Nat Trimarchi

The reason AI cannot make original art comes down to the difference between ‘artificial intelligence’ and ‘practical intelligence’, and distinguishing genuine art from artefact. Neither AI (nor markets) can resolve such ethical or dialectical contradictions because only human intuition can discern between ‘action’ and ‘making’ or believing and knowing. Drawing on several philosophers, I argue that since what Aristotle called ‘practical intelligence’ cannot be adopted by any form of ‘mechanical’ or ‘genetic’ learning, educators would do well to teach these differences. As AI is increasingly integrated into all manner of human activities, it is critical to understand what the normative sciences (aesthetics, ethics, and logic) offer a humanist, as opposed to ‘post-humanist’, conception of life. Failure in the Humanities to teach this, and help bridge the ‘two cultures’, is ultimately responsible for the demise of civic humanism. Orthodox Marxist submission to market-driven ‘mechanical thinking’, social-Darwinism, and theoretical aesthetics, being key roadblocks. Building on previous argument I first explain artmaking’s relation to Reason (and knowing vs perceiving), and how this deteriorated in modernity. What reconnects Art to normativity via the ‘practical sciences’ is then argued to ameliorate this, prohibiting any possibility of ‘post-human’ art. In concluding, I suggest how educators can realise the ethical imperative of ‘naturalising’ art, to avoid the pitfalls of overestimating what technology can achieve; and halt the theoretical aesthetic ‘artworld’ delusion hastening resignation to a ‘post-truth’ world - that AI is set to ordain as ‘Real’.

As Big-Tech gains more control over human appetites and aversions (which Hobbes notoriously reduced humanity to), it is crucial to understand technology’s limitations. Why it cannot do the most important thing, upon which the prudence to balance autonomy with necessity rests: distinguish believing from knowing. This is an ‘ethical’ deficiency, revealed in reasons proposed here why AI can’t possibly make art (replaced now mostly by cultural artefact-making, which AI will excel at). Because aesthetics is about knowing, not perceiving (as Kant believed), such reasoning matters to human survival. It has deteriorated in modern mythology under the mechanistic worldview that Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and others of the failed enlightenment project advanced to control Nature. Now driven by an avaricious political and technocratic elite advancing posthuman (anti-humanist) ideology, ‘mechanism’ underwrites excesses leading humanity toward self-destruction via militarism, dehumanisation, and ecological devastation. To control it, contrasting nature's teleological "mechanism" with humanity's ‘telos’, I propose embracing an "ahistorical" humanist perspective rooted in the Principle of Art, ancient mythology, and Aristotelian and Schellingian inspired complexity science. This shows mechanism and teleology are two different species of ‘acts’; and having a “free relation” with both Nature and technology requires promoting humanity’s ahistorical ‘being’ via genuine art-making.

This paper disputes the generalised definition of ‘aesthetic practice’ which leads deconstructive postmodern ‘aestheticians’ to equate aesthetic activities (eg., gardening, hair-braiding) with art-making. Reviving an understanding of Art’s single unifying Principle is a necessary precondition for restoring the meaning of an artistic practice. I describe its ancient origins, its disappearance in modernity, and reconstruct its defining criteria, showing why art cannot be confused with just any ‘cultural practice’ whereby one’s experience of the ‘general aesthetic’ can by merely mimicking Nature elicit familiar empathic responses reflectively. I argue very little real art is being made today, and AI is perfectly suited to making what has replaced it: ‘cultural artefact’. In reconstructing this Principle, I show why artistic practice cannot be predicated merely upon theories of beauty/pleasure; but rather on what Aristotle deemed the ‘higher pleasure’ of making Reason (merging beauty with truth, and freedom with necessity). This overcomes Kant’s reflective aesthetic paradigm that engendered the misguided ‘experientialism’ dominating modern/postmodern “art” - undergirding an ‘artworld’ of mainly anti-Art (in what Bernard Stiegler calls the ‘catastrophe’ of modern aesthetic experience driven by the rise of ‘technicism’). A process for applying the Principle’s criteria is briefly outlined, demonstrating how to distinguish a ‘phenomenological experience’ from ‘ordinary experience’, and thus a genuinely poetic discourse from any other form of speculative discourse. Uncovering the Principle’s origins in Aristotle’s natural science (and his discernment of ‘making’ from ‘acting’ in technê), separating normative from theoretical aesthetics, and unveiling art’s ‘objective’ meaningfulness in any artwork’s phenomenology, reaffirms why art’s relation to the Person (its ‘anthropological phenomenology’) is of primary concern to aesthetes. I conclude with how the purpose of all inquiry into aesthetics is made more meaningful by reviving the Principle of Art, and why this essentially renders theoretical aesthetics redundant.

Mythology, as we know, is at the heart of everything. This paper advances an argument for creating harmony among humanity, and with nature, by changing how we ‘world’ reality in modern mythologising. The connection between metaphor, the person, and art is proposed as key, since artmaking and admiring presents our most powerful way of creating a mythology. Metaphor is the unique form of meaning productivity, originating in nature’s ‘semiotic freedom’, which is fundamental to expressing human embodiment in a ‘world’. Symbol merely represents; but metaphor places us in the realm of the part-whole relation simultaneously with the becoming-being polarity. These are processes inherent in all life and emerging consciousness, hence ‘spiritual’ phenomena (in the most scientific sense), producing what Peirce claimed as the evolution of thought toward Reason. And, equally, the key processes in artmaking. Though high mathematics is metaphoric, revealed religion is essentially symbolic; and arguably the highest ‘spiritual’ expression is made, not even in philosophical discourse, but through Art. Linking meaning with valuing, I show where neuroscience is helpful, but hamstrung, in accounting for the primacy of metaphor in art. Benefits of Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic phenomenology and Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology over Lakoff & Johnson’s more generalised ‘experientialist’ approach to metaphor are examined. Ricoeur’s account of “symbolism’s” confusion with metaphor here reveals that, to activate the ‘re-productive’ imagination, art must present a ‘proper’ metaphoric utterance (as does Schelling’s: T2024a & 2024b). This was distinguished from the ‘productive’ imagination’s merely reflective engagement with symbol and concept; and later argued to move us ‘beyond interpretation’ as Bradley (2009) suggests necessary, via Peircian semiotics (T2024c). Further detailed exploration here of this key relation between metaphor, the person, and art, hence reveals how philosophical anthropology provides the basis for re-empowering art to transcend Danto’s ‘artworld’. Making it thus capable of producing a realistic collectivising Spirit able to inspire the essential longer term humanistic ‘new deal’ with Nature, that is much needed to avert our possible extinction or descent into ‘posthuman’ mechanism.

The aim of this thesis is to confront the crisis in art and argument over whether it has lost its way. According to Friedrich Schelling, the ‘modern mythology’, bolstered by the onset of Christianity, is responsible for generating ‘aesthetic privation’ producing a joint crisis of meaning for humanity and art. Their artificial historicising, at the root of this, began with overturning the ‘ancient mythology’ in which art was a unified principle integrally linked to both Nature and History via the Person. Extending this argument, drawing on other Radical Enlightenment thinkers, I show why this corrupted the essential link between aesthetics, ethics, and logic (exacerbated by Kant’s re-definition of aesthetics). And subsequently how the human habitus and telos globally transformed under an evolving modern ‘positivistic materialism’, characterised by an ideological, reflective standpoint, ‘worlding’ humanity toward posthumanism and possible extinction. Addressing the underlying problem of modern ‘mythologising’ and ‘aesthetic privation’ is proposed as essential to mending the associated historicised disjunctures between Art and Society, Nature, and the Person connecting both meaning crises. Early chapters examine why reassociating art ontologically with the normative discipline of aesthetics rather than theoretical ‘aesthetics’ is necessary for this. Reconceiving art as complexity science (Wissenschaft), as Schelling’s ‘process metaphysics’; ‘naturalising’ it to restore habitual primary attendance to bearers of higher meaning (‘internal’ goods) is proposed. This requires understanding ‘ethical value’ in the phenomenology of this ‘science of admiring’. A method for which, and for returning virtue ethics (firstly to the arts ecology), is suggested as a meaningful, practical way to reunite ethics with morals in modern society. Naturalising Art is thus argued as necessary for developing a new mythology and genuine political community needed to reorient humanity. The procedure followed is to firstly examine the posited underlying problem’s significance and causes. Deterioration of the Principle of Art (and essential link between Art and the Person, via corruption of the normative disciplines) emerges as a key reason for why art and humanity’s meaning crises developed together, peaking in contemporary ‘modernity’. This central claim and corresponding remedial propositions (reconnecting Art with normative aesthetics) centre on four main arguments for addressing five suggested historical ‘modifications’ (identified by Raymond Williams, and others) producing the above disjunctures. Re-establishing an ontological conception of Art, restoring dialectical normativity to our modes of admiring (‘idealising’), is thus proposed as essential for confronting deep assumptions inherent in modern mythologising. A methodology for assessing ‘ethical’ meaning-value directionality in any artwork, by combining Peircian semiotics with Max Scheler’s hierarchy of values to revive Schelling’s principle of Art, is then developed to suggest a practical approach for restoring virtue ethics to the human telos.

The fundamental problem for theoretical aesthetics is its inability to account for art’s meaning-value (Trimarchi, 2022). As previously argued, Art’s higher meaning is only found emerging from the artwork’s tacit dimensions, where empirical-historical intentionality is almost completely inconsequential (Trimarchi, 2024b). The latter’s interpretable ‘phenomenology of sequence’ produces a false theorising tendency, disconnecting art from the history of ideas and severing aesthetics from ethics and logic. Art appears ‘infinitely interpretable’, hence entirely subjective. Adapting Arnold’s (2011) actantial processual approach, I show how Peircian semiotics, via ‘real Secondness’, uncovers art’s higher meaning. Peirce’s ‘diagrammatic thinking’ exposes art’s unique role of ‘objectifying’ the Person (in any subject, via appropriate propositions), without de-valuing this bearer of moral values. His ‘semiotic realism’ helps unveil Scheler’s anthropological (also termed ‘ethical’) phenomenology emerging from Merleau-Ponty’s ‘obscure zone’, to discern poetic from other speculation. Art’s ‘subject-objectivation’ (or, ethical intentionality) is thus able to be mapped phenomenologically to reveal any artwork’s meaning-value orientation. This paper combines Peirce’s ‘phenomenology of reason’ with Scheler’s hierarchy of values and Schelling’s ‘mythological categories’ (Trimarchi 2024b) to suggest a methodology for moving beyond neo-Kantian theoretical aesthetics (and analytical philosophy’s grip on the anti-art of ‘modernity’). That is, moving from the realm of perception to knowing, reviving art’s ontological connection to normative aesthetics. In conclusion, Peirce’s ‘science of ideals’ is thus revealed as Complexity Science, which – via his ‘suspended second’ (or, Ricoeur’s ‘second ontology’) - vindicates Schelling’s claim for how ‘aesthetics becomes objective’ (Trimarchi, 2024a).

Schelling’s Principle of Art returns us to an ancient epic sensibility, laying the foundations for reversing the unrealistic ‘modern mythology’ arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. This contribution examines how, by detailing his systematic approach to constructing art ‘in the particular’ (art-forms/works). ‘Particularity’ is subject only to the reason inherent in the potences (or consequences) of the affirmation of the whole unity (Principle). Hence Schelling’s ‘affirming principles’ determine boundary conditions for his ‘mythological categories’, revealing why their generalities inform a ‘scientific sequence’ for explaining the features of the Formative and Verbal arts (ie., all artforms, ‘for all time’). Examining specific examples shows how Schelling resolves key difficulties (appearance/reality, form/non-form, intentionality, and purpose) for assessing art’s higher meaning-value directionality; why phenomenology is key to understanding it; and how we arrived at the problematic modern ‘epic’ reversal of ancient universalising focusing our attention on ‘efficient’ over ‘final’ causes in art-making/admiring. Explaining practical application of the Principle-in-action expands on why Schelling’s ‘dialectical aesthetics’ presents a hitherto unrecognised radical advance on Kant’s. My conclusion summarises what shifts in attendance to the art object Schelling’s system demands, and why his Philosophy of Art offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world.

The problem with how we mythologise reality is arguably at the core of humanity’s ecological/existential crisis. While others have pointed to this, F. W. Schelling produced a philosophy of art which both confirms it and lays the foundations for how it can be addressed. This involves reversing the polarities of the ‘modern mythology’, related directly to Art-and-Humanity’s joint meaning crisis which Schelling claimed originates in our alienation from Nature and the rise of ‘revealed religion’. Despite his resurgence (inspiring Complexity Science), the relevance of Schelling’s aesthetics to resolving humanity’s long-standing ethical problems has been neglected. In this paper, I begin by framing Schelling’s view on religion, contextualising his ontological, cosmological approach to art. I then argue why his ‘dialectical aesthetics’, grounded in ‘process metaphysics’, presents a radical advance on Kant’s and Hegel’s ‘reflective’ standpoint featured in our dominant theoretical aesthetic paradigm (causing art’s sharpest decline via the evolving ‘modern’ suppression of metaphoric thinking by ‘symbolic idealism’, at the heart of our ‘worlding’ problems). Then, showing how Schelling’s Principle of Art leads us archetypally back to the normative sciences, I argue redirecting the self-destructive modern mythology means reorienting ‘final cause’ in our narratology. And why this firstly requires distinguishing proper metaphor from the symbolic constructions common in ‘conceptual art’. (In a subsequent paper, Schelling’s Art ‘in the Particular’ will be revealed to offer the practical application of his Principle to any artforms/works ‘for all time’ in praxis, advancing my argument here for why his system offers a suitable framework for collectively re-worlding the world). [Pre-print English version - author's copy; Spanish translation - in press]

Fred Polak’s futurology takes up where F. W. Schelling’s claims about the ‘modern mythology’ leaves off. Linking these, I argue Art and humanity’s joint meaning crisis originates in ‘symbolic idealism’, de-futurising both and crippling humanity’s attempts to develop a proper internal ‘narrative order of goods’ needed for our survival. Polak’s tracing of how various forms of Expressionism emerged from Impressionism in later modernism, transforming our images of reality and the future, vindicates Schelling’s earlier claims that our symbolic mode of ‘worlding’ creates a materially positivistic idea of progress. And our modern repurposing of art has produced what Polak calls a disorienting ‘false and deluded realism’ partly responsible for the counter-utopian, post-humanist tendencies prevalent today in both the East and West.

Following C. S. Peirce’s claim that aesthetics precedes ethics and logic, I argue for reconceiving aesthetics as a normative science. The deteriorated relations between these links in the ‘modern mythology’ is associated with art’s decline and apparent indistinguishability from the ‘general aesthetic’ (aided by ‘aesthetics as theory’). ‘Naturalizing’ art, according to F. W. Schelling’s system, is proposed to ameliorate this. Bringing together Peircian semiotics with Schelling’s ‘process metaphysics’ suggests how to restore the historicized split between Art ‘as principle’ and the Person (two ‘perfect signs’) by attending to the ‘ethical phenomenology’ of artworks. An argument is then made for how modern ethics and ‘morals’ may be reconnected.