Art Invented Humanity

16 pointsposted 14 hours ago
by prismatic

4 Comments

encomiast

9 hours ago

The headline and the deck of the article are contradictory. The headline claims art "invented humanity" while the deck says art allowed us to "find out who they really were." One is an invention the other is a discovery. One implies a malleable identity, the other a ground truth.

I'm partial to the first — our conception of ourselves is largely a creation of our imagination.

Towaway69

4 hours ago

> ... [Herzog] once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’.

HN is a place of accountants.

pingou

6 hours ago

How has art invented us, or allowed us to find us who we really are, more than science, or a conversation with friends, or countless other things? My bullshit detector was running pretty high while reading the article.

turgidpost

7 hours ago

First time finding out aeon is clickbait dreg?