Regarding Philosophy and Abstract Art

I have been reading a history of the enlightenment and discovered several ideas presented differently than I had previously regarded them. The author went over the Romantic Movement and considered how that developed in opposition to reason. With much of the secularism and transition away from a more Platonic realist regime because of science and political advances that beset the continent of Europe in the 18th century it was rather natural that Rousseau, Coleridge and Kant arose as writers with opinions not at all reliant upon authority. The author of the book I read found Kant's thought about mind and morals to be apposite to the secularized approach of Rousseau.

It is the secularized or even existential paradigm in which Kant develops his Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Practical Reason that is rather remarkable. The categorical imperative as a naturally inductable universal moral law does not of course rely upon hierarchical, revealed or political authority. Rousseau believed one should follow one's heart as a moral footing. That approach led to troubles in later politics, yet so does the alternative of detached intellectualism with particular object oriented goals.

Kant and the Romantics found morality and reason to be a little different than we might today. Yet I think that today perhaps we moderns do not reason as deeply as either Rousseau or Kant in the nature of mind, or of how emotion comprises an element of reason and morality.

It was in the author's description of Kant's term 'noumenon' that I found that my previous notion of the meaning of the term simply incorrect. I wonder if the author's term of use paradigm may have been incorrect rather than mine, yet I think not, for it does serve a salient philosophical purpose especially as regards art.

The author did in particular describes a critical transitional phase in the historical development of modern art that formed during the evolution from naive realism and philosophical realism to that of abstract thought about the natural world. The author (I can't recall his name presently or the actual title of the book--he was a Cambridge scholar) pointed out Picasso's approach to painting the natural world as an example of how modern artist might view the relationship between thought and perception... That is where I should return to Kant's concept of the nomumenal.

In the philosophical field of epistemology the Kantian categories of perception are fundamental for a significant portion of philosophical thought then and subsequently. From Schopenhaur's neo-Kantian pessimism to Empiricism and even perhaps Strawson and Quine there has been a search for the classification of what is perceived, what is perceived phenomenally, and what is subjectively added to percepts with thought or reason. The author regarded Kant's term noumenon as applying to self-awareness and sentience perceptions of the sensations (of the natural world). The things perceived are phenomenal, while the phenomenology of mind (no relationship to Hegel here) is noumenal.

I had made the error for some time of believing that the noumenal applied to those things that are things-in-themselves or things-for-themselves...The unknown and unknowable deeper realities beyond the phenomenality of things perceived. I regarded the noumenal as 'exterior' things belonging to reality of which we saw or heard a superficial surface appearance as phenomenality. The author on the other hand, regarded the noumenal as an interior experience of mind. Because mind can think, and does, the noumenal is a different perception than the plainly phenomenal and more--the noumenal is capable of a tremendous range of analytical thought. Some of that analytical thought may be found inn abstract art that implicitly recognizes the profound differences between naive phenomenalist percepts and the interior, noumenal phenomenology of mind.

Without self-awareness, the phenomenal realm is not even recognized. Slave devices such as cameras have no cognizance of the find snapshots they capture to provide for the use of sentient awareness. Art can have tremendous value to philosophers as a means of sketching or surveying interior and exterior relations of ontology. Art may provide methods of expressing phenomenalities of mind and experience in-itself. Art may be a tool for exploring that noumenal fact of conscious experience that shapes and conforms, liberates and sets aside, what can be known of space-time and being.

God has created the noumenon and the phenomenon, I have faith to believe. Nature in a sense is itself a great work of philosophical art, though of tremendous meaning as a challenge for the soul.