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From: blp Category: Art Date: 23 March 2007 Time: 01:48 PM Review: Why can't we have some great art? Perhaps because great art depends on a complex relationship to reality, and the notion of reality has got thrown out with the bathwater of religion. It's implicitly seen as naive – less naive than being a grown-up peddling cartoon animal pictures to other grown-ups (pace Dzama). Reality = truth = natural order = god. It's not really the case that this is so, but this may be the thought process that's got us here. It's a sort of massive simplification of philosophy since the enlightenment, one that's riven with contradictions. Reality = truth = natural order = god (even though we reject god for not being real). Journo Giles Coren, on the Animal Farm TV GM debate the other night unwisely invoked the idea of a natural order and was accused by the scientist of religiosity, which is a neat point, but a stretch. This is a great way of ending a debate, which was never the purpose of philosophy, but when these things get watered down, you do get stuck in the mud. Kant's rejection of empiricism, however convincing, is elided without understanding, with a rejection of experience, another stretch, or a category error. Reality, however much in doubt, is all we have and is more than us. Cartoon animals are less.