性的贡献。     

Art, authenticity and appropriation

It is often suggested that artists from one culture (outsiders) cannot successfully employ styles, stories, motifs and other artistic content developed in the context of another culture. I call this suggestion the aesthetic handicap thesis and argue against it. Cultural appropriation can result in works of high aesthetic value. While in China as a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy of Beijing Normal University, I gave a series of lectures at leading Chinese universities. This essay is based on a lecture that I gave at Renmin University of China on 17 April 2006.     

LES CULS-DE-SAC OF ENLIGHTENMENT AESTHETICS: A METAPHILOSOPHY OF ART

Abstract: This article charts the rise and fall of the Modern System of the Arts and the failure of the aesthetic theory of art to define membership in the so-called system, which, instead, I argue, is and has been, for a long time, merely a historically evolved collection. Rather than endorsing the continued attempt to define Art with a capital A in terms of aesthetic experience, I recommend alternative lines of research for contemporary philosophers of the arts.     

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME IN NATURAL SCIENCE

The various aesthetic phenomena found repeatedly in the scientific enterprise stem from the role of God as artist. If the Creator is an artist, how and why natural scientists study the divine art work can be understood using theological aesthetics and the philosophy of art. The aesthetic phenomena considered here are as follows. First, science reveals beauty and the sublime in natural phenomena. Second, science discovers beauty and the sublime in the theories that are developed to explain natural phenomena. Third, the search for beauty often guides scientists in their work. Fourth, where beauty is perceived, feelings of the sublime often also follow upon further contemplation. This linkage of beauty in science with truth and the sublime runs counter to most aesthetic theory since Kant. Scholarship in theological aesthetics has recently argued that the modern and postmodern elevation of the sublime over beauty is merely a preference that reveals a bias against transcendence—against God. If doing and understanding science can show this sundering of the sublime from the beautiful to be in error, science also gives evidence of transcendence.     

The Significance of Xuwu 虚无 (Nothingness) in Chinese Aesthetics

Just as nothingness is a fundamental concept in Daoist philosophy, it is also a fundamental concept in Chinese aesthetics, where it has multiple meanings: First, nothingness, as a reaction against unaesthetic psychical activity, is a primary precondition of aesthetic and artistic activity. Second, as the void or intangible “stuff” juxtaposed to “substance,” it is an indispensable compositional property of artworks as well as an essential condition for the manifestation of an artistic form. Finally, as a reaction against the unaesthetic world of daily life—the experiential world—nothingness is the fundamental basis and essential provision for establishing an artistic world.     

Marcel Duchamp: On the fruitful use of narcissism and destructiveness in contemporary art

Considering Marcel Duchamp's work, this paper raises the question as to the nature of the subjective experience proposed by contemporary art to today's audience. Approaching art through the concept of sublimation, Freud maintains a fundamentally optimistic and positive view, putting forward its libidinal and sexual aspects, the pursuit of pleasure, beauty, and omnipotence. Following the path opened by Freud through the concept of the 'uncanny', most post-Freudian authors have proposed a 'blacker' image of artistic endeavour, allowing the expression of aggression. From a perspective which is neither that of an art historian nor a moralist, the author proposes the idea that certain propositions of contemporary art may allow the viewer to live narcissistic and destructive fantasies, via culturally sanctioned and socially acceptable means. The recognition of the fertile use of destruction as a condition of the emergence of the new, on the one hand, as well as the legitimacy of the expression through art of the most primitive fantasies and the right to non-communication, on the other, are postulated as constructs for a non-normative, non-judgemental psychoanalytic approach to the cultural world.