Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919)

https://palianshow.wordpress.com/2025/08/30/evelyn-de-morgan/

"Nocturne: Blue and Silver - Chelsea," James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1871.

Whistler (1834-1903) was a highly influential and famous painter, although it would infuriate him to know he was most famous for that over-familiar painting of his mother....because it's regarded as a portrait of motherhood, while he intended it only to be a study of shapes and colors. Really.

That's something about Whistler's art that many modern folks struggle with. He was a big proponent of the Aesthetic movement, preaching "art for art's sake". Many scenes like this weren't intended to be landscapes or capturing a moment in time...they were explorations of color and form. They were meant to be beautiful, and not teach a lesson or have a message.

He was known as a Tonalist, an art movement that branched off from Impressionism, and was more about capturing form and color.

From the Tate Modern, London.

#Art #JamesAbbottMcNeillWhistler #Tonalism #Aestheticism #Nocturne

Kierkegaard’s Three Stages on Life’s Way: From Pleasure to Faith

Talk about Kierkegaard’s 3 stages on life’s way: aesthetic, ethical, and religious.

ChatGPT said:

Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century Danish philosopher often regarded as the father of existentialism, described three stages on life’s way—the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. These are not rigid categories but modes of existing, each representing a deeper engagement with selfhood, choice, and meaning.

1. The Aesthetic Stage
The aesthetic life is driven by pleasure, novelty, and immediacy. The individual lives moment to moment, chasing experiences—art, love, beauty, excitement—without commitment. Kierkegaard’s figure of A in Either/Or embodies this life: witty, charming, but ultimately despairing. The aesthete avoids boredom and responsibility, yet this avoidance leads to emptiness, for life becomes fragmented and lacks enduring meaning.

2. The Ethical Stage
The ethical person transcends the chaos of pleasure by embracing duty, responsibility, and moral order. Here one chooses oneself through commitment—to family, society, or moral principles. Judge William in Either/Or represents this stage, arguing that real freedom comes not from endless choices but from choosing to be bound. The ethical life thus brings structure and purpose, yet it, too, can end in despair if morality becomes mechanical or self-righteous.

3. The Religious Stage
The religious stage is the highest, where the individual confronts absolute relationship with God. It requires a “leap of faith”—an inward, paradoxical trust that transcends reason and ethics. Abraham in Fear and Trembling exemplifies this stage: willing to sacrifice Isaac, he suspends the ethical to obey the divine. The religious life is marked by passion, inwardness, and surrender—an acceptance of life’s absurdity through faith.

In essence, Kierkegaard’s stages trace a movement from external pleasure, through moral self-definition, to spiritual inwardness. The journey is existential, not chronological—each person must choose, again and again, how to live authentically.

Claude said:

Kierkegaard’s three stages — what he calls the stadier on life’s way (Stadier paa Livets Vej, 1845, and developed across Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) — are best understood not as a developmental ladder one climbs in sequence but as existence-spheres, qualitatively distinct modes of relating to oneself and the world. The movement between them is not gradual maturation but rupture: each transition requires a leap, a discontinuous act of choice that reason cannot underwrite. This matters because Kierkegaard is polemicizing against Hegel, for whom the lower is aufgehoben — sublated, preserved and transcended in a rational mediation. Kierkegaard denies mediation. You do not reason your way from one sphere to the next; you decide, and the decision reconstitutes the self.

The aesthetic. The aesthete lives in the category of the immediate — in mood, sensation, possibility, and the pursuit of the interesting. Crucially, “aesthetic” does not mean crude hedonism; Kierkegaard’s exemplary aesthete in Either/Or is refined, ironic, intelligent, a connoisseur of his own experience. Don Juan represents the sensuous-immediate; the “Seducer” of the famous diary represents the reflective aesthete who has made even seduction an art form, holding himself at an ironic distance from his own life. The defining structure is that the aesthete’s selfhood is dispersed into the external and the contingent — into what happens to him, what he enjoys, what holds his interest. The aesthetic life therefore harbors a built-in instability: its telos is to avoid boredom, but it cannot generate continuity of self, and so it collapses into despair — though often a despair the aesthete does not recognize as such. The “Rotation of Crops” essay, where the aesthete cultivates arbitrariness and forgetfulness to keep experience fresh, is the symptom of a self with no center of gravity.

The ethical. The ethical individual — Judge William, who writes the second half of Either/Or as a married man addressing the young aesthete — chooses himself. This is the pivotal Kierkegaardian act: not choosing this or that, but choosing to have a self, to take responsibility, to bind oneself to commitments that endure through time (marriage is the paradigm, precisely because it converts erotic immediacy into a task). Where the aesthete is his moods, the ethical person has a continuous identity constituted by resolve, duty, and the universal. The ethical is the sphere of the universal in a specific sense: the individual realizes himself by expressing the universal moral law, becoming transparent to himself through it. There is genuine grandeur here, and Kierkegaard takes it seriously — but he also sees its limit. The ethical assumes the self is capable of fulfilling the universal. It does not yet reckon with guilt that cannot be discharged, with sin, with the possibility that the self before the moral law stands not merely as imperfect but as fundamentally unable.

The religious. This is where the architecture becomes most demanding, and where Kierkegaard introduces his sharpest distinction — between Religiousness A and Religiousness B in the Postscript. Religiousness A is the religion of immanence: inward suffering, the consciousness of guilt, the recognition that before God one is always in the wrong. It is available, in principle, within human resources — a Socrates could reach it. Religiousness B (specifically Christian) turns on the paradox: the eternal entering time, the God-in-time, the Incarnation, which to reason is an absurdity and to the understanding an offense. Here faith is not a higher knowledge but a passionate inward relation to that which cannot be thought, sustained “by virtue of the absurd.”

The crucial text is Fear and Trembling and the figure of Abraham — the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” Abraham, commanded to sacrifice Isaac, cannot justify himself ethically; from the standpoint of the universal he is simply a would-be murderer. He cannot even communicate his situation, because the ethical is the medium of communication and he has stepped outside it into an absolute, incommensurable relation to the Absolute. Faith is therefore higher than the ethical, but it looks identical from outside to its opposite (fanaticism, madness, crime). The “knight of faith” is invisible; he may look exactly like a tax collector. What distinguishes him is the double movement: infinite resignation (giving Isaac up completely) and then receiving Isaac back by virtue of the absurd — believing he will have him in this life, in this world, against all reason.

What unifies the whole scheme is Kierkegaard’s account of the self in The Sickness unto Death: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, and in relating to itself relates to that which established it. Despair is the misrelation, and it runs all the way through — the aesthete despairs without knowing it, the ethical person despairs in the impossibility of self-sufficiency, and despair is finally overcome only when the self “rests transparently in the power that established it.” The stages are, read this way, a typology of forms of despair and their resolution.

A few things worth holding onto critically. First, the leaps are not arbitrary even though they are unmediated: each sphere generates, from within, the despair that motivates its own transcendence — though it cannot guarantee the leap, only make its necessity felt. Second, the religious does not abolish the ethical; the suspension is teleological, and the knight of faith returns to the universal, which is why Abraham gets Isaac back rather than losing him into pure transcendence. Third, the whole project is pseudonymous and indirect — Kierkegaard does not speak as the Judge or as Johannes de Silentio, and the indirection is itself the method, since existential truth cannot be handed over as a result but must be appropriated inwardly by the reader.

Given your own terrain, the friction point most worth sitting with is this: Kierkegaard’s telos is the intensification of individuality, the self made infinitely concrete and responsible before God, “that single individual” — almost the diametrical opposite of the Advaitic movement toward the dissolution of the jīva and the recognition that the apparently bound individual was never real (ajāta). For Kierkegaard the self is won, achieved through passion and decision; for Śaṅkara the self (as ahaṅkāra) is precisely what must be seen through. And yet there’s a strange convergence in the language of “resting transparently in the power that established it” — a passivity at the summit of all that strenuous activity — which is not so far from prasāda or from the bhakti collapse of the doer into the ground. Whether that convergence is real or merely verbal is, I think, the genuinely interesting question, and it turns on whether Kierkegaard’s God-relation can survive without the irreducible two that the paradox seems to require.

"The Gold Scab; Eruption in Frilthy Lucre (The Creditor)," James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1879.

This painting has an interesting story. Whistler's relationship with his wealthy patron Frederick Leyland ended when Leyland was furious with Whistler's work on the now-famous "Peacock Room;" it seems Whistler was only supposed to finish work started by someone else, but instead totally redid the room. The two parted ways acrimoniously.

Not long after that blow-up, Whistler unadvisedly sued art critic John Ruskin for defamation, over a bad review of one of his paintings; while Whistler won the suit, he was awarded only a farthing in damages. The suit was so expensive that he had to declare bankruptcy....and Leyland was his chief creditor.

So we have Leyland as a peacock, sitting on his house. Whistler pokes fun as his frilled shirts ("Frilthy", get it?) and his piano playing; if you look close you can see a butterfly, Whistler's signature, about to sting Leyland. The color scheme is that of the Peacock Room.

Reminds me of illustrator Sidney Sime...

From the De Young Gallery, San Francisco.

#Art #Aestheticism #JamesAbbottMcNeillWhistler #Caricature #RevengeArt

The Mirror of Venus (1877) by English painter Edward Burne-Jones. A member of the pre-Raphaelite movement formed in England in 1848, Sir Edward Burne-Jones became one of the leading figures in a new trend, Aestheticism, that emerged in the 1860s. This composition can be seen as an exaltation of ideal beauty, aligning the atmosphere of the painting with a perspective shared by late Victorian art.

https://stellar-art.pixels.com/featured/the-mirror-of-venus-1877-edward-burne-jones.html

#art #ArtHistory #Aestheticism #Victorian

Mariana (1851) by Sir John Everett Millais (English artist, lived 1829–1896).

'I am aweary, aweary ..' Based on Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, via Tennyson's poem ‘Mariana’.

#PreRaphaelite #PRB #Autumn #Fall #Leaves #FashionHistory #victorian #victodons #VictorianArt #VictorianEra #Victoriana #FineArt #Youth #Aestheticism #VintageFashion #FashionHistory #1800s #19thcentury #thelongvictorian #art #historyofart #oldmasterpaintings

Autumn or Fall has arrived and so here is: Autumn Leaves (1856) by John Everett Millais (English artist, lived 1829–1896). Raking and burning leaves in the twilight. The artist's sisters-in-law, Alice and Sophie Gray. Unsure as to the identity of the two on the right, wearing rougher clothing.

#Autumn #Fall #Leaves #FashionHistory #victorian #victodons #VictorianArt #VictorianEra #Victoriana #FineArt #PreRaphaelite #Youth #Aestheticism #Twilight #Transience