"Schopenhauer’s philosophy blended that of Plato, Kant, and the Hindu Upanishads to create a worldview that manages to be both compelling and depressing: existence is suffering. It is an endless buffet of boredom and pain, combined with a constant striving for that which cannot be attained. And yet there is escape. Human beings can perform works of art and lose themselves in the craft of music, game playing, or workmanship.
What Schopenhauer means by “losing ourselves” in artwork is very similar to the idea of “flow” as described by the modern psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Flow is a mental state of full involvement with an activity.
This idea of flow is ironic as it suggests in that most human of activities, that of artistic expression, we do not use that most human of faculties of conscious awareness.
Schopenhauer is usually portrayed as the pessimists’ pessimist, but I can’t help feeling that Schopenhauer could be interpreted as saying something profoundly optimistic: even if conscious existence is suffering, it is within our power to lose ourselves in art, and transcend our baser propensities for violence and conflict."
-More Here
What Schopenhauer means by “losing ourselves” in artwork is very similar to the idea of “flow” as described by the modern psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Flow is a mental state of full involvement with an activity.
This idea of flow is ironic as it suggests in that most human of activities, that of artistic expression, we do not use that most human of faculties of conscious awareness.
Schopenhauer is usually portrayed as the pessimists’ pessimist, but I can’t help feeling that Schopenhauer could be interpreted as saying something profoundly optimistic: even if conscious existence is suffering, it is within our power to lose ourselves in art, and transcend our baser propensities for violence and conflict."
-More Here
No comments:
Post a Comment