Document Type : Research
Authors
1 Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative and Analytical History of Islamic Art, Faculty of Art, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
2 Department of Islamic Philosophy and Wisdom, Faculty of Humanities, Shahed University, Tehran, Iran
3 , Department of Islamic Art/, Faculty of Arts/Shahed University/ Tehran/Iran
Abstract
Contemporary philosophy of art has proposed theories including mimesis, expression, formalism, institutional theory, and the open-concept view. Yet it has not arrived at a definition that includes all artworks and excludes non-artworks. This difficulty suggests that the search for a common essence shared by all artworks may need reconsideration. Rather than seeking such an essence or common property, this article examines the reality and mode of being from which the concept of art is abstracted. The study employs an analytic-deductive method based on library research and draws on the principles of Transcendent Philosophy. It argues that the imagined form and the artist’s form-giving act depend on the soul from which they proceed and can be understood through emanative dependence and relational existence. Since dependence on an agent characterizes all voluntary acts, it cannot distinguish artistic activity from other action. What distinguishes art is a mode of manifestation in which a determinate form discloses an existential perfection proportionate to the cognitive capacity of the apprehending subject. The concept of art is therefore treated as a secondary philosophical intelligible. It is abstracted by the mind yet predicated of a real feature of human acts and works. In this account, the ground of abstraction is the aesthetic aspect of the act and its form. Art is thus an existential reality rather than a merely conventional or institutional status. Its boundary with non-art is consequently gradual and admits degrees rather than being sharp and categorical.
Keywords
- definition of art
- Transcendent Philosophy
- relational existence
- secondary philosophical intelligible
- emanative dependence
- ontological ground of abstraction
- aesthetic aspect
Main Subjects
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