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The Starry Night Analysis

Decent Essays

Throughout history, we can see that humans always try to acquire new knowledge. We can see this pattern because knowledge helps us, human, to have a better understanding of the world that we live in. When gaining knowledge we don't only use one way of knowing for each area of knowledge. We use a network of ways of knowing for each area of knowledge in order to acquire new discovery. We can notice a network of ways of knowing is being used in mathematics and art. Not every area of knowledge uses the same network of ways of knowing. Instead, each area of knowledge has a slightly different network of ways of knowing. Mathematics is one of the most certain areas of knowledge, because it connects to the real world better than the others. It is the one area of knowledge that most people believe in and studies …show more content…

However, it is possible that some art only needs two way of knowing to learn its truth. In the famous painting "The Starry Night", by Vincent Van Gogh, the reader can learn one of the truths about nightfall. The two ways of knowing that are needed to acquire the truth are sense perception and emotion. We need to use our sense perception to view the artwork. Mainly, it is used to perceive the numerous details that are being displayed on the painting. These details include the wavy sky, the glowing star, a miniature town, the blue paint, and a huge moon. When use emotion to interoperate these details, one can feel relaxed from the wavy sky, calm from the shining moon, cold from the blue paint, and lonely from the quiet town. After sense perception and emotion is deployed, then the reader can learn one of the possible truths about nightfall, which was that it calm people's heart but also make evoke loneliness within people. In this case, the audience is only using two ways of knowing to learn the truth about an artwork, but not a network of way of

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