Where does art come from?

[Alf]

Bob, I know you were born and grown up in England and lived in England until your military service. But you have been living in Germany for some time. Are you still thinking in English or already in German?

[Bob]

Hi Alf,
I do a bit of both, and I start writing in German sometimes but mostly in English. I translate everything into the respective “other” language, especially words that I initially can’t translate despite knowing their meaning. That is because I was always a communicator, and made a career in Germany, but took a lot of inspiration from Anglo-American sources.

Are you multilingual yourself?

[Bob]

@Alf

@ Bob (ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.p … 8#p2925902).

It’s interesting how you keep skirting around my statements. In other words, you haven’t put forward a single argument against mine. And if you want to criticise my statements, then you have to refer to their content. But you have not done that once. No wonder, then, that you are constantly talking past me or my text, constantly circling around my statements. For example, you always refer to linguistic language when you use the word “language”, although I have now said more than twenty times that linguistic language is only a sub-area of language, that it only arises evolutionarily/historically after semiotic language and that it only arises in humans, but that human babies, for example, do not yet understand it, while older children already understand it and can use it soon afterwards. But what was before that? Language too! And that was semiotic language. Babies react to touch, to objects, to other people, etc. (= all signs, i.e. language). (= all signs, i.e. language, semiotic language!). Babies are still at home in semiotic language, as are animals (in some respects plants too, with the difference that plants can only do this with the help of chemistry). By the way, your example with the childbabi is not quite correct if you want to say that the child blushed out of shame, because you say that the child is not able to use “language” (linguistic language you should have said here).

That is probably because I read how language comes from primordial music, which evolved from the spontaneous rhythm of nature and developed more varied sounds. Flutes have been dated as 40,000 years old, suggesting that music was getting sophisticated even then. Learning to control the breath and recognizing the fundamental frequency or pitch must have come after learning to use the breath to form sounds which eventually became words. So, the theory that language evolved as songs borrowed their rhythm from nature supports the idea that early songs were initially an immediate participation in nature, echoing or mimicking its many sounds, and finally giving them a semantic symbol. Probably the sound an animal made was the initial “name” given to that animal, and so on, failing that, Owen Barfield wrote, “When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.”

Ancient language symbolised many experiential correlations, the prime example being the word pneuma for wind, breath, and spirit. This indicates an immersive experience, with the spirit always present in the breath and the wind. It seems that Owen Barfield discovered this in ancient languages and said, “Before the scientific revolution, [man] did not feel himself isolated by his skin from the world outside to quite the same extent that we do. He was integrated, or mortised into it, each different part of him being united to a different part of it by some invisible thread. In his relation to his environment, the man of the Middle Ages was rather less like an island, rather more like an embryo.”

I also said,

I have no issue with what you wrote about language, but we are talking about art and my own artistic endeavours were almost always a representation of something that presented itself. It is mimicry, and language has no place until perhaps when I am finished with a drawing or a painting. It is a reaction to awe, the observance of a pattern, the fascination of a curve, the lure of light on an object, the smoothness of a face, and the symmetry of a body. I could accept that with time, the positioning of figures or features on a canvas could involve geometrical consideration, but initially, the object or subject of my representation is speechless.

I once drew a simple picture with a pencil, fascinated by the lines, and someone picked it up and spoke about its meaning. I was fascinated by what this person saw in what I had seen as pure lines on a piece of paper and told him that I hadn’t thought of the things he had mentioned. He told me that it wasn’t about me, but about him. This suggests that a picture’s implied or explicit significance may have less to do with the artist’s intention and more with our search for meaning.

That could show you that I am, in fact, on a different page to you.

@Alf

This - my - thread is about art, yes, but primarily about where art comes from, and I already answered the question on the first page, in the dialogue with Kriswest (see page 1): art comes from language.

You must try to put yourself in the position of animals or human babies in order to realise that, although they have not yet mastered linguistic language, they too interpret signs (language), in their case semiotic signs (language), i.e. recognise them, and in order to do this correctly (for the animals their lives depend on it!), they must already have learned the meanings.

So when you say you have recognised meanings without signs, you are saying something that is false. You cannot know or recognise meanings if you have not first become familiar with or learnt to recognise the signs (language) that go with them. Observe this for yourself!

For me, you are going off on a tangent, and it may all be correct and verifiable, but I am just saying that if I am impressed with a colour, a shape, or a curve that I try to mimic, I am not necessarily communicating, but trying to discover what that is. I may, as a result, wish to present my understanding and mimicry, but that is a second step. As an impressionable child, I drew many things that I saw, but the drawing was about me and the object, not about third parties.