Unity of Truth, Language, and Method in Art Education

Abstract

The history of modem thought is inseparable from the history of modem science. We cannot reflect upon this history easily because science and political power have become hopelessly entangled, much as church and state were in earlier days. Everywhere we see sanctioned, both officially and popularly, the naive and dogmatic concept that science and reality are synonymous. We have given up our belief that we can reflect meaningfully about what is real and true, and replaced it with a blind faith in method. Already in Kant (1966) we find that knowledge and reason have shrunk to the scale of a progressive natural science. We learn from Kant that we can acquire knowledge through the operation of doubt and mathematics on postulated thingsin-themselves. The rest of our powers are consigned to a subjective sphere which, by comparison, is inconsequential. What may be known apart from our subjective selfconsciousness in partnership with the methodology of science is thus consigned to limbo. According to this inheritance, art conveys no knowledge, has no truth. By happy indirection, art may lead one to a grasp of the order of nature, but usually as mediated through the convenient concept of the genius, who is caricatured more as an evolutionary sport than a profoundly feeling and thinking human being standing within a cultural tradition. Counter to Kant's thought, Hegel (1977) denied that there was a gap between things-in-themselves and self-consciousness. Instead, he claimed that things and mind were identical. All became mind, and mind, not method, became absolute. Hegel pushed mind to its ultimate condition where all that is other and therefore alien is appropriated by mind to achieve perfected selfconscious-