Facets of Ayn Rand by Sures on the web


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Jonathan,

A word from a friend.

I see the art in what you generally do when you criticize something or someone. I've often seen you use the same verbal expressions, or emotional postures, or scorched earth value judgements that they present when talking about a great artist. Except you reverse it and apply it to ideas you find weak or behavior you find inconsistent. Also, I've seen you harshly jump on ideas like how to measure a heroic soul in art and things like that, which I believe should be questioned. Especially in light of all the nonsense in artistic opinions that float around O-Land.

However, recently, your expression has been extremely negative and hostile--disproportionately so by comparison with before. That leads me to be concerned. (I said I was a friend and I meant it.)

Ayn Rand herself allowed this kind of negativism and hostility creep into her soul. It grew. She started expressing it more and more and, I believe, it gradually purified (as is the case in humans as they automatically learn and hone skills through repetition). The humor went away and only the bitterness and disgust remained when she got like that, which, in my opinion, was way too often to be healthy. I am going on what I have read, of course, and the videos of her public presentations. In fact, I am convinced part of her health issues later in life were due to her long intense negative bouts.

I would hate to see that happen to you. In my experience and observation, the term "negative spiral" corresponds to an increasingly toxic reality. There is a lot of proof in neuroscience and modern psychology that supports the conclusion that biological vulnerability is aggravated by extended intense negative emotions.

So I call your attention to this. Most people who are in the middle of a phase where their emotions are high are usually not aware of what is happening. They are too busy living it.

Take this as you will as I will not discuss it more (unless you wish), but my intent is to sound a wake-up call out of concern, not out of trying to control you.

Michael

Thanks for your concern, MSK. I'll take a little time and cool down, and reflect a bit on my current attitude.

J

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I thought that I had read it, but apparently I had only read excerpts or an abridged version. And, yes, I think that reading it in its entirety is what caused the immediate reaction of disgust. Honestly, to me it's like watching someone use a Rorschach test as a weapon. It's like watching a witch-hunter's glee in making accusations of witchcraft.

I apologize for the strong reaction, but I find it hard to be a fan of The Fountainhead and to not react strongly to real-life behavior that is so reminiscent of Ellsworth Toohey.

J

Clarification: I wasn't suggesting that your reaction was over the top. :smile: It's similar to the way I reacted on first reading that piece.

I was just surprised by the vehemence, since I'd thought you were familiar with the article previously, but the "explosion" quality made me wonder if maybe you were reacting spontaneously to a first-time read.

Ellen

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.

"Pull your head out of ass, Stephen" -J

There, there, now, go to sleep, got what you wanted, there, there, everything is OK, Jon-Jon.

(But wait, let's quote this for a bonus. Best obscenity against Stephen Boydstun in print since Prof. Campbell's identification of Boydstun's anus as his fundamental aperture, shit on his mind and self.)

That's actually a good idea, depending on where your head is.

--Brant

I've done it!

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I thought that I had read it, but apparently I had only read excerpts or an abridged version. And, yes, I think that reading it in its entirety is what caused the immediate reaction of disgust. Honestly, to me it's like watching someone use a Rorschach test as a weapon. It's like watching a witch-hunter's glee in making accusations of witchcraft.

I apologize for the strong reaction, but I find it hard to be a fan of The Fountainhead and to not react strongly to real-life behavior that is so reminiscent of Ellsworth Toohey.

J

Clarification: I wasn't suggesting that your reaction was over the top. :smile: It's similar to the way I reacted on first reading that piece.

I was just surprised by the vehemence, since I'd thought you were familiar with the article previously, but the "explosion" quality made me wonder if maybe you were reacting spontaneously to a first-time read.

Ellen

I don't think that my reaction to the piece was over the top, but on further reflection, I let my reaction expand to Stephen, and I took it out on him. Sorry, Stephen. I misidentified whose head needs to be pulled out of his ass. Please accept my apology.

J

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In Metaphysics in Marble, Mary Ann Sures aimed in part to “demonstrate the connection between the dominant philosophy of a given era and its sculpture.” She noted that “man has been the predominant subject of sculpture,” meaning that, for the most part, figures in sculpture have been figures of the human form. What about the other figures? Do they also convey, at least implicitly, a philosophy, dominant or otherwise, of their era? Specifically, what about figures of animals and what about modern sculpture such as Calder’s Flamingo at the Federal Plaza in Chicago?

A link to the latter is here. At that site we read:

Alexander Calder’s abstract stabile anchors the large rectangular plaza bordered by three Bauhaus style federal buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe. The sculpture’s vivid color and curvilinear form contrast dramatically with the angular steel and glass surroundings. However, Flamingo is constructed from similar materials and shares certain design principles with the architecture, thereby achieving successful integration within the plaza. Despite its monumental proportions, the open design allows the viewer to walk under and through the sculpture, leading one to perceive it in relation to human scale.

I did not know until now that this work is titled Flamingo. To me it was simply a form I found visually pleasing, something rather joyous in the way that we find most aerial fireworks joyous, and something that often lured me to walk under in my decades in Chicago. Of course I found the steelwork glorious as I always do wherever I come across it in its utilitarian settings; though that pleasure I realize is peculiar to me and Dagny and our engineering ilk, is a more intellectual pleasure than the other joys I mentioned, and is clearly derivative of the pleasure we take in the utilitarian setting of such steelwork, such as in buildings or bridges or cranes. The title Flamingo names one interpretation of the form, evidently the one in the mind of the artist (if he is the one who gave it that name) at that more intellectual level of experience. I can see the character of flamingo in the form. But I could give the form the title Burst or Excelsior at about that same level and looseness of intellectual play over the form, and there are likely other titles that are suitable to the form, that is, other subjects or themes one might reasonably (not utterly idiosyncratically) associate with the form and could fairly name in a title for the work.

Ancient figures of animals would seem to be sculpture reflecting a culture’s, or anyway an artisan or patron’s, view of animals, possibly in direct relation to man, possibly for their own features and charm. Such charm we moderns would tend to think of as something in our response profile, rather than in the object per se; but that is surely intellectual input concerning the experienced figure, and moreover doubtful to be part of how ancient cultures took the figure within their philosophical/religious outlook. That animals are seen as living and as life companions to our own would be a fair bet for any culture. Perhaps those circumstances, which have some relation to man, are reflected in the animal-sculpture of most any culture.

To show connection between a culture’s dominant philosophy and its art whose subject is the human being, Sures has to summarize what that dominant philosophy was or is. I am not an expert on Egyptian civilization, but I seriously doubt that in all its eras, it saw man as “moving haltingly through what he believed to be an incomprehensible universe.”

One of the sculptures Sures has now linked, in endnote 1, is King Menkaure and His Queen, c. 2530–2500 BCE. The pair look to me resolute, proud, serene, and pleased, with the woman looking affectionately bound to the man, the man independent and strong. This piece is from Fourth Dynasty, the Old Kingdom, beginning around 2600 BCE. Dipping into Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution – From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Harvard 2011), I learn:

In the absence of continuous texts until well into the Old Kingdom, that is, towards the end of the Fifth Dynasty, around 2400 BCE, it is difficult to reconstruct religious belief and practice. . . . The relation between Horus [one of two major gods, the other being Seth] and the king is clearly central. The naming of Egyptian kings is complex and became more so over time, but from the very beginning Horus figured prominently in the name of every king. Horus’s emblem is the falcon, but it would be a mistake to call him a “falcon god.” The name Horus means “the one on high.” The falcon then, rather than an exclusive identity, associates him with the sky, perhaps even with the sun. . . .

A critical question for us in trying to understand archaic religion is the question whether the king is Horus in a strong sense . . . . This question has been answered variously. . . .

. . . The “gods” of early dynastic Egypt are only incipiently differentiated from the “powerful beings” of tribal people, . . . they are more identified with than worshipped . . . . In this context it makes sense to say that the king is Horus, in that he enacts Horus rather than worships him. . . .

. . . Horus was the god of kings before Amun, Re, or Ptah came on the scene and probably before Osiris was clearly established as his father.

. . . The king, whether as incarnation, son, or servant of the gods, is the key link between humans and the cosmos such that the weakness or absence of the king is a sign of profound cosmic and social disorder; the proper functioning of the king is the primary guarantee of life and peace.

Just as the powerful beings of tribal peoples were violent as well as benevolent, . . . so chaos and disorder were never far from the consciousness of the ancient Egyptians. Erik Hornung describes an Egyptian understanding of reality going back as far as the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom in which chaos, defined as limitless waters and total darkness, preceded the coming into being of the first god, surrounds the finite universe, and will ultimately prevail when the cosmos grows old and is reabsorbed into it. Further, chaos not only surrounds the cosmos but penetrates it continuously, requiring equally continual human action to deal with it.

This human action, focusing on the king, takes two main forms. One is the “hostile confrontation” with “the powers that belong to the nonexistent outside creation but invade creation and must be driven out of it. It is the duty of the king and the gods to do this.” . . .

But there was another aspect of the confrontation with chaos or the nonexistent, namely its essential role in “fertility, renewal, and rejuvenation.” Unless the sun, which grows old at dusk, descends into the utter darkness of the underworld, it will not be reborn at dawn; unless the land is submerged by inundation of the Nile it will not bear new crops; unless all things, including humans, die life will not continue. . . .

It is this second kind of confrontation with chaos, dangerous but not hostile, indeed essential, that helps us understand the importance of mortuary ritual and royal tombs in Egyptian history. The apparent Egyptian preoccupation with death was in reality a preoccupation with life. Because death of the king was the greatest threat to human order, special precautions needed to be undertaken to be sure that it [death of the king] rendered life not death. (230–33)

The great pyramids were constructed during the Fourth dynasty, the era of this particular Egyptian sculpture Sures has set before us. The pyramid tomb at Giza is Menkaure’s. There were Egyptians in that society who created that structure and who comprehended a great deal of the world, including practical arithmetic and geometry, and who evidently thought they comprehended the universe, finding in it pervasive unity and order. They do not seem to fit Sures mold of ancient Egyptians believing they lived in an incomprehensible universe.

After writing the preceding, I recalled having a book from decades ago on art and civilization. It took some searching last evening to locate it, but I have found it. It is titled indeed Art and Civilization and its author is Bernard Meyers. He says of this particular sculpture and others of its era:

In the pyramid temples and mastabas, the images of the deceased were in stone . . . . The statues might be standing, sitting, or kneeling, but had to conform to the strictest geometric formality; their various parts were parallel to the vertical and horizontal lines of the original rectangular block and were contained within the dimensions of that block. The figure itself was so posed that it faced squarely front and could be divided into two equal parts. Sculptures like the Menkure and His Queen . . . illustrate this prescribed arrangement: the head, shoulders, and hips are placed in parallel lines, and other parts of the body are made parallel to these. Arms are held rigidly at the sides; feet are set flatly on the ground, one before the other, in a formal rather than natural pose. Yet within these restrictions . . . [the] faces show a striking naturalism that is characteristic of earlier Egyptian art. (19)

I had not noticed the parallel lines in my earlier look at the picture of the piece. Having that pointed out makes me realize another feeling I had about the sculpture, and that was a sense of pleasing order. Sures linked to an image of this sculpture to illustrate the practice of frontality in Egyptian art and for exhibit of the concretization of the Egyptian dominant view of reality and human existence. In much contrast to the representation of those Egyptian views by Bellah, Sures wrote: “This was the Egyptian’s concept of man’s nature and destiny: a mindless puppet with strings attached to hosts of deities who manipulated him through an unintelligible life, while beckoning him into a state of non-life. This is the view concretized in most Egyptian sculpture.”

Sures argued that last thesis as follows:

For every living entity, motion is a prerequisite for the achievement of the values that sustain its life. Man, who must initiate the process of thought required to identify and select his values, must also initiate the physical motion required to attain them. . . .

The state in which man, while still alive, can initiate neither thought nor movement, is a state of coma. A close approximation of this state is embodied in most Egyptian sculpture. The application of frontality produced an appearance of arrested movement. The sculptor then incorporated other features which, in conjunction with frontality, indicated that the movement of the body could hardly continue: he carved thick ankles and wrists, which suggest an arthritic condition; he minimized the musculature, virtually eliminating it in the arms, barely indicating it in the legs; he placed the arms down, along the sides of the body, often locking them to the torso with a web of stone; he terminated the motionless arms with clenched fists, or, in seated figures, placed the hands on the thighs, palms down. The material was carved in such a way that it retained the quality of stone, of inert matter. The face was usually carved to match the body: motionless, showing neither pleasure nor pain, neither perception nor introspection—a face virtually devoid of expression, reflecting no awareness, no consciousness. The total result projects a state which is neither life nor death, but a grotesque combination of the two: a state of living death.

No. The feelings or moods I listed earlier are the more immediate projections from Menkaure. Going beyond those meanings to more intellectual ones such as in this last block quote from Sures would be a formidable challenge, a rough travel. Fitting the Bellah version or strand of Egyptian philosophy/religion to my list would seem easier.

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Brant, I think that larger paragraph I last quoted from Sures is a serious effort to read a coherent view of human existence from specifics noted in this class of Egyptian sculpture. Some of the features she notes in these sculptures are ones that fit more easily with her understanding of the ancient Egyptian views of the cosmos and human existence in it than would fit with Bellah’s expert best understanding of those views. So I would say there are points in Sures’ discussion of the Egyptian sculpture valuable for someone, such as me, to consider in specifying how the sculpture might square on the one hand with the immediate feelings I found expressed in apprehension of the work independently of any historical context and, on the other hand, with Bellah’s picture of their society and central philosophical/religious views.

That such works are manmade is immediately evident to us. That they are representations of human form is also plain for us these four-and-a-half millennia later. That they were made to communicate and symbolize something, and do so in the context of their funereal setting, is a reasonable inference, a reasonable projection from our own psychology, craft, and ritual to theirs. That is a very general proposition to claim for these works, a very general psychology to impute to the people behind the making of these works.

To impute with reason more concerning the meaning of these works for people in that culture requires lines of information on their culture independent of these works themselves, which is limited in this case and which continues to come to light as research continues. Then it requires that specific features of the sculpture be argued to fit well with what we have learned of their social organization and culture, including religion. Then too, it requires that this more extended meaning of the sculpture that we propose for their makers and audience square with the more elementary and more immediate feelings and moods we find the sculpture to induce in ourselves, where such feelings and moods of and expression by actual people we know might reasonably be expected to be in common with ourselves and people that far back.

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Well, except as an affront to the Muslim religion, ancient Egypt came to a dead end regardless of its effect on Greek culture which is a Western heritage. All the staticness of the statuary can't deny its human orientation. Frankly, to call it representing "of living death" was stupid of Sures. More like part of the birthing process of sculpture that then evolved.

--Brant

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To show connection between a cultures dominant philosophy and its art whose subject is the human being, Sures has to summarize what that dominant philosophy was or is. I am not an expert on Egyptian civilization, but I seriously doubt that in all its eras, it saw man as moving haltingly through what he believed to be an incomprehensible universe.

The effrontery of the characterization still makes me feel like spitting in anger after all these years.

How dare Sures write such a statement in the magazine of a philosophy supposedly of reason and commitment to reality? Did she think that all of her readers would be so ignorant of ancient Egypt as to buy that description?

And what in Rand wanted to accept such distorting?

Compliments on your analysis, Stephen. I agree with Roger that your comments are "fine, nuanced, insightful."

Nonetheless, I think that Sures' analysis is outrageous.

Ellen

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The Objectivist seems to have been still playing catchup in its production schedule. The infamous May 1968 issue came out in October 1968*. There must have been a lot of strain on Rand to push all these issues out and lots of people had articles published, but the best editorial days had passed. Dealing with all the editorial work must have encouraged her to switch over to The Ayn Rand Letter, not just the money.

--Brant

The Feb. 1969 issue was late but the March 1969 was on time

*I received it Oct. 11

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I hear you, Ellen...

It may well be that Sures' article was excerpted or adapted from the guest lecture she gave in Branden's Basic Principles series, which means that it had the approval of both Rand and Branden. So, it's probably appropriate to shovel some of the criticism toward Nathaniel, too, for allowing it to be part of his series.

I think Nathaniel's book, The Vision of Ayn Rand, suffers from containing only literary aesthetics, and all of that being from his essay in Who Is Ayn Rand? There's nothing particular wrong with it; it's just way too narrow in focus. In that respect, Peikoff's chapter on aesthetics in OPAR is much better.

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Mary Ann Sures’ essay repeats a pattern of historical representation exhibited by Ayn Rand. Widely accepted facts concerning a people, with some selectivity, are set out and then given a certain analysis peculiar to the philosopher. This pattern was followed by modern philosophers, and other modern thinkers, before Rand.

Setting up classes of Throne, Altar, and Producer in all ancient societies in which a state had replaced tribes and chiefdoms would be pretty widely accepted as correct, I should think. But to transform Throne into Attila with his definitional shortsightedness is where Rand gets innovative and onto shaky ground. She tried to divest long-term thinking and rationality from Throne and to vest it only in Producer. I don’t think that squares with the historical record, and announcing that one is dealing with psychological archetypes as played out in social dynamics (shades of Republic) makes dubious up front one’s tracing and analysis of history by referring to the philosopher-specific concepts Attila, Witch Doctor, and Producer.

Rand represented the development of philosophy—philosophy largely independent of mystical dogma—in Greece as required for workers to know adequately what is human existence and mind, and what it is that they are doing in working, to know adequately so as to become what she means by Producer (compare and contrast with the last three pages of Ominous //’s). This is an underweighting of intelligent production before Greek philosophy, and before the Greeks’ ounces of political freedom. Sures’ representations of Egypt and Greece are conformed to the earlier Randian picture.

Sures’ essay appeared only a couple of months after Rand’s “Of Living Death.” I expect Rand would have been delighted with this related Sures concept of living death and Sures’ case for seeing that manner of existence concretized in the Egyptian art that Sures has now linked for us.

Four decades ago, as now, it was a commonplace that Egyptians of those centuries were evidently obsessed with death, and “living death” is only a stone’s throw away. But Sures has given her specific arguments in terms of the artwork for the verdict: idealization of the comatose and living death. I don’t think Sures’ summation of human nature and existence represented in these Egyptian artworks should be summarily dismissed, notwithstanding any of Rand’s special influence on how to view ancient cultures before Greece tilting Sures’ representation of Egyptian culture, which in turn could dispose how Sures interpreted these works. Sures’ case should be answered point by point, meaning each right point acceded and each error shown its place and remedy in correct view, and one would likely learn something of the culture and its art by that project. Under the picture of Egyptian religion and wider Egyptian culture drafted by Bellah, I would anticipate a reconstrual of what Sures saw as living death concretized in Menkaure as rather the Egyptian manner of coming to grips with human life and death by vision of life’s continuance beyond death integral with life’s continuance along the Nile and continuance of the social structure the visionaries would hold high as necessary for that life.

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Four decades ago, as now, it was a commonplace that Egyptians of those centuries were evidently obsessed with death, and living death is only a stones throw away. But Sures has given her specific arguments in terms of the artwork for the verdict: idealization of the comatose and living death.

The Egyptians thoroughly believed that there was a life after this life, so I think the better description is obsessed with life. They even mummified pets, preparing those to accompany them.

Under the picture of Egyptian religion and wider Egyptian culture drafted by Bellah, I would anticipate a reconstrual of what Sures saw as living death concretized in Menkaure as rather the Egyptian manner of coming to grips with human life and death by vision of lifes continuance beyond death integral with lifes continuance along the Nile and continuance of the social structure the visionaries would hold high as necessary for that life.

I don't know if Bellah specifically talks abut the king's next-life role as intercessor with Ra to be sure the weather conditions for growing crops would be good. At one point an Egyptian dynasty was deposed because of bad weather, which was taken to mean that the kings of that dynasty weren't doing their proper job in the next life.

Again referring to this comment:

To show connection between a cultures dominant philosophy and its art whose subject is the human being, Sures has to summarize what that dominant philosophy was or is. I am not an expert on Egyptian civilization, but I seriously doubt that in all its eras, it saw man as moving haltingly through what he believed to be an incomprehensible universe.

A big focus for Egyptians was gathering knowledge. Egyptian astronomy compiled much accurate observation (link to Google search). And in their drawings of plants and animals the Egyptians were meticulous trying to get details right (within the limits of their not knowing how to do perspective drawing). And what of such accomplishments as mummification? And...pyramid building? Would these things have been done by a people who thought of the universe as "incomprehensible" and man as "moving haltingly" through it?

Seems to me that even minimal knowledge of Egyptian civilization should have militated against such a description.

I hear you, Ellen...

It may well be that Sures' article was excerpted or adapted from the guest lecture she gave in Branden's Basic Principles series, which means that it had the approval of both Rand and Branden. So, it's probably appropriate to shovel some of the criticism toward Nathaniel, too, for allowing it to be part of his series.

That's interesting as to how far back the material for the article might have gone. I heard the Basic Principles course via tape in Chicago in late 1963. I don't recall there being a guest lecture by Sures, which doesn't mean there wasn't one that far back. My memory of the course is hazy.

What I've thought is that the article was hastily put together to help wth getting the publication caught up to date after the "May" 1968 issue (which, as Brant noted, was mailed in October '68).

Ellen

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I see Rand had a conception that she named living death in Galt’s speech:

. . . that state of living death which you now see within you and around you, the state of thing unfit for existence, no longer human and less than animal [cf. Aristotle], a thing that knows nothing but pain and drags itself through a span of years in the agony of unthinking self-destruction.

Rand’s use of the phrase in her 1968 essay “Of Living Death” is:

Deprived of ambition, yet sentenced to endless toil; deprived of rewards, yet ordered to produce; deprived of sexual enjoyment, yet commanded to procreate; deprived of the right to live, yet forbidden to die—condemned to this state of living death, . . . .

Those are two different, though related uses of the phrase. The condition Sures describes under the phrase is again different, though related to Rand’s earlier ones.

Ellen, Ra (or Re) was not yet on the scene at the time of Menkaure. We do not have Fourth Dynasty continuous texts revealing their religious belief and practice. From two centuries later, we have such continuous texts, from which back-extrapolation might be reasonable. Of the period of Menkaure, in the Fourth Dynasty, Bellah writes: “Many local gods are known, and the centrality of some of the gods, such as Horus and Seth, . . . is clear, but we know little of the context of myth in which these gods may have been embedded” (231).


In Egypt as in Mesopotamia many centuries pass from the “invention of writing until the appearance of continuous texts. (235)

Jan Assmann in a number of works has argued for a changing understanding of the king's divinity, from god to son of god, to chosen by god, to servant of god. Perhaps the key is a changing understanding of divinity itself. (231)

In Egypt as in other early archaic states, centralization of power under the leadership of the king was associated with remarkable cultural creativity in the development of writing, art, and architecture, but also with experiments in pushing the limits of human power. . . .

The most extreme example of pushing the limits of power must be the building of the great pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty . . . . Impressive tombs are a hallmark of Egyptian culture before and after the Old Kingdom, but nothing in Egyptian history or that of any other archaic society comes near to equaling the colossal undertaking in the construction of the great pyramids . . . at Giza in the middle of the third millennium BCE . . . .

. . .

It is ironic that, because we have no inscriptions associated with them, we know little of the exact meaning of the great pyramids. (234–35)

Rand remarks on the pyramids in “The Monument Builders” (1962). As reported earlier, Menkaure belongs to the Fourth Dynasty; it is statuary from one of the great pyramids. By way of potential back-extrapolation to that culture and interpretation of its artifacts, I should mention also from Bellah:

When we first find decorated tombs in the Fifth Dynasty and later, the scenes depicted are full of life, not only the daily life of humans, but the life of animals and plants as well. In later centuries the preoccupation with the netherworld grew and representations of daily life were no longer so evident. But the “afterlife” to the ancient Egyptians was not viewed as a radically other world, but as a continuation of this one. (233–34)

I expect Menkaure was an important piece Sures (and Rand) had in mind when she wrote of frontality, symmetry, arrested movement, stone webbing, clinched fists, projected immobility and inertness, faces expressing minimal consciousness, and projection of a state that is “neither life nor death.” An alternative reading of what is projected in Menkaure, taking into account each feature of the work Sures makes note of, as well as those I noted in #82, remains to be written (by someone, probably not me).

–S

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Stephen:

Enjoyed your analysis.

Have you ever read Allen Drury's novels about ancient Egypt?

51mK14bHZRL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

http://www.amazon.com/Return-Thebes-Allen-Drury/dp/0385041993/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1/185-7372344-5351435

A...

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How did Rand and Sures et al not even consider the possibility that their method of aesthetics as moral and psychological divination could just as easily be applied to Rand's art with the same condemnatory outcome? If they could anoint themselves capable of detecting an artwork's "true meaning" (as Rand's followers are fond of saying) and the artist's "actual sense of life," why couldn't everyone else do the same and declare that they've detected the evil of what Rand "really meant" regardless of "whether she knew it or not"?

If an artist's own statements about his intentions can be disregarded, along with the historical reality of his context, all in the name of claiming to know him through his art better than he knows himself, on what rational grounds could Rand possibly be exempt from her own petard? If the greatest creators throughout history were the self-unaware zombies that the Objectivist Esthetics implies that they must have been (so self-unaware that someone with Sures' intellectual abilities could know them better than they knew themselves), what does that say about the nature of mankind, and therefore about Rand? Doesn't it suggest that if the most brilliant people in history, who were most certain and confident about what they believed, were mistaken about themselves and what they thought that they believed -- that they actually believed the opposite -- that Rand also probably believed the opposite of what she explicitly stated?

After all, it's pretty easy to find flaws in Rand's art which could lead to quite different interpretations than what she would have wanted. It's not difficult to selectively focus on certain dark elements in her art and arbitrarily give them more weight, just as Rand and Sures have done with others' art.

Heh. I'm often very amused by Objectivists today misinterpreting the ideas of great thinkers of the past while unknowingly practicing the ideas that they're condemning. For example, their unknowingly admitting to experiencing Kantian Sublimity in something while trying to condemn Kantian Sublimity. But I think the most amusing thing of all is that the Objectivist method of aesthetic hermeneutics, as practiced by Rand and Sures, not to mention Hicks, Newberry, Pigero, Bissell, Hudgins, etc., is identical to certain brands of Postmodernism!!! It's a particularly vicious form of deconstruction which denies authorial intent and selectively reads what it wants to into the text or artifact.

J

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How did Rand and Sures et al not even consider the possibility that their method of aesthetics as moral and psychological divination could just as easily be applied to Rand's art with the same condemnatory outcome?

A question, less specific, that a young teenage man clearly asked while looking at this wondrously intelligent woman who presented a world view that made sense to him.

My lesson, looking back, was, and is, hers,...check your premises.

Her fundamental lesson for me, was the downfall of her argument in the arts.

It was actually never a contest. Had this been my chosen profession, I would probably have tormented myself until I resolved that tension.

Thankfully, I accepted her original precept and checked my premises.

A...

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How did Rand and Sures et al not even consider the possibility that their method of aesthetics as moral and psychological divination could just as easily be applied to Rand's art with the same condemnatory outcome? If they could anoint themselves capable of detecting an artwork's "true meaning" (as Rand's followers are fond of saying) and the artist's "actual sense of life," why couldn't everyone else do the same and declare that they've detected the evil of what Rand "really meant" regardless of "whether she knew it or not"?

When you're on top of the intellectual heap you stay dry because the waters of criticism don't flow back uphill.

--Brant

these people didn't operate in the Internet age

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Stephen:

Enjoyed your analysis.

Have you ever read Allen Drury's novels about ancient Egypt?

A...

No. I didn't have time to read much fiction in my life. These look fun.

Thanks. –S

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Christmas

Related to some of Jonathan’s concerns and criticisms of Objectivist views touched on in #94, I should like to mention a delicious book relating modern philosophy, along with existential developments in the early twentieth century, to (not sculpture, but) some paintings. That book is Picasso and Truth – From Cubism to Guernica by T. J. Clark (Princeton 2013).

From the jacket:

Was Picasso the artist of the twentieth century? In Picasso and Truth, T. J. Clark uses his inimitable skills as art historian and writer to answer this question and reshape our understanding of Picasso’s achievement. Supported by more than 200 images, Clark’s new approach to the central figure of modern art focuses on Picasso after the First World War: his galumphing nudes of the early 1920’s, the incandescent Guitar and Mandolin on a Table from 1924, Three Dancers done a year later, the hair-raising Painter and Model from 1927, the monsters and voracious bathers that follow, and finally—summing up but also saying farewell to the age of Cubism—the great mural Guernica.

. . . Picasso and Truth argues that the way to take Picasso’s true measure as an artist is to leave behind biography—the stale stories of lovers and hangers-on and suntans at the beach that presently constitute the “Picasso literature”—and try to follow the steps of his pictorial argument. As always with Clark, specific works of art hold center stage. But finding words for them involves thinking constantly about modern culture in general. Here the book takes Nietzsche as guide.

Is Picasso the artist Nietzsche was hoping for—the one come to cure us of our commitment to Truth? Certainly, as the dark central years of the twentieth century encroached, Picasso began to lose confidence in Cubism’s comprehensiveness and optimism. Picasso and Truth charts this shift in vivid detail, making it possible for us to see Picasso turn away from eyesight, felt proximity, and the ground of shared experience—the warmth and safety that Clark calls “room-space”—to stake everything on a glittering, baffling, unbelievable here and now. And why? Because the most modernity can hope for from art, Picasso’s new paintings seem to say, is a picture of the strange damaged world we have made for ourselves. In all its beauty and monstrosity.

The plates are a feast.

From the text:

Is not Picasso Nietzsche’s painter? Is not his the most unmoral picture of existence ever pursued through a life? I think so. Perhaps that is why our culture fights so hard to trivialize—to make biographical—what he [Picasso] shows us.

. . .

We know that Picasso, especially early on in Barcelona, existed in circles for whom Nietzsche was the new Dante, his aphorisms pointing the way through hell. But Nietzsche does not figure [in this work] . . . as an influence on Picasso—he may or may not have been—but as a way of making sense of what the painter did. . . . It is not likely or necessary for the one term to have known the other at all directly: “it is not very probable,” as Panofsky puts it dryly, “that the builders of Gothic structures read . . . Thomas Aquinas in the original.” What matters is whether we find that the verbal . . . statement gives us a means of thinking about a visual idiom that before had stayed out of focus. (53–54)

What kind of optics is this?

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What kind of optics is this?

It's quite Objectivish: It offers an interesting perspective based on selective generalizations, but also demands (though much more gently than Objectivists do) that readers set aside whatever Clark wishes to be set aside. Clark is very polite about it, but he appears to want readers to replace their experiences and understanding of art and artists with his own. He seems to have the very common attitude of wanting to "reshape" others' views so that those others will be able to join him in taking Picasso's "true measure," as opposed to the false measure that they've apparently been taking in his absence. In other words, he seems to believe that there is one right perspective, and that he is revealing it, rather than that the nature of art involves multiple possible perspectives, none of which are necessarily more "right" or "true" than others.

But, at least Clark doesn't forbid all "outside considerations" when contemplating art and judging its creators. He considers the artist's context rather than arbitrarily imposing an unrealistic expectation of contextless universality (the irrational expectation that all art should be self-contained and self-evident across all cultures and times).

J

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  • 4 weeks later...

Add to Clark's application of Nietzsche to Picasso (cubism to Guernica)

the following two works applying specific philosopher to specific paintings:

Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth Vico and Neapolitan Painting

Malcolm Bull (Princeton 2013)

After the Beautiful Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism

Robert B. Pippin (Chicago 2014)

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