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Francis Schaeffer pictured below:

 

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The clip above is from episode 9 THE AGE OF PERSONAL PEACE AND AFFLUENCE

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Francis Schaeffer has written extensively on art and culture spanning the last 2000years and here are some posts I have done on this subject before : Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 10 “Final Choices” , episode 9 “The Age of Personal Peace and Affluence”, episode 8 “The Age of Fragmentation”, episode 7 “The Age of Non-Reason” , episode 6 “The Scientific Age” , episode 5 “The Revolutionary Age” ,  episode 4 “The Reformation”,  episode 3 “The Renaissance”, episode 2 “The Middle Ages,”, and  episode 1 “The Roman Age,” . My favorite episodes are number 7 and 8 since they deal with modern art and culture primarily.(Joe Carter rightly noted, “Schaeffer—who always claimed to be an evangelist and not aphilosopher—was often criticized for the way his work oversimplifiedintellectual history and philosophy.” To those critics I say take a chill pillbecause Schaeffer was introducing millions into the fields of art andculture!!!! !!! More people need to read his works and blog about thembecause they show how people’s worldviews affect their lives!

J.I.PACKER WROTE OF SCHAEFFER, “His communicative style was not that of acautious academic who labors for exhaustive coverage and dispassionate objectivity. It was rather that of an impassioned thinker who paints his vision of eternal truth in bold strokes and stark contrasts.Yet it is a fact that MANY YOUNG THINKERS AND ARTISTS…HAVE FOUND SCHAEFFER’S ANALYSES A LIFELINE TO SANITY WITHOUT WHICH THEY COULD NOT HAVE GONE ON LIVING.”

Francis Schaeffer’s works  are the basis for a large portion of my blog posts andthey have stood the test of time. In fact, many people would say that many of the things he wrote in the 1960’s  were right on  in the sense he saw where ourwestern society was heading and he knew that abortion, infanticide and youthenthansia were  moral boundaries we would be crossing  in the coming decadesbecause of humanism and these are the discussions we are having now!)

There is evidence that points to the fact that the Bible is historically true asSchaeffer pointed out in episode 5 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? There is a basis then for faith in Christ alone for our eternal hope. This linkshows how to do that.

Francis Schaeffer in Art and the Bible noted, “Many modern artists, it seems to me, have forgotten the value that art has in itself. Much modern art is far too intellectual to be great art. Many modern artists seem not to see the distinction between man and non-man, and it is a part of the lostness of modern man that they no longer see value in the work of art as a work of art.” 

Many modern artists are left in this point of desperation that Schaeffer points out and it reminds me of the despair that Solomon speaks of in Ecclesiastes.  Christian scholar Ravi Zacharias has noted, “The key to understanding the Book of Ecclesiastes is the term ‘under the sun.’ What that literally means is you lock God out of a closed system, and you are left with only this world of time plus chanceplus matter.” THIS IS EXACT POINT SCHAEFFER SAYS SECULAR ARTISTSARE PAINTING FROM TODAY BECAUSE THEY BELIEVED ARE A RESULTOF MINDLESS CHANCE.

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Schaeffer asserted:

 

How do we know we know?

 

Take another example out of the history of this new approach in philosophy, that of David Hume (1711-1776). In 1732 he shocked the world with A Treatise of Human Nature. John Locke (1632-1704) had already denied the concept of “innate ideas” of right and wrong; that is, Locke denied that these ideas are inherent in the mind from birth. This had troubled many. Then Hume burst on the scene with a challenge which went further.

What was most startling was his progression beyond skepticism concerning God and other things of the “invisible world” to a skepticism about the visible world as well. Among other things, he questioned the concept of causality. That is, Hume challenged the notion that there is a reality in the external world which leads us to speak about one thing as being the cause of another. When we see a tree bending and swaying and its leaves falling to the ground and racing off across the field, we naturally speak of the wind as causing this phenomenon. Hume challenged this.
Following on from Locke, who said that all knowledge comes only from the senses, Hume argued that causality is not perceived by the senses. What we perceive are two events following closely upon each other. It was custom, he argued, which led us to speak in terms of causality, not any objective “force” working in the things themselves. Anyone can see where this thinking leads, and it was so understood at the time. If causality is not real, science becomes impossible – for what scientists are doing is tracing the path of cause and effect from one event to the next.
A modern British humanist, Kathleen Nott, has written perceptively about Hume in Objections to Humanism (1967): “Among great philosophers, Hume … hung his nose as far as any over the nihilistic abyss.”83 This is right. Hume was questioning the most basic elements of our experience. Yet he was trying to be consistent to his presuppositions (that is, his starting point). Where did this lead him? To a skepticism about knowledge itself. Hume wrote designedly against the Christian world-view which prevailed in England at the time. He wanted to dismantle the system of ideas which came out of the Bible, of a God before whom man was responsible, of people being more than matter, of a life after death which seemed to defy all natural law. Where he ended, though, was with uncertainty even about the ordinary things of life. As Kathleen Nott continues: “Hume’s philosophizing was indeed a radical skepticism, which left no convincing logical grounds for believing that anything natural, let alone supernatural, was there at all.”84
But there is something even more striking about Hume. Skepticism was the direction in which his philosophy led him; yet he was not able to live with it himself. He “hung his nose over the nihilistic abyss” – and we can picture him standing on the edge and peering over – but what then? Nott says he “withdrew it sharply when he saw the psychological risks involved.” Hume himself said in A Treatise of Human Nature (Volume I):
Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, and whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that all is uncertain … I … should reply … that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion … I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends; and when, after 3 or 4 hours amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strained and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts that he cannot defend his reason by reason; and by the same rule, he must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, though he cannot pretend, by any argument of philosophy, to maintain its veracity.85
We believe there are only two basic alternatives in the search for the source of knowledge. One is that a person attempts to find the answers to all his questions alone. The other is that he seeks revealed truths from God. We shall come to the second later. Now we are looking at the former, and we are suggesting that this is the basic problem with which all humanistic systems must wrestle: the problem of knowledge.
We could go into many other details concerning the subsequent history of the ideas we have dealt with, including in particular Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and his own “Copernican revolution” in philosophy and also the developments surrounding Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and linguistic philosophy in the twentieth century. We shall stop here, partly to keep the discussion of modern philosophy from becoming too technical, but mainly because the basic difficulties had already been expressed within a century of the birth of modern philosophy.
Starting with himself, a person cannot establish an adequate explanation for the amazing possibility that he can observe the world around him and be assured that his observations have a correspondence with reality. The problem is not just that a person cannot know everything. The need is not for exhaustive knowledge; the need is for a base for any knowledge at all. That is, even though we know we cannot exhaustively perceive even the smallest things in our experience, we want assurance that we have really perceived something – that is “perception” is not simply an “image” in our brain, a model or symbol of reality which we have projected out from ourselves. We want to know that we have had a real contact with reality. Even Hume had to admit that his philosophizing did not make sense, that it did not fit into his own experience of the world. On the humanist side this is the great tension – to have no reason for reason and yet at the same time to have to live continuously on the reality of reason.
At this point, someone is bound to ask, “But why is it necessary to have an `adequate explanation’ for knowledge?” Agreeing that Descartes, Hume, and others could find no theoretical base which tied in with their experience, isn’t it sufficient to just reason? Probably many of you have been wanting to ask this, as you have followed along. It is a good question, for the bulk of the world never bothers about the issues which Locke, Hume, and others like them raised. Most people simply live, going about their daily lives, never troubling themselves about reality and fantasy, the subject and the object, and so on. And we are not suggesting that their experience in itself is invalid, as if to imply that they are not perceiving and knowing the universe around them. They are. What we are saying is that – whether they know it or not – their experience is possible only because they are living in the universe the Bible describes, that is, in a universe which was created by God. Their internal faculty of knowing was made by God to correspond to the world and its form which He made and which surrounds them.
If, however, we attempt to bypass the question, “Why is it possible for man to have knowledge in this way?” we must then remember the other two great problems any system which starts only from man. Recall the illustration of the oil tanker and the rock. The rock is the problem of knowledge which we have been considering. That is the central problem. But there are two forms of pollution which flow from the broken ship of knowledge: first, the meaninglessness of all things and, second, the relativity of morals.

 

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 David Hume and “Radical Skepticism”
Generally regarded as the most important philosopher ever to write in English, David Hume (1711-1776) —
the last of the great triumvirate of “British empiricists” — was also noted as an historian and essayist. A
master stylist in any genre, Hume’s major philosophical works — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740),
the Enquiries concerning Human Understanding (1748) and concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), as
well as the posthumously published Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779) — remain widely and
deeply influential, despite their being denounced by many of his contemporaries as works of scepticism and
atheism.
Quotes by David Hume in which he cannot find any rational, scientific “proof” that the principle of “cause
and effect” exists. His “radical skepticim” demonstrates that for the philsophically consistent atheist,
science (which presupposes “cause and effect” and the uniformity of nature) cannot lead to any knowledge
about the nature of reality whatsoever:
It appears that, in single instances of the operation of bodies, we never can, by our utmost
scrutiny, discover any thing but one event following another, without being able to
comprehend any force or power by which the cause operates, or any connexion between it
and its supposed effect. The same difficulty occurs in contemplating the operations of mind
on body- where we observe the motion of the latter to follow upon the volition of the
former, but are not able to observe or conceive the tie which binds together the motion and
volition, or the energy by which the mind produces this effect. The authority of the will
over its own faculties and ideas is not a whit more comprehensible: So that, upon the whole,
there appears not, throughout all nature, any one instance of connexion which is conceivable
by us. All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but we never
can observe any tie between them. They seemed conjoined, but never connected. And as we
can have no idea of any thing which never appeared to our outward sense or inward
sentiment, the necessary conclusion seems to be that we have no idea of connexion or force
at all, and that these words are absolutely without meaning, when employed either in
philosophical reasonings or common life. (David Hume, 1737)
..all arguments concerning existence are founded on the relation of cause and effect; that
our knowledge of that relation is derived entirely from experience; and all our experimental
conclusions proceed upon the supposition that the future will be conformable to the past. ….
Without the influence of custom, we should be entirely ignorant of every matter of fact
beyond what is immediately present to the memory and senses. (Hume, 1737)
I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the
knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises
entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined
with each other. (Hume, 1737)
It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance
of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that
resemblance. Let the course of things be allowed hitherto ever so regular; that alone,
without some new argument or inference, proves not that, for the future, it will continue so.
(Hume, 1737)

I say then, that, even after we have experience of the operations of cause and effect, our
conclusions from that experience are not founded on (a priori) reasoning, or any process of
the understanding.(Hume, 1737)
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Francis Schaeffer, in The God Who is There, argues that the more philosophically consistent atheists are
with their worldview, the less they will live in the real world. Conversely, the more they live in the real
world, the less philosophically consistent they will be.
Applying this principle to Hume, we find a “point of tension” between his philosophy and the way he lived
his life:
Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to
such pains to inculcate, whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that everything
is uncertain, I should reply that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and
constantly of that opinion. I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my
friends and when after three or four hours of amusement I would return to these
speculations, they appear so cold and strange and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart
to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe
though he asserts he cannot defend his reason by reason. (Hume)
“Among great philosophers Hume, who hung his nose as far as any over the nihilistic abyss, withdrew it
sharply when he saw the psychological risks involved and he advised dilution of metaphysics by playing
backgammon and making merry with his friends. The conclusion of Hume’s philosophizing was indeed a
radical skepticism which left no convincing logical grounds for believing anything natural was there at all
and he saved his reason by refusing to take the implications of his philosophy to heart.”
Kathleen Knott – Objections to Humanism

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Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Dr. Francis schaeffer – The flow of Materialism(from Part 4 of Whatever happened to human race?)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical flow of Truth & History (intro)

Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of History & Truth (1)

Dr. Francis Schaeffer – The Biblical Flow of Truth & History (part 2)

Featured artist is William Pope L.

Tom Wolfe on Modern Art in Sept of 2011

Uploaded on Oct 11, 2011

Washington and Lee University alumnus Tom Wolfe presented a lecture on Modern Art during the 60th reunion of his class, the Class of 1951, held on the campus in September 2011

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William Pope.L 2012 Joyce Award

Uploaded on Jan 26, 2012

William Pope.L interview excerpt

Here is some of William Pope L. art below:

WILLIAM POPE L. Evan J. Garza

Reviews SAMSØN – BOSTON“Color Isn’t Matter,” the title for William Pope L.’s recent exhibition of tightly scattered works at Samsøn in Boston, seems at first pretty self-explanatory. Viewers must walk through a blue tarp to enter the show and are met by an aquarium filled with red liquid, a large cactus (and an adjacent wall) covered in splattered paint and several small pops of color throughout the room. Even the mound of rich, brown dirt in the center of the gallery is marked by pools of greentintedsoil, leaked from a mug of ink held by a mannequin-like performer in baggy blue scrubs and an Obama mask. Closer inspection of the exhibition (and of the artist’s other motive here) reveals that the color in question is, in fact, race. It’s a coy trick, and the show is full of them. WILLIAM POPE L., Plant, 2009-10. Cactus, shelf & spray painton wall, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Mitchell, Innes& Nash, New York and Samsøn, Boston. Square-shaped vinyl pieces, scattered throughout the gallery and mixed in with found/altered works on paper, feature phrases like “Negro Idea #38” and “By any means necessary Dec. 20,1964,” taken from a speech by Malcom X on that date, nearly invisible in white letters on white material. The installation is raw, down to the details (including the gallery’s ladder leaning on awall), and a smattering of wooden boards from crates are exhibited alongside original works. Peanut butter covers two stuffed animals mounted to wooden trophy bases, installed flush against the walls. Even Obama’s clothes, which are largely proportioned, are a euphemism, in this case for “the clothes are too big for the man.” Everything feels both remarkable and remarkably unfinished, effectively placing Pope L.’s confrontational wit on view here instead of the work itself. And surprisingly, it works. The installation is a perfunctory affair, and the messy nature of the show ultimately takes a back seat to the investigation of color, in both racial andtonal conditions. Flash Art 272 MAY – JUNE 2010

Food.

Eli Blood-Patterson ’11 | March 11, 2009

William Pope.L

William Pope.L (also known as Pope.L, born 1955 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American visual artist best known for his work in performance art, and interventionist public art. However, he has also produced art in painting, photography and theater. He was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial and is a Guggenheim Fellow.

Education

Pope.L attended Pratt Institute from 1973 to 1975 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program from 1977 to 1978. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Montclair State University, Montclair, New Jersey in 1978. Each summer he worked assisting severely disabled persons at camps in rural environments. He received a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual arts from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1981.

Early work

From in 1990 to 2010, Pope.L was a lecturer of Theater and Rhetoric at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. As a faculty member he directed a production of Lorraine Hansberry‘s A Raisin In the Sun, in which he used both African-American and Caucasian actors as members of the same family.

For ATM Piece, performed in 1997, he attached himself with an eight-foot length of Italian sausage to the door of a Chase bank in midtown Manhattan wearing nothing but a skirt made out of dollar bills.^[1]

eRacism, a project that Pope.L began during the late 1970s, included over 40 endurance-based performances consisting of “crawls”, varying in length and duration. In one example titled Tompkins Square Crawl (1991) Pope.L dressed in a business suit and crawled through the gutter in Tompkins Square Park, New York, pushing a potted flower with one hand. Another example titled The Great White Way, involved a crawl which stretched over 22 miles and took five years to complete. For this performance he donned a Superman outfit and strapped a skateboard to his back. The crawl stretched the entire 22 miles of Broadway, in New York City.^[2] Documentation of this performance was included in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. He attended Upper St. Clair High School where he donated much money for the reconstruction of the school; Upper St. Clair named their school library after him.^{[citation needed]}

2001 onward

In 2001 The National Endowment for the Arts advisory renew panel granted Pope.L $42,000 in financing for a traveling retrospective called William Pope.L: eRacism. Shortly after announcing the award, the acting chairman, Robert S. Martin, rescinded funding for the grant.^[3] Joel Wachs, then president of the Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts, stated in the December 21st issue of The New York Times:

“It is important, particularly in light of what I would consider an attack on freedom of expression, to stand firm. We want this exhibition to occur; we want other funders to step forward; we don’t want the N.E.A.’s decision to be something that has the effect of stopping what I think is going to be an important exhibition of art.”

The Warhol Foundation, in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation and the LEF Foundation provided $50,000 in funding for the traveling retrospective to tour the United States.^[4] eRacism exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art; Diverse Works Art space, Houston, 2003; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Oregon, 2003; and Artists Space, New York, 2003 .

The catalog “William Pope.L: Friendliest Black Artist in America” was produced by curator Mark Bessire in conjunction with the retrospective exhibition.^[5]

In 2002 Pope.L received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant. In 2004 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship.^[6] In 2005 The Black Factory, an art installation on wheels, traveled from Maine to Missouri as part of The Interventionists show organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA). “Typically the Factory arrives at a city or town and sets up its interactive workshop on the street. People bring objects that represent blackness to them. The Factory’s workers use these objects in tightly rehearsed but loosely performed skits to stimulate a conversation — a flow of ideas, images and experiences. Most objects are photographed and made part of the Factory’s virtual library, some are housed in the Factory’s archive for later use, and some are pulverized in the Factory’s workshop to make new products available in the Factory’s gift shop.”^[7]

In 2006 he was selected as one of the United States Artists fellows,^[8] for which he was awarded a $50,000 unrestricted grant.^[9]

He was featured alongside other performing artists: Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Brad Pitt, Steve Buscemi, and Juliette Binoche in Robert Wilson‘s LAB HD portraits. In 2008, Pope.L’s piece “One Substance, Eight Supports, One Situation” was selected to participate in The Renaissance Society‘s group exhibition, “Black Is, Black Ain’t”.^[10]

In 2010 Pope.L was appointed faculty at the University of Chicago.^[11]

Quotes

Pope.L’s art focuses on issues of consumption, social class, and masculinity as they relate to race. He is quoted as saying of his own work:

“I am a fisherman of social absurdity, if you will… My focus is to politicize disenfranchisement, to make it neut, to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from.^[12]”

In his Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship bio, he writes:

“Like the African shaman who chews his pepper seeds and spits seven times into the air, I believe art re-ritualizes the everyday to reveal something fresh about our lives. This revelation is a vitality and it is a power to change the world.”.^[13]

References

Further reading

• William Pope.L: The Friendliest Black Artist in America, Mark H. C. Bessire, The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 2002 (ISBN 0-262-02533-7).
• The Whole Entire World: Interview with William Pope.L by Amy Horschak in Dak’Art 2006, La Biennale de Dakar: Dakar, 2006, p. 382-383.

External links

• The Black Factory project official website
• Documentary Film of the Black Factory Rehearsal 2005
• Distributing Martin
• Artful Mind article from 2004
• The Void Show Exhibition Review published in X-TRA : Contemporary Art Quarterly
• William Pope.L at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

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Francis Schaeffer’s “How should we then live?” Video and outline of episode 1 “The Roman Age” (Schaeffer Sundays)

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