Abstract
It is generally, dogmatically, admitted that the function of art is expression, and that artistic expression rests on cognition. An artist — even a painter, even a musician — tells. He tells of the ineffable. An artwork prolongs, and goes beyond, common perception. What common perception trivializes and misses, an artwork apprehends in its irreducible essence. It thus coincides with metaphysical intuition. Where common language abdicates, a poem or a painting speaks. Thus an artwork is more real than reality and attests to the dignity of the artistic imagination, which sets itself up as knowledge of the absolute. Though it be disparaged as an aesthetic canon, realism nevertheless retains all its prestige. In fact it is repudiated only in the name of a higher realism. Surrealism is a superlative.
“Reality and Its Shadow” was published in French as “La réalité et son ombre” in Les Temps Modernes 38 (1948): pp.771–89.
The notes in this chapter have been added by the translator.
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Notes
Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962), § 44.
Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 1964).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination, a Psychological Critique, trans. Forrest Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), and The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).
Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents, trans. A. Lingis (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 17.
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© 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht
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Levinas, E. (1987). Reality and Its Shadow. In: Collected Philosophical Papers. Phaenomenologica, vol 100. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4364-3_1
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