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Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine

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There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one.

I teach a class called “Death,” on the question of whether it is rational to be afraid of death. Like all my classes, it is a philosophy class, so of course I assign the seminal philosophical texts on that topic. But I also assign Karel Čapek’s play The Makropulos Affair , Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade”—a poem I strongly disagree with. In my class on the philosophical puzzles surrounding self-creation, we read contemporary philosophical essays—and we also read novels by James Joyce and Elena Ferrante. I teach Shakespeare’s Hamlet alongside Descartes

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