Ma`rifat Falsafi

A central question on how a work of art imitates reality concerns the nature of representation in art. Dominant theories often confine realism to the imitation of external objects, actions, or phenomena. Such a narrow definition, however, faces significant challenges: it fails to account for non-representational arts (such as music), blurs the distinction between artistic and purely cognitive imitation, and inadequately differentiates between art and craft. Through a detailed analysis of the concept of "realistic representation" and with recourse to the notion of "philosophical secondary intelligibles" in Islamic philosophy, this study investigates the realistic representation of an artwork as grounded in an external source of abstraction. Allāmah Misbāḥ Yazdī is among the philosophers who consider the work of art to be fundamentally the result of the artist's mental abstraction -an abstraction that occurs in the mode of a philosophical secondary intelligible (ma‘qūl thānī falsafī), and through an inquiry into relations that have an external source of abstraction. He views the relativity of the artwork as ontological, in connection with the perfection of the perceiver and the nature of his abstraction. Findings of this paper -which adopts a descriptive-analytical method and relies on library-based research to elucidate the concepts of realistic representation as well as the matter and form of the artwork- indicate that the relativity of art is ontological in nature. This ontological relativity does not contradict the realistic representation of the artwork; rather, it is in harmony with it."