love of my life<\/a> was (and is) an artist. Her art speaks of the need to reacknowledge the texture of life, a texture robbed from us in a life lived too hastily. Italian in heritage, she brings with her a bit of that Old World mentality of richness in life: the wealth of slow cooking, laughter, and discovering the huge wide world to be found in simple objects.<\/p>\nShe has a show running now. I went. I brought my Iranian philosopher friend, Ali. We were alone as we walked through the gallery. It\u2019s not the kind of art that hits you quickly, makes you say \u2018wow!\u2019 or \u2018ah, ha\u2026.\u2019 or smile or laugh or anything\u2026 quickly. The art is itself a wholesale attack on \u2018quickly\u2019.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m reminded that just yesterday I ran into a high school friend, Dan, at the University. He told me he\u2019s working and going to school. I said I was in the MA Philosophy program. His eyes lit up, he said \u2018wow, that\u2019s great.\u2019 I somehow don\u2019t always think so. I should be in a Ph.D. program already, I should know more about what I want in life, I should be married, I should be working, I should have a 401K, I should this, I should that. But no; that is<\/span> great. Dan and I agreed with a smile that education shouldn\u2019t be rushed, perhaps half joking, perhaps only trying to make ourselves feel better for dissapointing a society that demands swift decisions in life. Perhaps, though, we were right.<\/p>\nI\u2019m the first to admit that I don\u2019t really understand a lot of <\/span>art. Plato\u2019s attack on art in the Republic made sense to me. But he was thinking of the perfect society, and we certainly don\u2019t live in that today. Art has the power to effect us here, to tell us to \u201cslow down, open your eyes, relax, reevaluate life, smile at the absurdity of it all, etc.\u201d<\/p>\nMy question is: can\u2019t philosophy do all this and more? Or is art irreducible to philosophy because it has the power to unite body and mind in the experience of an object? (for my view, see a brief, old entry here<\/a>)<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7907151-113408512842683699?l=americanbuddhist.blogspot.com\")
<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"