Wednesday is Ironman day here at Coachean

A question that must arise is if there is some value to traditional painting other than its ability to represent reality. Is there something painting can do that other media can’t do? Or do its representations of reality add something to our understanding of that reality?

These are, again, the questions that must always be asked in the post-dialectic. But, say, does Turner ask this question of himself when he paints this?



Is this realistic? Is it a true representation of a sunrise or is it a true representation of the sense of a sunrise? As a viewer, do I feel like I’m looking at a sunrise when I look at this painting? Or forget about sunrises altogether and just ask, is this pretty? Do I enjoy looking at it regardless of its content? What, exactly, was Turner up to when he painted it?

I bring all this up because what I’ve been saying has not been all-inclusive. It has not addressed all the questions of art. But maybe we do need to point out that these and other questions remain, even though at the moment they have not been our main interest.

While we’re being hoity-toity, we might as well point out that, according the Manny the K, the other chief a priori epistemological concept besides space is time. Space is that place that is the outside of us, while time is entirely within us, unrelated to space. Objects exist in a space but not in a time. Objects do not have time as an inherent quality. An object can not be in two different spaces at once, but an object can be in two different times (the way we perceive time). None of this is physical time-space Einstein but philosophical conceptual truisms. The point being, we can perceive concepts of time and space without any empirical, sensual data. They exist before we input any data. Hence, a priori.

Manny was, it appears, a Deist. When you turn him upside down and shake him, whole conflagrations of teleology fall out of all his nooks and crannies. No wonder he is the last of the old and not the first of the new…