Original scientific paper
Kvirin Vasilj’s Epistemological Approach to Beauty and Art
Draženko Tomić
; Učiteljski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
Epistemological and aesthetical views of Kvirin Vasilj (Međugorje, 1917 – Chicago, 2006), philosopher and Franciscan who lived and worked in the USA, are discussed in this article. In 1943 Vasilj attended lectures in aesthetics in Zagreb, and in 1944 in Vienna, but unsatisfied with the scope offered, it was then that he decided to pursue aesthetical issues more systematically at some later point in life. This he accomplished in the book Ljepota i umjetnost (Beauty and Art, 1979), where in the introduction he admits having embarked upon this project reluctantly, aware of the fact that he devoted little scholarly attention to aesthetical topics. He believes that his pursuit of other, foundational philosophical issues − evidently, epistemological isssues – by the nature of things has produced certain original thoughts in aesthetics, too. Additional interest in the here selected topic comes from the fact that lectures in beauty and art do not fall within the common canon of scholastic themes.
Vasilj speaks of beauty as a fundamental notion of human knowledge, which is entirely independent from the actions of will and senses. Beautiful is all that is to the liking in the very act of intellectual intuitions. Beauty is not the property of things but beauty is what the subject understands as beautiful. Hence it is not possible to prove that something is beautiful, Vasilj reasons.
Vasilj emphasises the practical side of art: it is an activity aimed at the materialisation of human ideas and feelings, fulfilment of human need for beauty, production of quite specific moods. An artist does not distinguish himself from other people by his great ideas or passionate feelings inherent in all people, argues Vasilj, but by the fact that he is able to wrap his ideas and senses into a suitable perceptional form. In producing a work of art, an artist also develops and shapes his own ideas and feelings, making the work of art a ‘synthetical birth’.
Art cannot deal with issues on the essence of human existence, states Kvirin Vasilj, yet in the matter expresses most profound and strongest human feelings and prevents their evanescence. However, art as a free human activity becomes the topic of ethics, not in the sense that a moral law imposes special rules concerning the creation of a work of art, but in the sense that it governs the artist to create art according to the final cause of his being.
Kvirin Vasilj approached the issue of art from his specific epistemological standpoint and made a clear-cut distinction between art and some other theoretical and practical fields of human activity. Although Vasilj’s aesthetics promotes artist and artistic work – places emphasis on artist’s inspiration and his mind, yet does not disregard the material component either – in his discussion on beauty Vasilj seems to give precedence to the subject. Partly contrary to Vasilj, we assert: aesthetical experience is not in its entirety an automatised reality which appears in every knowledge of the reality of things, just as the beauty itself is not a fully relative reality dependant on its own liking or disliking.
Keywords
Kvirin Vasilj; epistemological theory; aesthetics; beauty
Hrčak ID:
175732
URI
Publication date:
19.12.2016.
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