ABSTRACT

The focus of this essay is the art of Vincent van Gogh and the way in which van Gogh’s understanding of nature informs his landscape painting. Van Gogh’s descriptions of the relationship between nature and his art betray certain humanist views that invest nature with anthropomorphic elements. Van Gogh seeks to subdue nature in order to uncover its essence and divulge its inner truth. I do not defend van Gogh on these points as it is not my position that there is some hidden truth that must be revealed about nature. I also do not hold that, at bottom, nature and human beings are one. In fact, I argue that these views, precisely, pave the way to the tragedy of van Gogh’s life, because they make him blind to the fact that, in his attempts at wresting truth from nature, he works to uproot himself. My interest in this paper lies along the lines of answering the question that van Gogh’s articulation of his artistic process allows us to ask. This question is: What is the role of aesthetic feeling in the artist’s ability to understand nature and make it intelligible to his audience? The correlate of this question is: How and at what cost does van Gogh’s landscape painting accomplish this transformation of aisthesis into art? In my analyses of van Gogh’s art, nature, and the relationship between feeling and intelligibility, I rely on Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, and Hegel’s articulations of these subjects.

摘要

本文的重点是文森特梵高的艺术，以及梵高对自然的理解如何影响他的山水画。梵高对自然与他的艺术之间关系的描述背叛了某些人文主义观点，即赋予自然拟人化元素。梵高试图征服自然，以揭示其本质并揭示其内在真相。在这些观点上，我不为梵高辩护，因为我的立场不是必须揭露一些关于自然的隐藏真相。我也不认为，归根结底，自然与人类是一体的。事实上，我认为这些观点恰恰为梵高的悲剧铺平了道路，因为它们使他对这样一个事实视而不见，即在他试图从自然中夺取真理的过程中，他努力将自己连根拔起。我对这篇论文的兴趣在于回答梵高对他的艺术过程的阐述允许我们提出的问题。这个问题是：美感在艺术家理解自然并让观众理解的能力中起什么作用？这个问题的关联是：梵高的山水画是如何以及以什么代价完成这种转变的对艺术的追求？在我对梵高的艺术、自然以及感觉与可理解性之间的关系的分析中，我依赖于尼采、海德格尔和黑格尔对这些主题的表述。