Some articles say that philosophy is not a religion, but it can give you faith; Philosophy is not art, but it can give people aesthetic feeling; Philosophy is not a science, but also can enlighten people with truth; Philosophy is not morality, but it can also persuade people to be good. Philosophy is like sunshine shining on the earth. It illuminates the world of human life and gives human life a meaningful "light". I appreciate this poetic interpretation of philosophical connotation.
In a word, philosophy is not a ready-made intellectual conclusion. The wisdom of philosophy is not only a way and method to "teach people to think", but also to make people realize the "essence of thinking" and master the logic of ideological movement, so as to gain real understanding. To truly master philosophical wisdom, we not only need to think deeply and distinguish rationality, but also need to experience real emotions and rich and profound experiences, just like the same proverb has a very different meaning between old people and children.
Russell said that to understand an era or a nation, we must first understand his philosophy. This is very profound. Behind every great civilization is a great philosophy. Philosophy is the core of all cultures, the embodiment of the vitality of the national spirit, the symbol of the maturity of civilization, and the reflection of civilized human beings on their own destiny. A nation without philosophy is doomed to have no great future.
So, what is art? Art is a special way of human use. She grasps and reflects the world with emotion and imagination, and expresses her views on the world, herself and the relationship between them. She reproduces reality, expresses emotions and ideals through aesthetic creation activities, and realizes the mutual objectification of aesthetic subject and object in imagination. Generally speaking, art is a special product of people's comprehensive psychological activities of knowledge, emotion, ideals and ideas, and it is an image expression of people's real life and spiritual world.
Because some human experiences and emotions are difficult to express in ordinary oral language, in order to express these deepest feelings and thoughts, people use a more sensitive and delicate "language", which is called art. This kind of language can be a kind of writing, a kind of music, a picture, a kind of body movement, an object which is processed by people and endowed with rich connotations, and it may have many forms. Any poetry creation that expresses people's emotions and imagination to the extreme is endowed with artistic talent.
Art belongs to the category of entertainment and game culture, and it is a cultural phenomenon created by people in order to satisfy their subjective defects in emotional organs and comfort their behavior. The essential feature of this cultural phenomenon is to create virtual human real life with various "languages", and art is a refined cultural form for people to exchange feelings and thoughts. Because people's emotional and ideological exchanges are based on language, and the foundation of art is human language. In people's artistic practice, the occurrence of art always depends entirely on people's language. What kind of language form human beings have will produce what kind of art form. There are many forms of human language, such as oral language, written language, painting language, body language, music language, modern film and television language and so on. The occurrence of art will appear in the form of stories, novels, poems, paintings, dances, music, movies and TV plays. If there is no language, there is no foundation for the formation of art; If people don't understand each other's language, or don't use the same language at the same level, artistic communication and exchange can't be realized.
Art is different from science, it reflects the regularity of the objective world with the help of human reason. Art reflects the world with the help of human sensibility, including the objective world and the subjective world. Science is more about "discovery" and art is more about "creation". Art is a perceptual knowledge different from human reason and belief, and it is a reflection of human inner true feelings and imagination. Art uses language to create illusory events and let others feel the occurrence of illusory events through the understanding of language. In the process of feeling this situation, people's corresponding subjective shortcomings will be properly comforted, and people's emotional organs will have a positive and fierce behavioral response.
Because the comfort of people's subjective regret and the behavioral response of emotional organs are entirely based on people's subjective needs for some objective things in social life, the virtual events created by art must be based on people's subjective needs in social life; The virtual reality constructed by art can have a great influence on the formation and change of people's ideology. For people's spiritual world, art is God's shepherd's whip, which can lead people's souls to heaven or drive them into hell. Of course, art, as an aesthetic object, means that people pay attention to and appreciate it because of its intrinsic value. It is this characteristic that makes art a precious existence beyond secular life.
Philosophy is man's rational thinking. She thinks about all the questions that people are interested in, and it is a no-man's land between theology and science. Art is people's intuitive feeling of the world. With the development of society, art history has undergone tremendous changes. Under the influence of external factors, it has been unfolded again and again, writing people's emotions. Obviously, philosophy and art belong to two different fields, and they are obviously different in content and form.
However, the brilliance of art is rooted in the development and evolution of human thinking, and it develops with the development of human cognitive ability, scope and depth. Art is a creative behavior of human beings. The history of this creative behavior shows that since human beings can think freely, their creative behavior depends on their various understandings of the world and life in many important aspects. If we want to understand art as the creative behavior of human beings, we must understand philosophy as the basis of its thinking. If an art form wants to be recognized in a specific social scope, it can only try to adapt to the aesthetic taste of the whole society. It is often the philosophical consciousness of the whole society that determines the aesthetic taste. Philosophy and art complement each other and promote each other. The change of the times and the progress of history lead to the change of philosophy, which in turn affects art.
Specifically, all human activities are activities of life. The process of life activities includes the process of thought and the process of action as its inevitable extension. In philosophy, people's thoughts are carried out through written language, which is objectified and fixed by its structure (concept and semantics). The difference between art and philosophy is obviously much smaller than that between art and science. This difference is not that philosophy is abstract thinking and art is thinking in images, but that philosophy is mediated by written language, and art is not entirely like this. The statement of philosophy is nothing more than a series of conversion processes of written language symbols, and the fuzziness of the language used means the fuzziness and looseness of reasoning. Philosophy tries to conceptualize and clarify emotion through the intermediary of written language, so emotion becomes thought in philosophy, and perceptual power solidifies into rational structure in philosophy, while art does not have to rely on the intermediary of written language.
Because philosophy is the fundamental thinking foundation of art, and art has broader means and ways of expression than philosophy, philosophical consciousness determines the development direction and aesthetic taste of art, and artistic form in turn affects the development of philosophy.
Judging from the actual course of China's artistic development, the social culture and education in ancient China were based on poetry, calligraphy, ceremony and music. Confucius and Mencius' philosophy of "making music through ceremony based on poetry" deeply influenced art. Confucius and Mencius' philosophy was a rational and precocious agricultural culture based on ethics, and its basic spirit was self-improvement morality. On this basis, a classical artistic and cultural model with tenderness, honesty, harmony and perfection as its aesthetic ideal has been formed. In ancient China, people's sigh and understanding of cosmic life were first expressed through primitive artistic activities such as singing, dancing and offering sacrifices. Most ancient philosophers in China had strong characteristics of poets and artists, while the spirituality of China poets always contained a long metaphysical philosophical feeling. In ancient China, philosophy was poetic and art was rational. We read Confucius' Analects of Confucius and Laozi's Tao Te Ching, and were deeply amazed at the artistic beauty of their words. We appreciate Wang Xizhi's Preface to the Lanting Pavilion and more than a thousand Buddha statues in Yungang Grottoes, and are shocked by their philosophical realm. The ancient culture of China, from the lowest material objects, through the life of rites and music, to the realm of heaven and earth, is a kind of great harmony and great rhythm, full of harmony and harmony. Classical harmonious beauty, as the ideal of China's ancient art, requires that various elements that constitute art, such as reproduction and expression, subjectivity and objectivity, ideal and reality, emotion and reason, time and space, be handled and organized into a balanced, harmonious, stable and orderly unity. This artistic pursuit has also become a solid cornerstone and ideal realm of Confucius and Mencius' philosophy and Zhuangzi's philosophy.
The development of art has greatly promoted the progress of human civilization, and human reasoning and thinking about their own living environment are also reflected in artistic creation. It is precisely because of the extensiveness of artistic forms and the dominance of philosophical spirit that art and philosophy blend with each other, nourishing and growing from their roots to each other's details. In a sense, philosophical world outlook and methodology are the forerunner of artistic connotation, and art also contains rational thinking, which is an organic and dynamic dialectical unity.
In the whole human history, the most amazing thing is the sudden emergence of Greek civilization. Greek civilization occupies a very important position in ancient philosophy, and many philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato have great influence on the development of later philosophy. The most important things in their philosophy are his utopian thought, idealism, proof of the immortality of the soul and the theory of the origin of the universe, which embodies an obvious perfectionism. During this period, Greek art also tended to be perfectionist. From the initial simple, crude and inaccurate sculpture to the increasingly exquisite architectural art, the peak of classical architecture marked by the Parthenon appeared. What she is trying to express is a perfect sense of reality.
In medieval Europe, Catholic philosophy supported European thought. Catholic philosophy is essentially a philosophy of social organization and a comprehensive system of ideas. Under the guidance and influence of this ideological system, the works of art in this period also have distinct political or religious colors. Byzantine art has been praising God and the emperor since the third century. Because she is in the unity and opposition between the church and the imperial power, her style tends to be serious and symbolic. Later Roman art developed after Christianity gained a new balance. She is a unified imperial art, with deep religious color, but various forms of expression.
With the development of modern European society, the prestige of the church declined, the prestige of science gradually increased, and the state increasingly replaced the church as the dominant force of culture. At the same time, individualism philosophy has been fully developed and promoted the realization of the Renaissance. Once the spiritual shackles were liberated, people showed amazing talent in art, and various artistic creations left a lot of artistic treasures to future generations, and some even reached the peak that future generations could not surpass. The free development of art and the outstanding achievements of science have further developed the concept of humanistic philosophy to a new peak.
The above discussion shows that philosophy and art are not two isolated tributaries in the long history. They blend with each other and reflect each other, reflecting the long course of human thinking development. From ancient times to modern times, philosophy and art are constantly exploring and updating. Facing the complicated world, they interpret their understanding of the world from different angles, and they have the inevitable main line of * * *. Broadly speaking, they are different expressions of the same theme. They are two different spaces and two different rivers, but they meet and blend, holding hands with each other and rushing forward, doggedly pursuing their dreams.
From the perspective of human development, the art of any nation, era and society is bound to be related to the philosophy of this nation, era and society. Philosophy is the self-consciousness of the nation, the times and the society, and great works of art always show profound philosophical concepts. She is not only the product of national character, zeitgeist and social ideological trend, but also actively participates in the construction of national character, zeitgeist and social ideal, and is the representative of her nation, era and society. If we want to sum up the dialectical relationship between philosophy and art, I appreciate the following poetic exposition:
Philosophy has become thinking, suffering thinking; Art comes from beauty, from the beauty of singing.
Philosophy perceives the objective world with subjective consciousness, and expresses subjective feelings outside art.
The magic of philosophy makes too many people stay away from it, and those who have tasted it are obsessed with it, or look back at society and life, or alienate the world and reality; The charm of art lies in the inner harmony between the creator and the appreciator, thus producing a natural aesthetic taste.
Philosophy is a comprehensive exploration of all time and space trajectories, and art is a static condensation of local dynamics. Everyone tries to intercept the limited bright spot from infinity and pray for eternity.
Philosophy will be very attractive if it is displayed by artistic means. Art contains strong philosophical reflection, which will add gorgeous and long luster.
Philosophy feels the vitality of life from the trajectory of inanimate movement, and appreciates the illusion of inanimate life from the ups and downs of life, so as to deeply explore the real existence of man and nature, man and society, and man and man; Art, on the other hand, strives to pursue the ultimate meaning of life, often with a profound imprint of non-life.
Philosophy is the knowledge of thinking, focusing on the subjective reflection of the objective world; Art is a technical activity to create beauty, focusing on the objective expression of subjective feelings.
Philosophy is not only a proud prince in the palace, but also an ascetic who trudges on the journey; Art is both a melancholy princess and a happy and cheerful village girl.
The trouble of philosophy sometimes lies in that when people are placed in nature as an ordinary existence, they will feel deep contempt and guilt for many behaviors, thus mourning their bodies; The distress of art sometimes lies in separating man from nature, which will play too many discordant notes and hurt one's soul.
Philosophy studies the dominance and laws of man and nature, while art explores the separation and combination of man and nature.
Philosophy is firm, and art is the elegance of the body.
Philosophy abandons the epiphany of perceptual mutation, but what can achieve leap and promotion is as the generator of inspiration spark; Art despises the tools used by craftsmen, and mastering and using various tools is the best result.
Philosophy is not born of reason and tenacity, and the passion of art is not indulgence and venting. They only pursue beauty, indulge in thinking and endure loneliness.
When there are only "classics" left in philosophy, there is no enjoyment of thinking, introspection and conscious soaring; When artistic humiliation became a vassal of the powerful, it suddenly lost its easygoing color and affinity and loveliness.
The foundation of philosophy is the jumping and linking of real perceptual thinking, and the root of art is the exertion and application of absolute rational thinking.
Philosophy is the essence of purgatory, art is the myth of heaven, and economic politics is the secular existence. Philosophy holds up economy and politics, while art pulls them, one is quiet introspection, and the other is beautiful yearning. Economy and politics, supported entities, accepted the warning of philosophy, accepted the baptism of art, and moved forward radiant. On the contrary, if politics or economy belittles, belittles or even hurts and abandons philosophy and art, it will inevitably lead to blindness, loss, disorder and even disaster.
The "Cultural Revolution" that broke out in China exactly 40 years ago is an extreme example of the philosophy and art of political slavery. It not only distorts, desecrates and destroys philosophy, stifles, destroys and tramples on art with political rudeness, insolence and arrogance, but also degenerates politics into cruel farce and despicable conspiracy, and staged scenes of "zhang xun restoration" of authoritarian politics under colorful smoke screens. What is even more worrying is that this restored extreme politics has not been completely eradicated until today, and it still exists to some extent.
In addition, the relationship between politics, economy and philosophy and art is the same. In view of the painful lessons of history, we are now "centered on economic construction", and we must never let the economy be arrogant, contemptuous or even ravage philosophy and art, and let Kong Fangxiong override philosophy and art. If philosophy and art become handmaids that Marshal Zhao Gong can send at will and prostitutes who can have sex at will, the consequences will be equally terrible.