Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure

FAIN: FB-37593-02

Lambert P. Zuidervaart
Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI 49546-4301)

No project description available

Associated Products

Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure (Book)
Title: Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: People turn to the arts as a way of finding orientation in their lives, communities, and institutions. But philosophers, hamstrung by their own theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of authenticity, significance, and integrity prevail. Understood in this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value of the arts.
Year: 2004
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/artistic-truth-aesthetics-discourse-and-imaginative-disclosure/oclc/54046841&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0521839033

Prizes

Symposium Book Award
Date: 5/30/2006
Organization: Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy
Abstract: The first annual book award given by the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy for the best book in continental philosophy written by a scholar in Canada. Assessment criteria include originality and the importance of a book in its field of investigation.

Imaginative Disclosure: Adorno, Habermas, and Artistic Truth (Article)
Title: Imaginative Disclosure: Adorno, Habermas, and Artistic Truth
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: The idea of artistic truth is a crossroad for third-generation critical theorists. Few ideas were more crucial for Adorno's negative dialectic. Yet it finds no place in Habermas's theory of communicative action. The divergence of paths between "Adornians" and "Habermasians" in the third generation cuts directly through the idea of artistic truth. This essay promotes a new convergence. First it reviews Adorno's idea of artistic truth content (Wahrheitsgehalt) in light of Habermasian concerns about a general conception of truth. This leads to my redescribing artistic truth as "imaginative disclosure." On my redescription, artistic truth is internal to artworks, as Adorno claims, but differentiated into three dimensions, in a manner reminiscent of Habermas's theory of validity. The three dimensions of artistic truth are "authenticity," "significance," and "integrity." The final section of the essay explores correlations within "art talk" between these three dimensions and claims to validity in communicative action.
Year: 2004
Primary URL: http://www.c-scp.org/en/symposium/the-journal.html
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Symposium
Publisher: Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy

Cultural Paths and Aesthetic Signs: A Critical Hermeneutics of Aesthetic Validity (Article)
Title: Cultural Paths and Aesthetic Signs: A Critical Hermeneutics of Aesthetic Validity
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: Contemporary philosophical stances toward 'artistic truth' derive from Kant's aesthetics. Whereas philosophers who share Kant's emphasis on aesthetic validity discount art's capacity for truth, philosophers who share Hegel's critique of Kant render artistic truth inaccessible. This essay proposes a critical hermeneutic account of aesthetic validity that supports a non-esoteric notion of artistic truth. Using Gadamer and Adorno to read Kant through Hegelian eyes, I reconstruct the aesthetic dimension from three polarities in modern Western societies. Then I describe aesthetic validity as an horizon of imaginative cogency governing the exploration, presentation, and creative interpretation of aesthetic signs. The essay argues that aesthetic processes, so construed, are crucial to cultural pathfinding, and that aesthetic validity claims in art talk contribute significantly to this pursuit. Aesthetic validity, cultural orientation, and art talk constitute the hermeneutical matrix from which questions of artistic truth emerge.
Year: 2003
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/cultural-paths-and-aesthetic-signs-a-critical-hermeneutics-of-aesthetic-validity/oclc/437661372&referer=brief_results
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Philosophy & Social Criticism
Publisher: Sage Publications

Art, Truth and Vocation: Validity and Disclosure in Heidegger’s Anti-Aesthetics (Article)
Title: Art, Truth and Vocation: Validity and Disclosure in Heidegger’s Anti-Aesthetics
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: A central point of contention between Critical Theory and Heideggerian thinking concerns the question of truth. Whereas Martin Heidegger orients his conception of truth toward the ongoing disclosure of Being, Jürgen Habermas regards truth as one dimension of validity in 'communicative action.' Unlike Habermas, who usually emphasizes validity at the expense of disclosure, Heidegger tends to emphasize disclosure at the expense of validity. The essay uses Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' as its point of departure. While reclaiming elements from his account of artistic truth, I criticize his reactionary conception of art's vocation, and I propose a notion of aesthetic validity that does justice to modern and contemporary art.
Year: 2002
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/art-truth-and-vocation-validity-and-disclosure-in-heideggers-anti-aesthetics/oclc/440859258&referer=brief_results
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Philosophy & Social Criticism
Publisher: Sage Publications

If I Had a Hammer: Truth in Heidegger’s Being and Time (Book Section)
Title: If I Had a Hammer: Truth in Heidegger’s Being and Time
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Editor: James K. A. Smith and Henry Isaac Venema
Abstract: The conception of truth proposed by Martin Heidegger's Being and Time is both provocative and problematic. On the one hand, Heidegger provides a way to reconnect technical accounts of truth with the cultural practices and social institutions from which these accounts take distance. On the other hand, Heidegger takes such a dim view of public communication that attaining truth becomes the inexplicable privilege of "authentic" existence. This essay aims to fashion an alternative conception of truth that frees Heidegger's insights from their reactionary garb. While agreeing with Heidegger that asserting is a mode of interpreting, I take issue with his description of the supposedly derivative character of assertions. Similarly, while endorsing Heidegger's claim that the agreement between assertion and object (what I call "correctness") derives from a more comprehensive process of disclosure (what I call "truth"), I criticize how he traces this derivation. In response, I propose to conceive of truth as a process of life-giving disclosure to which a differentiated array of cultural practices and products contribute in distinct and indispensable ways. What distinguishes true disclosure from false is not the authenticity with which human beings face the possibility of their own impossibility (their so-called "freedom toward death"). Rather it is their life-promoting and life-sustaining fidelity to that which they hold in common and which holds them in common. The pursuit of assertoric correctness is one important but limited way in which such fidelity occurs.
Year: 2004
Primary URL: http://www.worldcat.org/title/hermeneutics-of-charity-interpretation-selfhood-and-postmodern-faith/oclc/55220439&referer=brief_results
Publisher: Brazos Press
Book Title: The Hermeneutics of Charity: Interpretation, Selfhood, and Postmodern Faith
ISBN: 1587431130

Truth without Correspondence: Aesthetic Cognition in Goodman’s Languages of Art (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Truth without Correspondence: Aesthetic Cognition in Goodman’s Languages of Art
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: Few analytic philosophers have more effectively freed Anglo-American aesthetics from correspondence theories of truth than the late Nelson Goodman. Contrary to mainstream analytic discussions of "artistic truth" prior to 1968, Goodman insists that art has important cognitive functions and questions whether science is the paradigmatic field of knowledge. He also rejects propositions as truth bearers and doubts that correspondence governs cognitive functions. By wresting "representation" and "expression" from the grip of correspondence theories, Languages of Art gives these concepts an insightful new account. This paper summarizes Goodman's account and examines the alternative theory of truth it implies. The paper argues that, while freeing aesthetics from propositionally inflected correspondence theories, Goodman misconstrues artistic import and overlooks the intersubjective dimensions of artistic truth.
Date: 05/27/2002
Conference Name: Annual Meeting, Canadian Society for Aesthetics

Correspondence without Truth: Fictive World Projection in Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Correspondence without Truth: Fictive World Projection in Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: Nicholas Wolterstorff's Works and Worlds of Art regards mimesis or "fictive world projection" as "pervasive and fundamental in the arts." On his theory of fictive world projection, what the artist presents can be true to actuality, but it can not be true about anything. The paper suggests that this theory gives art cognitive status without cognitive substance. It recommends instead that asserted propositions not be considered primary bearers of "truth-about," and that artistic import not be equated with propositional content, thereby eliminating the motivation for distinguishing between "truth-to" and "truth-about."
Date: 03/28/2002
Conference Name: Pacific Division Meeting, American Society for Aesthetics

Truth and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Being and Time (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Truth and Authenticity: Heidegger’s Being and Time
Author: Lambert Zuidervaart
Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time proposes a holistic conception of truth that can reconnect epistemology with cultural practices and social institutions. Yet his conception seems to make personal or communal “authenticity” the key to attaining truth. The seminar develops a constructive critique of Heidegger’s conception of truth by examining its internal logic and its hermeneutical role.
Year: 2005
Primary URL: http://courses.icscanada.edu/2011/05/truth-and-authenticity-heideggers-being.html
Audience: Graduate

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