Philosophy: Real or True Reality - Essay Example

Running Head Philosophy: Real or True Reality Philosophy: Real or True Reality The understanding of real and unreal depends upon the issue of analysis and its meaning for different groups of people. It is thus to do with perception and sensation, with the apprehension of things rather than thoughts (Irwin, 2003). The judgment of reality is subjective in that reality is clearly not an attribute of the object in the way that heat is objectively an attribute of fire. It is necessarily grounded in the personal experience of pleasure, not in concepts. There can be no a priori grounds for attributing beauty to an object. Despite the attempts of philosophers to provide universal principles for the classification and judgment of works of art, to find objective criteria for reality in art, Kant is firm that there are no objective rules of taste (King 1997). Thesis The unique details of the country are merely the image of realty created by its people and influenced by their own perception of history and cultural details. The communicability of the mental state of the reality experience is fundamental. In talking about beauty, one is attempting to distinguish some quality which may meet with the agreement of others. There is an essential connection between reality and rationality--only a rational being can experience beauty--yet the mechanism of this rational process seems very complex. With the emergence of this new society, its culture divided by industrialism, comes a powerful series of changes in the reading public and its literature (King 1997). This inwardness of culture makes it like religion; culture becomes a secular counterpart of the kingdom of God, to be discovered within us. The development of the discipline of English in the university has frequently been seen as a secular alternative to theology, developed in the increasingly agnostic society. This kind of perfection is something greater than the moral perfection pursued within the traditions of English Puritanism, best exemplified for Arnold in the contemporary non-conformist churches. The quest for religious perfection, while no doubt laudable, is only perfection in part. It relies for its achievements on victories which are essentially outward, it is characterized by conformity, and a conformity to outward law and circumstance. Its zealotry is in fact one of its biggest drawbacks, fundamentally of a different temper from that harmoniousness characteristic of culture, called by Arnold sweetness and light (Gracia, 2007). This perfection of our being, our culture, is to be achieved in the ways in which we use our minds to reflect upon the world around us. Contrasted with the conformism and zealotry which lie at the heart of reality of culture, it is characterized by vitality and freedom of thought and it strives to see things freshly and as they really are—called (King 1997). In a context of profound social change brought about by the industrialization leading to an increase in population and new social groupings, the expansion of overseas empires, the creation of new literary forms and a massive increase in the production of literary texts to meet the demands of an expanded reading public--a rich tradition of thought developed around the interconnected and sometimes conflicting themes of art, aesthetics, nationalism, and the nature of social life and change. Although it is possible to see art theory as in many ways an ancient topic, as one can see social theory, as well, this was perhaps the first time that the social dimension of art--how art is produced in society and what its social effects are--had been addressed so consistently as a separate question (Gracia, 2007). The view of culture is inherently a liberal one; it ought to lead naturally to a respect for all aspects of a societys life, including the cultural life of all the people, not just the art of a small section of it. But, almost because it is such an inclusive definition, because so much seems to come within its purview, it creates a kind of anguish about culture which pulls in a contradictory way towards conservatism (Irwin, 2003). Implicit and explicit within much of the work both influencing and influenced by individual perceptions, there develops a conviction that not all parts of this broadly defined culture are qualitatively the same, indeed that the development and vigor of some parts actively threaten others. In many ways, this conservative, classicising cultural view, rather than the liberal, has been the stronger part of the legacy of Arnolds work in the twentieth century. It is this aspect of the thought which underlies the militancy of much modernist angst about the threat to cultural life and standards. Instead of culture residing in the whole of a society it turns out to reside within a very small part of it, whose job now becomes to ensure the ascendancy of its views against the majority (King 1997). Reality is created by the community and its people who share similar and unified values and principles of their land. In essence, the masses are born not to rule; by definition, the masses cannot and should not direct their own existences; they need the guidance of superior intellects, and yet everywhere in Europe they are coming into power and demanding that their opinions be heard. They have even claimed possession of those areas, like culture, formerly the exclusive domain of minorities. The plenitude which seems superficially so attractive conceals a deep threat to the future of our civilization. When everything seems possible, then the worst of all is also possible (Gracia, 2007). The plenitude which is the experience of modern life, the life of mass man, is not understood by him, nor is it valued; in mixture of passionate desire and ingratitude, mass man is like a spoilt child, not working for the plenitude which surrounds him but outraged when it is lost. It is the peculiar fate of experimental science that much of its truly great progress has been achieved through the efforts of people who are not in Ortegas terminology either educated or cultured, mediocre men as philosophers call them. The most graphic term for them is the learned ignoramus. Mass man is a primitive in the heart of civilized world (Irwin, 2003). The resistance to reality which will come from education will not in any case be from the narrow education of the elementary schools set up by the reforms of the nineteenth century, but a new liberal education, with the subject of English at its core. An education in the great books of English high culture is more important now than ever before because it is the only substitute for the loss of the living culture of the organic community. A comparison of traditional folk song with modern popular music, for example, will show up the cheapness and emotionalism of popular culture. Education must resist the blandishments of advertising in particular. King (1997) recommends the practical criticism of good prose as a way of getting to the lies and deceit of advertisements. Reading the criticism of this period one could be forgiven for thinking that English was established as a school subject with the principal aim of countering advertising (Irwin, 2003). The essence of realism, on the other hand, is not just its conception of history as changing and dynamic or its belief in the social nature of the human condition but its faith that human beings are agents in that process of change. The distinctiveness of high art lies in its peculiar historical self-awareness. Realism is more than a faithful recreation of history--indeed, in some ways the more faithful this is, especially at a superficial level of historical detail, the more it lays itself open to the underlying weakness of naturalism, the conviction that things must be as they are (King 1997). The great realist writers do not just portray individual characters or stories or exact historical detail but a complex marriage of both of them, achieving in their characterization especially an evocation of the most significant types of the era. The most impressive characters of this kind of art are those who thus stand in a kind of symbolic relationship to their society, expressing the dialectic between man-as-individual and man-as-social-being (Irwin, 2003). For instance, the realist writer must strive to portray the nodal points of this dialectic--where they are at their most vivid and their most typical--understanding the underlying trends in the historical development of an era, in that area where human behavior is molded and evaluated, where existing types are developed further and new types emerge. Although literature is a relatively autonomous sphere of practice, the high points of its art are not those which are the finest exemplars of style but those texts which create types in this sense and identify the emergent and developmental forces of social change. the researchers seem to have disliked almost every aspect of American life and to have developed a particular antipathy to its distinctive contributions to twentieth-century popular culture--popular music, jazz, films, television, for instance (King 1997; Irwin, 2003). In particular the culture industry confuses reality by making unlike things appear like, by treating particulars as if they were universals, a feature which is called subsumption. The so-called traditional values, the very phrase concealing the conflict and struggle which always exists over social and ethical value, become the norms of authoritarian and hierarchical society. The image of pure womanhood in early popular culture for example, the result in Adorno view of conflict between concupiscence and the internalized Christian ideal of chastity, is now presented in popular culture as the natural state of women and their chastity as a value per se. Mass culture aspires to a shared experience and in the process de-emphasises real class differences. This kind of repressive integration in conceptual matters is the counterpart to Fascism in social policy. Ultimately, people feel that there is no alternative to the status quo. The culture industry thus effects an act of antienlightenment, attacking rationality, replacing consciousness with conformity (King 1997). This, amongst other things, is why it is anathema to totalitarian regimes. Mass culture, on the other hand, seeks to suppress conflict and to deal in certainties. As a consequence, it denies the reality of a world based on social conflict. It becomes impossible to distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents and factors of manipulation (Irwin 2003). One of the distinctive features of advanced capitalism has been its ability to incorporate culture into the established order. For example, high culture was formerly the expression of a conscious alienation from the world of business and industry. Its literature was full of outsiders: artists, prostitutes, rebel poets, fools, devils, leading in fact to the paradox that the bourgeois orders literature was hostile in essence to the spirit of business (King 1997). Literature was an oppositional discourse within the establishments own art. In the society of advanced capitalism, the antithetical role of art has been neutralized and it has been absorbed into the materialistic culture and lost its truth value. The kinds of social undesirables formerly represented in literature have been utterly transformed into such characters as the vamp, beatnik, gangster, neurotic housewife; they are no longer images of another way of life (Irwin, 2003). In sum, reality is not true” developed and shared by a group of people. The principal manner in which the reality manifests that complexity is in its ability to generate meaning, especially in its capacity to mean something important and relevant even to a culture very different from the one in which it was originally written, in particular a later one. The power of the classic to generate meaning is indefinite. In this it has a power, in effect, to dissolve history. As a model or criterion, the notion of the classic is based on the assumption that the ancient can be relevant to a contemporary situation. Reality of the country and its image becomes a kind of unity. The classic is always, in effect, modern, and the modern work of importance is in its turn a renovation of the reality. The opposite of this search for something in the text itself which produces its literariness, its classic quality or whatever, is to see this kind of stratification in art and culture as determined by social process. Literariness, or artistic quality even, is not something texts have inside them but a marker, a seal of approval as it were, conferred from without by society as a whole, in different times and places, or else by particular groups in society whose job it is to make these kinds of decisions. References Gracia, J.B. (2007). Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Irwin, W. (2003). The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Open Court. King, A.D. (1997). Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. University of Minnesota Press. Read More