Thoughts on Icons and the era of images in terms of Nietzsche

In his critique of modernity and his romanticism of Archaic Greek "tragic culture," Nietzsche speaks about the 'immediacy' of the cultural relationship to God(s)/spirituality. People could feel the presence of god directly through a painted vase. That ornamental image WAS God, and you knew because you could experience it with your senses, right now, in the present. What Socrates introduced with his rationalism and logic paved the way for the Martin Luther's and Calvin's Reformation. The Word is God, not the image. The image is of the heathen. This jives specifically with Socrates' ideas, passed on through his student Plato, of virtue. Through the rational and methodical Socratic method, we should all come to the same conclusions. That conclusion somehow, because we came to respect Socrates' groundbreaking suggestions, would need to come to the individual separately of their physical body. That is to say, the body is a fetter and a stumbling block from enlightenment. Therefore the enlightenment of knowing God could naturally no longer come from the experience of our visual sense.

So the Word is law now. And I'm an artist/philosopher, not an Art Historian, but I think it's Barthes whose Death of the Author finally exposed and de-deified Socratic rationalism. Nietzsche would say we had become alienated from our world, first and foremost because we had become estranged from our own bodies. We were not meant to trust our senses as they were physical barriers from our metaphysical ability to discover and understand God. Somehow reading text appears to transcend the bodily fetter with which we experience images. Nevermind how written language developed from glyphs. Like Socrates' universal logic by which we should naturally all of us come to the right and good and moral conclusions we need to live this present, but transient mortal coil of a life, a system of glyphs becomes abstracted,  checked for efficiency, aestheticized, and catalogued as a law. The Word is a system of glyphs-turned-icons that we practice and memorize until we forget where they began. Gutenberg prints, with mathematical perfection, each letter in each word of a doctrine, and we suddenly have forgotten that our minds are looking at a system of images which each hold individual history and personal meaning. Now we are looking at Words.

The printed page lends itself to a new kind of immediacy that is firmly married to the industrial revolution. Machines become the new God as they are fashioned from the rational paths of modern science, the religious pinnacle of the beginning of modernity. I probably need to read Death of the Author again - but I concern myself in part with graphic design and with Letterforms. There is a mathematical preciseness to each letter of a font, which most people take for granted. Each letter in a font is not simply a letter in the alphabet but an architectural structure as meaningful to us in our time as was the Parthenon.

As far as making and meaning, we have been preoccupied with universal systems to unite us. We have abstracted images to the point that they no longer can allow us to experience personal meaning; that immediacy which the Archaic Greeks experienced when they used their senses to experience God. Somehow we still make art out of words. Artists are determined to find and make images that can give that experience and immediacy that we long for as mortals.