Aesthetics and Associated Mental Humbug

Recently I have been quite busy with the move, new job, and strangely uncharacteristic attempts to become slightly more organized. Because of this, I have tried to lay off much of my self-applied pressure to continue regular posting. However, each night as I lay down to sleep, certain thoughts persist in preventing me from doing so, no matter how tired I may be. As these thoughts, though they are in no way formalized, pertain to the general strain of thought displayed in my postings (sans the Olympics babble), I will do my best to hash them out in a semi-understandable format.

Point one of my basic ponderings is the idea of instability in human nature. Perhaps it is an effect of my naiveté, but I have rarely thought of human nature as being transient at best. Yet Gregory of Nyssa writes, “Existence itself originates in change” and, “The created nature cannot exist without change.” This, of course, is because “nothing comes from nothing” and things came to be as a result of change (a point upon which all people agree, whether ex nihilo or from preexisting matter, all things begin as change, hence “begin”, not just “be”). And, according to Newtonian Laws (Chase correct me if I’m wrong), things in motion tend to stay in motion (though these laws do not necessarily apply to metaphysics, accept the allegory). Thus, to approach a study of human nature, or the nature of anything created or deriving from a created thing, one must approach it with the concept of constant motion. Though I already had thought that language was constantly changing (though not evolving), my thoughts have been much involved with how much different things (language in particular) change in reaction to things or in action towards them, or a combination, or whatever (very Hegelian I know).

As you can tell, my thoughts are very scattered and incomplete, but my next point is along the same lines: all of my “Signs and Metaculture” series was supposed to pertain to the representation of things (examining words like Metaphor, Mimesis, Ekphrasis, maybe Reification, etc.) yet I have also recently discovered Theodor Adorno’s “Aesthetic Theory” and can’t help but look for everything to have an inherent contradiction, vis-à-vis, “Art can only be understood by its laws of movement, not according to any invariants. It is defined by its relation to what it is not.” Of course, I know next to nothing about aesthetic theory (having read little of Kant, less of Hegel, and maybe 30 pages of Nietzsche, without tapping much into the 20th century at all), but Adorno’s desire to describe the relation of Art to society, determining in the process that Art is neither the sublimation of society alone nor the mere representation of it, convinces me that Language and signs, in their act of representation, may perhaps participate in the same particular fluidity to which human nature is subject. Though none of this plays out empirically, I am trying to process the relation between the necessarily human act of “making” that I promised to discuss, and the reflection of the transient nature of the “maker”.

Lastly, I put forth a call to anyone who can suggest further reading on “Ekphrasis”, as I can find very little on it and don’t have access to university thinkers right now.

Until I can figure out a regular schedule, I remain yours, my 2 ½ faithful readers!