Fuelled by an introductory rant about AI art-making’s mechanistic enactment of ‘being’, this paper explores our educational relation with art and film-making as a participation in the ‘mystery of being’; one to which the art work (e.g. film) – as a spatial-temporal arrangement in material - draws us (readers and makers) to ‘in love’. German philosopher, and father of modern hermeneutics, Hans-Georg Gadamer asks how we are to ‘know’ a piece of art, which exemplifies a desire for abstraction when it is, ultimately, also non-generalisable and (discursively) unknowable – yet always calling us for signification through its aesthetic structure. French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain suggests that an art work able to address and move us in this way is the result of the artist’s cultivated habit of craft as a form of practical intellect. ‘In love’ with her/his material, the artist intuits matter’s potential revelation of b/Being and ‘shines’ (transcendental) Beauty onto the material through her/his craft skills. Art’s (e.g. film’s) ability to move an audience’s intellect and senses in pleasure and delight – and with that any revelation of being and knowledge in art - relies on two hermeneutic gestures: the artist’s practical intellect - able to skilfully arrange matter towards a mystery (of being) – as well as the reader’s and maker’s hermeneutic openness to be moved ‘in love’ beyond what they already know of the world – even themselves.
Katja Frimberger is Lecturer in Education Studies at the Strathclyde Institute of Education in Glasgow, Scotland. Her research is located in philosophy of education – curious how theatre- and film-making may be theorised as education. Her most recent publications look at German theatre maker/theorist Bertolt Brecht’s actor training and his philosophising theatre of estrangement and Latvian director Asja Lācis' educational philosophy in her proletarian children's theatre.