Hi All, I recently got a print of Fransisco Goya's "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" for my office, and this morning I was asked about it, and in talking about it I went back to this passage from the Khan Academy's SmartHistory.
http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/goyas-the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters.html "Imagination United with Reason In the image, an artist, asleep at his drawing table, is besieged by creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery and evil. The title of the print, emblazoned on the front of the desk, is often read as a proclamation of Goya’s adherence to the values of the Enlightenment—without Reason, evil and corruption prevail. However, Goya wrote a caption for the print that complicates its message, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.” In other words, Goya believed that imagination should never be completely renounced in favor of the strictly rational. For Goya, art is the child of reason in combination with imagination." (Text by Sarah C. Schaefer) It strikes me that this could be a sort of proto-MOQ description of Pirsig's central metaphor. For Goya (in 1799), 'reason' was a new child of the Enlightenment. Goya's work was being done right at the moment in time the intellectual level was gaining independence from social forces. Pirsig writes, "The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to invent a myth of independence from the social level for its own benefit. Science and reason, this myth goes, come only from the objective world, never from the social world. The world of objects imposes itself upon the mind with no social mediation whatsoever." (LILA) That was the reason Goya was talking about, "science and reason come only from the objective world". While the Enlightenment gave way to the Romantic Period, which in many ways as an abandonment of intellect in favor or 'validated intense emotion' (Wikipedia), Goya seemed to point to an expansion of reason rather than a dismissal. For Goya, 'reason' without imagination led to corruption, but imagination without reason fairs no better. It is when 'reason' and 'imagination' are united that the arts flourish. Arlo PS: I am no expert on Goya, Enlightenment or Romanticism. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
