Art and Mathematics in Matila Ghyka’s Philosophical Aesthetics.
A Pythagorean Approach on Contemporary Aesthetics

Abstract: Although Matila Ghyka is one of the Romanian philosophers who changed the way some of the most important artists and art theorists of the twentieth century practice art and think about aesthetics, his works remain almost unknown to the Romanian public and to the Western academic-philosophy tradition. I will argue that this state of affairs is caused by some of the cultural biases and preconceptions concerning the Pythagorean sources of Matila Ghyka’s thinking, that define a large part of the contemporary philosophical community as a whole. In this essay, I will tackle two main preconceptions and cultural biases that have contributed to this reluctance that contemporary thinkers show towards a mathematical approach to art from a Pythagorean point of view and will try to sketch a way of surpassing them. The means by which this aim can be achieved is a new (meontological) approach to the concept of “number”, which lays at the heart of Ghyka’s aesthetics and philosophy of art.

Keywords: aesthetics, philosophy of art, Matila Ghyka, ontology, meontology, ancient philosophy, affective hermeneutics

Publicația: Hermeneia nr. 20/2018

Anul Publicării: 2018