Plato theorized that imagination was exterior to the mind; Aristotle disagreed and said that theopposite was true. Although both are necessarily true.

 

“If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite from these, must necessarily come from elsewhere, from the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.”  Jean Baudrillard, Fragments

 

Q. If subjectivity surrounds the subject, why does objectivity surround?

 

• Intentionality.

 

“Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called intentionality (and also) mental in existence of an object, and what we would call, although not in entirely unambiguous terms, the reference to a content, a direction upon an object (by which we are not to understand a reality…), or an immanent objectivity. Each one includes something as an object within itself…” Bealer, Quality and Concept

 

Both passages speak of the subjective response to objective phenomena. Subjectivity is the pathway to existentialism, dialectic/transcendental thought and reason. Art has the poetic transfiguration of the real. Philosophy has the poetic transfiguration of the concept.

 

Mostly, I paint for myself.

-Alan Jon Parker