Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue

Socrates and Dionysus engages and seeks to redraw the bounds among philosophy and poetry, technological know-how and paintings. Friedrich Nietzsche argues in his paintings The start of Tragedy that technological know-how conquers paintings, particularly the tragic paintings of the Dionysian poet of historic Greece. attractive to the normal, primeval self that's suppressed yet now not extinguished through the information of tradition, Dionysian tragedy establishes touch with bodies and their inner most longings. technology and philosophy, linked to the ‘Socratism’ of the theoretical guy, have fun the human brain particularly and the brain or rationality of the universe extra generally.

According to Nietzsche, it really is Euripides who destroys the Dionysian completely. Euripides celebrated the unadorned person simply because in basic terms the person, separated from their god, is intelligible or available to human cause; he insisted that artwork be comprehended through brain or that it's rationally understood. Euripides used to be possessed of this kind of rationalizing force, Nietzsche claims, simply because his basic viewers used to be Socrates. it really is Socrates, hence, who's the real opponent of Dionysus. Following Nietzsche’s bifurcation among philosophy and paintings, postmodern political thinker Richard Rorty rejects the tendency of philosophy to posit absolute, common truths and turns to the idea that of ‘redescription’ which he affiliates with the ‘wisdom of the novel’. the radical is sensible since it posits the relative truths and views of a number of the members, societies and cultures that it represents. As an paintings shape, it may well for that reason contain each attainable point of view of each specific scenario, occasion or person.

New interdisciplinary fields in politics, literature and movie are giving upward push to an increasing group of students who disagree with the techniques taken by way of Nietzsche and Rorty. those students are laying off mild at the ways that philosophy and artwork are pals instead of enemies. They search to bridge the theoretical and moral gaps among the realm of ‘fiction’ and the realm of ‘fact’, of artwork and technology. There seems to be a primary rigidity among literary-artistic and medical initiatives. while the artist seeks to recreate human event, thereby evoking simple moral matters, the scientist it appears seeks ethically-neutral, evidence-based evidence because the parts of our wisdom of truth. Chapters during this quantity, notwithstanding, will re-evaluate how artists, philosophers and film-makers have addressed and tried to reconcile the artist’s language of normativity and the scientist’s language of facticity.