Schopenhauer does have a reputation for being pessimistic. But he really wasn’t. Because he also believed that there’s a way to leap off the wheel of desire.
That way is the contemplation — the contemplation — of sublime art.
Sublime art is the door to a perspective on reality that transcends Will.
It frees us from the agony of contingency and causality, and give us a brief, precious glimpse of what we really are, one thing, already complete, and perfectly ambiguous.
In this lens, art isn't so much a craft that elicits feeling, but the opus of a master that expands our consciousness - perception, empathy, taste, intellect, and the recursive capacity to create - through our appreciation of it. It doesn't remove us from reality, it strengthens our connection to it.
My favorite painting is Matisse's The Red Studio[0]. I could look at it all day. If you gave me a poo bucket and delivered me a burrito every couple of hours, I could probably sit there for months, just absorbing it, contemplating the nature of creativity and the satisfaction of craftsmanship and never have any desire to create or craft anything myself. Matisse has erased my need to do these things by providing me with contemplation that ends my need for willful activity.
Literature is just as powerful. John Gardener describes fiction as building a dream world inside the head of the reader[1]. Fiction possesses the consciousness of the reader, and great literature never lets go. After you read a truly captivating piece of fiction, it'll flicker through your mind for the rest of your life, shaping your experiences forever. When I read Shakespeare or Bronte or Orwell, I'm not just enjoying a narrative, I'm calibrating the lens through which I experience life.
And video games are absolutely capable of shaping the human experience this way, but it's not in the quality of graphics or the power of the music or the story or voice acting. It's not even in the goal of the game. It's in the surrendering of your will to the game designer. Like the author or painter or director, it's about letting the artist take you by the hand and expand your consciousness so that your sense of movement, of peril, of success and of failure are redefined (or maybe "undefined?")
It might take me a lifetime to argue that any particular game has achieved this at the level required in this context to be defined at art. But one thing I am certain of: we've had the requisite technology to create these experiences in video games since Spacewar[1]
Schopenhauer does have a reputation for being pessimistic. But he really wasn’t. Because he also believed that there’s a way to leap off the wheel of desire.
That way is the contemplation — the contemplation — of sublime art.
Sublime art is the door to a perspective on reality that transcends Will.
It frees us from the agony of contingency and causality, and give us a brief, precious glimpse of what we really are, one thing, already complete, and perfectly ambiguous.
In this lens, art isn't so much a craft that elicits feeling, but the opus of a master that expands our consciousness - perception, empathy, taste, intellect, and the recursive capacity to create - through our appreciation of it. It doesn't remove us from reality, it strengthens our connection to it.
My favorite painting is Matisse's The Red Studio[0]. I could look at it all day. If you gave me a poo bucket and delivered me a burrito every couple of hours, I could probably sit there for months, just absorbing it, contemplating the nature of creativity and the satisfaction of craftsmanship and never have any desire to create or craft anything myself. Matisse has erased my need to do these things by providing me with contemplation that ends my need for willful activity.
Literature is just as powerful. John Gardener describes fiction as building a dream world inside the head of the reader[1]. Fiction possesses the consciousness of the reader, and great literature never lets go. After you read a truly captivating piece of fiction, it'll flicker through your mind for the rest of your life, shaping your experiences forever. When I read Shakespeare or Bronte or Orwell, I'm not just enjoying a narrative, I'm calibrating the lens through which I experience life.
And video games are absolutely capable of shaping the human experience this way, but it's not in the quality of graphics or the power of the music or the story or voice acting. It's not even in the goal of the game. It's in the surrendering of your will to the game designer. Like the author or painter or director, it's about letting the artist take you by the hand and expand your consciousness so that your sense of movement, of peril, of success and of failure are redefined (or maybe "undefined?")
It might take me a lifetime to argue that any particular game has achieved this at the level required in this context to be defined at art. But one thing I am certain of: we've had the requisite technology to create these experiences in video games since Spacewar[1]
[0]https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78389 [1]http://amzn.to/2n7CJ1U [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacewar!