After more than three decades working in the arts (as an artist, manager, and consultant, in community, government, and private sectors), my main attention is now refocused on what makes art more meaningful for people. Why does this matter? Because art is not just any ‘cultural practice’. It should do more than simply inform, disturb, excite, or 'move' us by appealing to our senses. Or be a fashionable amusement consumable, or distract us with novelty, or merely create agreement and disagreement. It should make a claim on us. This turns out to matter a great deal for humanity’s flourishing, and possibly survival.
My doctoral thesis, The Way Out: Naturalising Art for a New Mythology, is about reconnecting art with the ‘normative science’ of aesthetics. This is how the ancients understood aesthetics, and art’s unique ethical and logical relation to it, before its meaning was changed in the eighteenth century and it became theorised. I hope to stimulate discussion about this (very different kind of) science, and how it can un-shackle art from the entirely subjectivised ‘cultural and creative’ industrialisation, commercialisation, mass-production, specialisation, and professionalising that has left most of us thinking we need not really be too concerned with its meaning.
NAT TRIMARCHI
Recent Publications:
The Poles of Idea and Reality (and the De-futurising of Art and Humanity)
Trimarchi, N. (2023). The Poles of Idea and Reality: (and the De-futurising of Art and Humanity). Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 19(1), 426–457
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.
The Aesthetics of Meaning
Trimarchi, N. (2022). “The Aesthetics of Meaning,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 18(2), 251–304
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.
Forthcoming, pending publication:
Re-Worlding the World: Schelling's Philosophy of Art - Abstract
Schelling's 'Art in the Particular' (Re-orienting 'Final Cause') - Abstract
The Way Out: Naturalising Art (for a New Mythology) Dissertation - Abstract
Areas of specialisation:
Process Philosophy, Metaphysics, Normative Aesthetics, Virtue Ethics, Intentionality, Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, Semiotics, Culture and Cultures
Areas of interest:
Philosophical Anthropology, Aesthetics and Culture, Aesthetic Value, Art and Artworks, Value Theory, Perception and Phenomenology