Beauty's Appeal: Measure and Excess

BEAUTY’S APPEAL

ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA THE YEARBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH

VOLUME XCVII

Founder and Editor-in-Chief: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning Hanover, New Hampshire

For sequel volumes see the end of this volume.

BEAUTY’S APPEAL Measure and Excess

Edited by ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA The World Phenomenological Institute, Hanover, NH, U.S.A.

Published under the auspices of The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning A-T. Tymieniecka, President

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

ISBN 978-1-4020-6520-0 (HB) ISBN 978-1-4020-6521-7 (e-book)

Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. www.springer.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

THEMATIC STUDY BRIAN GRASSOM / Beauty, Truth, Alterity: Beyond

Cause and Effect

xiii SECTION I

L A W R E N C E K I M M E L / Eros / Kalon / Agathos : L o v e ,

the Beautiful, and the Good

3

GABRIEL HINDIN / The Beautiful Recollected:

M e m o r y a n d B e a u t y i n P l a t o ’ s Phaedrus

13

J O H N B A L D A C C H I N O / A r t after B e a u t y : V a l u e s

before S t a n d a r d s

21

PIERO TRUPIA / The Semantics of Beauty: The

Grammar of the Sign and the Phenomenological Gaze for a Knowledge of Reality beyond the Sign

33

S E C T I O N II MARIA GOŁASZEWSKA / The Aesthetics of

Possibility: Beauty in the Post-Conceptualist State of Art

67

MARIOLA SUŁKOWSKA / Aesthetization of

Aesthetic Values?

75

VALERIE REED AND MAX STATKIEWICZ /

Shattering Beauty: Rilke’s Aesthetics of the Fragmentary VICTOR GERALD RIVAS / From Perfect Beauty

to a Conscious Life: An Elucidation of the v

85

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Postromantic Import of Love and Friendship, B a s e d o n H e n r y J a m e s ’ s The Spoils of Poynton

103

ROBERT D. SWEENEY / Von Hildebrands, Father

and Son, and the Beautiful

127

S E C T I O N III RAYMOND J. WILSON III / Measure or Excess: The

Unity of the Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Political in Dante, Marlowe, and Molière BRIAN GRASSOM / Measure and Excess

139 155

TSUNG-I DOW / Harmonious Balance: Ultimate

Essence of Beauty and Goodness, A Confucian View

165

VLADIMIR MARCHENKOV / The Dialectic of the

Serious and the Ludic in Myth and Art

173

S E C T I O N IV MACIEJ KAŁUZA / The Theater of the Absurd and

Reality

183

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL / Too Much Is Never

Enough

187

DIANE SCILLIA / Minimalist Art: “Less is More”

or the Paradox of Boredom

195

BRUCE ROSS / Dances with Bears: The Beginnings

of Western Art

207 SECTION V

JAMES WERNER AND ELENA STYLIANOU /

The Re-Emergence of Beauty in Contemporary Technology

215

ARTHUR PIPER / Beauty and Truth in Science

and Phenomenology

225

TABLE OF CONTENTS

vii

CHRISTOPHER WALLACE / Action and the Open

Work

239

MATTI IKONEN / Lived Worlds Re-Revisited: The

Opacity of the Transparent. A Time-Dweller’s Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic

263

MÜNIR BEKEN / Impenetrable Historiography and

Value in Academic Music Composition

281

ANDREW JAY SVEDLOW / Hermeneutic

Phenomenology of Mark Rothko’s Painting INDEX

287 295

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present collection of studies comes from two annual conferences that the International Society of Phenomenology, Fine Arts and Aesthetics held for its annual 10th and 11th conferences at the Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in May 27 and 28, 2005, and May 26 and 27, 2006. The topics treated respectively were “Beauty’s Appeal in the Transformation of Standards for Valuation” and “The Happy Choice: Measure or Excess.” These themes fitted together beautifully within a common network of our metaphysico-aesthetic discourse, so that I found it most appropriate to combine their texts. I thank the authors most sincerely for their personal, insightful, and inventive work. My secretary Jeff Hurlburt merits thanks for his careful preparation of the editorial work, and Springer Publishing for copyediting and proofreading. A-T. T

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BEAUTY, TRUTH, ALTERITY: BEYOND CAUSE AND EFFECT

Pulchrum autem respicit vim cogniscitivam; pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent. On the other hand, beauty relates to the knowing power, for beautiful things are those that please when they are seen. Thomas Aquinas1

In James Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the hero, Stephen Dedalus, has recourse to the writings of Thomas Aquinas on two occasions. This passage on beauty from the Summa Theologica is quoted when Stephen, as a student, is in conversation with his college dean. Stephen is uncertain that beauty can be defined in such a way—he suggests, for example, that the fire that the dean is busy kindling in the grate while are they talking might please the sight in one instance, whilst the fires of hell would have the opposite effect. Later, he confides to his friend Lynch his newly developed thoughts on beauty and art. The difficulty for Stephen is first of all in defining what it is that beauty, particularly beauty in art, consists of, and consequently how he, as a writer, should aspire to create in his work that element, whatever it might be, that is essential to a work of art. He differentiates between a hypothetical stasis as the apprehension of aesthetic pleasure and the kinesis of physical pleasure. This stasis is effected by “pleasing” an aesthetic sense, which in Aquinas’ text is communicated by the words “visa placent”, suggesting a kind of seeing. Separating beauty and truth, Stephen points out to his friend Lynch, who had once enjoyed scrawling his name on a copy of Praxiteles’ sculpture of Venus, that he probably would not be moved to add his name to the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle. Truth appeals to the intellect through the intelligible, he says, as intellection; beauty appeals through the sensible not to the body, but to the imagination as aesthetic apprehension. The problem of beauty that confronts Stephen is its relative nature. He resolves this problem of the universal and the particular by hypothesising that whatever the particular object of beauty, it has sensible relations that coincide with certain stages of aesthetic apprehension, and it is they that are universal. He goes on to explain how the Thomist principles of wholeness xiii A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, xiii–xxiii. © 2008 Springer.

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(integritas), proportion (consonitas), and clarity (claritas) combine to give the apprehension of beauty, and that the effect of this is the essence of art, “the luminous, silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” and this he calls the “enchantment of the heart.”2 KNOWLEDGE, BEING, AND ENCHANTMENT

Aquinas strove to emphasise the agreement of spiritual revelation, which was held in his time to be supra-rational, with the light of reason as philosophy. Most medieval scholars did not consider Beauty as a pure Transcendental,3 and indeed Aquinas was among the first to consider the problem of beauty as far as modern (as opposed to ancient) philosophy is concerned. At a time in Western culture when there was a new and growing interest in all things material, Aquinas gave expression to this feeling by including beauty, albeit briefly, within his theological system.4 What then is beauty? Aquinas says, that which pleases when it is seen. And it relates to “the knowing power,” or knowledge (vim cogniscitivam). It pleases because, like all pleasure, it satisfies a human need, the need for wholeness and harmony, and what St. Thomas defined as claritas. Now, claritas is the term that gave Stephen the most difficulty when formulating his theory of aesthetics. Integritas he defines as wholeness, isolating (one could say ‘framing’)5 the object for contemplation. Consonitas is harmony or proportion, discovering through contemplation the harmonious relationship of parts to the whole. The third principle, claritas, translates in English as ‘brightness’. Stephen alludes to brightness when he admits that by claritas he first thought Aquinas meant “the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world,”6 but he later discovered it to be something different. In his book The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, Umberto Eco explores St. Thomas’ three criteria of beauty. His findings are interesting and worth quoting fairly fully. In its purely formal aspect—the aspect which is of interest in aesthetics—a perfect object is an object which has integrity and proportion, and nothing more is required. Its form is complete, ontologically ready to be judged beautiful [  ] However, if this judgement is actually to take place, it is necessary that a seeing or looking (visio) should be focused upon the thing [  ] And it is therefore necessary that there should be a new and essential type of proportion, this time between the knowing subject and the object [  ] Proportion presents itself as clarity. Proportion is its own clarity. It is fullness of form, therefore fullness of rationality, therefore the fullness of knowability; but it is a knowability which becomes actual only in relation to the knowing eye [  ] Clarity is the fundamental communicability of form, which is made actual in relation to someone’s looking at or seeing of the object. The rationality that belongs to every form is the “light” which manifests itself to aesthetic seeing.7

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Eco proceeds, in his examination of claritas, to give it first of all an objective ontological significance (in its Aristotelian and medieval context) as light being a quality of the object qua form.8 But he then returns the effect to the perception of a “seeing” subject, which suggests that the percipient recognises or supplies the necessary proportional relations that result in the “light” of his seeing them. In this way we move between an objective and a subjective approach, and also between the medieval world and the modern; one could also say between a God-centred and a man-centred universe. However, Eco’s idea of beauty’s concomitance with knowledge is in accord with Aquinas. On the other hand, beauty consists in due proportion, for the senses delight in things duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind—because even sense is a sort of reason, just as is every knowing power. Now, since knowledge is by assimilation, and likeness relates to form, beauty properly belongs to the nature of a formal cause.9

In Aquinas’ system, truth is prior to goodness, and goodness, in the context of the text from the Summa, is prior to beauty. Nevertheless, beauty is here admitted as a form of knowledge, apprehended by reason. Thus it in some way relates to truth, for truth is implicit in knowledge and reason. But if beauty is indeed a formal cause, it means for Aquinas it is not on a par with truth, which is a final cause. As Stephen says, according to Plato “beauty is the splendour of truth.”10 In this way, beauty could be said to accompany the expression of truth. So it seems that in Aquinas’ view, knowledge gives rise to beauty. This knowledge, though, is more than simply mental cognition. Its relation to form gives it an ontic quality, that is, it has to do with Being. As the recognition of the truth of being, it manifests to the percipient as what Eco called “light.” It may be this light that Stephen feels, rather than sees, as “the enchantment of the heart.” The transformative power of art, then, according to Joyce, involves art being recognised as art because of its formal properties. These properties correspond to those through which the artist apprehends beauty in the things of life surrounding him, and he uses them to reveal beauty through his art. The beauty of the artwork, both in subject and execution, is in the first instance related to the perception, whether sensible or intelligible, of the beauty of the world: but the beauty of the world is perceived only through the realisation of its truth. Thus, the perception of beauty proceeds from an existential reality: the apperception of the truth of being results in the apprehension of beauty. And these together result in the ecstatic “enchantment of the heart.” This enchantment, therefore, is not immediately ‘present’; nor is it latent, awaiting manifestation. It is neither and at the same time it is both, a synergy of subject and object.

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It is this existential beauty that Joyce uses as the basis for his later work, Ulysses, in which the lyrical beauty of the characters, their situations, and their thoughts combine to give a sense of ‘being’ that simultaneously encompasses, permeates, and transcends the work as a whole. He draws attention to this sense of being by the unorthodox structure, the form, of the text, disrupting the customary ‘story’ with its beginning and end, and presenting rather an almost discontinuous play of parts, each with its own resonance of truth. Through the pattern of the parts and their microcosmic beauty, the beauty of the whole steadily unfolds. This is the narrative that ‘enchants’ the heart. At no time within Joyce’s narrative is beauty referred to as an abstract, nor is it claimed as an attribute, or its presence assumed as remote and transcendent. Rather it is revealed only through its concomitance with truth, the truth of being, of consciousness. Thus what Joyce calls the “enchantment of the heart” is always already there, like a silent music, made audible by the writer’s art. It is simultaneously present and absent, immanent and transcendent. As such it cannot be conceived by the mind. It is something ‘other,’ and somehow it is, if not realised through art, at least signified by it. THE TRUTH ABOUT TRUTH

Two centuries ago, Kant initiated the ‘modernist’ discipline of aesthetics. Within his theory, he differentiated natural beauty, aesthetic beauty, and the beauty of the sublime: [Natural beauty] Flowers, free patterns, lines aimlessly intertwining [  ] have no signification, depend upon no definite concept, and yet please.11 [Aesthetic beauty] Taste in the beautiful may be said to be the one and only disinterested and free delight; for with it no interest, whether of sense or reason, extorts approval.12 [The sublime] can never be anything more than a negative presentation—but still it expands the soul.13

Although he sought to include beauty within a system acquiesced in by an all-encompassing ‘reason,’ Kant’s effort is generally deemed nowadays to have fallen short of this goal. On the other hand, his apparent failure to bring beauty and art convincingly into the domain of rational judgement points to something more interesting. For two millennia after Plato first demonstrated the separation of art and truth in The Republic, no one thought it necessary to make a case for their philosophical reconciliation, that is, until the Enlightenment. Kant’s insistence upon the transcendental subject and the subject’s relation to aesthetic enjoyment is crucial to art’s inclusion in the development of modernism. The result was twofold.

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In securing an autonomous domain of aesthetic judgement, a domain with its own norms, language, and set of practices, Kant was simultaneously securing the independence of the domain of cognition from aesthetic interference.14

Thus the separate categories of truth as knowledge and beauty as aesthetics were sustained. However, Kant’s recognition of a specialised domain of aesthetics acknowledged that there was another approach to truth judgement that was independent of rational cognition. This was to have unforeseen consequences. According to J. M. Bernstein, a reading of the Critique of Judgement from a modern perspective shows that “it begins to engender what we have come to think of as the fundamental conceptual vocabulary of continental philosophy, the philosophy that challenges enlightened modernity through recourse to the phenomena of art and aesthetics.”15 In seeking to explain art through reason Kant provides a loophole in the structure of a progressively rationalistic system of values through which art can escape. But this means that it is not only art that escapes rational definition: By being able to comprehend art without being able to provide a rational explanation for it, reason itself appears to transcend its own limits. Thus in seeking to incorporate art in a philosophical system where reason is the ground, Kant reveals a characteristic of reason that disrupts the boundaries of the system inscribed in it’s own name. So, that which Plato (in The Republic)16 sought by way of rational discourse to exclude from the ideal city—namely art—apparently returns by way of a later extension of that same discourse, to settle the score by unsettling reason’s claim to autocracy. But, of course, it is not reason that is unsettled, only its legislating factor, its temporal proxy, its own mimetic double—the rationalising mind. For it is arguable that Plato, in the first place, never meant to exclude art from the city, but only that kind of art that is mimetic, the kind of art that presumes to present the truth while merely re-presenting a facsimile of truth’s reality. Moreover, Plato (through Socrates) hints at another kind of art that is superior to the Homeric. The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations, and would desire to leave as memorials of himself works many and fair; instead of being the author of encomiums, he would prefer to be the theme of them.17

Thus, reason and beauty are tacitly understood to converge somewhere beyond the bounds of rational discourse. Plato realised that many of our assumptions about life and the world at large are based not upon direct empirical experience, but on second-hand information and representation. He in turn represented his thoughts on truth and falsehood through the largely fictional character of Socrates. Now representation is by default indirect. The

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reality of Plato’s idea of truth is never concretely ‘present’ in his discourse. It is a transcendent, the ‘ideal.’ But it is axiomatic that the ideal can never be represented, as it would then cease to be ideal. In this way Plato’s concept of truth is undermined by his own attempt to express the truth conceptually, and taken as a whole the warm dialogues between Socrates and his friends become transformed into parables for what we think we know. This interpretation of Plato, if allowed, would put painting, such as Jackson Pollock’s abstract work, ‘back in the picture,’ so to speak, as regards its having a spiritual function, a truth function, relating to a finality. In its social and historical context Pollock’s work attempted to transcend the ‘commodity’ values of an overly materialistic cultural paradigm of possession. More important, perhaps, it hints at our inability to possess knowledge through objective recognition. Only with high modernism is art’s departure from and critique of representation and truth-only cognition achieved. Modernist works of art are sublime: They exceed representational categories while opening up the categorial space in which they are represented.18

The extreme abstraction of Pollock’s work defies any attempt at ‘possession’ by the mind through pictorial and literal translation. It therefore appeals to a response to something beyond the parameters of representation, material objectification, and rational cognition. Pollock was extending the

Figure 1. Jackson Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950

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boundaries of the painting as an object, implying infinity and space beyond the frame, whilst at the same time trying to contain the concept of summation and totality within a rectangular two-dimensional surface. The truth as a final cause is glimpsed in the very impossibility of its finality. In Lavender Mist’s self-negation of its own reality there may be a key to understanding what art is and does. THE TRUTH ABOUT ART AND BEAUTY

In his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger elucidates the aporia of art and the work of art. We ascribe to an object the quality ‘art,’ whilst the only references for such a qualification would be its comparison with other objects already accepted as ‘art’ or its being the work of an ‘artist.’ Neither can answer the question—what do we mean by ‘art’? The only way out of the circularity of this argument would be the intervention of Hegelian spirit, or the value ‘art’ as a transcendent, which can be attributed to selected objects or practices. And these Heidegger dismissed: Art is considered neither an area of cultural achievement nor an appearance of spirit; it belongs to the propriative event [Ereignis] by way of which the ‘meaning of Being’ (see Being and Time) can alone be defined.19

He concludes by saying it is beyond the scope of his essay to give a definition of what it is that makes an object an art-object, only hinting tantalisingly that it has something to do with its “created-ness”.20 Adorno, writing about art and beauty, sums up the combination of created-ness and the art object’s position of alterity in relation to its more empirically understood reality: Artworks become appearances, in the pregnant sense of the term—that is, as the appearance of an other—when the accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone[  ]21

The created-ness of an artwork seems crucial: and as we see here, the work is not meant to pass itself off as truth through verisimilitude, to produce a copy by way of mimesis, to excuse by, or worse still to celebrate, its virtuality. Even in so-called representational painting, it is precisely through its alterior positioning to objective reality, and to its own reality, that the work’s transcendent effect as ‘art’ comes about. The more cannot be adequately described by the psychological definition of a gestalt, according to which a whole is more than its parts. For the more is not simply the nexus of the elements, but an other, mediated through this nexus and yet divided from it. The artistic elements suggest through this nexus what escapes it.22

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Thus, what we call the beauty of an artwork is produced integrally. Adorno cites the example of works that are calculated rationally to produce the effect of beauty but fail to do so because they lack the purity and spontaneity that are linked to creativity. The material element in this process of creation is the form of the work to which, according to Adorno, its spirit as art is integral. Joyce’s novel Ulysses is, as a work of art, incumbent upon form, and that form is, like the work of Pollock, inextricably bound up with its context, both historically and artistically: Furthermore, form in art is the result of intense human artifice, as distinct from any instance of natural beauty. Art’s inherent opposition to fixed ideas of beauty is essential to its very existence. If anything, the presentation of a work of art qua form effects the stripping away of superfluous concepts or pre-sentiments and insists upon the contemplation of form in its truth to being: Spiritualization in new art prohibits it from tarnishing itself any further with the topical preferences of philistine culture: the true, the beautiful, and the good.23

This somewhat acerbic statement does not mean to say that the work of art must be false, ugly, or bad, but that art can and does appropriate what is generally understood to be so as a subject for aesthetic production, its spirit remaining beyond the confines of such terminology. Paradoxically, therefore, we may say that an artwork is ‘beautiful’ or relates to truth when in fact its meaning does not fall within the conventional or quotidian definition of those words. Art’s insistence that it must be not only the other of the quotidian, but also its own ‘other,’ is a self-negation that guards its integrity. In this way it always escapes categorical identification to remain ‘art.’ At the same time we must bear in mind that no object, least of all an art-object, has any true objective meaning outside of human intentionality. Art exposes a hidden truth of nature: Its form reflects its pure created-ness and its self-transcendence.

ALTERITY

According to Adorno, indeterminateness is at the root of both natural beauty and aesthetic beauty. What is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there [  ] Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty, but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable.24

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Nature has a way of ordering and presenting itself, and it is this that the artist seeks to replicate, not nature’s beautiful appearance. In seeking this, the artist is seeking the truth of nature, wherein lies her beauty. An Indian sage25 once said that he fell into a trance on seeing a flight of white birds passing beneath a dark rain cloud. In the same vein, India’s great poet, Rabindranath Tagore, felt in nature’s beauty the presence of an ineffable truth. Seeking an expression of this feeling he wrote of his childhood experiences of nature[  ] I am certain that I felt a larger meaning of my own self when the barrier vanished between me and what was beyond myself.26

There is a relationship here to that which Kant expressed as essentially ‘moral’ in his treatment of the sublime in nature. The experience of the sublime indicates for Kant the presence of a higher moral feeling within the human self. Its inherent ineffability, which Kant compares to non-representable in religion, is akin to the notion of alterity that concerned continental thinkers such as Derrida and Levinas. In Lavender Mist, a work on the cusp of high modernism and postmodernism, we have seen that Pollock ‘frames’ the issue of the universal and the particular but leaves out the frame. He refers to infinity of meaning by implying the space beyond the canvas. The impossibility of achieving closure by framing the truth is taken up by Jacques Derrida. In his essay “Tympan,”27 philosophy is seen as a text, within margins, that constantly seeks to include philosophy’s limits, its other, within itself. Thus philosophy attempts to resolve unanswered questions within its enclosing embrace, and in so doing creates infinite reverberations that constantly exceed its boundaries. Derrida’s allusion to the tympan also takes into account its meaning as an element of a mechanical printing-press. Even in the margins of philosophy in its search for truth there is, by deduction, that which escapes, is non-philosophical, and cannot be represented by being inscribed or marked in any text, and moreover everything that is, is, in fact, text. In this light the sublime in Pollock’s work refers to something that is and remains always beyond. Kant’s ‘morality’ could be restated as ‘ethics.’ It is partly ethics that Levinas refers to when he speaks of the “Other,” which we can only know through its absence, its absolute alterity: It is because there is a vigilance before the awakening that the cogito is possible, so that ethics is before ontology.28

John Keats said “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The indeterminateness of art means that its truth is without closure. Art is the experience of truth

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in a non-cognitive way that is essentially ‘other.’ And I would suggest that ‘non-cognitive’ does not signify the other of reason, but rather the other of rationalisation. It is the timeless perception of truth, and therefore beauty, in the phenomena of life, interpreted through reason and feeling. Reason and feeling together embody pure consciousness, the life of the soul. When a work of art is successful, it is in its pure alterity, its constant otherness, that it becomes a signature of consciousness, of existence in its truth and beauty. Gray’s Art School, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, U.K.

NOTES 1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), I:5:4. 2 James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Chancellor Press, 1993), p. 213. 3 The known Transcendentals were goodness, truth, oneness, being, and so on. 4 Aquinas performed the same service for beauty as did St. Francis of Assisi—St. Thomas scholastically in the Summa, and St. Francis poetically in his “Cantico delle creature.” 5 The implications of the idea of ‘framing’ will be explored later in this paper. 6 Joyce, op. cit., p. 212. If beauty were a “light from some other world,” it would, of course, be a transcendental. 7 Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. H. Bredin (London: Radius, 1988), pp. 118–119. 8 By form here is meant substantial form. 9 Aquinas, [Summa Theologica], I,5,4. op. cit., 10 Joyce, op. cit., p. 207. 11 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), [207] p. 46. 12 Ibid., [210] p. 49. 13 Ibid., [274] p. 127. 14 J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Boston: Polity Press, 1993), p. 8. 15 Ibid., p. 10. 16 Plato, “The Republic,” in Dialogues, trans. B. Jowett (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), [595–608], pp. 427–434. 17 Ibid., [599], p. 429. 18 Bernstein, p. 18 19 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, trans. D. F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 145–146. 20 For something to be created, there has to be someone (or something) around to create it. Is Heidegger pointing to recognition by the human spectator of the touch of a human hand and intellect in the creation of the artwork? It may be this that we somehow respond to, in kind, in much the same way as St. Thomas alluded to in the Summa: “for the senses delight in things

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duly proportioned, as in what is after their own kind.” This alludes to the trace of an ‘other’ personality. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 79. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., p.95. 24 Ibid., pp. 71, 94. 25 Swami Vivekananda. 26 Rabindranath Tagore, The Religion of Man (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), p. 62. 27 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) pp. viii–xxix. 28 Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. M. B. Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1999), p. 98.

LAWRENCE KIMMEL

EROS/KALON/AGATHOS Love, the Beautiful, and the Good

There are different levels of perception and response in aesthetic experience, different backgrounds, capacities, and passions of engagement with respect to beauty. But the appeal of the beautiful in the lives of every human being and the constructive and transformative character of that appeal are undeniable. If, as Aristotle expressed it, love makes the world go round, then, at least in the world of human beings, it is beauty that is the force of attraction of that movement. Two basic intuitions led to the writing of this essay. The first is a sense that love and beauty have a necessary and reciprocal connection in the growth of the individual and culture such that as one develops a greater capacity for love, so too does the perception and scope of beauty increase, and as the capacity for beauty expands, so too do the dimensions of love. The second intuition is in the form of a correction, one that reconnects the cultural integrity of love, beauty, truth, and wisdom. Modern philosophy typically struggles with the problem of the relation between the analytic categories of the beautiful and the good, and the further disconnection of these with the true. We seem to have independently divergent and conflicting standards for judging anything, and accordingly need to choose exclusive perspectives. Classical Greek culture modeled a different perspective, insisting on the fundamental integrity of the true, the good, and the beautiful such that whatever is beautiful must be good, and whatever is good must be true. My interest in this essay is an investigation of beauty in the transformation of standards of value. This requires that I address not simply an aesthetics of beauty—the sensuous experience common to the judgment that something is beautiful—but a poetics of beauty, in the sense that beauty is not merely a passive reflection of experience, but an active bringing forth. Contemporary discussions of beauty in art, if the question is addressed at all (artists understandably weary at the insistence that art be “beautiful” in traditional or accepted standards of the time) tend, as do other such questions, to be technical discussions of style or production. My approach is to return to a simpler notion of beauty, away from techne and technique, to Sophia and wisdom—to the way in which beauty is transformative in the life of a person or culture. 3 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 3–12. © 2008 Springer.

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The standard or generative text on beauty in the philosophical tradition is Plato’s Symposium. A dialogue of encomiums to love, its design is to track the transformations of the soul in the pursuit of the beautiful. At dramatic and discursive length, the dialogue among the participants moves toward an ultimate stage of understanding in which the soul gives birth in beauty to what is good. Beauty, on Plato’s view, is the focus of the valuational transformations of a journey toward wisdom. The erotic linking of beauty and wisdom at the highest reach of human activity is to give birth—not simply as in the case of arts, to beautiful objects and thoughts—but to give birth in beauty to the good that is within each soul. The genuinely good life requires continuously creative acts through love and wisdom, but the life is good only if it is brought forth in beauty. There is an expression at the heart of Navajo culture that fits the case I want to argue: to walk in beauty. The classical conception of philosophy as the love of wisdom is sometimes redescribed in the canon of modern philosophy in ways that discounts the essential and generative force of love. So reconfigured, philosophy becomes not the love of wisdom, but the logic of knowledge. In classical Greek thought, love, as desire and the root of motion, was first identified as a lack or absence to account for human aspiration to wisdom. That love is essential is recognized by Plato in the central dialogue of the Symposium; the focus of development toward wisdom is accounted for not in terms of Logos and knowledge, but of Eros and beauty. Wisdom in its cultural embodiment must arguably include all these essential elements, but Plato clearly has in mind a convergence of Beauty and Truth, in the Wisdom that achieves the Eidos of the Good. In effect, a life well lived—the life of wisdom and virtue—requires a love of the beauty of truth. Depending on which dialogues seem central to one’s particular interests, or what philosophical issue is being considered at the time, one may get a very different reading of the Platonic corpus. The greatest contrasting paradigms, both central to Plato, would seem to be the logos of the Republic against or in tenuous alignment with the eros of the Symposium. The question of whether it is reason or desire that is at the heart of philosophical inquiry is perhaps a moot question: Both are obviously central to the defining conception of “the love of wisdom.” Whatever the core of method that develops in the pursuit of wisdom, however, there is no pursuit without a sustaining desire, and that generative idea is the presenting question of the Symposium. The interest of this essay is in the development of desire in beauty, and I will attempt to clarify the connection between love of the beautiful and love of the good— love inspired by beauty in relation to the love of the good in life. In this way I track a convergence of the aesthetic and the ethical in individual life and human culture celebrated in art.

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The original intuition of common sense in ordinary discourse that has served philosophy since Socrates on both sides of the issue pro and contra is that the perception of ‘good’ is a rational judgment, a product of measured reflection. On the other hand, the perception of beauty, as commonly considered, is the result of an emotional reflex more than a reflective or mediated response. Similarly, while the good is a determination with regard to something within, beauty at first blush is a response to something without. The love of the good seemingly requires reflective study and cultural effort, whereas the love of the beautiful seems natural and automatic. But if so, and for that reason, the latter, the love of the beautiful, is arguably prior in an order of philosophical concern. Hence the present focus on the Symposium. The range of discussion of beauty in Plato’s many dialogues would require an extensive inquiry in its own right and will not concern me here. It is enough to say that there is an uneven if not ambivalent comportment in the dialogues toward beauty; but the whole of Plato’s effort is clearly committed to extract the essence of beauty from the sensual faculties and the physical world, from the vulgar and carnal senses, by effecting an ascendance through higher forms of love in the appropriation of Beauty itself into the soul. Nietzsche complains that the Socratic demand, which Plato made his own, is that nothing can be beautiful or good unless it is rational, or rather an insistence that to be beautiful a thing must be good as judged by reason. But even if this is a final position that proves problematic, it obscures the more complex process of development that Plato provides in which beauty— the immediate occasion or quality which accounts for the human being’s response to the world of sense—generates a deeper form of attraction that leads the soul, on reflection, to what is genuinely good in life. Keats’ lyrical affirmation in the Ode on a Grecian Urn, that Truth is Beauty, Beauty Truth, is a romantic trope distanced from philosophical consideration, but there is in classical Greek thought a steady conviction that there exists an integral relation among the fundamental values of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Each requires a convergence of the others: Nothing can be good that is not true, nothing beautiful that is not good. There is also a deep and connected belief that the ascendance to this higher and deeper perception into the heart of what is essential to human well-being is love. Aside from the metaphysics that attends Plato’s analysis, consider the following familiar passage from the Symposium: But what if man had eyes to see beauty    pure and clear and unalloyed    and so, holding converse with true beauty simple and divine, to have hold of a reality, bringing forth and nourishing true virtue.    These things did Diotima say to me    that regarding the attainment of this end, human nature will not find a better helper than love. (Symposium 211e)

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The concluding sense of the dialectical encomiums in the Symposium is that Eros, Love, leading to a converse with true Beauty, has hold of a reality that nourishes the truly Good. It would be hard to find a more complete philosophical statement of the connection that I am analyzing between the concepts and deeper reality of love, beauty, and goodness: The convergence of the good and the beautiful is effected by Eros. And so beauty, that to which desire and attraction responds, is at the root of the good and so at the heart of human culture and to whatever is higher in human aspiration. There are four basic distinctions within classical Greek literature that delineate the phenomenon of love, to which I will try to articulate commensurate levels and kinds of beauty. 1. Libidos is the primal energy of the living organism, the driving force of life itself, a primal manifestation of a lust for existence. 2. Eros is desire for, and evoked by, the other, the primary attractive force in human motivation, usually identified with romantic love. Plato, however, in the Symposium uses this concept as the most general and inclusive form at every level of human motion and attraction. 3. Philein is a measured and thoughtful response of attraction; considered and considerate, it establishes a stable reciprocity of attraction, usually identified with friendship. 4. Agape is a form of “selfless” love, of devotion which does not respond to the imperative of survival, demand requital, or consolidate social relationships. The highest development of love, Agape, is transcendent and reconciling. These common and traditional forms of expression of love can be drawn out in various ways in terms of kinds, levels, and intensity. The object of love at the level of Libidos is the driving imperative of life itself—in the absence of libido there is no life. It is then not surprising to find that life-energy, motion, and love are in this way linked as essential to all existence, including human existence. At the level of the organism, the most elemental manifestation of love tied to the imperative of survival, Libidos brooks no obstacle of consequence that would moderate its force. It does not make sense to speak even in pejorative terms of self-love at this level because there is no “self” to be satisfied, nothing of motion or motive in the imperative of survival that requires the human locution of “self.” At this level of description an organism is driven by the desire for life, and love; “Libidos” is simply an expression of its own energy. To the degree to which an organism as a living creature initially engages the other, it is in terms of a will to prevail over whatever would restrict or suppress such expression.

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If we regard these four different kinds of love in terms of human development, which is my interest here, the second stage toward fulfillment is Eros, understood in terms of attraction rather than compulsion, in which force is displaced by choice. This distinction is partly a matter of perspective, but it also represents a conceptual shift from a natural organism manifesting life energy to a human being responding in specific ways to another human being, and in so doing manifesting in itself a sense of lack, and so a sense of the autonomous Other, and in the process gaining an identifying sense of self. The chief philosophical interest in an analysis of this level of life, as in the Symposium, is precisely that the process and problems of desire generate a preliminary if tenuous sense of humanity, in contrast to the way that the process and problems of libidinal desire generate only an awareness of existence. It may be that the “lack” implicit in the movement of erotic attraction is not necessarily experienced as that come without disaffections of failure or success, but it provides the basis, on reflection, for an awareness of both the limits of self in terms of needs and capacities for satisfying them and also as basis for discernment of wants, of aspiration and fulfillment. It is likely for this reason that Plato makes Eros the comprehensive category of the Symposium in the encomiums to love that trace its kinds, levels, objects, and effects through the various dimension of human desire and development. For Plato this movement is from the sensual world of body to the transcendental world of soul, but we can, I think, make out this difference in domains without adopting his idealist duplication of worlds. Every level of response and every speech in the Symposium is understandable as a distinctly human—that is, erotic— response, and each level has already a capacity for development beyond the libidinal imperative of survival and so figures in the higher development of human culture. In a broad reading of the Platonic corpus, Eros in the Symposium functions in contrast to Logos in a creative and balancing tension that accounts for human life and culture. So considered they provide a parallel metaphor to Nietzsche’s categories of the Dionysian and Apollonian, although clearly betraying a very different cultural bias. Plato’s analysis of culture is centered within the intellectual structure of a formal polity typical of the classical Greek age, in contrast to Nietzsche’s grounding of culture in the whole of nature. Plato’s rejection of the paradigm of the structure of the polis in favor of a republic retained the conviction that human life, both individual and cultural, requires the context of fully human community—the root meaning of polis. Nietzsche’s consequent critique of classical Greek culture placed the vitality of cultural development in the emergent and dynamic context of a changing

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nature. Arguably, in contrast to Eros as the desire of attraction in Plato’s account, Nietzsche’s concept of the life force, of the will to power, founds human culture in terms not of desire and attraction where beauty is crucial, but in terms of libidos—a driving force that seeks to prevail, to overcome the restrictions of any stable development of human community. The times are different of course. Socrates, insisting that the unexamined life was not worth living, was concerned that human beings lost their lives for thinking too little about them; hence “Know thyself” remained the central touchstone of higher culture. In the emergent culture of the nineteenth century and into our own time there has been a decided remove from the classical project of sophrosyne, practical wisdom, and a loss of confidence in the Enlightenment values of universal reason. A persistent existential strain of the modern temper suggests, on the contrary, that human beings may lose their lives for thinking too much, not too little about them. A corollary, though too faintly felt to be an effective deterrent, is that the erotic beauty of the spiritual is depleted by the rational economics of utility. Nietzsche’s romantic and naturalistic rant against the leveling of what he called Alexandrian culture and the effects of a spiritless social order is not without a kind of classical precedent. In Plato’s balancing of Eros with Logos, and in the complementarity of the Republic and the Symposium, he is plainly aware that the spiritual health of culture is an erotic as well as a logistical project, and integral to that project is beauty. In any event, although the emphasis changes in the evolution of culture and intellectual history in accounting for the split of mind/body, self/other, reason/desire, and so on, the four Greek categories of love are still intact and useful, and beyond the libidinal and beginning with the erotic are singular to the development of human culture in their relation to beauty. Philein constitutes a further development from the self-satisfying immediacy of desire of the erotic; it is a dimension of life that can be and is moderated—as filial or fraternal love, friendship. At this level of attraction there is a clear awareness of the reciprocity of human need in the other. Reciprocity may occur earlier, with or without recognition at the erotic level, in that what one desires in a sexual or romantic engagement is precisely the desire of the other; however, such awareness is not essential to erotic attraction, in which the beauty of intensity in the feeling is central. Philein, friendship, discovers beauty in a mediated and shared relationship, a stage apart in beauty from cathection of an object as a source of immediate gratification that generates a nascent sense of social integration of the good and the beautiful. In every case and in whatever form, love is an activity in response to a lack, but in the case of Philein, it is perceived as mutual, an

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implicit acknowledgment that life can be fulfilled only through and within a community of others. If erotic love is a desire for the desire of the other, the success of which ensures a sense of intimacy, Philein is a desire for the mutual well-being of the other which ensures a generative sense of community. It is a love built on recognition of myself in the other that fosters a reciprocity of care and concern. The beauty found here is not in the immediacy of feeling, or in the transformation of self in desire, but is the enhanced beauty of social acknowledgment. Agape, the final development of the form of desire, in whatever its variations of secular or sacred expression, expands the scope of desire and so the scope of beauty and carries with it the idea of transcendence. Perhaps the broadest reading of this form of desire is that of reconciliation with, and celebration of, the whole of existence. If the initial movement of love as Libido is the internal drive of the organism to overcome the other, the evolution of desire develops in Eros for the other, through Philein as care and concern for the other, then the cultural development of human beings comes full circle in a comprehensive love in Agape, paradoxically, that is selfless. In this last stage of development, beauty is discovered in both transcendence of the isolated self and of the mutual isolation of self and others as a form of life. The beauty of appeal in Agape is reconciliation with the wholeness and unity of life. The individual in such a condition of love becomes, in love, one with the whole of existence. Thus the direction of desire and the compass of beauty tends always toward completing the cycle and circle of initiation, separation, and reconciliation. As an organism, a creature must contend with and overcome all else; developmentally transformed by love, this conflicted individuation is overcome and life itself at the level of Agape is reconciled in beauty so renewed. The familiar journey of desire in Plato is an ascendance to a synoptic vision and the form of the good, in which one apprehends beauty as it is in itself, that is, no longer individuated in particular things or people. In a less metaphysically encumbered expression, the phenomenal world appears as, and in terms Keats poetic conflation, is made whole in, love, truth, and beauty. In a different, religious context—for example, in Christianity—this ascendance is from love of world to love of God; but in either case the accomplishment is the fulfillment of the soul, understood as the highest cultural achievement of the human being. Even in Nietzsche’s deliberately profane account in which love is more a manifestation of will than desire, there is this same spiritual ascendance, an overcoming of both the individual and commonplace in a restoration of cultural life.

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In all three of these variances, the manifestation of desire in response to beauty involves transcendence as well as ascendance. Although “selfless” means something quite different in Plato, Christianity, and Nietzsche, the life of the individual is a cultural development, a cycle of completion from a libidinal creature (whether an organism whose origin is the sea or whose home prior to a fatal Fall was Eden) in which the initial imperative of love is the beauty of life itself. The perspective I am suggesting here is that individuated life, through a cycle of developmental desire, is restored through desire to a beauty creatively commensurate with the evolution of Being itself. This is technical and regrettably obtuse. A better way to express the point may be that the development of human life—that is, human being within cultural life—can be recognized in the ascendant cycles of desire and transcending stages, through the sequences of organism, human creature, individuated person, dividuated community, to a final reconciliation of human being with the principle and source of life itself. The life and emergent culture of human beings are generated and transformed through desire toward more and more inclusive forms of beauty. Beauty, which begins as an immediate appeal of perception that separates self from other, becomes an ultimate focus and form of reflection, reconciliation, and celebration. Once we have moved beyond the simple, primal imperative of survival built into the living organism—Libidos—movement is accounted for differently in degree, and arguably in kind. No longer a driving force within, love becomes an attractive force without that accounts for movements of heart and forms of mind. It is at this generative stage that Plato began his account of the requisite journey of human aspiration in philosophy, in Diotima’s relating to Socrates the story of the demigod Eros, son of Penia and Poros—a creature born of poverty and plenty, a creature caught-between, always longing for something higher. It is hardly surprising that this description of Eros is not unlike the picture we have of ourselves as human beings, creatures defined by a culture that is the beneficiary of the spiritual force of this lesser god. We can match up the objects of attraction to levels and kinds of beauty according to the development of love from Eros to Agape. Freed from the imperative of life, love develops in response to beauty, as we have seen, into a transcendent aesthetic that embraces the whole of existence. Although we have identified Libidos as a driving force in response to the imperative of life, it is clear that the first erotic attraction to beauty, for example, in the Symposium’s analysis in terms of judgment, is the attraction of the particular person or object. Plato, typical of the classical Greek sensibility, is interested only in development at this “higher” level of rational consciousness—that is, independent of the cycles of natural necessity that bind the lower forms of

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libidinal life. The concept of beauty on this view only arises at the level of Eros. We can, however, easily conceive of prior possibilities of the emergence of beauty. Consider, for example, Eric Erickson’s familiar psychosocial stages of development, the first focus of awareness in the infant’s attachment to the mother’s breast as a source of life and comfort. It is arguable that this context manifests an initial and intimate sense and source of beauty that develops and remains a focus of attraction in the history of art in sculpting and painting nudes no less than the hyping of the female body in contemporary culture. It is not only philosophy but life that begins in wonder, which carries beauty with it in the logic of its attraction. The whole of ensuing culture, from the first spark of desire, is a continuing development of a logic of wonder in beauty, the most eloquent expressions of which are found in creative modes of variance within religion, science, and art. It is common in philosophy to begin an analysis of beauty at the point of judgment “That is beautiful.” However, beauty seems appropriate to account for the quality in anything that attracts and delights even the child who as yet has no sense of propositional judgment. In this sense beauty may cover a broad range of qualities and levels of response, but in every case a property in or attributable to something that elicits or triggers desire—the response of Eros. Modern aesthetics has tended to analyze the aesthetic response to art as necessarily disinterested, wholly disengaged from erotic engagement. An aesthetic appreciation of the painting of a female nude, for example, must be such that there is no desire for the body in question, no prurience in the perception of a naked woman. But both Plato and Freud, for their different reasons, were closer to the heart of a continuing albeit transformed Eros in accounting for the extended passions of cultural life. It would be useful to engage in more detailed analysis of the dimensions and variations of beauty, for example, in perceptions of pretty, attractive, striking, fascinating, singular, awesome, unique, and so on. It is also clear that as a generic concept neither beauty nor love has definite boundaries. Love, as we have seen, may be usefully distinguished in four distinct categories, prior even to more detailed differences among wants and needs. So too beauty may be discovered in parallel categories that fit the level, kind, and intensity of attraction. In concert with Plato’s analysis, the surface beauty and physical form of youth may be considered within several variations of carnal or sexual attraction; the appeal of friendship further develops in response to a different level and kind of beauty, in the attraction of sharing—not simply of taking, but of giving. We can also attribute, with thanks to Plato, parallels in the ascendance of love and beauty from a response to particular things to more general and inclusive experiences, from physical and surface attraction to the

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deeper spiritual attraction to which the soul—that is, the whole and fully human person—responds, so that at a consummate level of Agape the whole of existence becomes an experience of beauty. From the perspective of the creative arts, desire manifests itself at every level of expression. One may choose to judge levels of expression in terms of development out of primitive expressions of sheer energy in the striving for existence (Libidos), or, in negative terms, in the desperate gestures of those losing a sense of existence, for example, in the graffiti on the tenement walls of the inner city. The judgment of what is art, much less what is good art, always remains tenuous. We are inclined, however, and rightly I think, to reserve the expression of beauty in art to some clear form of affirmation, some celebration of life beyond that of contingent survival. But whatever forms art may take beyond “erotic” expression, that primitive core of desire remains an essential part of the expression and attraction—the beauty—of the work, however refined or abstract its form. Whether in a flat surface of monochromatic paint on a canvas, or the surface features of a sculpted shape, if we are moved by its expression as art we are drawn into the interior life of the piece, into an interior life of desire in ourselves, and into the cultural fabric of a shared history. The fact that beauty is transformative through desire is the creative appeal of art, as well as a reason for its continued existence. Having said all this about the appeal and imperative of beauty and desire in art and life, I will end on less than a positive note about contemporary life and culture: When beauty becomes incidental to the cultural life of a people, when art becomes at best an afterthought or addendum of leisure, when it becomes a mere commodity of investment, a distraction from the tedium of existence, or worse, a medium for primal expressions of anger and hatred, then any hope of a higher culture or a more vital human existence is at an end. It is the love of beauty, simply, that creates and restores what is good in human life, and the gift and grace of the creative arts in giving us access to expressions of that love and to that beauty are finally and integrally an essential form of the good that we cannot do without. Trinity University

GABRIEL HINDIN

THE BEAUTIFUL RECOLLECTED Memory and Beauty in Plato’s Phaedrus

This essay asks what role memory and imagination play in the appreciation of the beautiful. By this I mean in what way do memory and imagination facilitate our relationship with the beautiful. In this respect, then, the main concern of this essay resides in the domain of the experience of beauty itself. A deeper concern asks what our relationship is to the beautiful, what the beautiful experience is, and how it works. As this essay is about relationships, and specifically human relationships with the world, the argument finds its home within the realm of an individual’s comportment with his or her world. My claim is that by examining the experience of the beautiful, from a certain perspective, we begin to open and examine fundamental concerns about our being; moreover I am asserting, in a Heideggerian manner, that fundamental to any other concern, each being’s primary concern, in ontological and quotidian matters, is its self and its own finitude. This is not a concern that is necessarily selfish, nor is it necessarily a concern that places one’s being above the rest of the world, but rather it asserts that each being’s own being is its natural starting point and framework, and that in everyday affairs concern for one’s being informs how those affairs play out. Thus this concern permeates and colors all other human inquiry and finds its home in everything we touch. In what way is this concern? Again borrowing from Heidegger, I am asserting that our relationship with the world is that of “thrownness.” We are ontologically and experientially thrown headlong into the world, and in some form or another, spend the rest of our days addressing the question of why this is so. In this “thrownness” our primary concern is the nature of our being, and as a lived experience this concern manifests itself as concern about our ontological contingency versus essentiality—the nature of our identity or self. What is the nature of our individual being, is it pure accident, are we simply a being whose own flame flickers meekly in the darkness of existence, lit by coincidence and ready to be snuffed out at anytime? It is my claim that opening up our relationship with the beautiful brings us to the question of contingency and identity itself, and that the question of beauty can, in a preliminary manner, provide us with some answers. I examine and interpret moments of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus to address these issues. 13 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 13–19. © 2008 Springer.

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Whether through the error of philosophy, science, or perhaps the error of truth, we too often seek a metaphysical and topological explanation of the structure of our world and our relationship to it that insists upon dualities: cause and effect, mind and body, artist and artwork, one and many, imagination and memory, consciousness and unconsciousness, subject and object, person and world. These dualities abut each other, but in their moment of contact, pull back; one cannot be without the other, yet one exists in a space the other can never dwell in. Within this framework no dialogue can take place, within this framework alienation resides. However, in my interpretation of Plato in his Phaedrus a possibility opens up in which this duality of self and world through the experience of the beautiful can, if only temporarily, melt away. Before entering into the dialogue I should qualify in what way I understand beauty. What takes place when you call something beautiful? My initial claim, which will be clarified through the interpretation itself, is situated in Kant’s distinction between beauty and taste in his Critique of Judgment. However, it is mediated through my position put forth of our primary human concern with our contingency and identity. For Kant taste is ultimately a subjective opinion, which is not grounded in a universal judgment. Thus my taste in clothing is clear to me to be my subjective taste in clothing and not one I would expect everyone else to adopt (though I may think you would be better off if you did). I may not like your taste in clothing, thinking it to be in poor taste, and dismissing it as such. But I would never find a contradiction between the possibility of my taste and your taste existing simultaneously. The same cannot be said about judgment of beauty, says Kant, and I think he is right. To call something beautiful is, for Kant, not a subjective opinion but a universal judgment, a demand—a call. When I claim that something is beautiful, says Kant, I do not mean that it is beautiful to me; rather, I mean that it is beautiful as such and in the process demand your agreement in the matter. Moreover, if you issue forth the call of beauty about a particular thing or artwork, I am forced to take sides in the matter; I cannot simply be satisfied with the idea that it is something that is beautiful to you and leave it at that; I must either agree or refute your claim. What interests me here is the claim itself, what is at stake in this claim, and how it relates back to the earlier point of concern for one’s being qua contingency. Earlier I argued that the primary concern of our being is preoccupied with its concern after its possible contingency. How can one, as an individual, who knows only his or her experiences, and more fundamentally knows the experience of his or her existence, exist as a contingent accidental being? It is this very notion that drives us; this is the heart of desire itself. And this is

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the question that issues forth from the very core of our being and resonates throughout our world. We are looking for authentication of our essentiality— our authenticity. And I argue that this is the very essence of what is at stake in the call of beauty. An experience with a beautiful object, hence a judgment of a beautiful object, a painting, for example, is not one of pure intellect; rather, it resonates through and from our entire body. While experiencing a beautiful object we are fully caught up in it, fully invested; we are taken outside of our everyday attunement and relationship with our world. It is my claim that to be confronted with a beautiful object is to be confronted by something that connects deeply with a lived experience, as a ghost or a memory, and at the same time it confronts us as new and previously unseen. While engaging in an object of beauty I find within it an embodied memory, an externalized manifestation of a lived experience; this is why it resonates so deeply within me. To be confronted with a beautiful object is to be confronted with a thing in which an element of our lived experience is articulated, thusly affirmed. In this moment we see in an object of the world, our self, and the distinctions between subject and world become unhinged. To say that an object is beautiful is a call that issues forth to the other, which demands that one’s authentically validated lived experience via the object in question be recognized by the other as such. Thus what is at stake in the claim of a beautiful object is not the object itself qua object but the object as the embodied experience of the viewer of the object. By calling an object beautiful I am at the same time calling the other, through mutual agreement on the beauty of the object, to acknowledge my essentiality. I am demanding that the other be coconspirator in the transcendence of my contingency. If the other disagrees, then I cannot simply acquiesce, but will make the call again. Let us turn now to the Phaedrus to see what it can tell us about this experience. The dialogue is overtly about the art of making speeches and discusses the qualities and constructions of a good speech. However, one divinely inspired speech, issued through Socrates, presents a compelling story of the nature of the soul and of beauty. It is to this section I will turn; however, before doing so, it is important to highlight a few contextual elements in the earlier parts of the dialogue that have implications for the matter at hand. As I alluded to previously, when confronted with a beautiful object one’s relationship with the world shifts from that of the everyday; one is moved from a place of everyday comportment to a more fully attuned and heighten sense of his or her relationship with the world. The entire dialogue takes place in this shifted attunement. In the very opening of the dialogue Socrates encounters Phaedrus and joins him on a walk outside the city walls, outside

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the domain of everyday human affairs.1 The walls define the border between the city, the world of human affairs, and the world beyond human distinctions and constructions, the world of nature. And it is in this domain outside of everyday human experience that this dialogue unfolds throughout. The opening lines of the dialogue, besides placing it outside of everydayness, are also concerned with the notions of essentiality, contingency, and authenticity. In the very first line Socrates asks, “My friend Phaedrus! Where are you going and where have you come from?”2 Socrates here is not just making pleasantries with Phaedrus but asks after Phaedrus’ identity. He asks after Phaedrus’ sense of self: Who are you, where have you been, and where will you go qua Phaedrus? Socrates brings Phaedrus’ contingent being forward to Phaedrus as an issue of concern, in the realm outside everydayness. In the very first part of the dialogue we learn that Phaedrus has left the city walls to practice memorizing and reciting a speech by the famous Lysias. Socrates, being a self-proclaimed great admirer of speeches, follows Phaedrus and cajoles Phaedrus into sharing Lysias’ speech with him. He playfully taunts Phaedrus in attempt to have the speech read, at one point asserting, “Oh Phaedrus! If I don’t know Phaedrus I have forgotten myself, yet neither of these things is true!”3 Later in the dialogue, after Lysias’ speech has been read and Socrates points out certain inadequacies, Phaedrus attempts to convince Socrates to create his own speech. Flipping roles, Phaedrus playfully taunts Socrates, and mirroring the latter’s taunts, says, “Socrates, if I don’t know Socrates, I have forgotten myself.”4 In this playful taunting we see the first emergence of the mirror of identity; in both cases it is only through the other that Socrates and Phaedrus can know themselves, and in this respect each must grant authenticity to the other in order for that self-knowledge to arise. I point this out to highlight the importance of the recognition and validation of the other in the process of one recognizing oneself; it is this recognition that is demanded in the call of the beautiful as articulated earlier. At last Socrates gives in and delivers his first speech, of which he is ashamed. He responds to Phaedrus, “I’m going to speak with my head covered, so that I can rush through my speech as quickly as possible and, by not looking at you avoid faltering through being ashamed.”5 Socrates closes himself off both from Phaedrus and any other influence, including the Muses, when giving his first speech. He ends his speech quickly and realizes that he has committed a sin. His speech, like Lysias’ before him, was directed to a young boy and attempted to convince that boy that he ought to give pleasure not to the one who loves him but to his non-lover. His sin consists in speaking slanderously against a god, in this case love (Eros). To rectify his wrongdoing, Socrates composes a second speech; it is to this speech that I now turn.

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Socrates begins the speech by articulating three kinds of madness, the third being most relevant to the content of his speech and the experience of the beautiful itself. This madness, a leaving of the senses and an extension beyond the borders of one’s normal self, is the possession by the Muses that seizes a man in the throws of poiesis, of creation. Thus, Socrates states, If anyone comes to the halls of poetry without the madness of the Muses, convinced that technique alone will make one a good poet, both the poetry of this man who is in possession of his senses and the man himself will fall short of perfection and be eclipsed by the poetry of those who are mad.6

Thus it is only the one who can go beyond himself as an individual and give him self over to the power of and union with the Muses that can find himself through poetry. Only the one who can extend past his everyday boundaries can find himself. Socrates, in attempts to right his wrong and make his atonements to the god Eros, begins by offering an interpretation of the nature of the soul. The soul is an immortal thing that does not change, but rather cares after those things that do not have a soul. In an attempt to describe the soul, Socrates likens it to a team of winged horses and a charioteer. The souls of the gods are made of the best stock of horses and are not unruly, but souls of humans are of lesser quality: In our case the driver holds the reins of a pair of horses, one of which is noble and good and of similar stock [to the gods], while the other is of the opposite stock and opposite in character. Thus, the driving in our case is inevitably difficult and troublesome.7

All souls follow a cyclical existence, sometimes animating a living being, and sometimes circulating in the great march of the souls in the heavens. When the soul is nearer to a state of perfection it sprouts wings, which allow it to partake in this great heavenly circuit, but sometimes, owing to forgetfulness, it can lose its wings, and at this point it floats down and inhabits a human or other animal. The souls of the gods travel in a great circuit around the heavens, and upon reaching the edge, they sit and contemplate “the being that really is,” the Platonic forms: On its circular journey, it sees justice itself, it sees judiciousness, and it sees knowledge, not the knowledge that is connected with becoming and varies with the varying things we now say are, but rather the knowledge that exists in the realm of what really is and really is knowledge.8

Each soul according to its character lines up behind Zeus to make this journey. Those that are perfect, the gods, see the forms as they are; those that are less perfect and whose horses are less powerful only catch a glimpse of the true knowledge; and some miss most of it.

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There are times when the horses become unmanageable to the point that they lose their wings and fall to earth; there, depending on the quality of the soul, it will inhabit a human or an animal. Once the soul enters the human it forgets what it once knew about its experience of true knowledge. But the access to knowledge is not entirely cut off from the human. Through a fourth kind of madness, which the rest of the speech addresses, the human soul can “wake up” and remember its previous knowledge. This fourth kind of madness is the madness one undergoes in the presence of beauty. Thus Socrates says, “Whenever someone sees beauty in this world he is reminded of true beauty and his wing feathers grow.”9 Beauty has the power to shine forth, in this case through a young boy, not as the appearance or shadow of the form, but of the form itself. This experience jars the soul; the person becomes afflicted and reacts physically as well as emotionally. Beauty triggers remembrance in the soul, and in the presence of the beautiful object the soul’s wings begin to grow again; the human then appears mad; his concern is no longer with earthly things, but “when he has regained his wings he longs to fly up, but he is unable to and gazes upward like a bird, not caring for the things below, and for this reason is regarded as mad.”10 The engagement with the beautiful in this speech is an erotic one, erotic in that it is fueled by a desire of the speaker for the young boy, but erotic also because the experience of the speaker in the presence of the beautiful boy initiates a kind of madness in which the speaker is both overcome and passes beyond individuation and at the same time is decisively present. It is through this erotic engagement of beauty that the speaker remembers what his soul has forgotten. In this respect the beautiful triggers a moment wherein the individuated soul remembers it was at one point undifferentiated, part of the larger train of souls throughout the heavens. At the same time, this erotic engagement with the other initiates the erotic logic of the mirror of identity, and it is through the beautiful that the lover knows himself and knows his own authenticity. Thus Socrates states, So, he loves, yet he is at a loss as to what he loves. He neither knows what has happened to him nor can he explain it. He is like someone who has caught an eye infection from someone else and cannot account for it. He does not realize that he is seeing himself in his lover as in a mirror.11

At the start of this essay I put forth the claim that in the experience with and judgment of a beautiful object something essential to the human experience is at stake. I claimed that the paradigm of thought governing our worldview of binary opposites places us out of connection with our world, and that the primary concern of our being is our authenticity and contingency. I have argued, through Plato, that the question of this contingency can only be

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answered through the response of otherness, through a movement beyond individuation. And this movement beyond individuation is the experience of the beautiful itself. By interpreting Plato, I do not mean to suggest literally that when one sees a beautiful object one gains access to a universal kind of knowledge, but perhaps more simply one does undergo a small kind of “madness” in which one does step outside of the differentiated self and moves slightly past the subject/world divide, and at the same time the object itself through which the individual is mediated can perhaps provide a means, through the agreement of the other, for an individual’s validation and authenticity. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York NOTES 1

Plato, The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, trans. William Cobb (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), p. 87. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 88. 4 Ibid., p. 95. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 102. 7 Ibid., p. 104. 8 Ibid., p. 105. 9 Ibid., p. 107. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

REFERENCES Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996). Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1951). Plato, The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, trans. William Cobb (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993).

JOHN BALDACCHINO

ART AFTER BEAUTY Values before Standards

[  ] non ho che le lettere fruste dei dizionari, e l’oscura voce che amore detta s’affioca, si fa lamentosa letteratura. ([  ] I’ve none but the stale words of dictionaries, and the murky voice that love utters is faded, turning into [a] grieving literature.) Eugenio Montale1

Any discussion of the relationship between art and beauty faces a dilemma, a question that remains suspended between teleology and relativism. On one hand we find ourselves taking a teleological position when we attempt to justify the complementary nature of art and beauty—with the consequence of obfuscating their necessary distinction. On the other, we are often confronted with a relativist position where what we mean by ‘art’ and ‘the beautiful’ becomes an accident of what we would like them to be. I

The relationship between art and beauty has to confront its own historical character, and therefore its contingent fate. It also invites us to take a historical approach that would ultimately preclude those teleological positions by which art and beauty are entered into speculation over a common ‘homological’ origin.2 This preclusion is essential because often, historical positions are mistaken for teleological positions. In this state of affairs, surrogate forms of measure frame art and beauty. The expectation would be that of a standardized ground that gives us a system of values by which art and beauty are supposed to be ‘rationalized’ and ‘made sense’ of. So when I argue that the relationship between art and beauty needs to confront its historical character, I mean that even the idea of history must partake of the dilemma that arises between art and beauty. In this case art is distanced from the idea of it being for something, somewhere, sometime, or 21 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 21–32. © 2008 Springer.

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someone—whether this is beauty, history, or art itself. Lyotard rightly argues that when it comes to art, “there’s no for, because there is no finality, and no fulfillment.”3 This also precludes the attempt to play the game of beauty and art over a constructed relationship between subject and object. Adorno reminds us that in art the subjective act, by presenting itself as the successful rescue of objective meaning, becomes untrue. Of this it is convicted by kitsch; the latter’s lie does not even feign truth. It incurs hostility because it blurts out the secret of art and the affinity of culture to savagery.4

The relationship between art and beauty remains solidly historical because it is tantamount to a paradox that we can only ‘illustrate’ by history.5 In seeing the relationship of art and beauty for the quandary that it presents, we can confirm that no historical postulate could be simply assumed a priori. When we talk about art, history, or beauty we are in effect posing a context that we come to assume as historical, beautiful, and artistic—as they remain hermeneutically ‘ordered’ by the respective specificity by which they are made, perceived, and located. The interpretation of this state of affairs enacts a hermeneutic positioning where interpretation comes to play its own role without it being necessarily trapped by the portent of a ‘strong’ reality which assumes one form of grounding over another.6 However, it is important to note that Modernism has radically shifted the relationship between art and beauty. Even when Modernity bears its own responsibility for those so-called ‘meta-narratives’ that trapped human doings in the morass of instrumental reason, the art of Modernism had no choice but to be engaged by art’s openness when it came to its positioning vis-à-vis beauty. Modernism opened up history’s interstices. Once those faults became evident, it became obvious that any attempt to ‘mend’ the quandary, or resolve the dilemma of the relationship between art and beauty, would be a futile exercise. Modernism could not avoid the openness by which art found a way to legitimize its autonomy without shirking its historical responsibility.7 The openness to which art was ‘condemned’ produced a situation in which one could discern art and beauty as two distinct concepts—art as an act qua object and beauty as an attribute qua object. Beyond the instrumental impression that this ‘objective’ positioning gives, we know that the logical sequence by which art and beauty ‘follow’ each other emerges from a kind of deceit. When art is seen to be ‘followed’ by beauty it is implied that, logically, a sense of beauty is already prefigured in art as a desire that opens the object to other than art and other than the object qua object. Yet we also know that by saying “Art after Beauty” we add nothing to either art or beauty. It is just a tautological assumption, which on close inspection leaves us high and dry.

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In fact, the title of this essay—“Art after Beauty”— is meant to highlight the impossibility by which any ‘following’ of art after (or from) beauty tends to impress upon us. This also means that any sequential relationship between art and beauty can only hold on the basis of tautological symmetry, which is why I remain very doubtful whether the term ‘follow’ holds any validity at all. So with art following beauty, where is the deceit? The desire to move into the world by what the Modernists saw as their utopian telos was ultimately the greatest lie of Modernism. The Modernists were intent on other than the redemption of history: They remained in the ideals of a quidditas—a whatness—in a world outlook that required everything to become object.8 Art’s magic remains in how art could deceive while constructing what it meant to undermine. In this way Modernism’s revolution was ultimately assumed as a blatant failure—that is, a willed failure that was necessary in order to free art from the shackles of the reason that the polity of Modernity—that is, Capital and the Revolution—proclaimed as art. Adorno reminds us that such forms of objectivity confirm art as “magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”9 The openness of the work of art confirmed the quandary by which Modernism made a promise to the world while secretly keeping its fingers crossed. We can all cite several prominent examples from Modernism where we witness an approach to art and beauty that is ‘settled’ (if one can use this word) by the very openness that confirms their aporetic relationship. The very notion of relationship—as a conciliatory word—between art and beauty corroborates the deceit of the Enlightenment. Modernity has no choice but use deception in order to posit its take on the dialectic. While claiming its criticality as central to its dialectical nature, Modernism sought to resolve the matter by force of those narratives that sought to explain the world in its own positive terms, where even would-be nihilist gestures such as those of Marinetti or Dalí were neutered by their certainty—which remind us of Nietzsche’s ambivalence with a certain form of nihilism when he states that All those brave birds which fly out into the distance, into the farthest distance—it is certain (!) somewhere or other they will be unable to go on and will perch down on a mast or a bare cliff-face—and they will even be thankful for this miserable accommodation! But who could venture to infer from that, that there was not an immense open space before them, that they had flown as far as one could fly!10

The deception of Modernity found its viability (rather than mere justification) in forms of openness by which the inherent Machiavellian nature of its polity came into operation. One could say that notwithstanding its self-emasculation, the certainty of Modernism gave ground to an openness that ultimately allowed

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us to go ‘beyond’ Modernity. It was because of the inherently Machiavellian nature of the Enlightenment that this also gave way to an openness that furnished us with the implements of escape from the morass of instrumental reason.11 It was never the end of the journey, and that is why Nietzsche sees beyond blunt forms of nihilism: We are reassured that “Other birds will fly farther!”12 II

The openness by which we can now assume the quandary of art and beauty is also informed by the history of art’s relationship with beauty. In the Quattrocento, art and beauty remained intrinsic to each other because art was predicated by a theocentric manifestation of beauty. This intrinsic relationship was moved by a desire—at least in the religious imaginary—to realize God’s beauty in the ultimate sacrifice of Christ’s human death. Christ’s death takes a historical character, assuming for history a collective catharsis whereby God-made-flesh is made manifest as Spirit-made-art in the eyes of those who had to make sense of the aesthetized politics of the day. While we are told how horrendous was the death on the cross, in the Christian narrative of salvation we are also reassured that Christ’s death on the cross results in divine resurrection. So it was necessary for such an ugly death to be made manifest by an intense beauty that only art could express. Put in this way, one could never entertain any doubt that art by itself could not be beautiful. This is evident in the Peruginos, the Botticellis, and even the early Raphaels, where the Son of God is assumed by an historical reverence actualized by space and a time that were familiarized and indeed modernized by art’s magical ‘truth.’ This relationship was dialectical even in the days when theology was safe in its a priori certainties. Nevertheless, even in the safety of theological certainty—or one should say because of the safety of theological certainty— art and beauty were prone to radical shifts in their historical positioning within the development of art. This is very clear in the radical shifts of art and beauty within the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti. His three Pietà’s come to represent art’s manner—maniera—as a sphere of radical change in which the idea of beauty moves away from the purism of the Quattrocento to become almost its own other in the Cinquecento. This becomes obvious in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Arnold Hauser argues that “the Last Judgement [  ] is the first important artistic creation of modern times which is no longer ‘beautiful’ and which refers back to those medieval works of art which were not yet beautiful but merely expressive.” He continues,

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Michelangelo’s work is nevertheless very different from them; it represents a protest, achieved with obvious difficulty, against beautiful, perfect, immaculate form, a manifesto in the shapelessness of which there is something aggressive and self-destructive. It is not only a denial of the artistic ideas which the Botticellis and Peruginos sought to realize in the same place, but also of the aims once pursued by Michelangelo himself in the representations on the ceiling of the same Sistine Chapel, and it surrenders those ideals of beauty to which the whole chapel owes its existence and all the building and painting of the Renaissance origin.13

We can argue that the later Michelangelo challenged the very foundation of the positive dialectic of theocentrism. His response to the theocentric polity was to take the doctrine of the mystery of salvation to its extreme consequences and bring forth the humanity of God’s intervention—Christ’s human death—within the grasps of human reason. Michelangelo does not deny Christianity, but he takes it to its rational conclusions: that of the denuded history of an equally denuded human condition. After Michelangelo, the dialectical relationship between art and beauty has no choice but to be seen in its historic truth—thereby as a negative and nonidentitarian truth (to use Adorno’s and Nietzsche’s terms) and thus defined by its paradoxical nature. In the humanized polity of Michelangelo’s art, there is no hope for a synthesis between art’s aesthetic deed and beauty’s salvific narrative. A split between art and beauty by no means dooms this state of affairs. Rather, the expectation of redemption (as articulated by Michelangelo’s salvific narrative) is made robust by the intellectual and ethical sobriety that the distinct positions of art and beauty help us to achieve. Here I offer the example of what I have called elsewhere Caravaggio’s ‘modernity’—that is, the actual ways by which Caravaggio attunes art to the modo of history and thereby gambles (and ultimately eliminates) the very serenity by which art has always been limited to the beautiful.14 In Caravaggio’s Mannerist context, history must appear in its horrendous truth. Even when Caravaggio verges on the heretical, his art remains true to history and in turn true to the redemptive dilemmas where the beauty of God’s salvation remains true to the horrors of the death of God’s only begotten Son. Historically this was consonant with the ideas of a ‘low Church’ within Catholicism, emerging in figures like San Filippo Neri, whom Caravaggio admired and whose life with the poor and the dejected he sought to reveal in its challenge to the high ideals of a previously undisputed theocentric polity. Caravaggio’s art is not only a breakthrough in terms of its aesthetic narrative, but it also carries beauty into new forms of theological thinking. In Caravaggio’s work we have the gospel of God’s only begotten Son who dies the death of a thief and a criminal for the sins of the world that rejected the poor, the marginalized, and those made outcast by a polity that claimed its roots in a divine calling (and therefore a polity that was supposed to be

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beautiful by dint of its assumed divinity). To Caravaggio—who himself was a criminalized outcast of this polity—the redemptive message had to be borne out by a beauty that becomes other (if not extraneous) to the relative serenity found, in say, Raphael’s Deposizione. In Caravaggio’s art we are regaled by an ontological argument for beauty that takes art into the bowels of truth, only to return it to us in its brutal sense, so that it could enlighten us with the horror of the same truth by which beauty relates to art. Caravaggio’s truth is neither Aristotelian nor Platonic. It rejects a positively synthesized dialectic. It thrives on the nonidentity of its parts and portends the horror of skinning someone alive—a martyrdom that remains central to the Catholic imagination of the Mannerist and Baroque notions of beauty—which, indeed, the late Michelangelo had already anticipated in his depiction of St. Bartholomew’s martyrdom in his Giudizio Universale. III

When Eugenio Montale is faced by the aesthetic greatness of the Mediterranean sea, he declares that all we have are mere lettere fruste; old and obvious, stale, moldy and musky words that we may have to use, time and time again, almost by way of helpless endearment, to try to explain and reaffirm that any union between our conception of beauty and its being made manifest is by no means a given: [  ] non ho che le lettere fruste dei dizionari, e l’oscura voce che amore detta s’affioca, si fa lamentosa letteratura.15 ([  ] I’ve none but the stale words of dictionaries, and the murky voice that love utters is faded, turning into [a] grieving literature.)

In Montale’s beautifully crafted stanzas one can see the frustration of this state of affairs: The words that are musky and the syllables in flight, which we have come to love by dint of habit and certitude, become the only instruments by which we want to challenge the very certitude that we have come to accept—and to some extent love—in the idea of art and beauty. We also sense that Montale is suggesting that this union is by no means less assumed by a justification of why, as human beings, we want our manifestations to be beautiful. Indeed his very narrative cannot be other than composed in a poetic form that is no less beautiful even when it remains intentionally hermetic. But we can also see how this modernist poet only takes

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us as far as assuming that this union between a concept and a manifestation comes to us as an innocent expectation Pur di una cosa ci affidi, padre, e questa è: che un poco del tuo dono sia passato per sempre nelle sillabe che rechiamo con noi, api ronzanti.16 (Yet you entrust us with one thing, father, namely: that some of your talent has been forever passed in those syllables we bear in us, [like] buzzing bees.)

In Montale’s awe of the beauty of the sea there is a bewildered feeling that any relationship of this kind could well turn into a serious breach of what the poetic forms, by which we manifest such awe, should do for us. This becomes evident when, in fact, we opt to make art for ourselves in an attempt to preserve the feelings that we had when we did not experience beauty in art, but somewhere else—as we can see in Kant when he discusses beauty by way of the subliminal fears that we get from the sight of mountains or the fear from cataclysms like earthquakes. So the question is: In view of the historicity of the relationship between art and beauty, why should art remain a form of ‘beauty’ and why should beauty—as an ‘unqualified’ attribute—be made to serve as an instrument for the legitimation of art? The latter statement raises an issue regarding beauty as an attribute, which also questions the very nature of beauty in relationship to something else. The issue of relationship is crucial because we know that the phrase ‘a beautiful horse’ brings up the question whether (1) ‘beautiful’ is just an attribute of a thing (in this case the horse) or (2) the thing bears out the notion of beauty as (a) an ideal to which we attach our modes of understanding of (or indeed saying that) the horse is beautiful or (b) that the horse brings to us the very idea as an originary quality of beauty. These questions may ‘solve’ the problem for us in a lateral way. We could argue that beauty is a matter of language, and to that extent it offers the opportunity of a game for us to consider in ascertaining what we value as beautiful and thereby what we could conserve of the very notion—and utterance—of the term and attribute ‘beauty.’ We can try to say that the question of beauty has to do with an agency of language insofar as it has to do with the denial of private languages so we can withdraw from the very temptation to keep the beautiful ‘intimate.’ In this way we may want to see how we could draw beauty out of a linguistic excuse and attempt to see how it could be played in the game of life relations in terms of what it says of us when we use it as a kind of agency of thought and language.

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However, here we are also discussing beauty in terms of art, and the consequence of that is more than simply assuming beauty in its linguistic agency. In art’s historic illustration we see that there is no straight answer prompted by historical function or aesthetic language. Art is a manner that assumes itself out of the many aspects by which we cope with history and indeed by which we construct our realities, rather than simply imitate or replicate history as a form of illustration. And this is where the idea of ‘history as illustration’ stops. History, like beauty, forms part of that construction of reality that is human and is responsive of, and a respondent to, the interpretations by which we make sense of our deeds as human beings. The question I chose for this discussion also revolves around the question of value and standard. It is here that the notion of insufficient words (for Montale with regards to the Mediterranean; for us in view of the dilemmas of our own history and its necessary deceit) comes in play. This initial insufficiency is indicative of the insufficiency of our dialectical designs when these are confronted by the deceit that is assumed in order to survive history—a fallacy that hides truth to protect its potential effect against the mores of times, or the Machiavellian strategies by which art, among other phenomena, is played against the crude standards by which human expression is expected to perform in the name of (or to the service of) the polity. So when we attempt to conform to the idea of a standard by which we measure beauty and art we know that standards are by no means innocent. This is where the historical context for the question of art and beauty kicks in, especially when we know that the question of art and beauty often gets confused with epistemology. In the latter case, art and beauty begin to be seen as pertaining to forms of knowledge by which we are expected to behave to the tune of those very norms that are posed to us as ‘values.’ One can see how, like the fallacy of a sequential procedure from beauty to art, we have a procedure of values from standards. The very notions of procedure and sequence are symptomatic of a structure that seeks to construct meaning via a sociology of means and ends by which knowledge comes to us in a rubric and is charted out by the ‘efficiency quotient’ that it is supposed to articulate. The economy of knowledge, like its sociology, assumes a logical procedure that fulfils the teleology—the same teleology by which art and beauty are bound together to fulfill the positive dialectic of the polity (even when the polity is presented to us as democratic and thereby secular). In this state of affairs the ‘beautiful horse’ is questioned by assumed values of why we consider the horse as beautiful, and the whys and wherefores are not necessarily objectified forms of knowledge (as if there was an objectified

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beautiful horse) but are posed in loose Platonic terms—more precisely brought up to obfuscate the dialectical grounds by which Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Schoenberg, Joyce, or Beuys have moved to articulate ‘their own’ forms of modernity. This is also where the question of the relationship between art and beauty is framed in a context in which the value of beauty and the value of art mean something different—because the context for what is ‘value’ (in terms of the relationship between art and beauty) has something else as its object apart from art and beauty. This other object can take various forms, which, more often than not, pertain to specific political assumptions made in the various spheres in which art and beauty appear as free agents or agents of freedom—even when we know that this means something other than freedom as a phenomenon of humanity. IV

So the idea of beauty and art remains flawed by its own dilemma, and this is compounded when value and standards become the means by which beauty (or art) is supposed to follow from art (or beauty). By way of concluding, I recall why Kant went on the rampage with the whole idea of disinterestedness when he discusses the questions of beauty and aesthetics in general. In his Critique of Judgement (§6) Kant argues that The beautiful is that which apart from concepts is represented as the object of universal satisfaction.    For the fact of which everyone is conscious, that the satisfaction is for him quite disinterested, implies in his judgement a ground of satisfaction for all men.    Consequently the judgement of taste, accompanied with the consciousness of separation from all interest must claim validity for all men without this universality depending on objects.17

And in the Introduction (§V) to his Logic Kant also explains that Aesthetic perfection consists in the agreement of cognition with the subject and is based on the special sensibility of man. In aesthetic perfection    no objectively and universally valid laws can be applied, in accordance with which this kind of perfection could be judged a priori in a manner universally valid for all thinking beings as such. So far as there are, however, also general laws of sensibility that are valid, though not objectively for all thinking beings, yet subjectively for all mankind, an aesthetic perfection may be conceived which contains the ground of a subjectivegeneral pleasure. This perfection is beauty: that which pleases the senses in intuition and for that very reason can be the object of a general pleasure, because the laws of intuition are general laws of sensibility [my emphasis].18

When I originally proposed this paper, I suggested that the relationships between art and beauty, value and standard, are embedded in the peculiar conditions that make them. So far as history was concerned, I started by

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arguing in this essay that beauty and art, as a relationship, had a responsibility toward the contexts that made them—and by that, the conditions appeared as indeed peculiar and specific. Yet as this paper evolved, I came to realize that it is not enough to say that the conditions remain peculiar without critically engaging in artThis is where art’s way of deceit in Modernism secures a qualification for art’s autonomy from any sequential relationship between art and beauty, value and standards. However, this state of affairs throws in a further caveat: that of a presumed dialectic between art and beauty. While beauty entertains a dialectical character, art does not necessarily assume the synthesizing certainties of the dialectic—especially when it comes to history and the historical assumptions that are made about beauty. As the art of Caravaggio and Michelangelo shows, art’s dialectical construct is nonidentitarian and remains far removed from any positive resolution. What takes place in art is not a dialectical narrative of resolutions, but a manner of form and being by which any historical dialectic appears in its true intents—as evident in the entrapment of Modernity by the logic of instrumentality. Also, I originally entertained the idea that, by means of a relational pattern between art and beauty, and values and standards, we could sustain the argument for the method of epoché without having to lose the very ground on which we can continue to relate beauty to art and without having to succumb one to the other. In part, I made an argument for the last intention—that of art and beauty refraining from succumbing to each other. Yet the ‘method’ by which this came forth was not by a suspension of the whereabouts of art, but by the very assumption of art’s historical grounds, which proved to be in itself a way of suspending the positivist assumptions that are often made by some art historians who tend to assume a straight-laced relational pattern between art and beauty in terms of the values and standards that appear as the historical contexts of art. However, I find this relational pattern to be illusive. Equally illusive is the expected location of the method of epoché—which proved to be other than a simple assumption of symmetry between values and subjects that are normally perceived as self-evident in terms of their ‘reduction.’ The bottom line of my attempts and counterattempts may have not led to what I expected in terms of the symmetrical sequences of art, beauty, value, and standard. Knowing that such patterns were tautological, I assumed that their assumption of being quandaries (that should be untouched) would do the job of breaking the hermeneutic cycle by which they become tautologies. Yet this is not enough. Even when art and beauty (in their relational dilemma) are left undisturbed (so to speak), and therefore are assumed as disinterested,

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the notion and application of disinterestedness needs to be read against a specifically qualified history in which art is seen as radically autonomous from beauty. If, as Kant’s argument goes, aesthetic “perfection is beauty: that which pleases the senses in intuition and for that very reason can be the object of a general pleasure, because the laws of intuition are general laws of sensibility,” we could never find this mirrored in art. This is because art’s does not attune to perfection per se. Perfection in art has nothing to do with beauty as such, but with art’s ways of achieving autonomy from the history that made it. Likewise in the artistic endeavor, the laws of intuition do not follow the general laws of sensibility as in beauty. Rather, in art, intuition diffracts itself from universality. In fact it is more likely that in art, intuition is located within the fragments of particularity. If there is any sequencing or mirroring between art and beauty, it is one that is reflected in a shattered mirror. At the same time, any ‘values’ by which we try to assume this relationship are never reflected anywhere. What is often assumed as a number of standards or concepts by which the relationship between art and beauty could be measured is only a forced assumption of the same tautological mirroring by which we insist on invoking art by means of beauty. The values that are expected of this relationship can do nothing but confirm that art and beauty, although apparently destined to be paired, remain out of joint. Teachers College, Columbia University, New York

NOTES 1 Eugenio Montale, “Potessi almeno costringere,” in Ossi di sepia, “Mediterraneo” (8), reprinted in Montale, Eugenio, Tutte le poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990). My English translation. 2 On the shortcomings of the notion of a homological origin, see the opening chapter of Andrew Benjamin, Art Mimesis and the Avantgarde (London: Routledge, 1991). 3 Lyotard, Jean François, Anamnesis of the Visible, or Candour, in Lyotard, Jean-François, The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 239. 4 Adorno, Theodor, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 225–226. 5 Here it must be noted that ‘history as a form of illustration’ must imply an externalized view of reality. It is as a form of hindsight—thoroughly critical and not merely reflective—that history allows us to see our human doings for what they are. Through historical illustration we know that there is no such thing as a dialectical resolution, nor any straight hope for entelecheic fulfilment. 6 I would present history as that ‘weak’ reality that facilitates our moves between the interstices of the multiple interpretations of art and beauty. This argument is framed by Vattimo’s notion of weak thought (pensiero debole), which I also apply for the notion of a ‘weak reality.’ See

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Baldacchino, John, Between Illusions: Art’s Argument for Weak Reality, in Tymieniecka, A.-T., ed., Analecta Husserliana LXXXVI, pp. 157–168 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2005). 7 Eco, Umberto, Opera Aperta. Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan: Bompiani, 1995). 8 On the matter of the quidditas (whatness) and the utopian tropes of the avant garde see Baldacchino, John, Easels of Utopia. Art’s Fact Returned (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1998). 9 Adorno, op. cit., p. 222. 10 Nietzsche Friedrich, Daybreak § 575, in Nietzsche, Friedrich, A Nietzsche Reader, ed. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 205. 11 Here I am mindful of Gramsci’s assessment of Machiavelli’s Il Principe as a modern concept of the polity, particularly with regard to the political mechanism of cultural and social secularization via the concept and ‘practice’ of a ‘Modern Prince’ (as embodied in the concept of the political party assumed by the precepts of Modernity). See, for example, his Noterelle sulla politica del Macchiavelli, in Gramsci Antonio, Note sul Macchiavelli (Turin: Editori Riuniti, 1975), particularly pp. 9ff. 12 Nietzsche, op. cit. 13 Hauser, Arnold, The Social History of Art, (London: Routledge, 1984), Vol. II, p. 105. 14 On Caravaggio’s ‘modernity,’ see Baldacchino, Easels of Utopia, pp. 86ff. 15 Montale, “Potessi almeno costringere,” in Montale, op. cit., “Mediterraneo” (8). My English translation. 16 Montale, “Noi non sappiamo quale sortiremo,” in Montale, op. cit., “Mediterrane” (6). My English translation. 17 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Press, Collier-Macmillan, 1974), pp. 45–46. 18 Kant, Immanuel, Logic, trans. R. S. Hartman and W. Schwarts (New York: Dover, 1988), p. 41.

PIERO TRUPIA

THE SEMANTICS OF BEAUTY The Grammar of the Sign and the Phenomenological Gaze for a Knowledge of Reality beyond the Sign

INTRODUCTION

Aquinas holds that beauty is claritas. This is the Truth in its splendor, purity, and glory. Beauty is not a fictional artifact superimposed upon the features of the ordinary world. Beauty lets the essence of things appear as well as their mutual belonging and, sometimes, their cosmic togetherness. Beauty itself is not performable. It is performable, however, as a mise en scène of even the most ordinary objects. They can make beauty appear only through a perfect textuality that issues from rigorous syntax and semantics. An education in reading beauty is an education in catching reality. AN INVADING AND AUTO-REFERENTIAL BEAUTY

The present epoch is characterized by the invasion of the “beautiful”—a beauty that is, strictly speaking, functional. It can be admired by virtue of the capacity of “beautiful things” communicated through the flow of mass media, which is, above all, commercial but also political, religious, and cultural. These media strike the senses in unexpected ways; they stupefy and stir the psyche. This beauty is almost exclusively psychological, an efficient means of communication—communication being the principal instrument of address and governance of the masses. Also, this beauty does not generate the surprise of discovery, but rather the tremor of the unexpected. It triumphs in the scene of public ceremonies, in the tools of the theatre of the social baroque as the project of propagation, today as yesterday, of a prodigious faith, against the insidiousness of austerity and the severity of the reforms of customs that are announced from time to time. A dominant figure of the baroque, beauty was then “strangely” not codified. It lets things appear differently than they are according to nature and culture, “culture” being understood as the organized attempt to discover and represent the true with the personal appropriation of the true. 33 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 33–64. © 2008 Springer.

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The prince of the baroque, Gianlorenzo Bernini, was a conscious master, even ante litteram, of this “estrangement.” Against the critics of his new manner of sculpting, he celebrated the frothy lightness of the drapery and head of hair of his equestrian monument of Louis XIV as the greatest achievement of his chisel. He punctiliously explained that he rendered rock as malleable as wax and that he managed to fuse sculpture with painting. His great achievement was transforming the equestrian figure, traditionally connected to the earth, into a celestial vision that ruptures space.1 Panofsky characterized the baroque as “a new order of being, a psychometaphysical state of consciousness [  ] the universal fluid perception in which every perceived reality can be taken up.” Panofsky speaks of the baroque as a representation of reality through “allegories.”2 Courbet, even as a professed realist, also speaks of his own personal baroque as a “real allegory.” Today’s mass communication has created the baroque of advertising, a propagation of faith in the magnificent fate and progress of an opulent consumerism as well as a belief in continual development. But some kind of referent, whatever it may be, is necessary for the success of the psychogogic intervention. It would be better if it were not verifiable and non-discussable. Less faith, then, would be required. A neo-mythology, namely, beauty as appearance or image, is the principal referent of mass communication: youth, that is, age without reference to any of its signs; health that consists of tanned skin and a well-defined but not too bulky musculature; an apparent cordiality constructed in the schools of communication that can sell used cars without any guarantees. One reaches the mutation of the baroque exasperation with nature through the total rhetorical manipulation of the referent. The upshot of this is the grotesque, which is opposed to the sublime, as Victor Hugo indicates in the preface to his work on Cromwell. Today’s literary representation of the grotesque is that willed and undergone by the poet Gustav Von Aschenbach, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Enamored with young Tadzio, he entrusts himself to the hands and more to the seducing words of his Venetian hairdresser: We only have the age of our spirit, of our heart [  ] Believe me, dear Sir, grey hair lies more than a much maligned hair-color [  ] Allow me, Sir. All done! [  ] And now all that remains to be done is to freshen up the skin of your face. Indefatigably and unhappily—the story continues— the hairdresser dedicates himself, always with greater enthusiasm, to one manipulation and then to another [  ] A small insignificant touch-up [  ] and now Sir you can fall comfortably in love. Von Aschenbach—and so the story ends—leaves quickly like a dream, confused and scared. He was wearing a red tie and his wide straw hat was adorned with a multicolored ribbon.

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Today, we go beyond this notion of the grotesque, which is ingenuous. With plastic surgery and controlled doses of botox, a paralyzing poison that stretches wrinkles and vitrifies one’s facial expression, the physiognomic referent is annihilated, as is the story that is impressed upon one’s face, one’s true personal identity. This is the “beauty” of postmodernism. Fortunately, art has reacted. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was seen by Picasso as an ideal of beauty in his time, a time that was becoming one of white telephones. In 1944, the portraits of Francis Bacon were distorted according to a precise reference indicated by Bacon himself: “Look at yourselves in the mirror as soon as you get up hung over from the evening before and after a night of nightmares.” These are distortions of one’s physiognomy that are related to a lived-experience. This is not decorative beauty, but it is true just as it is for the functionary dwarfs of the Court, full of nobility and dignity, that Velazquez painted. WEAK BEAUTY

Weak thought and its practical application most popular with cultivated individuals, and hermeneutics, have annihilated the very idea of the referent. In Gianni Vattimo’s conceptual view, which he wishes to be a further development of Heidegger’s existentialism, being certainly is, but we know nothing about it. All that remains is the historiography of the existents. Vattimo follows Heidegger when he says that poetic silence is a lived-relation to the nothing that draws near to its own essence as it draws closer to silence; it is the sunset of language after language pushing itself to its extreme limits where it shipwrecks in its own silence.

In contemporary effective poetic practice, one reaches the “rarefaction of lyrical language, experimentalism, the proliferation of senses without any further instant of legitimation in the referent.”3 Vattimo also affirms, speaking in light of Gadamer’s words, “Hermeneutics is in its core an application of analytic philosophy; it is a development of Wittgenstein’s theory of language games.”4 For Vattimo, the ground of hermeneutics is the Gadamerian thesis: “Sein das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache.”5 If this is true, “the referent loses itself in the continual referring of language [within texts and between texts], which activates interpretation within the hermeneutic circle from interpretation to interpretation.” This circularity, Vattimo says, “does not find a conclusion, a foundation in the classical sense of the word that was also valid for Dilthey.”6

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This is the fundamental undertaking of hermeneutics: “a break-down.” This refers to a breaking down of every real extralinguistic foundation of saying and, consequently, of knowing. For Gadamer, this breaking down is the reduction of truth to the method of searching out the foundation, a search and construction of pathways, the odonpoeietiché of Zeno of Cytium, but only to pass through them without an aim outside the net of these said pathways. Even worse, Gadamer reduces truth to its “being spoken about.” He maintains, however, that one can escape the web with the Hegelian notion of the experience of truth when “the encounter with the ‘thing’ produces an effective modification in the subject.” This may seem to be an encounter with Husserlian phenomenology, but it is not. That experience “does not found itself in any sense of the philosophical tradition.”7 What does our displacement do? It creates an otherness, it sends us back to another region of sense, to another provisional referent. THE SAYING AND NON-SAYING OF GADAMER

Gadamer is not so extreme. He seeks to chart out the course of the hermeneutic program in the concluding pages of his Truth and Method. Here, the discursive character of a hermeneutical philosophy clearly emerges, namely, saying and non-saying, affirming and negating, asserting and, immediately afterward, doubting. An example: That which comes to expression in language is something other than the word; the word is only a word insofar as it expresses [  ] That which comes to expression in it is not something that exists separately; only in the word does it receive its proper substantial [sic!] determinacy.8

Gadamer also comments on art: The being of the work of art is not an in-itself that distinguishes itself from its execution and the contingency of its mode of presence. Only by virtue of secondary witnessing of the two aspects does one attain the aesthetic differentiation [  ] The language that things speak [  ] is not the logos ousias [  ] the work of art identifies itself with the history of its determinations.9

Gadamer continues with his saying and non-saying. He wisely takes up again the concept of the beautiful and the good of Plato and Aristotle10 and he summarizes their thought: Beautiful things have a value that shines forth in themselves. We cannot ask what they are useful for. They are preferable in and of themselves. They permit one to peer into the highest ontological grade of that which is called kàlos.11

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He is, however, seduced by the Platonic idea of the beautiful mirroring the order of the cosmos. From this stems a definition of the beautiful that “has a universal ontological character.”12 He concludes, “Art can discover within the structured totality of the natural order the residual possibilities of the formation of the artificial and can perfect the beautiful nature of the ontological order.” With these words Gadamer not only returns to the metaphysical tradition of the Greeks, neo-Platonists, and medievals, but also he goes beyond them, creating a universal referent that is above all things. It is the light that everything makes appear such that it makes itself intelligible and evident; it is the light of the word. It founds itself upon a metaphysics of light, that is, the strict relation between the splendor of the beautiful and the evidence of the intelligible. It is the relation that has guided us in the establishing of the hermeneutic problem.

He does not hesitate to recall that this spiritual light, this divine light, is that of Augustine. He draws particular attention to the fact [that] only with the creation of light does God begin to speak [  ] a spiritual illumination that gives birth to the differentiation of created things [  ] We can see in this sharp Augustinian explanation of Genesis an interpretation of the speculative vision of language that we developed in the analysis of the structure of hermeneutic experience of the world according to which the multiplicity of thought is born only from the unity of the word.13

Here, we do not speak of a “falling-through.” Three pages remain at the end of Truth and Method, and, as one would expect, he returns to reexamine his words: The concept of evidence belongs to the rhetorical tradition. Eicos, verisimilitude, the evident (das Enleuchtende) [  ] reclaim a proper legitimacy against truth and certainty of that which is demonstrated or known [  ] The hermeneutic experience is positioned in this domain—it is the occurrence of an authentic experience. The fact that in a discourse something imposes itself as “evident”, without even being controlled, judged and decided upon, is verified by the case in which something transmitted from the past speaks.14

Is the past, then, the foundation? And, what is the past of the past? Is it a foundation just like Atlas on the tortoise, floating on the great sea? Gadamer has a solution to this aporia: If we commence with the fundamental structure, through which being is language, that is, autorepresentation, a structure is revealed at the base of the hermeneutic experience of being; the result is not only the character of the event of the beautiful and the eventual structure of all comprehension. Just as the beautiful has revealed itself as the model of a fundamental ontological structure, the same is true for the concept of truth that reconnects itself to it.15

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It seems that here Gadamer recovers the thing in itself. In fact, he adds and confirms that splendor is not external to the beautiful; it is proper to being itself insofar as it is true (here Thomas Aquinas should have been cited). Gadamer also speaks of the metaphysical character of the beautiful [  ] constituted by the fact that in it the hiatus is fastened between the idea and the phenomenon; [a beautiful thing] that belongs to an order of being that arises in itself, stable and permanent beyond the flow of phenomena. But it is equally clear that it appears as a “phenomenon.”16

Where do ontological indefiniteness, the falling-through, infinite crossreferences, and the circularity of hermeneutics finish? This is not a problem for Gadamer. “Ambiguity does not constitute the weakness of the oracle, but is its force.” He continues, “There is no sense in asking whether Hölderlin or Rilke believed in their gods or angels [  ] Existence cannot add nothing to the aesthetic content of pleasure, to pure appearing.”17 But, what appears? These are questions that hermeneutics does not answer. Gadamer reconfirms that beauty is not a splendor that illumines a form from the outside. This resplendence comes properly from the being itself of the form [  ] From this, it follows that, with respect to the being of the beautiful, the beautiful must always ontologically understand itself as an image. It makes no difference at all that it appears “as itself” or its image.”18

But the image, in its ontological legality, has no emptiness behind or ahead of itself, but it has something that appears in the image and it is not the same image. Gadamer explains, “It [the beautiful] is certainly ‘idea’; it belongs to an order of being that arises in itself, stable and permanent above and beyond the flow of phenomena. But it is equally clear that it appears as a ‘phenomenon’.”19 As always, saying is a negation with the further complication of an unforeseen appeal to Plato that seems, at the same time, both shared and held at a distance. He justifies these oscillations with the golden key of the “hermeneutic procedure,” pointing out that it is “only the effort of a purely philological consciousness [  ] indifferent to “the truth of texts.” One notes the shrewd Gadamerian use of semantic quotation marks in order to bring to evidence a particular significance of the term. He avoids compromising himself by employing the ordinary significance. He remarks, The comprehension of a text cannot suppose, from the viewpoint of a superior objective knowledge, an already-resolved problem of truth [  ] The dignity of hermeneutic experience [  ] has appeared to us as residing in the fact that in it there are no data that are treated simply as coordinating with the rest of our consciousness. Rather, what comes from the past tell us (italics in text) something.

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He nihilistically concludes, however, by saying that there is no thing [read ‘in itself”] where language matters least, and from this perspective one can understand truth as defined in the most adequate fashion by the concept of play. Language games are things through which we learn [  ] to understand the world.20

REALITY ACCORDING TO LANGUAGE AND THE IMPERATIVE OF REFERENCE

The insistence on Gadamer’s thought and the calling to mind of his considerations on “truth” and the “beautiful” are justified in two ways. First, there is the centrality of Gadamer for weak thought. He, more than the mystical Heidegger, the dramatic Nietzsche, and the brazen Ricoeur, does not succeed in hiding the gnoseological aporia and the tactical contortions of the weak model. By positing language as the first reality and text as the second reality on the gnoseological plane he leaves behind the matrix of language, obliterating its instrumental character. Better still, it acts as a vehicle in a representational fashion, forgetting the encounter of the subject with reality and the thing. This can be accepted in a hermeneutic vision of a technical type as happens, for example, with philology and historiography. This does not happen, however, in that which wishes to be a philosophy, an investigation of the true and a reflection on truth and its being. In the Gadamerian model, the text, on the contrary, is an object in and through itself of reflection; it is the reality-object and not a representation of the known by means of language. It is most evident that there is a relation between text and language, and between language and reality. But language is always a construction in textual form and is not necessarily something that makes contact with reality. This, in turn, can be achieved with “things themselves,” in “flesh and blood,” to borrow from Husserl, or by means of subjective reconstructions, be they realistic, fantastic or fantasmatic, recognized, spoken, pronouncements, reconstructions, or whatever constructions. It is said: Hermeneutics verifies. We can agree on this, but it could only do this if it could only exit language and confront the state of things. Even remaining within the confines of the hermeneutic process, a reality of reference still exists—the mind, fantasy, fantasms—but in order to establish to which reality they refer one needs to exit the text. To be sure, in the first place, there is form and modality. In the second place, there is the reconstruction of the “conditions of production” in order to establish its gnoseological status. It is here in the production

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of the text and in its linguistic elaboration that one encounters that prelinguistic moment, and even more pre-textual is the encounter with the thing itself, of which one speaks successively in the usual linguistic forms: textual, representative, communicative. Hermeneutics, therefore, simply collects a phase of analysis of a linguistictextual yield that is anterior, extra or prelinguistic: precategorial and antepredicative. The linguistic one is an expressive formalization of a knowing that is born in a nonlinguistic domain, and even less textual, but which nonetheless has direct contact with reality. The efforts of hermeneutics to achieve, analyze, and know the implicit structures in or deducible from the text, that is, in the hypo-text, peri-text, hyper-text, co-text, and context—their study is important for completely recovering the full semantics of the text—remain beyond the essential moment of mimesis. This is understood in a larger sense than the ancients’ simple imitation of nature; it is to be understood in the sense of a withdraw of contents in reality, which is the first reflection and the later incision of what is learned through the lived-experiences of consciousness. What is in play here is the essential question of reference. The affirmative answer appears to be assured: The reference is the thing we speak about, the corresponding real of language. But the thinkers of weak thought and the semioticians, who are the weak thinkers of linguistics, consider this security to be “ingenuous” and the encounter with extralinguistic reality a leap in the dark. Umberto Eco speaks of a “fallacious referential”21 and maintains two theses. In the first, he holds that one can speak of reference only within a code. In the second thesis, reference may be external to the code, but only as a shared cultural content that does not belong to a presumed objective external reality. Not a “thing”, but a “cultural unity,” that is, a doxa. Eco accepts the formalization of the semiotic model according to the triangle of Ogden and Richards with the three vertices of the sign, the signified, and the referent. But, in it and in the analogous formulations of Peirce and Frege the referent has the status of a cultural unity and this is so because an external signified would imply a transcendent Platonic essence and not a denoted sign, a cultural unity, or, in the language of Frege, a Sinn. According to Eco, If one assumes that Bedeutung is a state of the world, whose verification proves the validity of the sign, one must, therefore, ask how the perception and the verification of that state of the world comes to be and how its existence may be defined and demonstrated when the signifying function is de-codified. One will be able to see, then, that in order to know something about Bedeutung one needs to indicate this through another expression and so on. As Peirce said, solely another sign may explain a sign. In this way, the Bedeutungen are collected through a series of

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proper Sinn and at this point it becomes imprudent to assume that various Sinn are able to be recognized as ascribable to the very same Bedeutung at the moment that Bedeutung is defined by the proper Sinn and not vice versa [  ] To say that a signified corresponds to a real object constitutes a ingenuous attitude that not even a theory of values of truth could readily accept. In fact, one very well knows that there are signified (signs) that refer to non-existent entities like “unicorn” or “siren” such that in such cases an extensional theory of the meaning prefers to speak of “zero extension.”

Eco cites Goodman and the “possible worlds” of Lewis to strengthen his case.22 Eco’s reasoning is absolutely valid, but only within the confines of a universal semiotic discourse and with the presupposition of the immanence within the code of the signified. Within these limits, the title of Eco’s work, Treatise of a General Semiotics, is justified, with “General” taken within the limits of semiotics and of Saussurian linguistics, both understood as the science of signs. THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL METHOD APPLIED TO ART

Exiting from under these limits, the perspective radically changes. One can ask Eco, “How is it possible to perceive and verify that ‘state of the world’ insofar as it is a reference that transcends the sign?” How is it possible to recognize Sinn that transcends Bedeutung? The answer is simple: by moving back to the primary reality that is the matrix of sense and the justification of signing; by moving back to the place of the original encounter with reality. It happens in the direct seizing of intuition, before the thing seized is formalized in categories, logics, linguistic expression, and stylistics, becoming aware of its image in consciousness as a lived-experience. Only in this first encounter, through its exits, from the necessity of representing and transmitting them, is codification born. From what else could it be born? From another codification and so forth unto infinity? Perhaps, but not for the first man. And, if words are born from thoughts, and then words from cultural unities, where are thoughts born from, if not from a perceived reality, intuited, sensed in the originary aisthesis and taumazein? This is the universe of phenomenological discourse, from which the semiotic one can be a technical extension. That universe is the hyletic place, the encounter with originary matter, the noneliminable phase of those acts of thought like passive synthesis, a precategorial and ante-predicative apprehension of an intuited reality. As often happens, the simple and strong solution is found in Plato. In the eponymous dialogue, Cratylus maintains that names are natural and not

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given by convention. They are not born in discourse, as Socrates dialectically objects, since lies also dwell within discourse. They are born from an originary onomastics and are successively denominated in operations “with letters and syllables, the essence of things: the beauty of beautiful things, the goodness of good things.”23 Then there is combination and imitation, that is to say, the creation of other terms from primitive ones just as composite numbers are derived from primary numbers. The question that resounds in the Cratylus is a legitimate one: “From whence does the imitator begin to imitate?”24 Socrates fixes upon a term of a maieutic process that was initiated by himself. “He who does not know in some way the correctness of the first names, will find it impossible to know that of posterior names.”25 And, definitively, “we can say of a name that it is correct when it shows what the referred thing is.”26 Sinn, then, is something similar to the Platonic idea, that “horseness” that founds the Bedeutung of the word “horse.” “Bedeutung is defined from the proper Sinn and not vice versa,” says Eco. And this is true. But Sinn is not only a cultural unity. It becomes so only after following an original seizing of reality, outside the code. Let us return to Plato, where Socrates asks a final question of Cratylus: “That some names are composed of preceding names and that others are primary, does this not seem to be well-articulated?” Cratylus, closing the dialogue, simply responds, “Yes.”27 The phenomenological program is enclosed in nuce within the “primary” term. A transparent formalization of the relation Zeichen-Sinn-Bedeutung is given in the already mentioned semiotic triangle of Ogden and Richards. At its vertices we find the sign or signifying (Zeichen), the referent or the thing that the sign designates, and the signified or the idea (eidos) or essence of the designated thing. Bedeutung is the referred thing in the world, outside the language. This triangular schema simply indicates the cognitive impossibility of a direct conjunction of sign and referent. It is necessary to pass through the signified at the vertex of the triangle—a necessity that the weak thinkers and the semioticians do not recognize, denying the reality of essences. They admit, however, the triangular track, asserting that the signified placed at the vertex is, as we have already seen, a simple cultural unity. With this, the triangle of Ogden-Richards really becomes virtual. Another fallacy of weak hermeneutics is not to distinguish composite names from primary names. It denies, in fact, that primary names that are born from an inaugural onomastics exist. We find this in the words of Socrates, “He who has found names has found things, of which those names are the names.”28

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REFERENTIALITY IN ART

Art is a different denomination of things, of the same things denominated by verbal languages and nonverbal ones. Art is not creation ex nihilo. This is impossible even for the genius. Unicorns, hippogriffs, and sirens are not ex nihilo, but are ex natura or, sometimes, ex doctrina, ex arte, or ex artificio. Art is inventio in natura, discovered or, better, in the artistic field, the result of a “gaze” that sees that which the nonartist does not see. “His gaze is like the claw of a vulture,” said Gertrude Stein of Picasso. And he said of himself, “I do not seek, I find.” The hermeneutics of art, just as the classic hermeneutics of Scripture, is interpretation of the codified once a vision has been codified and translated into language, following inventio or, in ancient terms, mimesis. The objective is a luminous semantics or, one could even say, a shining through or an appearing in the sign of a profound and absolute reality—an “idea.” We encounter here the definition of beauty according to Thomas Aquinas: “Three things are required for beauty: integrity, concordance and clarity.”29 Clarity or claritas is the splendor of truth or the truth in its splendor or even absolute truth. Since, however, we are in the field of art and not doctrine, this truth shines not in the general concept, but in the contingent thing, in the concrete existential, in the ordinary object. Contrary to the nihilistic pessimism of Montale when he says, “Life is this enjoyment/of trite facts/vain/more than cruel,”30 life is the discovery of truth even among the rubbish of the everyday, and art is the concrete testimony, per tabulas, of the possibility of this discovery. It is discounted that there are signs that call to mind the discussion of inexistent entities, but these are only factually inexistent. Certainly, the siren does not exist except as a “cultural unity” that does not have the same ontic status of the real whale, which is also a “cultural unity.” But no one who speaks seriously or narratively of sirens actually maintains it. “Siren” is an artifact of a composite style, an assemblage of woman and fish that singularly and factually exist. Here, one has assembled them with a narrative end in mind in order to put them in the same camp and to exist and to act in a possible narrative world. Why did this happen? In order to create a beautiful metaphor for feminine seduction, deceiving and dangerous in this specific case if this were to exist in the real world. This is the case with television fiction the extension of which, or reference, is in “cultural unities” of a certain audience, unities that are not born from nothing, but rather from the crystallization of precise contents in the mind of an audience.

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PIERO TRUPIA FROM THE REFERENTIAL FALLACY TO THE SEMIOTIC FALLACY

Concerning the neo-positivistic “values of truth” that are recalled by Eco, they make evident a precise limit upon that which we are surveying. He remarks, “All dogs are animals, all dogs have four legs, propositions that can be considered ‘true’, if only they are really animals and if they truly have four legs.”31 We can all perfectly agree on this, but one must add that in order to reconstruct the truth of the two propositions, one needs to exit the code, taking a walk in the real world and believing what one sees. This is an operation of a certain complexity and delicateness. If one does not do this, then one falls into a “fallacy of signs” or, by the same token, a “fallacy of semiotics.” A true semiotic trap and an example of this fallacy is a dictionary that had a huge influence for the last twenty years of the last century.32 Its characteristics perfectly mirror the semiotic model of reference. Each of the nearly 1600 voices contain numerous appeals to other voices within the same dictionary that result in an increase of about 20 % of the categorematic terms (substantives, adjectives, verbs) present in each voice. It is a classic example of a closed system that is inevitably circular, rendering it virtually and even factually impossible without prior knowledge to grasp the significance of the illustrated terms. Fortunately, real language is not like this. It presents numerous windows from which one sees and peers into the things of the world. One can even agree with Heidegger when he remarks, “language is the house of being.” But only on the condition that hermeneutics proceeds from language to being and not from language to language. This does not exclude the house of being from being complex and articulated. But it is not closed in itself. Every linguistic representation presupposes more levels of sense, and it proceeds deeper and deeper into the depths until one reaches the being of the thing. Some of these levels are functionally external to language, but they are also always immanent to the human practice of communication, of which language is an instrumental aspect. This is the case of the so-called “implicit” or “presupposed”.33 An implicit non-said (in the said) is that of social or conversational rules: That which can be said must be said, in determined circumstances, observing the rules of verbal and communicative comportment. There is, then, the implicit activation of the “recipient encyclopedia,” which is what one presumes that the recipient or the addressee already knows. Paul Valéry reminds us, “It is boring, saying all.” There is in the end that nonexplicit “encyclopedia” that is more method than content, that is the profound belief or quasi instinct that there exists an

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objective reality and that speaking is speaking about something that is beyond the word and the discourse. There are clamorous forms of activation of the presupposed, and this is when one implicitly recalls a “thing” assuredly present in the cognitive horizon of the addressee. The encyclopedic definition of horse is “a large, solidhoofed, mammiferous, odd-toed ungulate, bearing the weight only on one functioning digit, the third, which is widened into a round or spade-shaped hoof; perissodactyl, belonging to the family Equidae.” In a popular dictionary the definition is “The well-known quadruped.” This is perfectly comprehensible and referential in the encyclopedia of ordinary English speakers. THE SHORT CIRCUIT BETWEEN SEMIOTICS AND HERMENEUTICS

The analysis of the legitimacy of this “seeing” is a precise “program of research,” namely, that of the Husserlian phenomenological project. One can ask whether Eco had this in mind in the paragraph of his work Ideas as Signs when he recalls Peirce, for whom an idea called forth from a real object is a “sign of that thing.” The same is true for Locke and Berkeley. He finally arrives at Husserl, whom he cites and comments on for only 18 lines in his 379-page work. One can ask, up until what point does the phenomenological notion of the signified coincide with that of the cultural unity?: Rereading Husserl in this light, one could perhaps discover that the semiotic signified is the socialized codification, understood in the sense of cultural unity, of that perceptual experience that the phenomenological epoché seeks to find in its originary freshness. And, that signified by quotidian perception, which the epoché seeks to remove, is nothing other than that attribution of “cultural unity” within the field that has not yet been undifferentiated by perceptual stimuli.34

Eco concludes by affirming that phenomenology intends to re-found from the beginning those conditions of formation of cultural unties that semiotics must accept as givens, because they constitute the skeleton of the systems of signification [  ] The phenomenological epoché returns perception to a state of re-codifying the references themselves, understanding them as highly ambiguous messages and in large part honed to aesthetic texts.35

From such a perspective, Eco concludes, semiotics flows into a hermeneutics when, instead of defining itself as a “science of signs,” that is, semiotics, it in fact becomes a semiotics of the ambiguous or even a phenomenology of experience. Apart from the interpretation of Husserl’s gnoseology, which is most misleading insofar as it is brought back under the force of the semiotic model, there are errors of fact in Eco’s reconstruction.

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The complex Husserlian apparatus of the cognitive seizing of reality is not reducible to the epoché that is, together with the reduction and eidetic variation, a condition of the method for seizing reality. The originary freshness that Eco recalls is to be found in lived-experiences, as phenomenon, that is, the primary and immediate manifestation in consciousness of reality. The collection of this reality is extremely complex and it is performed according to a stratification of phases with the final objective of a universal and necessary consciousness of the singular thing that in its depths coincides with its essence. For this reason, Husserlian phenomenology, which is much different than the English phenomenology of the eighteenth century, is transcendental.36 To confuse it with hermeneutics is tantamount to canceling, along with reference, the profound stratum of the encounter with the things themselves. Concerning aesthetics or, better still, textuality or poetic representation, understood by Eco as a highly ambiguous message, in the indefinite sense and maybe even in a confused sense, such a judgment is the fruit of an equivocation of the nature of art.

ARTISTIC REPRESENTATION IS AN UTTERANCE

Let us anticipate a characterization of the work of art in order to understand its precise place in the phenomenological process. Every artistic representation is a linguistic act: the assertion of an author about the state of things, about an event, a persona, an absolute ultimate reference. It is not the objective rendering of a state of things, an awareness that is like a protocol. In essence, it is a point of view. According to the theory of linguistic acts, the work of art is necessarily an utterance even when language has the form of a thesis. Even in this case it is born from a point of view and contains a judgment. One can see this in the pathos of veracious prose. The old shoes of Van Gogh are a point of view of that object and they recount a story which that object evokes. The work of art, therefore, does not demonstrate; it shows things in their essential purity: things and their staying together, how they inhere in one another, reciprocally and with all that which creates significative complexities, vital or cosmic.

WHAT ARE WE SPEAKING ABOUT WHEN WE SPEAK ABOUT ART?

Many dangers threaten the semantics of artistic language and, consequently, the correct reading of the work of art.

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We saw the hermeneutic danger and the corresponding a-referential semantics that exclude the true signified, the thing of which we speak, the correlative real of the signing system. Another danger is that of a philological focusing on the interpretative discourse: to individuate in every work antecedents, parentage, and even existing elements, and, finally, placing the work inside a historical process that would have conditioned, even determined, the creation. Critics exhibit a refined competence in such connections. They forget, however, the uttering character of each authentic work of art, the willingness of the author to open his or her discourse on a determined theme and the turning toward unknown addressees with the intent of obtaining from them a certification of truth, that is, a shared vision of a determined reality, the referent of representation. Antecedents and parental lines certainly exist, they are the substance of the culture of the author. But a work has value if its uttering act is personal and original, if it shows us something new about reality. Another reductive approach is that of an attention turned exclusively to language and its techniques, forgetting that language is always a system of signifiers, signs that stand for something else outside of language. There is no difference if the writing is symbolic. Symbols are also denoting signs. They can be denoted in various ways, but this happens for signifying signs. The gold background of the icon is a straining with respect to the normal solution of a neutral or naturalistic background. That gold is, in fact, the signifying-symbol of Sophia or the divine word. It has no other justification to assume for itself the symbol as the proper signifier of the language of art. The symbol is certainly present as the ratio facilis, that is, conventional presence, in the language of art in its diverse stylistic incarnations—the aureola or the nimbus, the cheek placed on the palm of the hand to indicate a mute pain or the arms raised with open palms to indicate desperation. The symbol is dominant in the symbolist style just as in realism, where other signifiers dominate. But the symbol is a signifier among others and, like the others, is also connoted. Stefano Zecchi, however, considers the symbol, along with metaphor, the peculiar characteristic of the language of art. This is a tense, complex operation, at least in the beginning, to promote the Gadamerian interpretation of art. The thesis is that the truth of art transpires in the linguistic experience of the world in order to be collected in hermeneutic investigation. The usual confusion arises here between the linguistic-ness of the representation of the world and the world-in-itself that remains beyond every representation and the language that codifies and expresses it. Language is not the world, being, or its house. None of these realities need language to be

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and exist. The question of whether gravity existed before Newton discovered the force of gravity has only one answer: It did exist. Even from the subjective point of view of the rest, where the Heideggerian pleasantry could have some plausibility, the linguistic codification is valid between the grades and forms of apprehension of being, from the originary intuition of presence to meta-languages. A second confusion can be grafted onto the first. It concerns the identification of languages of artistic representation with rhetorical figuration. In the words of Stefano Zecchi, art is “a language for symbols and metaphors through which a core of sense irreducible to givenness is revealed [  ] irreducible to every codification, as comprehended in Heideggerian Zuhandenheit.”37 Symbol, metaphor, other rhetorical figures, in particular, allotopy and isotopy, allusion, analogy, antonomasia, apology, emblem, image, hypotaxis and parataxis, litotes, metonymy, oxymoron, simile, synecdoche, synaesthesia, and even aprosdoketon, do not evoke a mystical sense, intangible to logical reason, even in the pluralistic meanings of logic we have today. I recur to the words of Angelo Marchese when he says that bad responses are given to “a certain simple enthusiasm for a thaumaturgical use of rhetoric.”38 Rhetoric, in the words of Lotman, is simply a process of trans-codification from a denotative code to a connotative code.39 Even the connotative codification is logical—not an apophantic logic that seeks an apodictic yield of representation (the logic of true and false), but an argumentative logic (of the possible/impossible, desirable, obligatory, permitted/forbidden)—nothing mysterious in the figuration of rhetoric, but, simply, the recourse to another source of instruments to capture a reality that is always fleeing with every logic. It is necessary, however, not to forget the capacity of the poet to demonstrate the being of things through existing things, collecting them into a state that is near original givenness, before any logical treatment, including the argumentative type. This happens in a transparent way in Leopardi and in the magical realism of Carlo Carrà.

A SEMANTICS OF THE WORK OF ART

The problem of a semantics of beauty is no different than that of any other semantics. It codifies a relationship between a signifier and a referent. In certain works of Raphael that have many personages in them, a figure looks outside the painting. In the School of Athens it is the painter himself in a self-portrait. What is he looking at? He is really looking outside the painting, at the world, an aspect of which is present in the work.

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Some critics reduce the reading of the painting to an externalization of proper sentiments and proper emotions that dispose potential observers to have a competent interpretation. What guarantee of universality do these sentiments deliver? A valid reading of a work presents different internal and external levels. Internal are the readings of signs, semiotic and syntactical, the minute review of the signs utilized by the author, for example, the type of brush stroke, the use of the slice, the nature of the mixings of color, the form of the objects and the disposition, their spatial rapport, the modality in which the figures are arranged in the scene, the scenery itself, the background, the environments, the horizon and the sky. External to the work are its historical and social situations, the personal life of the author, the historical dimensions of the authors’ times, and current ideologies.40 This also applies to the technical illustration, be it from the point of view of realizable materiality or from the point of view of adopted languages. But these readings are unilateral, if not misleading. The most useful reading seeks to discover what the work speaks about and how it speaks about it, including the reference and languages that make it present in the work. There is a noxious way to consider the reference, producing misleading results. It is the way of excess that generates confusion and sacrifices the singularity of the work, its unique and precise message. This happens when one generically speaks of cosmic tensions, universal perspectives, or the eternal tensions of the human soul, the drama of life. It is the case that kitsch makes content easily recognizable, strictly connoted, strictly with strong hues, such as to satisfy immediately the emotional expectations of the viewer. Perhaps it must be maintained that not all works are referential. It happens that even in ordinary discourse when one is not clear about what one is speaking or if one is speaking effectively about something. A work of Mondrian with its geometrical schematics has reference—a formalism of cosmic objects and their inherence, which a great fresco of a classic painter lacking inspiration cannot have. THE EYE OF THE COPIER AND THE INTEMPERANCE OF THE ORACLES

Fortunately, there exists an empirical proof. An inspired work has an impact on those who look at it. This does not happen with a work lacking in inspiration. If there is an impact, it can happen that one is not able to individuate the

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origin; one may not be capable of reading the work. It is certain that the scene, that landscape, and that figure have something to say. In order to know this, one needs an expert reading that recognizes the grammar and the syntax of those signs, one that is able to recognize the textual structure of that composition. From this analytic reconstruction the semantic syntax can have its origin, the significance of the work. Concerning this matter, I performed a didactic experiment. I showed a photographic reproduction of the Mona Lisa of Leonardo da Vinci and a painted copy in oils of the same subject, which was apparently faithful to the original and which was executed by a Chinese copyist, to a Master’s class of 25 students at the University of Florence. I did the same test with the students of the Academy of the Image in L’Aquila. Everyone recognized the false image, but they could not locate where the falsity lay. I demonstrated this falsity in various details, above all, in that universal icon that is the mouth of Mona Lisa. The smile was also in the copy, but it was displeasing, disturbing, and even derisive. The lips are in tension and the angles of the mouth are lightly contracted. With these alterations the smile became a mocking sneer. How is it that the copyist who studied in Europe and in Italy and who worked to copy many of the masterworks of the Italian Renaissance could not succeed in copying that mouth? “His hand is not Italian, Tuscan,” responded the students. I replied, “No, not his hand. His eye is not Tuscan. The hand reproduces that which the eye sees and the eye sees that which the mind intends in the object and recomposes in the lived-experience of the person looking.” The same failure is verified with the work of clumsy copyists who copy abstract work, which are apparently easy to reproduce. The eyes of these copyists do not see between the signs that inherency that only the gaze of the artist knows how to collect. The copyist’s eye does not see it between the signs since he does not see it between the things of the world: the reference. Sometimes, as it has been said, reference is superabundant—a superabundance that was theorized about in a certain measure on the philosophical or pseudo-philosophical level. Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) comes to mind as one of these theorizers. He did not lack brilliant intuitions, as he earned for himself the nickname “genial mixer-upper.” Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) also comes to mind. He created a complex system that was put together with pieces of simplified Hegel, Egyptian esotericism, Buddhism, and Gnosticism. Analogous critiques can be made against certain unresolved complexities of Heidegger, but not of Nietzsche; of Jung, but not of Binswanger. This is not say that great syntheses are impossible or useless. It is difficult, however, to be oracular and

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still preserve rigor. Plotinus and Pavel Florenski are exceptions: oracular and rigorous. Today the confusion of the great syntheses is reserved for the new age, and the impact on the reading of the work of art has been devastating. Unfortunately, even significant authors do not always escape, especially at the end of their careers, the temptation of oracular synthesis. One of these in relation to the interpretation of the essence of the work of art is Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854), the great theorizer of Romanticism. In the end, the Schellengian system flows into a theosophic synthesis in which art is nothing other than one of the multiple manifestations of the divine. In an early phase of Schelling’s thought art is the organ, the instrument of philosophy. One finds in art the eternal model of things that are the children of God. The proprium of art is to render present the absolute in the empirical world. In this way “particular things, even in their absolute particularity, are, at the same time, universal. They are “ideas [  ] in the world of human imagination whose law is absoluteness in limitation.”41 On this model the work of art would be an incarnation contingently unconditioned by eternal beauty. “If you call something or a work beautiful, only this work has come to birth, not beauty, which by its nature is eternal.”42 One can agree with these intuitions. In the final phase of his reflection Schelling opens his doctrine of the absolute to new theological developments. In this new configuration of the absolute, nature, contingency, and the empirical gradually lose their presence as qualified by the movement of the whole. They diverge and in the end they annihilate themselves in nonbeing and they flow into evil. Knowledge of the contingent no longer has relative value, and in the final theosophic version “the reason of finitude is only negation, fruit of an originary fall.”43 So, art, after losing its humanity, comes down from the pedestal of the absolute. Notwithstanding this final collapse, the lesson of the Schellengian intuition of a unitary force in the cosmos preserves its value. In art it is present as “inherence” and “gathering”: a recalling and reciprocal responding of things. It is the representation of nous in the contingent. Languages are diverse, the articulation of content is most varied, but the meaning is one. The oneiric and romantic magic of Caspar David Friedrich is stylistically different from, but substantially identical to, the magic realism of Carlo Carrà, to the metaphysical realism of Giorgio de Chirico and Giorgio Morandi. A SEMANTIC READING OF PAINTING

Now we have to use the model for a reading of a corpus of pictorial works representative of different languages.

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A Byzantine Mosaic A Byzantine mosaic of the sixth century at San Vitale in Ravenna is the first text to be examined. One is struck by the modus bizantinus of the geometric rigor that one finds in the representation. The cornices extra picturam that are part of the painting are simple and in the geometric style of the goldsmith’s of the time. This is also visible in the ornamentation that covers the two lateral pilaster strips and is also exemplified in the cover of the missal, cross, stud, and crown of the sovereign. Intra picturam an extraordinary simple and poor, and (apparently) involuntary, frieze is constituted by the line of feet of the eleven figures of the composition—feet shod in sandals except for those of the protagonist Maximian. Rigorously set as a ‘v’, they create an isotopy with the two inferior and exterior cornices extra picturam. This ‘v’ frieze exerts an impact on the spectator form the first moment even if he or she does not understand its specific significance—a subliminal effect, as one might say carelessly. No, it is pre-semantic. Once the gaze is fixed, the structure manifests its stable, basic significance of the Byzantine regime: a metaphor. Correspondingly, the textual structure of the work is rigorously paratactical. The disposition of the personages is frontal despite the fact that the clothing of Maximian, the Metropolitan Archbishop, and Vicar of the Emperor makes evident their five different roles, which go all the way down to the militants on the left; there is no difference of height. The difference in clothing is uniquely justified by the role that goes all the way to the crown, to the stud on the left shoulder and to the stole that hangs from the left arm of Maximian. The physiognomy and expression of feelings is light but decisively differentiated. The simplicity of the soldiers, the composure of the functionaries— from the fifth to the seventh, from the left to the right—the extreme holiness of the prelates—from the eighth to the ninth. Only the sovereign allows himself a fleeting smile, a sign of his self-confidence in his role. Picasso The hurried judgment that one gives of such a representation of Byzantine life is one of uniformity and, ultimately, insignificance. This is to be understood in the sense that apparently life is standardized and deprived of internal articulation. The painting changes with a close reading. It is a rich, variegated, and pluralistic world. The semiotic-textual number of the representation is the parataxis that we were induced to believe to be appropriated by the Byzantine world. It is the vision consolidated as a “cultural unity” that is expressive

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of a static universe deprived of tensions. This is not the case. We encounter parataxis in expressive representations of very different worlds. Surprisingly, we find it in one of Picasso’s highly dramatic compositions, which seems not to require a parataxical treatment, but a hypotaxical one. I refer to his 1951 Massacre in Korea.44 The hypotaxis is, in effect, present in this composition of Picasso, but only in specific places, whereas the general architecture is parataxical. Parataxis and hypotaxis are, in the manner of saying of Picasso and in particular in this painting, specific uttering forms. The paratactical structure unites the streams of narration: the group of shooters on the right, the landscape at the center, and those shot, on the left. The uniformity of the color is also paratactical: The dominant gray of the arms and weapons on the right that extend to cover the group of mothers on the left—a color that is textual and narrative. Such is also the case for the spent green of the countryside, turning toward the yellow of dryness and the death of the vegetation and the okra of the earth denuded behind the legs of the mothers. In the background are the remains of two desiccated trees, and, higher up, one sees a ruin. Tacitus comes to mind: “They have made this place a desert and they called this peace.”45 Ungaretti also comes to mind. “From these houses/nothing remains/ except some shred of wall./ From the many/ that used to correspond with me/ there remain/ but few.”46 The group of warriors is figuratively dehumanized. The foot in the foreground that assures the support of the shooter who takes aim is of a disproportional dimension. The articulation of the legs and the arms can be well seen and are mechanical organs. Moving higher, the trunk becomes a metallic breastplate and the head a simple crested helmet. The hands are prehensile structures dedicated to the maneuvering of weapons. Two headshelmets are distinguishable: the shooter in the foreground by his intending expression that is secure in having his victim in aim; the commander who has on his face traces of giving the just-spoken order to fire. His left hand clasps a primitive scepter, a symbol of political power. It is a contorted staff; it is primitive because the politics of war is always primitive. The right hand holds a sword, the symbol of military command. It is, as in the militaristic rhetoric of today, an immutable symbol throughout time. The sword enters into the paratactical configuration with its parallelism to firearms. The machinery of war is a unified block. Between the right and the left, between shooters and mothers, an allotopic relationship opposes the professional ferocity of the shooters with the double semiosis of the mothers, namely, the resignation to martyrdom of the first

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figure on the left and the torturous awareness of the near killing of sons expressed in the spasmodic embrace. The dimension and the tension of the hands that grip and protect their sons are unusual. Among these are also included the unborn that lie in their mothers wombs—their roundness lies in opposition to the rough edges of the war machine. This is another allotopic relation. Inside the group of mothers, a climax: from the serenity of the martyrs—two of them hold hands, the expression on their faces indicating detachment—to the physiognomic tension of the two on the extreme right. Inside this group is an allotopy, that is, the kissing infant in the arms of a mother, an infant who has the serene expression of trust that is opposed to the deformed face of the mother. One last remark on the two children on the right of the group of mothers. One of these remains unaware, with three little flowers rummaged from the disaster, a symbol of the possible rebirth of life. A second child runs toward its mother in search of protection, its face turned toward the shooters. Its right eye is semantically deformed, made bigger with the understanding of an imminent death. This is an acknowledgment on the part of Picasso, always with Picasso’s variation, of the little boy of Caravaggio’s who observes the execution of Saint Matthew in the eponymous painting in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.

Caravaggio The Vocation of Saint Matthew (1599–1600)47 is a dramatic pictorial composition by Caravaggio as part of a triptych dedicated to the life of the evangelist. The scene of his calling takes place in the obscure inside of Matthew’s cage-like office. Two bookkeepers, an armiger, a boy, and the owner of the office, Matthew, are around a table. On the table there is a small sac of money and a few dispersed coins, a ledger, a pen, and an inkwell. On the right, coming from the outside, are Jesus and Peter. Peter identifies Matthew and points him out to Jesus, who extends his hand to Matthew with very much the same gesture that one sees in the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. One sees the forearm of the figure of Christ, his right hand with his pointed index finger, and, in profile, his face. This is not an oleographic face: a robust and sharp nose, a strong jaw, hollow cheeks, an intense and decisive expression. This face speaks of the dramatic tension of his vocation. Of the five persons around the table, only two notice the event. The armiger is at the point of getting up to chase away the troublemakers. The calf of his right leg is tense.

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The boy shows surprise. Matthew is incredulous. The index finger of his right hand that points to his chest bespeaks disbelief. This is the usual refusal of the call when it is radical. Two hands, that of Jesus and that of Matthew, have the same position but in opposed directions, and they configure a substantial allotopy in the global figural isotopy of the painting. The first is assertive: “Come, I need you.” The second is defensive: “Me? Certainly not me!” The hand of Peter has a purely functional value, a denotative sign, but not a connotative sign. The figure of the two bookkeepers is allotopic with respect to the rest of the group of office workers. They continue to count money, and they are not aware that the office is in danger of losing its owner. They are a young man and an old man who intensely control the counting of money, wearing pince nez glasses—the indifference is shared by the two generations. The drama of the composition, which has as its center the initial refusal of Matthew, is made semantic in an unexpected way by the play of light. Light is a strong and characterizing presence in the work of Caravaggio. In this work, the light with its estranging effect is a presence on a second level with respect to the dominating darkness. The faces in full light are uniquely those of Matthew, the one called, and of the boy, the curious one. The faces of the bookkeepers and of the armiger are at half-light, and the general milieu is deprived of luminous sources. A window in the background does not give any light and, surprisingly, from the door, toward the shoulders of Jesus and Peter, a band of darkness penetrates the surrounding area: a physical inconsistency for a coherent narrative. In the darkness are the face of Jesus, an incarnate flame, and the two hands, his and that of Peter. It recalls the biblical theme of light (Isaiah 9, 2; John 1, 5) that shines in the darkness and that darkness cannot contain—containment that, for an instant, also excludes Matthew. Hals A composition in which hypotaxy prevails is Franz Hals’ Young Man Holding a Skull (1626–1628).48 All the macro-signs present in the composition stand in a hierarchical and also isotopic relation. A transparent symbol is a lush feather of the hat that is ostensibly falling downward. It is the sure sign of an impending and unexpected decline. The composition thematizes a classic argument: death and the knight or death and the maiden, a topos of Renaissance and baroque culture, Romantic ante litteram. It illustrates the illusoriness of the springtime of life—the brief bracketing of an eternal winter.

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More than one allotopy and a sole isotopy run through the composite structure of Hals’ work. This structure acts on the color of the yellow of the skull to the ivory of the face, to the deep yellow of the sky that fades into red and black, colors that dominate the head of hair. Yellow, red, and black are the colors on which the composition plays. The first allotopy, exhibited and estranged, more than the feather, is that which runs between the top of the knight and the skull. The face is young, the gaze alight, with brilliant and gently protruding eyes. On the diagonal of the paneling, however, we find the face and skull with the certainty asserted by the author that this is the true face of the knight. The other allotopy is that between the concave palm of the right hand and the temporal cap right of the skull. They perfectly tie in with one another in order to mark the continuity between life and death despite the material and non-natural contrast. The hand itself is yellow, with gold on the back of the hand and black on the palm. The same contrast occurs between the face and the black mantle that covers the knight as a stranger when it comes to the color, but it is emblematically significant as a shroud. Particular allotopic relations run between the lips that are particularly full and of an unnatural vivid red and the mouth opened wide from the skull, from the protruding and brilliant eyes and the abysmally black eye sockets of the skull. In fact, the face of the knight expresses a distracted challenge—a challenge to death that is communicated in the right hand; it is a bloody red color. It is the temporary, fleeting victory of life. Il Bronzino The examination of Hals’ work makes evident the central value of portraiture in painting, which was considered the culmination of painting in the Renaissance. This can be seen in the portrait artist Agnolo Torri, known as il Bronzino, to whom an entire room is dedicated in the Uffizi in Florence. The light that covers and models the figures in the portraits of Bronzino is metaphysics ante litteram; he renders each one of these as an absolute object. Sometimes the figure is placed in an architectonic environment, as in the case of the portrait of Ugolino Martelli (1537/1538).49 The pictorial perfection is a metaphor of the human perfection of the depicted individual, the goal of a severe education. The book is open, with Martelli’s fingers pointing to a precise point on the page, marking a brief moment of suspension in the studio. Ugolino was in his twenties, and he invested his brief life in self-education. He is caught in a moment when he is thinking about what he has just read from a page of Homer’s Iliad.

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The courtyard of his palazzo, which serves as the background, is the lifeworld of the humanist. A statue of David and Goliath signifies the triumph of ingenuity over brute force. The architecture demonstrates numerous perspectives of cornices and niches that frame and define the personage together with the lectern in the foreground. It is the intellectual setting of the humanists. It is a dedicated and severe life. His clothing is sober, his hat and suit are black and lack ornamentation, and the rest is gray. His face and two hands, however, are points of light. It is the interior light of the spirit. His head is turned three-quarters of the way, his gaze is intense and serene. He is not focused on a particular object, not ad spectatorem, not ad orbem, not ad infinitum. It is a gaze focused ad se ipsum, turned inward and introspective, an eye of the mind that contemplates, meditating, his thought just being ripped away from the indicated verses by the finger of his right hand. An isotopic chain of form is visible, color and light between the pure ivory of the open pages that become redder from the hand and the face that, in turn, pick up the red of the printed letters and lips that mentally repeat what has been read. The right hand is isotopic with his face. It rests on the edge of a closed book whose author, Pietro Bembo, is one of the masters of the Renaissance style of life. Dix The theme of the portrait makes evident the expressive value of the hand in continuum with the expressiveness of the face. Along these lines, I like to turn to Otto Dix’s portrait of Hugo Simons.50 In this work, the whole body is semantic. The movements, posture, the gesture are not solely contained in the face. I focus on the hands in particular. The left one, in its geometric convex shape, reproduces the face; it is its mold. The right is the negative of the left and of the face. The index and the middle finger unite to fix Otto’s assertion in act, which is clearly inscribed on the face through the intense gaze and the mouth taking on the shape of the words that manifest thought. The portrait draws inspiration from the young man of Franz Hals, but, in this case, the theme of death is incorporated in the same figure. Antonello of Messina 51

In the Annunciation (1475) of Antonello of Messina we find ourselves at the border between the medieval period and the Renaissance. The woman still

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belongs to the cosmic, theologico-social order, and she subjects herself to it, but, at the same time, she is homo novus, conscious and assertive. The left hand, according to tradition, clasps tight the veil on her chest, a sign of modesty that is still fashionable today in the Middle East. Her right hand, by contrast, is thrown forward in a pictorially expressionist configuration. She wishes to push away the announcement; she wishes to stop the annunciator. This is a new, insolent gesture that breaks with tradition. But her face tells us that the reaction is momentary even though humanly premonitory. This refusal is not found in the preceding works of Antonello on the same theme (1473).52 Here, the two hands stop the veil on the chest and her face expresses surprise and dismay. The half-open mouth expressly conveys this. More than a sigh is emitted from her mouth; it is almost a mute scream. Her look transmits fear. She is an unsuspecting young maiden, despite the open book on the lectern that is a presence of manner, who is overwhelmed by an incomprehensible event. The same theme can be found in the work of Lorenzo Lotto’s Annunciation (1528) a half-century later.53 The angel breaks into the interior, the cat arches its tail and back, and its fur stands on end. The Virgin is surprised while at prayer and she shows dismay. If this does not appear irreverent, there is an isotopy between the figure of the cat and that of the Virgin. On the contrary, the face of the Annunciation of Palermo anticipates composure, even in her awareness of the nonchalance (sprezzatura) of the homo novus: a smile hinted at but with satisfaction, a dialectic between hand and face. De Chirico In the 1920s Italian painting was decisively different than that of the rest of Europe. Those Italian painters like De Nittis and Zandomeghi who did not move to France to become impressionists created their own style: the metaphysical style. In a few words, they were against the idea of being, substance, reference, an ultimate meaning of things; they were in line with the feeling of decadence of then-contemporary philosophy. But in their deeds and in their works, they contradicted themselves and they witnessed to a decisive faith in the cosmic order. The towers of de Chirico are the authoritative affirmation of a reality that is “in itself.” They organize space, center the landscape, construct a double perspective, not toward points of the world, but toward the horizon, infinity, and toward the sky, equally infinite.

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The sky is terse; the horizon opens to a stripe of uniform light. The architecture and the tower, in particular, make space vertical; it even confers an erect stature to matter. In the compositions of de Chirico the foreground is covered by shadow. The architecture is one or two dark porticos that do not open onto anything: a labyrinth in the unknown. But in the middle part of the painting a piazza can be seen. It is the series Le piazze d’Italia. At the center a round or square tower emerges, as in the work I am about to examine: La nostalgie de l’infini (1911): a double layer of porticos at the base of the tower and a false portico at the top, under the dome. Contrary to the porticos of previous scenery, these do not open unto the dark. A firm and intense light illumines a side of the tower.54 Two figures can be seen against the light in the piazza. The overpowering and immensely high tower stands over the piazza. The figures cast a long shadow just as the porticos in the foreground, but not the tower that lacks shadow. This is a semantic straining. The tower, the sky, and the horizon; they are the absolute; they are for themselves, without shadow, cloud, or mist. The human figure is that which is relative. The portico is the darkness that impregnates every human artifact, including culture, architecture in its image, or, in another composition, an equestrian monument, a cannon—the jetsam of a shipwreck. The tower is not babelesque. It is completed with porticos and the dome, with four angles of the covering, four standards blow in the wind, in absolute light. But it is not the force of the wind, it is the energy of the light that blows from an infinite horizon in a razing fashion and renders candid the exposed side of the tower. Humans neither possess nor conquer the truth; even if it exists. It is the authoritative cosmic order that participates in that semiotic manufacturing uninhabited by cause—the work of an unknown god. This is the message of the metaphysical painting of de Chirico. Carrà In Carrà, human beings, animals, and plants are themselves inserted in the cosmic order in order to be monuments in it. In the Figlie di Loth (1919)55 the two female figures, like the dog between them, are immobile in the landscape. The act of achieving progeny by means of coupling with an inebriated father has just happened. Nothing more remains or would be possible. The landscape is empty, fixed in its destiny; it is in its ineluctable metaphysical configuration. The figure on the left, pregnant, looks to the future generations, whereas her sister, on her knees and in a gesture of

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offering, asks and offers at the same time. The dog, as is its nature, seeks to enter the scene in order to constitute itself as the object of the offering or the subject of the request, but it remains immobile for eternity. The landscape is fixed in its destiny, a container without content. The destruction of Sodom has happened. The perspective flight of the section of panels pushes the eye toward the tholos of the background. This, as well as the pine cone on the stilobate on the right, is an archeological reminder of the destroyed city. The dog is an echo of Giotto’s fresco, Gioacchino tra i pastori (1304–1312),56 in which, as in Carrà’s work, the dog tries to enter the discourse with Gioacchino while the pastors, Gioacchino, the rocks, and the trees, as is the case with the terse sky, are fixed in their immobility. Only the small flock of sheep, dethematized and extra-diegetic, is extraneous to the event. Morandi The 1930s was a period of fervent creativity in Italy. In painting, the great moment of the Macchiaoli having passed, various experiments were underway: divisionism, symbolism, scapigliatura, and futurism. The metaphysics of de Chirico, the magic realism of Carrà, and the later Giorgio Morandi are the high points of this effort. Morandi participated in the metaphysical movement at the beginning of his career (1910s and 1920s). He then developed his own version of magic realism that slowly evolved until his death in 1964. In his metaphysical phase, Morandi’s represented objects are geometrical as they are for de Chirico, but other objects gradually enter the scene until the end of his life and career: vases and sometimes flowers. Of interest is a series of a vase, Vasetto con fiori,57 which from the 1920s in its various versions endures until the beginning of the 1960s. The concrete model was found in the painter’s studio in via Fondazza in Bologna and is now housed in his reconstructed studio in the Morandi Museum located in Bologna’s Palazzo Accursio. In the metaphysical phase the small vase is isolated in space. This is constructed with a supporting plane and with a wall in the background at a right angle. The vase casts a small shadow that disappears in successive reworkings. Morandi will even radically change the representation and poetics of the theme. After abandoning metaphysics, Morandi devoted himself to magic realism, an expression coined by the German critic Franz Roh in his commentary on Carrà’s 1921 Pino sul mare. In magic realism objects engage in dialogue

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among themselves, with space, and with the background. This is the case in Carrà. Morandi, however, goes beyond this. Space progressively loses its perspective and geometric articulations, and it tends to reabsorb the objects that inhabit it. These progressively collapse into it. The poetics of Morandi testifies to the great theme of the one and the many, that is to say, Being and existents. These manifest themselves in historical reality and in human events as well as in that more ample region that is contingency. But, contingency, as its meaning implies, is destined to disappear. There is no annihilation, but a return to the absoluteness of Being. In Morandi the vases and bottles progressively lose their support. The anterior border of the horizontal plane of support gradually disappears. Then, the line of separation with the walls in the background collapses into it. The objects gradually lose their contour, melt into color, progressively plunge into the background space. Finally, it is the whole space, having become background, that animates itself, palpitates, attracts, and in the end swallows the objects and contingency with them. This is the theme of Morandi; it is perfectly coherent with the reaction of Italian culture of the early 1900s to the nihilistic and weak antimetaphysical European culture. L’ACIES MENTIS OF THE ARTIST

Art restores direct vision to us, an originary vision of reality. The device of this restitution is reference. The language of art cannot subsist without the thing about which it speaks. The thought of art, therefore, is strong thought. The artist by vocation, natural attitude, and study, first “sees” and then formalizes that which he has seen into a textual representation. Others, including scientists, observe and do not see. They collect only certain particulars that they classify according to a taxonomy and typology that they superimpose on reality with the help of the cage of logical and categorial schematisms. Things are forced into them. Art, on the contrary, is a form of direct consciousness of the real. The artist mainly approaches and restores to us the Husserlian plena, native reality, not already categorized and schematized. Modern hermeneutic thought in its two forms, namely, the apparently strong one of Heidegger and the declarative weak model of Gadamer, gives up reference to the reality external to language either because it does not have the sensitivity and often not the awareness of the plena of originary reality or because, like Heidegger, it follows the very dominating vision of an ambiguous refusal of a classical philosophy of being. Both forms remain imprisoned in the text as an Ersatz of the real.

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The Heideggerian pleasantry, “Language is the house of being,” speaks of a dangerous obviousness, but it neglects the complex and stratified events of the production of the text through which being enters into language, following a long and intimate contact with the real that is prelinguistic and only in part aware of itself. It is the complex and barely explored event of the hyletic, of passive synthesis, perception, apperception, and, in the end, the analytics of lived-experience. The Husserlian School has opened this horizon of consciousness, inaugurating a realism that for the first time, with the partial exception of Augustine and Descartes, has decisively shortened the distance between subject and object. The analyses of the students of Husserl, particularly Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, have delineated a map of this life of consciousness that encounters the real. Angela Ales Bello has taken up this program, including an exploration of the unpublished manuscripts, and shows the fecundity of the phenomenological method as it applies to diverse fields of knowledge and practice, from psychiatry to mysticism. This means that language and, even less so, the text are not the primary realities. They are a codification, always provisory, of the recognition of livedexperiences—a recognition that requires a particular acuity of the physical gaze and a speculative force of the mental gaze, that acies mentis of the Romans that divides the essential from the accidental. In this exercise, art is a school both for the artist-creator and the passionate user. It is an education of the gaze, a progressive familiarity with the real, confidence with being, beyond the sign, but in the full awareness of its designative and constructive force. Art is a textbook for this education. University of Florence NOTES 1

Irving Lavin, “Se il barocco é il moderno di ieri,” La Repubblica, July 7, 2006. Referred to by Lavin, op. cit. 3 “Being that can be understood is language,” in Gianni Vattimo, Al di là del soggetto: Nietzsche, Heidegger e l’ermeneutica (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981), p. 66. 4 Ibid., p. 69. 5 Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr), p. 542. 6 Vattimo, op. cit., p. 71. 7 Ibid., p. 72. 8 Gadamer, op. cit, p. 542. 9 Ibid., p. 544 10 Ibid., pp. 545–547. 11 Ibid., p. 545 12 Ibid., p. 546. 2

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Ibid., p. 551. Ibid. 15 Ibid., pp. 554, 555. 16 Ibid., p. 555. 17 Ibid., 556. 18 Ibid., p. 555. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Umberto Eco, Trattato di semiotica generale (Milan: Bompiani, 1975), pp. 88ff. 22 Nelson Goodman, “On Likeness of Meaning,” in Leonard Linsky, Semantica e filosofia del linguaggio (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1959), p. 62; David K. Lewis, Convention: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 23 Plato, Cratylus, XXXIV. 24 Ibid., XXXV. 25 Ibid., XXXVI. 26 Ibid., XXXVIII. 27 Ibid., XL. 28 Ibid., LII. 29 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae in Tabula Aurea, I, q. 39, 8e; 2-2, 1. 145, 2e. 30 Eugenio Montale, Ossi di seppia, 1927. 31 Eco, op. cit., p. 93. 32 Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtès, Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du language (Paris: Hachette, 1979). 33 Oswald Ducrot, Dire et ne pas dire: Principes de sémantique linguistique (Paris: Collection Savoir Hermann, 1972). 34 Eco, op. cit., p. 225. 35 Eco, op. cit., 226. 36 Angela Ales Bello, “Edmund Husserl: 1. La riduzione fenomenologica; 2. Il trascendentale,” in L’universo nella coscienza: Introduzione alla fenomenologia di Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, Edwig Conrad Martius (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2003), pp. 15–40. 37 Stefano Zecchi, La bellezza (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990), p. 163. 38 Angelo Marchese, Metodi e prove strutturali (Milan: Principato, 1979), p. 166. 39 Jurj M. Lotman, La struttura del testo poetico (Milan: Mursia, 1972), p. 15. 40 Arnold Hauser, Socialgeschichte der Kunst und Literatur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1948). 41 Friedrich Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst, 1802, par. 27, pp. 390, 393. 42 Friedrich Schelling, Bruno o del principio naturale e divino delle cose, 1802 IV, pp. 223ff, 241ff. 43 Friedrich Schelling, Philosophie und Religion. 44 Picasso Museum, Paris. The image can be seen at http://www.italica.rai.it/index.php? categoria=arte&scheda=picasso_fucil. 45 Tacitus, The Annals. 46 Giuseppe Ungaretti, “San Martino al Carso,” in L’allegria, 1942. 47 In the chapel of the church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. The image can be seen at http://www.wikipedia.org under “Caravaggio.” 48 The painting can be found in the National Gallery, London. See http://www.artrenewal.org/ asp/datatbase/art.asp?aid=797&page=2. 49 In the Staatliche Museen of Berlin, Gemäldegalerie. See http://cgfa.sunsite.dk/bronzino/ pbronzino15.htm. 14

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Otto Dix, Portrait of Hugo Wolf, private collection. Palermo, Palazzo Abatellis. The image can be seen at http://www.wikipedia.org under “Antonello da Messina.” 52 At the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. The image can be seen at http://www.wikipedia.org under “Antonello da Messina”. 53 At the Recanati, Pinacoteca Comunale. The image can be seen at http://www.wikipedia.org under “Lorenzo Lotto.” 54 At the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The image can be seen at http://www.wikipedia. org under “Giorgio de Chirico.” 55 Cortina d’ Ampezzo, proprietà Larese. The image can be seen at http://www.italica. rai.it/index.php?categoria=arte&schede=italia_nova. 56 Padova, Cappella degli Scrovegni. The image can be seen at http://www.giottoagliscrovegni.it. 57 Museo Morandi, Bologna. 51

MARIA GOŁASZEWSKA

THE AESTHETICS OF POSSIBILITY Beauty in the Post-Conceptualist State of Art

Each change in a realm of art entails changes in the manner of reflection on it from a theoretical and aesthetic standpoint. After the deep transformations art has undergone recently, aesthetics cannot be the same; it must be renewed and reconstructed. Thus, the question arises, what kind of changes in the realm of art might make the endeavors of traditional aesthetics pointless. I have in mind above all the recent step made by artists to turn art into anti-art, that is, Conceptual Art. Conceptual Art denies to works of art all of the properties that previously were their characteristics, and changes art into a reflection on itself. Invention and concept become more important than the embodiment and execution of the work; thinking about art becomes more interesting perceiving aesthetic qualities. Thus, art turns into a philosophy of art. Therefore, the main task of Conceptual Art can be defined as searching for something general and universal, that is, for structures.1 At the same time new possibilities of structuring the world and especially the human world appear that are not without influence on art. Thus, what should aesthetics do with works of art deprived of their qualities, of their material bases? With art that neglects perceivers and which identifies itself, as it were, with theory, philosophy, and finally even with aesthetics itself? The main standpoint of traditional aesthetics connected with art in the previous sense of the word is based on some metaphysical premises, particularly on a belief in the existence of aesthetic values, man’s aesthetic sense, and the autonomy of aesthetic phenomena. However, all these notions cannot be precisely defined. Moreover, traditional aesthetics presents various aspects and cannot be considered as a monolith. Axiological subjectivism and objectivism belong here along with such trends as skepticism and absolutism. A similar state of affairs appears with regard to attempts to create a new aesthetics as well. Various trends cannot be reduced to only one, be it a semiological approach, an institutional conception of art, art criticism, mathematical methods, experimental tendencies, and so on. On the other hand, one can suppose that there are no essential differences between classical aesthetics and the new one, both of which deal 67 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 67–74. © 2008 Springer.

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with the same fundamental problems. All differences would concern terminology only; linguistic formulations, means of expression, specific qualities (regarded as aesthetically significant), and aesthetic values would always be at stake. This standpoint, however, cannot be accepted: linguistic formulations as well as methodology touch on the very essence of the problem, not to mention the transformations within particular elements of the “aesthetic situation.” It is not my task to discuss what the traditional and the new aesthetics are like in reference to existing trends, although it is an important subject. I would like to propose a theoretical standpoint resulting from reflection on the place of art in the contemporary world. My point of departure is the notion of universal structures. One of them is “change” or “transformation.” It is found both in the physical world and in man’s world understood as an economic, cultural, social complex; in art in the wide sense of the word (as a set of creators, works of art, and recipients); and in the sciences. The considerations deal with the problems of art or, more generally, with the phenomenon of beauty. This emphasis on general structures brings us nearer to what I define as an “aesthetics of possibility”: Each change can occur providing the possibility exists. The direction and type of those changes are existentially possible in every set of facts mentioned previously or their significant variants in spite of the most general structures of changes. Traditional aesthetics stressed the particular and concrete modifications and the isolation between systems, whereas the new aesthetics is interested in general structures and in transformations as such; it makes abstractions from the existing features of works of art as material objects. Therefore, each thesis concerning art at the same time concerns reality as a whole and refers to general structures. Changes in art itself and in trends in culture as a whole entail a need for revision of what aesthetics should be like today. It is quite obvious that art is subject to permanent transformations. Perfect at one time, it must change and transform itself because the human world is permanently changing. Some of these changes, in turn, are stimulated or deepened by art, assuming a definite form. Thus, the theoretical tools of aesthetics (its concepts, notions, ideas) need to be adapted to the new phenomena of art, to its new modes of creation and reception. Aesthetics as a particular discipline depends not only on art itself, but also on an awareness of what art is. This awareness suggests a model of what “aesthetic qualities” and “aesthetic values” are like, as well as of all the

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categories that the discipline used to apply to its subject matter (e.g., content, aesthetic experience, creativity, and the like). Consider the traditional meaning of art. Art was considered as a set of works of art, unique and having a stable material basis susceptible to our sensory perception. Thus, a set of aesthetic qualities was considered essential to works of art. Contemplation of these qualities was fundamental to grasping the very essence of a work of art, and aesthetic experience was reduced to this contemplation. This was an important standpoint for phenomenologists (Ingarden among them), who considered a set of aesthetic qualities directly present to our senses as a fundamental basis for the constitution of aesthetic values. Above all the new aesthetics pays more attention to structures than to what is directly given to our senses. However, an emergent awareness of the importance of the aesthetic qualities may be interpreted as a first step toward some kind of abstraction: We “detach” some properties from a work of art and we constitute a new, qualitative whole named the “aesthetic object” or “concretization” (Ingarden). At the same time we face another task: A work of art is valuable not only for its directly perceived qualities, but for its “content,” for its message, and for what we call “general ideas.” In accepting this standpoint we give up a level of unique and individual aesthetic qualities that are supposed to be characteristic of only one work of art. We enter a realm of ideas that can be expressed by various sets of qualities in various works of art. The level of general ideas can be reached by a second step of abstraction: thus, behind the aesthetic qualities, we experience some truths concerning the human being and his world and affairs. A search for structures is a decisive step toward aesthetic abstraction. Behind aesthetic qualities and general ideas, we are aware of general structures that are similar in art and in reality. This is an essential link between art and reality that permits us to unify the aesthetics of reality and the aesthetics of art. Under the influence of Conceptual Art the belief is born that general structures and not a set of aesthetic qualities are the most interesting thing in art. And what about general ideas? The order of tasks, interests, and analyses has been inverted: The highest importance is attached to structures, then to general ideas, and finally to aesthetic qualities. Thus, general ideas possess an equally significant position in artistic creation, in works of art themselves and in a perceiver’s intentions directed toward discovering and explaining them. It is important to discover and explain them both in traditional and new art, Conceptual Art included. The point is that those ideas may be expressed in a many ways, which vary according to the time and the trends dominating in art.

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They used to be expressed explicitly or implicitly, by statements or through the situations presented in works of art, underlining some of the concrete, immediately perceived qualities, as well as through exposing some structures. The manner of expressing general ideas in a work of art is a separate topic to consider. In pointing to general structures as the most important feature of art works, we reach a real concept of art. Thus, art seems to return to its sources. As far as human self-consciousness has been developed, art gradually became more and more different from reality. In the beginning it was a mirror of the real world, of human affairs in particular. It was a duplication of reality and especially of its appearance, which was directly presented to our senses. Art became more and more expressively deformed in relation to the image of reality, and finally art lost the sense of being its imitation; it became an autonomous realm. It opposed reality instead of being an integral part of it. Artists made an effort to liberate art from all rules and duties. However, a moment came when art identified itself with some part of reality, not only with things, events, and their sensual images, but with ideas, thinking, and even science, which pretends to tell the truth about the real, existing world. I stress the close connection between reality and art, real events and aesthetic objects. Those two systems—of reality as a whole on the one hand, and a realm of art on the other —are intertwined, subject to mutual interference and influence. To explain this, I introduce the notion of “pro-aesthetical” elements of reality. The very essence of pro-aesthetical events is that they can be submitted to intentional transformation. Being intentional, not real, the transformations act upon the human mind and even behavior as if they were really fulfilled. Let us begin with art. The phenomenon of ambiguity or indeterminacy comes to mind. This means, in general, that everybody perceives one and the same work of art in a different way; therefore, his or her consciousness is submitted to different kinds of influences and modifications. A work of art, however, exists as one and the same object, comprehensively specified. Thus, the possibility of those different modes of perceiving belongs to its very nature. This situation seems to be different from our use of the things that help us in everyday life. In fact, those things are unambiguous because there always exist ways to prove all of their properties, to check whether they are real or not, and whether they really belong to an object or are an illusion. Those

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objects, however, may become subject to “aesthetization,” and this is why they may be considered as pro-aesthetical phenomena. Therefore, they may be grasped in an aesthetic attitude if one gives up a purely utilitarian stance toward them. We are able to “transform” them intentionally and turn them into “aesthetic objects” that are more or less satisfying. For instance, I hear loud music of the kind that is highly appreciated by young people. I turn the radio off because I perceive it as noise, a disharmonious set of sounds. But the music can “change” if new factors occur, if some stimulus makes me try to listen to it in another way and attempt to structure it differently than before. So, I may listen to it with interest, grasp its scheme and hidden forms, and begin to understand its power of affecting an audience. The same cases occur in painting, not to mention literature, film, or theater. Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, for instance, was initially considered rather ugly art but several years later was approved as a worthy and valuable masterpiece, evoking common acceptance among perceivers. The painting itself did not change, but the cultural milieu and the artistic achievements of other painters changed, as well as—under these influences—human taste, which is always formed by new techniques of artistic creation and the fact that new kinds of deformation in painting appear. Similar situation occur in the domain of the applied arts; the most striking example is the style of the Fin de siècle. After a short time in which it dominated the Western cultural world, it became a symbol of a bad taste, and then in the 1960s it underwent rehabilitation. Today it is considered, not very seriously, indeed, in “inverted comas,” as it were, as a “quotation mark.” Its attraction results from its opposition to the schematization and far-reaching unification of architecture and applied arts. Another example of what we used to regard as beautiful is the natural world. Not all landscapes, however, are equally beautiful, but all can be treated as pro-aesthetical objects. The simplest example is a landscape seen through the window. There may be plenty of freshness, greenery, and entangled branches of trees. In contrast, there may be a gray courtyard with monotonous walls of buildings. But even this may be enlightened by a ray of the sun and reveal a kind of beauty; it can be grasped in an aesthetic attitude, and thus be classified as a “pro-aesthetical” event. Examples of pro-aesthetical events can be taken, too, from every day life, from human relationships and interactions. They are subjected to the same laws of structuring, and they change their image according to the mode of perceiving them.

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Consider a couple who are in love at the beginning of their marriage. He is fascinated by her helplessness, she by his decisiveness and ability to find the best solution for each situation. Her helplessness is structured as something “attractive” that makes the man more responsible for her care and help, her naiveté as a charming property of someone who is weak but fundamentally honest, his resoluteness as a pillar that gives a stable support to the family, and his ability to get out of difficulties as resourcefulness and ingenuity connected with intelligence and perspicuity. A moment comes, however, when the situation starts to be restructured: Naiveté is defined as stupidity, helplessness as negligence of everyday duties, decisiveness as an authoritarian trend to dominate others, the ability to get out of difficult situations as cunning, and so on. As a result of such a restructurization of the phenomena of everyday life, a structure of drama emerges: a tension is born, a blow-up is in the air. A threat of the breakdown of the reality existing until then comes into existence. How is it possible that a couple who lived together harmoniously until now, supposing that neither of them would change his or her character, suddenly become enemies? A change was fulfilled, but it was only a change of consciousness, not of the reality where all belong to the realm of facts. And here we enter the realm of pro-aestheticality: The same facts can be variously transformed and restructured, and this new structurizations act upon the human mind. It is art that takes advantage of these phenomena and shows us an account of the possibilities in this matter. The foregoing considerations lead to the following. Four kinds of attempts as to define a work of art and, as a consequence, four kinds of “aesthetics” can be distinguished: 1. A work of art treated as an individual, unique entity, which is furnished with a unique set of aesthetic qualities, as a basis of aesthetic values. 2. A work of art as a message of something important for the human beings, furnished with content revealing general ideas. 3. A work of art as a structure, or as the embodiment of one of the possible structures we can conceive or invent. 4. A work of art as an element of the general structure, present in reality as a whole. To these kinds of treatment of works of art there correspond different models of aesthetics: 1. An aesthetics of qualities, supposing that they are presented immediately to our senses as aesthetic values are.

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2. An aesthetics of content, according to which aesthetic qualities and values are considered as revealing general ideas, which are considered to be the most significant characteristics of works of art, especially of masterpieces. 3. An aesthetics of structures, in which aesthetic qualities and values as well as general ideas are less interesting than the structures of a work of art and the links between the presented events or parts of a work as a whole. 4. An aesthetics as a universal discipline, supposing that similar structures can be found in reality and in art, that aesthetic values are rooted in some human beliefs (nonrational in nature) about what the world is like. The general axiological level is taken into account because aesthetic values are supposed to be closely connected with other ones (cognitive, moral, utilitarian, and so on). The basic standpoints of the aesthetics of the possible may be summarized as follows: 1. Aesthetics is interested in general structures, common to all reality and all kinds of art. 2. The basic universal structure is one of transformation or change; both reality and art are permanently subject to them. 3. What links reality and art is a phenomenon of “pro-aestheticality,” that is, the possibility of intentional structuring into structures appearing in reality in embryo, and expressively in art. The basic notions of the aesthetics of possibility are as follows: 1. The most universal possibility concerns intentional modifications of proaesthetical phenomena. 2. The historical transformations of art and of reality confirm that both domains can be grasped as a unique system and, at the same time, can be opposed to a universe of abstractions and ideas. 3. One of the possibilities of treating art as abstract structure is Conceptual Art. It reveals that on the level of abstraction, art and philosophy can be identified as one and the same. This is a structural identification, and let us recall that the basic structure for the Conceptualists is an idea of tension. 4. Another of the most recent attempts to point at structures as something essential to art is post-modernism. Here the qualitative elements are not so important; they serve as quotations, and general ideas play the same role. The plot of novel, for example, may be so unclear that we are forced, as it were, to grasp those structures that alone can justify the value and significance of this kind of work. The following scheme presents the place of art within the universal structures of reality:

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In the center of the set is reality, which may be variously defined depending on theoretical standpoint and interpretation. It is a point of reference of all phenomena that occur in the human world. The universal structure is meant to be similar to the solar system: the planets move around the sun, and, in turn, they have their own satellites. In our system there are four “planets”: science, art, religion, and common behaviors. Each of them has its specific properties and participates in the superior systems and is subject to modifications from them. Each of them may be considered as a fact (it exists in the human world and can be more or less precisely defined); it can be treated as a possibility (it hides in itself the potential to be developed and modified); each of them finds its counterpart in human consciousness, becoming an object of experiences that modify and form the personality of man; each of them is a specific value that participates in the axiological universe. Jagiellonian University, Krakow NOTE 1

My use of the notion of structure is basically taken from Structuralism, but I apply the reinterpretation suggested by Jean Piaget’s Le structuralisme (PUF, Paris, 1968) and the theory of systems due to Ervin Laszlo (The Systems View of the World, New York, 1971).

MARIOLA SUłKOWSKA

AESTHETIZATION OF AESTHETIC VALUES?

In the contemporary world we can observe the phenomenon of global aesthetization. We can speak of the following types of aesthetization: of everyday life, the natural environment, politics, sport, and, even more generally, thinking. It is even possible to speak of a new version of man: homo aestheticus. We live in the constant process of the aesthetization of the real world: embellishment and stylization can be found everywhere. If for Aristotle the most important part of philosophy was metaphysics, now aesthetics seems to take over this role. We can wonder if in this new situation aesthetics itself as well as aesthetic values have changed. As consequence of this global aesthetization the answer could be affirmative because the primacy of aesthetic values means that these values are no longer traditional ones. Moreover, the aesthetization of everything brings as a consequence the deaesthetization of art and beauty. The world, however, seems to exist only for our pleasure, and this is a kind of purely aesthetic pleasure. It seems that Nietzsche’s idea appears again, of life beyond good and evil. But should we not add beyond beauty? Is it true that now we are not faced with traditional, transcendent aesthetic values but rather with ornaments, trinkets, or at least a “stylized prettiness”? Or perhaps, in spite of the fact that the world seems to be a gigantic bric-a-brac, we can still find beauty somewhere. Perhaps we can still speak of Alberti’s aesthetic pleasure based on copiousness and variety or about Ingarden’s aesthetic situation and aesthetic experience. Or is it rather just Bakhtin’s carnival pleasure? Here I present some considerations that are closely connected with the general problem of aesthetization. The phenomenon is, on one hand, connected with the development of new media and, on the other, can be looked at from a broader perspective in terms of the transformation of industrial society into a post-industrial one. This process is accompanied by the replacement of a traditional logo-centered paradigm, which was characteristic of the modern world, with a new picto-centered one, which is supposed to define and determine our pop culture. As regards the latter, which is first of all described as a visual culture, we can speak of a new type of language: traditional logo-centrism has been replaced with a picto-centered language based on glyphs. This seems to be a return to the universal and common idea of a lingua franca. Thus, if 75 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 75–84. © 2008 Springer.

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thought was traditionally considered as an equivalent of the word, now the perception of images has been substituted for thought, or we can say that we think by means of images. Many contemporary thinkers have shown the importance of visualization and the aesthetization of culture.1 What I have in mind in considering this global aesthetization, including the aesthetization of aesthetic values, is a new aesthetic way of thinking, an idea of transversal reason, an idea of homo aestheticus, and, finally, a new status of aesthetics as well as of aesthetic values. I start with the exhibition The Immaterials (Les Immatériaux) organized at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1985. Jean-François Lyotard was both its originator and its curator. The neologism coined by Lyotard was intended to point to a new quality appearing in the exhibition space as well as beyond it, in the space defining the postmodern intellectual condition after the end of “grand narratives.”2 According to Lyotard, the character of the exhibition was purely philosophical: We will first of all ask questions and incite others to ask questions, not only about what the material is, but also about what is associated with it: material versus spiritual, material versus personnel (in the administration, the army), hardware versus software (in a computer), matter versus form (in the analysis of a manufactured object, a natural object or a work of art), matter versus mind (in philosophy and theology), matter versus energy (in classical physics), matter versus state (in modern physics), matrix versus product (in anatomy, printing, minting and casting; the problem of reproduction and, in art, of multiples), mother versus child, mother versus father, etc.3

All of these substantially philosophical questions aimed at casting light on the postmodern condition of thinking (philosophy, science) and also creating (art): In the tradition of modernity, the relationship between human beings and materials is fixed by the Cartesian program of mastering and possessing nature.    The ambition of exhibition entitled ‘The Immaterials’ is to make the visitor realize how far this relationship is altered by the existence of ‘new materials’ [which] in a wide meaning of the term, are not merely materials which are new. They question the idea of Man as a being who works, who plans and who remembers: the idea of an author.4

Lyotard stated in an interview that the first version of the exhibition title— New Materials and Creativity—made him realize the questionable nature of basic notions such as ‘material’ or ‘creation’; ‘new materials’ was thus replaced with ‘immaterials,’ and the notion of ‘creation/creativity’ achieved a new meaning.5 Immaterial signifies here a specific, most often computeror electronically generated material, one that is no longer matter for any future project. Therefore the notion of immaterials would perfectly suit Lyotard’s affirmative aesthetics that postulates the positioning of any aesthetic experience on the surface of the work of art.6 Transcendency disappears,

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and the structure of a work of art is limited to the event itself; there is also no difference between technological experiment and art. At the same time immateriality intensifies Lyotard’s presupposition that each piece of artwork, understood in its artistic context, is dogmatic, and teaches us how to perceive and comprehend it: In this sense, the museum or the gallery is the new Academy prescribing the discourse of knowledge.    [However] artists today are engaged not in the deconstruction of significations but in extending the limits of sense perception: making visible (or audible) what now goes unobserved, through the alteration of sense data, perception itself.7

The artwork becomes here, as for Daniel Buren, a dissident having ambitions of destroying its rules by courting them.8 Creation, then, seems to Lyotard a constitutive issue for being a man and is characteristic of thinking as such. Similar ideas can be traced in, for example, the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for whom being an artist and the connected idea of creativity is an ontic issue,9 or of Wolfgang Welsch, who perceives autocreativity—an incessant process of becoming oneself— as a basic feature of the condition of postmodern man, the condition of homo aestheticus.10 Creativity understood in such a manner also characterizes postmodern thinking and liberates it from the paradigm of ‘grand narratives’ that, in general terms, are suffocating stereotypes that define the frames of our thinking. These framings cannot be transgressed or transcended. Moreover, they also restrict and limit whole spheres of reality that cannot even be thought of and thus become devalued. Postmodern thinking thus ceases to be linear and teleological and becomes an unfinished process entangled in a net and happening in a blurred unrestricted way, deprived of a center and periphery, a zone of ‘intellectual conurbation.’ The organization of the exhibition itself was intended to correspond to this conurbational architecture of thinking. The exhibition was designed by Lyotard as a specific time-space negating the traditionally understood function and structure of a gallery. The display was deprived of any pedestals or bizarre molding aimed at triggering, comprehended by means of philosophy, feeling of uncertainty. The exhibition thus ceased to be a seventeenth-century gallery—a static system of ordered, coherent, representative objects, the seeing of which was defined by the dominating sense of sight in a wellplanned and teleologically ordered space providing the feeling of being a tamed, safe, and home-like atmosphere. The traditional modern gallery was one of specific ‘grand meta-narratives’ forcing themselves upon the subject-viewer. Lyotard avoided direct and unequivocal definitions of things and discovered, as he said, a more liquid,

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blurred, immaterial system of organization of time and space: instead of walls, we have a whole set of semitransparent, neutrally gray screens that outlined some space in a subtle way in which interactions could take place allowing a free choice of direction. Interactions were determined by means of aural, optical, olfactory, and even tactile stimuli: “The eye will be deprived of the exclusive privilege it enjoys in the modern gallery. Neither will there be a clearly signposted itinerary.”11 The latter is a result of happening interactions: what emerges here is a peculiar map, q labyrinth; paradoxically a map of single use determined by the tourist; a map that does not denote any route; a map that is disposable, unrepeatable, unique, virtual (in Paul Virilio’s sense) word.12 The exhibition attempted to characterize an aspect of our contemporary situation associated with the new technological (mostly, digital) revolution. For Lyotard, whereas mechanical (and that means modern, Cartesian and postCartesian) servants or tools hitherto rendered services that were essentially ‘physical,’ automatons generated by computer science and electronics can now carry out mental operation. Thus the new technology pursues and perhaps accomplishes the modern Cartesian project of becoming master and possessor. At the same time, a practical organization of The Immaterials was supposed to show and even teach a new, postmodern, way of thinking. This thinking is no longer Cartesian; first, it is no longer linear and teleological. It is embroiled in a net in which the opposition between center and periphery disappears, as does the opposition between inside and outside. The way of seeing the exhibition corresponded to this new way of thinking. The visitor, passing from one zone to another, became an investigator, but a very personal one. His individual itinerary was recorded on a magnetic memory card and given to him in the form a printout when he left. It was a map, but not a traditional one. It was a very personal map and could not be used again because in each case the route was different. For Lyotard this was a perfect metaphor of the postmodern way of thinking as well as a way of experiencing the world, which seems to be an aesthetic one. His idea has been continued and made specific by many contemporary thinkers. The German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch emphasizes the changes that were brought about in the area of what aesthetics is and that among other things are the consequences of Lyotard’s exhibition. Welsch proposed his thesis on aesthetization in his Ästhetisches Denken.13 For him the modus of the contemporary world has become aesthetics and the only way to understand the world is through aesthetical thinking. The latter takes place not in terms of traditional, Cartesian, rationality, but through a radically different transversal reason. The new form of rationality and of

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reason corresponds with postmodernity. It constitutes a specific universe for the subject in which its intellectual mobility must, from necessity, interplay with transversal rationality. The new paradigm of mind not only corresponds to philosophical inquiries of postmodernity, but, according to Welsch, also agrees with what can be labeled the postmodern way of life. Transversal rationality ascertains a chaotic multiplicity of phenomena while simultaneously rejecting its hierarchy. The transversal mind is thus ideally adjusted to the ‘subject becoming itself’ (the subject of so-called ‘weak identity’ in postmodern sociology or anthropology). Interlacing various forms of discourse and being always ‘among’ various forms of rationality, the transversal mind defines an optimal relation between the subject and the shredded, entangled world that appears as a gigantic bric-a-brac. In the other words, to have transversal reason means to think in nonlinear and nonteleological ways. It means thinking without any exactly appointed goal as well as without any rules or insuperable barriers. For Welsch, the idea of transversal reason was created to fulfill the needs to be free from omnipotence, fundamentalism, or intellectually totalitarian ways of thinking.14 Who is equipped with this transversal reason? The answer is: the postmodern homo aestheticus. The idea of homo aestheticus first appeared in Frederic Nietzsche’s philosophy. He said that he was ”glad to harbour    not ‘one immortal soul’, but many mortal souls within.”15 Furthermore, “The assumption of one subject is perhaps not necessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multitude of subjects, whose interplay and strife form the basis of our thinking and our consciousness altogether?”16 Nietzsche coined the formula of the “subject as a multitude.” Finally he says In this respect, my life is simply wonderful.    I fail to recall ever having exerted myself—no trace of struggle can be demonstrated in my life, I am the opposite of a heroic nature. “Wanting” something, “striving”’ for something, a “purpose”, having a “wish” in mind—I don’t know any of this from experience.17

The idea is not new. One can evoke the whole tradition of treating subjectivity not in categories of substantial unity, but rather in terms of relations and processes that are not aimed at achieving any final and ultimate objective. Let us think, as Welsch does, for example, of the Christian idea that one should disregard oneself and that by doing so one will reach oneself. Johannes Tauler held that experience and knowledge of God requires a kind of surrender and annihilation of the self. Similarly, for a Buddhist, it is the most obvious thing that you will gain redemption only by losing yourself: The intentional search for the Self is the cause of all unhappiness, the proper goal is the ‘selfless’ self. The Zen master Dogen said "To learn the Buddha Way is to learn the Self.

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To learn the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all things." Montaigne had already said that “we are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game” and “I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and solidly, without confusion and without mixture, or in one word.” Novalis wrote that one person is “several people at once” since “pluralism” is “our innermost essence.” Recall Walt Whitman’s “I am large    I contain multitudes.” Robert Musil declared in the Man without Qualities The ego is losing the significance that it had previously had as a sovereign dispensing acts of government.    Perhaps, when the inappropriate significance which we afford the personality disappears, we will enter into a new one as in the most splendid adventure.18

Of course, we can find a much longer list, but all of those examples of homo aestheticus, incessently creating and becoming himself, are just singular examples and nothing more. But in postmodern times we all, as Welsch and other writers believe, have this kind of condition—we all are homo aestheticus. Now at last we are all such artists in our everyday life. We sculpt our selves. Becoming a self is a kind of permanent process that is characteristic of our life. Because of this process a man becomes, well—postmodern ecce homo. So, we have the idea ofhomo aestheticus whose feature is weak identity and who is endowed with the transversal mind and incessantly creates himself. This objectless autocreation, this Welsch’s art of life, is an effect of the primacy of aesthetic values in the postmodern world. Zygmunt Baumann draws our attention to such a situation, labeling the three types of postmodern man tourist, nomad, and vagabond. For all of them “the world exists so that we can pleasantly live in it and only that gives it some sense.”19 This pleasure is purely aesthetic, situated ‘beyond good and evil’: The aesthetic sense is the only one the world needs, especially the world that is becoming morally barren. However, this world is not irrational because homo aestheticus’ ‘identity in transition,’ according to Welsch, is based upon the transversal mind. It is hence perfectly adjusted to a postmodern subject becoming himself: In the aspect of such challenges the transversal mind becomes significant. It is the essential faculty of postmodern way of life since postmodern reality always requires an ability of moving around various systems of sense and constellations of rationality. This faculty becomes simply a postmodern virtue.20

Art turns out to be a school of survival under the auspices of postmodernity. It provides us with behavioral patterns: ironically falsifying its death sentence, virtually spontaneously spinning various entangled plots that constitute a multiplicity of coexisting artistic phenomena; transgressing freely borders

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of formerly neighboring fields such as designing, media, advertising, architecture, cinema, dance, music, therapy, and so on, at the same time making receivers sensitive (often a cocreators and active participants) to the multiplicity that forces tolerance for itself.21 Being a model is intensified the more so as the borders between so-called art and life have become obliterated: The rolls of aesthetic avant-garde have become rhythms of everyday life. Fragmentariness, stage changes, combination of diversity, tendency to provoke are so widespread and common today from media culture through advertising up to our private lives. Our everyday reality consists of elements that are at odds with one another and we have achieved an ability of matching them that heterogeneity makes us more exhilirated than tired. Undoubtedly, it requires some art of life which original patterns and models were shaped in modernity. A man-artist will be in her element and feel like a fish in water.22

Hence it seems that the essential feature of the postmodern world of homo aestheticus in ‘becoming himself’ is its aesthetic exuberance. This situation reminds us of Bakhtin’s carnivalization, but here we rather have a permanent carnival, propelled, driven by hunger for new desires on the side of mass audience. Stimuli always have to be in an aesthetic environment—the more artistry and invention, the faster cultural digestion and metabolism; hence the less most frightening thing, i.e., boredom and monotony.23

What is extremely suprising in this context of the common rule of aesthetization is the status of aesthetic values. Jean Baudrillard underlined that postmodern panaesthetism functioning in the form of ‘stylized prettiness’ eliminates these values.24 According to Baudrillard, Something has disappeared—namely the essential difference between that what made abstraction attractive. The difference responsible for the magic of notion and charm of reality. All metaphysics has dropped out. One does not have to be right because the reference point, as an ideal, ceased to exist, either as a negative or positive.25

The whole sphere of transcendency has dropped out together with metaphysics, as well as the sphere of aesthetic values; we can speak of the aesthetic crisis that Jerome Stolnitz warned us against.26 Practically, the principal style of becoming a ‘weak subject’ is an aesthetic manner forced by the aesthetization of the whole of reality. Welsch states that because of this, the peculiar pleasure of aesthetic experience has lost its intoxicating power of a “beautiful drug.”27 In reality the process of “aesthetization takes place as anaesthetization”28 ; coolness and surfeit are the results. For this reason it seems necessary to work out a new version of aesthetics that would be capable facilitating from its sources the experience ofhomo aestheticus. Welsch evokes the Aristotelian category of aisthesis, which, contrary to the Kantian view, brings “not a false appearance of virtally outlined reality but a

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sensory flash of insight given in an immediate contact with multiple matter of the world.”29 What appears here is a specific aesthetic epistemology that can remind us of Paul de Man’s “epistemology of tropes.”30 So some reorganization of aesthetics is needed that would be based upon a reorganization of art itself; a new form of a trditional discipline appears, namely Welsch’s idea of aesthetics beyond aesthetics—anaesthetics. The notion of Aristotelian aisthesis is a necessity for the aesthetics of the twenty-first century because the world in which contemporary man actively participates, the world exposed to radical pluralisation and aesthetization (mainly because of the common accesibility of the media) as in the sphere of appearances as well as senses can no longer be comprehended in terms of mimetic aesthetics nor in terms of linear rational thinking.    Aesthetics dealing with issues of the new media can draw from its centuries old tradition—especially in connection with notions such as ‘medium’ and ‘techne’; it can also—in its revolutionary attitude, in a belief that the new electronic media radically change (in the sense of ontology and epistemology) fundamental elements of an aesthetic situation—attempt at building from the very beginning digital aesthetics as the aesthetics of art and new kind of culture.31

One such proposal is the aesthetics beyond aesthetics as proposed by Welsch. Two aspects can show the distinctness of such an aesthetics—its dialectical twofoldness and its transdisciplinarity. The idea of aesthetics beyond aesthetics is to cover both that what the aesthetic and the anaesthetic; it is a consequence of the assumption that “each aesthetic behaviour is a peculiar (or paradigmatic) one what signifies that it makes some things perceptible and some other imperceptible.”32 So the most important benefit of such aesthetics beyond aesthetics is to facilitate our experience of things that are elusive, indefinable, and imperceptible, by means of anaesthetics that mostly refers to the sphere of experience and sensation33 : Anaesthetics’ main issue becomes thus the fundamental area of the aesthetic, its conditions and limits. My main thesis professes that anaethetics does not border upon aesthetics from outside but derives/stems out from inside. Everything that is aesthetic as such is inevitably connected with the anaesthetic.    There is no aisthesis without anaisthesis.34

The second aspect—its inner transdisciplinarity—comes from its openness to other disciplines (from its interdisciplinarity) as well as from the postulate that says that elements of other disciplines (Welsch mentions here sociology, art history, anthropology, neurology, etc.) will become an integral part of the institutional structure of aesthetics and will function as its branches. “Aesthetics as such should intersect with other disciplines, should be interdisciplinar, not becoming interdisciplinary on occasion of encountering other fields of knowledge.”35 Obviously, Welsch’s assumption of the idea of transdisciplinarity is grounded in the assumption of transversal rationality: Distinct

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rationalities rejected by tradition, according to Welsch, entangle reciprocally, penetrate and shift, cancelling traditional divisions into branches of knowledge. The status of aesthetic value, which is liable to processes of aesthetization, changed but is not subjected, as ib Baudrillard, to a complete degradation. University of Silesia, Poland NOTES 1

See M. C. Taylor and E. Saarinen, Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New York, 1993); J. Baudrillard, Seduction, translated by B. Singer (London: Macmillan, 1990). J. Baudrillard, Simulations (New York, 1983); J. Baudrillard, The Evil Demon of Images (Annandale, 1987); J.-F. Lyotard, Le condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir (Les Éditions de Minuit, 1979). 2 Lyotard, Le condition postmoderne. 3 J.-F. Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” Art&Text 17 (1985), pp. 47–48. See Bernard Blistène, “Les Immatériaux: A conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” available at http://www.kether.com/ words/lyotard/index.html, and Georges Van Den Abbeele, “Jean-François Lyotard (Interview),” Diacritics (Autumn 1984), pp. 15–21. 4 Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” p. 47. 5 Blistène, “Les Immatériaux.” 6 J.-F. Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime," Artforum (April 1982); Blistène, “Les Immatériaux.” 7 J.-F. Lyotard, “Preliminary Notes on the Pragmatic of Works: Daniel Buren,” October 10 (1979), pp. 65 and 67. 8 Ibid. 9 G. A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (Northwestern University Press; 1993). M. Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et L’Invisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). 10 W. Welsch, “Becoming oneself”; available at http://www.uni-jena.de/welsch. 11 Lyotard, “Les Immatériaux,” p. 53. 12 Compare J. L. Borges’ map in his A Universal History of Infamy (London, 1997). See P. Virilio, “The Dark Spot of Art,” in documenta documents 1 (Cantze Verlag, 1996). 13 W. Welsch, Ästhetisches Denken (Stuttgart, 1989). 14 Welsch, “Becoming oneself.” 15 F. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister, in F. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2, p. 386. See Welsch, Becoming oneself. 16 F. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, Juli 1882 bis Herbst 1885, in F. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 11, p. 650. See Welsch, Becoming oneself. 17 F. Nietzsche, Ecce homo. Wie man wird was man ist, in F. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 6, p. 294. 18 All of the quoted examples are from Welsch, “Becoming oneself.” 19 Z. Baumann, “Nomada, wagabunda, turysta,” Res Publika Nowa 9 (1993), p. 26. 20 W. Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna, translated by R. Kubicki and A. ZeidlerJaniszewska (Warsaw, 1998), p. 438. 21 B. Riemschneider and U. Grosenick (Eds.), Art Now (Taschen, 2001). 22 Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna, p. 268.

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S. Morawski, “O swoistym procesie estetyzacji kultury współczesnej,” in A. ZeidlerJaniszewska (Ed.), Estetyczne przestrzenie współczesno´sci (Warsaw 1996), p. 36: “There has never been such a process of aesthetization of such a degree and extent that we can observe at present times. Its trigger is consumptionism together with permissivism. There are no gods, tribunals, no rules or ultimate norms. No one recognizes tyrants-politicians nor tyrantsintellectuals that know everything better. Artists instead of fulfilling their priestly roles function as moderators, that is, function as guides of many scenes of old and current culture.” 24 J. Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil. Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London, 1990). See Morawski, “O swoistym procesie estetyzacji kultury współczesnej.” 25 J. Baudrillard, “Procesja symulakrów,” translated by T. Komendant, in R. Nycz (Ed.), Postmodernizm. Antologia przekładów (Kraków 1996), p. 176. 26 J. Stolnitz, “Bezinteresowno´sc´ estetyczna a kryzys estetyki,” in S. Morawski (Ed.), Zmierzch estetyki – rzekomy czy autentyczny? (Warsaw, 1997). J. Stolnitz, “The Aesthetic Attitude in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXVI (1978), pp. 409–422. 27 O. Marquard, “Estetyka i anestetyka,” translated by K. Krzemieniowa, in: S. Czerniak, A. Szahaj (Eds.), Postmodernizm a filozofia. Wybór tekstów (Warsaw, 1996). 28 W. Welsch, “Estetyka i anestetyka,” translated by M.Łukasiewicz, in R. Nycz (Ed.), Postmodernizm. Antologia przekładów (Kraków 1996), p. 525. 29 Morawski, “O swoistym procesie estetyzacji kultury współczesnej,” p. 33. 30 P. de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 31 K. Wilkoszewska, Pijkno w sieci (Kraków, 2000), pp. 21, 25. 32 W. Welsch, “Odpowiedzi,” in A. Zeidler-Janiszewska (Ed.), Problemy ponowoczesnej pluralizacji kultury. Wokół koncepcji Wolfganga Welscha (Poznaq, 1998), p. 128: “Anaesthetics should be differentiated from the three bordering attitudes. Firstly, it is not anti-aesthetics.    Secondly, it does not deal with what not-aesthetic is.    Thirdly, it does not deal with what beyond aesthetics is   ” 33 W. Welsch, Nasza postmodernistyczna moderna, p. 449; “Estetyka i anestetyka.” Also see Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable.” 34 W. Welsch, “Estetyka i anestetyka,” pp. 522, 537. 35 W. Welsch, Estetyka poza estetyka, (Universitas, 2005), p. 103; W. Welsch, Vernunft. Die zeitgenössische Vernunftkritik und das Konzept der transversalen Vernunft (Frankfurt, 1995).

VALERIE REED AND MAX STATKIEWICZ

SHATTERING BEAUTY Rilke’s Aesthetics of the Fragmentary

the strange experience of beauty; its existence is too much; it tears one to pieces Marianne Moore, “Marriage”1 Qui dit fragment ne doit pas seulement dire fragmentation d’une réalité déjà existante, ni moment d’un ensemble encore à venir.    Il faut essayer de reconnaître à l’ ‘éclatement’    une valeur qui ne soit pas de négation. Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini2

In his essay “Sublime Truth,” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that Rainer Maria Rilke’s association of the beautiful and the terrible in the first “Duino Elegy” (“beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure”)3 expresses Rilke’s notion of the sublime. The remark is not developed in Lacoue-Labarthe’s theoretical essay; however, the implications of his insight should be pursued. The line from the first Elegy is not an isolated statement; even in some of Rilke’s earliest poems, there are many traces of the sublime. This paper attempts to bring together Rilke’s notion of the sublime with his interest in the fragmentary, also prominent in these early poems, and triggered in part by his encounter with the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Particularly as it is manifested in the 1908 poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the convergence of these issues in Rilke’s poetry grants a dynamic power to the fragmentary that links the sublime with the notion of truth. The model of classical beauty in Western art and thought on art has often been represented by an ideal and (at least seemingly) changeless form: by a painting or sculpture of a flawless human body, or by an object, perfect and complete. Only such a body, such an object, could secure the eternity of the form enclosed in it, and that eternity in turn would confirm the object’s perfection. Leonardo da Vinci’s model human body gave not only pictorial, but also mathematically exact expression to this idea. Classically descriptive or ekphrastic poems attempted to present the incarnation of beauty in art objects such as the sculptures of Phidias or Michelangelo, who fixed the 85 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 85–102. © 2008 Springer.

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perfection of the human form in stone; and even a more modest object, such as a vase, could acquire the exemplary status of perfect beauty for a poet like Keats, who invokes the work of Phidias in more than one of his poems but also famously addresses an idealized Grecian urn as a model form of the beautiful. In his ode, the beauty of the utopian vision presented on the urn is unchanging and eternal, and it is perhaps in this sense that we should understand the poem’s final lines, which identify beauty with truth.4 One might think that Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” belongs to the same aesthetic tradition. We maintain that it does not; if the poem belongs to any aesthetic tradition, it is rather to that of the aesthetics of the fragmentary, a tradition that goes back at least as far as the Schlegels and German Romanticism, and is rethought in the twentieth century by poets such as Pound and Eliot. But we shall argue that even within this tradition, Rilke’s focus on the exceptional, transformative power of the fragment, apart from any question of its past or future wholeness, places him in a separate category, namely, within the aesthetic of the sublime. The fragment’s power grants access to a particular kind of truth: truth as the radiance of being, which demands the radical transformation of the one who encounters it. Such a notion of truth transcends the narrowly understood aesthetic realm, with its classical notions of description and representation, where both the object and the subject of (disinterested) contemplation can remain intact; it engages the whole ethical sphere of human existence. I Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”5 These fragments I have shored against my ruins T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”6

Modern aesthetics, from Romanticism to (at least) High Modernism, seems indissociable from the notion of the fragment.7 It is with the German Romantics that the fragment—particularly the textual fragment—is first taken up explicitly as a preferred aesthetic object. In their critical anthology and study of German Romanticism, L’absolu littéraire, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy consider the fragment the “incarnation” of Romanticism, the “romantic genre par excellence” and the distinctive mark of the movement’s “radical modernity.”8 The importance of the fragment is most

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evident in the purposefully fragmented form of the critical writings of the Jena Romantics, and Friedrich Schlegel in particular; their work, however, is not limited to formal practice, but theoretically elaborates what we might call the absolutization of the fragment. Schlegel writes that, whereas many ancient texts have become fragments by an accident of history, many modern works, without any such accident, were born fragmented.9 The Romantic aesthetic of the “absolute” fragment is perhaps best expressed in Schlegel’s statement that, in the case of poetry, “every totality could well be a fragment, and every fragment in fact a totality.”10 In such a view, there is no nostalgia for an original whole, now lost. Poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to explore the notion of the fragment as aesthetically valuable. This trend is well described by Hugh Kenner, who notes that an aesthetic appreciation for the fragmentary inherited from the nineteenth-century decadents and symbolists allowed for a new appreciation among early-twentieth-century poets of what time had rendered materially partial—fragments of classical sculpture or bits of papyrus with only a few words on them.11 The new sensitivity to even the smallest sculptural or poetic pieces, he writes, made acceptable, even “cherishable—in our museums fragments a former generation would have eked out with more plaster than there is marble.”12 For the Modernists, just as for the Romantics, there is no longer a (Neo)classical nostalgia for the original whole. On the contrary, such nostalgia would itself be considered unaesthetic because artistic interest is now focused on the self-sufficiency of the fragment. A significant aspect of both Romantic and Modernist aesthetics, then, is the paradoxical view of the fragment—by definition incomplete—as complete in itself; what is important is not the lost whole from which the fragment was broken but, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it, “the borders of the fracture as an autonomous form”—autonomous in the sense that it no longer depends upon or derives from a larger whole.13 Insofar as the fragment comes to be valued for its own sake, it is in an important sense reconstituted as a totality. But this means that, while the definition of the totality may be expanded here, the traditional value granted to the organic whole remains to some extent unchanged: The only way to ascribe value to the fragment would be to assimilate it into the old system of classical aesthetic values. It is thus perhaps not surprising that art at the turn of the twentieth century also manifested a persistent desire to reassemble fragments into some kind of totality, in a move back in the direction of organic unity, and an understanding of the fragment as an incomplete part of something larger, the restoration of which can be seen as the artist’s task. In either case, a profound dilemma confronts any

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attempt to conceive of a true aesthetics of the fragment: It is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to think the fragment apart from the whole. More often than not it is conceived either as a ruined part of a vanished unity or as one piece of a whole to come; and even if one seeks to value the fragment in its own right, to the extent that it is taken as autonomous, one makes it into, as it were, its own whole, so that the aesthetic valuation of completeness remains. It is this dilemma that seems to prompt Maurice Blanchot’s reflections on fragmentation. He notes that our thinking of the fragmentary is caught between “the fragmenting of an already existent reality [and] the moment of a whole still to come.”14 Yet the fragment itself asks us to attempt to reconsider this relation, to take the fragment neither as merely an incomplete part of a totality nor as a totality in itself, but as something that “opens another manner of accomplishment.”15 It is just such a response to the problem of the fragment that can be found in several of Rilke’s poems. Rilke, with the moderns, might acknowledge the aesthetic value of the fragment, but only in order to move beyond it, toward “another manner of accomplishment,” whose “opening” can only be understood as the opening of truth. II

   das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht, uns zu zerstören. Rainer Maria Rilke, “The First Duino Elegy”16

Rilke’s interest in the problem of the fragmentary is usually traced to his encounter with Auguste Rodin in Paris. Commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin, he arrived in Paris in 1902 to interview the sculptor and observe him at work. The first part of his book was written that same year; Rilke, profoundly influenced by Rodin’s style and habits, remained in Paris, working for a time as his personal secretary, and published a second volume of the book in 1907.17 Rilke was struck by Rodin’s sculptural fragments, the limbs and torsos of stone that filled the sculptor’s studio. After his first visit there, Rilke wrote to his wife about the stacks of sculpted limbs he saw: “Each of these bits is of such an eminent, striking unity, so possible by itself, so not at all needing completion, that one forgets they are only parts.”18 Already in the 1870s, Rodin had shaken the contemporary world of art by insisting upon the independent value of

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deliberately fragmentary pieces. One of the better-known examples of this is his 1877 sculpture “Walking Man,” a headless and armless figure striding forward on muscular legs.19 Rilke was to praise such pieces in his book, writing that in Rodin’s armless statues, “nothing essential is missing. Standing before them, one has the sense of a profound wholeness, a completeness that allows for no addition.”20 He compares what he calls Rodin’s “complete fragments” to the partial figures in Impressionist paintings, shocking at first, but to which “we quickly adjusted.” People learned, he says, “to see and believe that an artistic whole doesn’t necessarily coincide with the ordinary whole-thing.”21 This notion that a fragmentary sculpture might still constitute an “artistic whole” suggests that Rilke’s thought at this point is aligned with the kind of appreciation of the fragment as complete and autonomous that we discussed in the first section. The beauty and power Rilke found in these sculptural fragments became a focal point of many of his Neue Gedichte or New Poems, written and published during his time in Paris. Many of the poems that make up these two volumes, the so-called Dinggedichte or “thing poems,” mark an attempt, as Rilke said, to create the poems themselves as things22 and thus invite their comparison with “plastic” works of art; some of these poems are formally fragmentary, and seem to mark Rilke’s desire to produce a poetic equivalent for what he saw in Rodin’s studio. Thus, for example, “Sappho to Alcaeus: Fragment,” an imagined recreation of a (nonexistent) poem by Sappho, breaks off abruptly in the middle of its final stanza, followed by the dotted line that marks the place of an absent line (or lines) in a fragmentary text: This god lends no assistance to a pair, But when he passes through the one                                 .23

Formally, the presence of the dotted line marks the understanding of the fragment as part of a larger whole whose totality is now lost. Yet such a notion is paradoxical here, since there is no whole other than the poem as it stands; the partialness of this artificially created fragment is original to its formation, and there is no unity other than, greater than, the one with which we are here presented. Rilke’s poem thus does not merely imitate the literal fragmentation of the corpus of archaic poetry but, by intentionally creating a broken poem, transforms fragmentation from mere accident of history into a form seen as complete in its own right. In this way, the poem seems to echo quite closely Rilke’s meditations on Rodin’s “complete fragments,” and presents his attempt to reproduce what he encountered there in his poetic work. Yet even at this early stage, Rilke was developing another notion of the fragment, centered not on aesthetic considerations of its formal completeness

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or incompleteness, but rather on its dynamism and power. In fact, this sensitivity to the power of fragmentation predates his encounter with Rodin. In the second (1901) part of the Book of Hours, a book of devotional poems whose language is often remarkably sensual, Rilke had included a revised version of a love poem he had written to Lou Andreas-Salomé several years before: Put out my eyes, and I can see you still; slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet; and without any feet can go to you; and tongueless, I can conjure you at will. Break off my arms, I shall take hold of you and grasp you with my heart as with a hand, arrest my heart, my brain will beat as true; and if you set this brain of mine afire, then on my blood-stream I yet will carry you.24

There is an obvious (to the point of morbidity) attraction to the fact of mutilation here, an attraction that can perhaps be explained, at least in part, by the truth-revealing potential that the poem locates in that mutilation. Here, love is unveiled in the apparent paradox of a blind seer, a deaf hearer, a tongueless speaker, and so on. The blood, which alone remains after mutilation has destroyed all the rest of the speaker’s body, still contains his essence. Thus, the most radical disintegration of the original organic form, of any form, for that matter, still seems to preserve his whole truth. One might object that the heart is here an exception to the insistent physicality of the body’s dismantling, that it functions as a symbol of the supersensuous, as a Platonic soul rather than as a broken part of the body. The heart, as metaphor for the soul, would then provide the “key” to the poem; the speaker here, just like the philosopher—in the Symposium or Phaedo—would attain the ideal domain and “grasp” (com-prehend) true beauty through the transcendence of the transitory domain of sensuous forms. This reading would violate, however, the cruel sensuality of Rilke’s poem. The comparison of the heart to a hand in the sixth line emphasizes a literal touching rather than a mystical, purely spiritual comprehension, an attempt to reach the other through a decisively tactile encounter. Indeed, the physicality of the heart, the poem’s refusal to grant it the traditional position as the ultimate seat of identity, is reinforced in the final lines of the poem, where the brain and the blood retain their power even after the heart is broken. This power is not only maintained despite the mutilation of the unnamed speaker’s body, it is even drawn from that mutilation (“Break off my arms,

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I shall take hold of you”). The violence that produces the fragmented body imagined here inaugurates the fragment’s power, not only to possess (“I shall take hold of you”), but to produce (“I can conjure you at will”) its object. In this case, the fragment need not be conceived either as a remnant of a creation now long past or as merely the potential for a creation still to come; yet it is also not a merely static object, self-contained and complete in its own right. The fragment has here a definitively dynamic character; it is the privileged location of sensuous power and, eventually, of poetic creation. Yet if this poem seems to present a notion of fragmentation more complex than the one offered by “Sappho to Alcaeus,” it should also be noted that it employs different means to do so: It is not the form of the poem but the object described there that demonstrates the notion in question. What are we to make of this difference? Is there an inconsistency in a formally complete poem that seems to argue for the power of the fragmented form? In other words, if Rilke believes in the power of the fragment his poem describes, why doesn’t he employ a fragmented form himself? One might, of course, argue that the later “Sappho to Alcaeus” is a response to just such an (hypothetical) objection, an attempt to put into practice the idea first articulated in the earlier poem. Yet, the objection itself relies upon an unstated assumption that what a poem says and how it says it must correspond to one another. And in fact, it is precisely such assumptions that Rilke was to question radically in his attempt to articulate the power of the fragment, and precisely by foregrounding the disjunction between the poem’s language and its object.

III    dans la violence du fragment    un tout autre rapport nous est donné, au moins comme une promesse et comme une tâche    Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation25

“Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the poem that opens the second volume of the Neue Gedichte, articulates the fragment’s radiant power in a way that goes beyond the experiments of “Sappho to Alcaeus” or the Book of Hours: We did not know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

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“We did not know his legendary head,” the poem begins: the torso, mutilated and incomplete, seems to remind us first, as this line suggests, of the whole of which it once formed a part, now lost to us forever. For Rilke, however, the fragmentary state of the torso is not (or not only) a cause for lamentation and, crucially, does not diminish the torso’s aesthetic value; indeed, the statue’s remains shine with a beauty that seems to render it essential, even in its acephalous state. This seems, at first, to be the case despite its partial form: “And yet his torso / is still suffused with brilliance from inside” (emphasis added) suggests that the torso’s glow somehow overcomes the obstacle of its fragmentation. But as the poem progresses, and the descriptions of its brilliance and power accumulate, it increasingly appears as if the torso’s radiance and force were inseparable from its fragmentary state. This notion culminates in the final lines of the poem, in which the torso breaks free from the confines of its form: when its stone “from all the borders of itself / burst[s] like a star.” The fragment possesses its own self-contained power here: the torso’s glow comes from within itself, it dazzles the one who sees it, and it eventually bursts open in a way that transforms glow into all-seeing gaze (“here there is no place / that does not see you”); it is precisely this that requires the viewer’s transformation. Indeed, it may be that the statue has to be broken open for the transformation to occur, that the fragment’s violence is a creative force that could not exist otherwise: a spiraling out of power from the torso’s center, a bursting forth of the gaze that demands a response.27 Indeed, the poem does not describe merely a fragmentary object, but an ongoing process of fragmentation, an active force that is itself the source of the torso’s power. The “bursting forth” in the final stanza describes the shattering of the torso’s stone, a fragmentation of the fragment, a radiant shattering (“like a star”) that produces an all-encompassing vision.28 The power of this fragmentation is linked explicitly to the necessary transformation of the viewer; the “shattered” beauty described here is also “shattering” for the one

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who encounters it. This radiance does not merely compensate for the torso’s fragmentation; it introduces a different kind of relation in which both statue and viewer are broken open. The dynamic character of the torso’s effect becomes even clearer when this poem is compared to “Early Apollo,” which opens the first volume of the New Poems. “Early Apollo” presents a statue at the very beginning of its existence, an unadorned form that allows “the brilliance [Glanz] of all poems” to strike the viewer with “almost lethal force”: As sometimes between the yet leafless branches a morning looks through that is already radiant with spring: so nothing of his head could prevent the splendor of all poems from striking us with almost lethal force; for there is yet no shadow in his gaze, his temples are yet too cool for the laurel crown, and only later from his eyebrows’ arches will the rose garden lift up on tall stems, from which petals, loosened, one by one will drift down on the trembling of his mouth, which now is yet quiet, never-used, and gleaming and only drinking something with its smile as though its song were being instilled in him.29

Here, the bare perfection of the statue is described in terms of potential adornments that are not present to mar that perfection (the laurel crown, the rose garden). This statue is pure potentiality, in opposition to the imposing radiance of the archaic torso, and the statue’s power seems to be understood entirely in terms of its ability not to impede poetry: “nothing of his head / could prevent the splendor of all poems / from striking us.” It is poetry, not the statue itself, that is the dynamic force, poetry and not the statue that can (literally) have an impact on the viewer. The statue remains a mute, immobile object, devoid of the powerful brilliance of the torso. But if “Archaic Torso of Apollo” presents a notion of the dynamism of the statue, here, as in the poem from the Book of Hours, there seems to be a disjunction between the formal completeness of the poem and its exaltation of a fragmentary work of art; although it describes a fragmented object, the poem itself proceeds in orderly, even expository sentences, maintaining, for the most part, a regular form throughout.30 If Rilke intended to align his poetics with the aesthetics of the fragment, why didn’t he have recourse to the techniques of “Sappho to Alcaeus,” or to some other method—syntactic incompletion, montage, even free verse—that would somehow disrupt the

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poem’s completeness and formal perfection? Wouldn’t such a form better correspond to the object of the poem, and wouldn’t the poem then better reflect this fragmentary “thing”? These are pertinent questions, but, as we have suggested, they rely upon a model of classical harmony and of a mimetic relationship of correspondence, and it might be that it is precisely such a correspondence, associated with the traditional form of representation, that would contribute to a new harmony and a new whole. Indeed, as Lacoue-Labarthe points out in his discussion of Schiller and Freud,31 such a presentation might introduce a harmony between the poem and its object that would overcome the original sense of incompleteness. In this case, a perfect, classical form might, on the other hand, preserve the sense of tension that accompanies the original lack or loss. A “fragmentary” (non)presentation of the fragmentary statue —of the kind that Lyotard associates with the “postmodern” sublime of the avant-gardes, which “puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself” and “denies itself the solace of good forms”—would, in other words, paradoxically contribute to the sense of perfect adequation in the classical theory of representation; whereas a classical presentation, faithful to the rules of language and literary genre, would on the contrary disrupt this adequation.32 What Lyotard calls the modern sublime, something that he associates with works like that of Proust (who “calls forth the unpresentable by means of a language unaltered in its syntax and vocabulary and of a writing which in many of its operators still belongs to the genre of novelistic narration”), in fact, far from allowing for a “nostalgia for the unattainable,” for the lost whole, might on the contrary draw attention to the very problem of presentation and its limits. This would be the case for any poem, but particularly so in the case of ekphrasis, since the poetic description of a visual work of art must necessarily confront the difference between the artistic mode of the poem and that of the object it describes. The classical formulation of the problem of ekphrasis is that of Lessing, and consists in bringing together two different media of artistic expression. Lessing argues that painting and sculpture depict things coexisting in space, while poetry (and language more generally) depicts things proceeding consecutively in time; because, he says, the sign must bear a “suitable relation” to what it signifies—it must, in other words, be adequate to the signified object, represent it “accurately” in some way—the different arts must consequently themselves have different objects.33 Lessing’s characterization of the difficulties inherent in ekphrasis—the translation of a visual, spatial object into its poetic, temporal description—is based on a clear opposition between the two modes of presentation. When

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a poet attempts to describe an object, he says, “the coexistent nature of a body comes into conflict with the consecutive nature of language” (p. 88); it is difficult or even impossible for the poem to present its object in an instant of time. A descriptive poem may succeed in describing parts of its object, but, because it is not in the nature of language to be able to present several parts together in a single moment, “the final reassembling of the parts into a whole is made extremely difficult and often even impossible” (p. 88). Fragmentation here becomes neither an accident of history nor a conscious act of artistic creation, but rather the necessary result of a fundamental disjunction between poetic language and its object. One might argue that it is precisely this disjunction that Rilke draws upon in “Archaic Torso of Apollo.” In Lessing’s view, ekphrasis—Homer’s famous description of the shield of Achilles, for example—is successful when it does not describe an object directly, but through an action, that is, through something that is within poetry’s power (Homer describes not the shield itself, says Lessing, but the making of the shield). Again, if the fragment in Rilke’s poem is no longer a static object, but a process, it would then be the disjunction between poem and object that allows this idea to come forward, that permits the torso to have the power that it manifests. Rilke’s poem complicates and questions the very notion of poetic representation, of a mimetic link between the poem and its object, of poetic truth as correspondence. It is thus not ekphrastic in the usual sense; the actual description of the statue occurs only in glimpses, and the different parts of the glowing torso, its curved breast, its “placid hips and thighs” and the “dark center” to which they lead, the “translucent cascade of the shoulders,” all seem to be present only insofar as they allow us to see the torso’s radiance. But this radiance is itself presented almost exclusively by means of conditionals and negation. The overwhelming presence of the word “not” (nicht)—it appears six times in the poem, twice in the final three lines alone—and the domination of the poem’s central sections by conditional verbs together create a poem of negative description that seems to withdraw its object from us in the same gesture with which it presents it. In a sense, the poem takes us through the entire development of the poetics of fragmentation. The negation that opens the poem—“We did not know his legendary head”—points to the possible nostalgia for a lost and irrecoverable whole that is, as we have seen, standard to a certain poetics of the fragment. But the direction taken by the poem from the “and yet” (aber) at the end of the second line does not follow this initial nostalgic theme, rather declaring the possibility of recuperating the loss through the brilliance that remains despite the loss of the statue’s head, a brilliance that (as we suggested) could not even

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exist were it not for the torso’s fragmentation. But while the description of this brilliance, which is perhaps the “true” object of the poem, culminates in the poem’s final three lines, the double negation of this climactic moment – “for here there is no place / that does not see you” (emphasis added)—emphasizes not only the radiant power of the fragment, but also the poem’s refusal to present this power as one more “object” of contemplation. For the poem refuses merely to replace one represented object with another. Although the poem first makes an attempt at the straightforward description of the torso’s brilliance, that description is elaborated in the middle stanzas of the poem almost entirely through negation. The poem thus seems to call into question the very possibility of representation. In this sense, although its formal regularity in comparison to the innovations of many of Rilke’s contemporaries may seem to be a concession to traditional aesthetics, that formality is in fact deployed in the service of a radical reevaluation of representation in poetry, one that emphasizes the differences between the poem and the sculpture (as Lessing suggests, “the poet alone possesses the craft of description by negative terms”; p. 54) in order to bring to the forefront the question of poetic representation more generally. Peter Nicholls, discussing Rilke and Apollinaire, links an increasing interest in the nonfigurative and nonrepresentational with an aesthetic of analysis and dissection of the poetic object that destroys the illusion of the unified body: The “rejection of mimesis is now clearly linked with a dismemberment of the body,” and this rejection, at the same time, “releases an energy which in some way exceeds representation,” or at least the classical limits of representation.34 The emphatic negation of “Archaic Torso of Apollo” does not deny us access to the poem’s “true” object, but rather refuses to allow us to understand either the torso or its brilliance as a poetic object in the classical sense. Indeed, the poem would, by refusing straightforward representation, “release an energy” prohibitive of the notion that description should somehow “reflect” its object, one that, in exceeding representation, should properly be linked not with the beautiful but with the sublime. IV Le sublime se dit par la lumière et l’éclat. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La vérité sublime”35

The question of presentation brings Rilke’s poem and the notion of radiant fragmentation that governs it into Heidegger’s aletheic theory of art, which

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Lacoue-Labarthe links with the sublime. The view of the “aletheic”36 character of beauty and art37 was developed by Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1935) and in his reading of Phaedrus (in Nietzsche: Will to Power as Art) (1936/37). The function of the work of art should not be aesthetic enjoyment, but rather an opening of the space of the truth of being (later thematized as clearing, as light(n)ing [Lichtung]) in which the essence of human beings and of the world, as well as the potential for their transformation, could appear. It is true that Heidegger, in his essay on Rilke, “What Are Poets For?,” states explicitly that the “Open” in Rilke’s sense is not equivalent to his own understanding of the word, namely the unconcealedness of being, but rather “what is closed up, unlightened, which draws on in boundlessness, so that it is incapable of encountering anything unusual, or indeed anything at all.”38 We are not dealing here, however, with Rilke’s explicit use of the term “the Open,” and would argue that certain aspects of his poetry, and this poem in particular, are very much aligned with the Heideggerian notion of the Open. Rilke does not attempt to resolve the paradox of a fragment independent from the whole. The power he describes in “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is a power possessed by the fragment, to be sure, but it is a radiant power (Heidegger’s “standing of the statue” as “the presence of the radiance facing us”)39 dependent on a breaking apart that becomes a breaking open—the disclosure of the essence of things. This view of the radiating fragment, broken from the whole but without a lingering nostalgia, belongs to the tradition of the sublime with its Heideggerian inflection: the aletheic nature of the work of art, which situates the poetic ecstasis in light itself, en to¯ i pho¯ ti auto¯ i.40 In fact, no word expresses better Rilke’s particular combination of the fragmentary and the sublime than the French noun éclat (a word that could very well translate the phrase “burst like a star,” “bräche    aus wie ein Stern,” in the poem’s final lines): both a breaking up into pieces (an ex-plosion) and brilliance, brightness, radiance. It is the latter sense of the word that evokes Longinus’ notion of light, which in his treatise Of the Sublime (peri tou hupsou) accompanies ecstasis as the very principle of the sublime. It is this brilliance that is supposed to “cover up” imperfections of argument or style that might have otherwise impaired the texts of such great writers as Plato and Demosthenes. But Plato had already pointed out the divine transcendence of the sun in The Republic and of the brilliance (to ekphanestaton) of beauty in Phaedrus. Indeed, it is the extreme brilliance of the ekphanestaton that has a privileged role in the recollection of truth, in the overcoming of the forgetfulness of being. The beauty of the beloved in this world reflects the beauty that “was radiant” during the mythic journey across the sky and is an occasion for recollection and a radical transformation of the human being. It

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is this union between the truth of being and the radiance of beauty that is at the center of the idea of “sublime truth”—the notion that attempts to bring the poetics of truth within the tradition of the sublime.41 But would it not be possible to maintain the aesthetics of the ekphanestaton within the limits of the beautiful as epitomized by the sun-god Apollo? The importance of the ecstatic Dionysian, if we accept Nietzsche’s opposition, would thus be neglected in favor of the all-powerful classical Apollo. Extreme brilliance would accompany the Apollonian harmony of parts within a larger unified whole. Indeed, both volumes of the Neue Gedichte begin with poems that describe and celebrate statues of Apollo—a fact that is certainly not accidental—and the whole collection thus seems to stand under the sign of the god of light and patron of the Muses, traditionally the symbol of classical beauty, harmony, and wholeness. But perhaps the Apollo of these poems is not quite the clear, orderly Apollo of Nietzsche’s binary opposition; it retains elements of the Dionysian (for example, the comparison to a wild animal’s pelt42 ), and in this sense is more like the “fiery Apollo” whose realm Hölderlin contrasted with that of Junonian sobriety, although it never ceases to be the god of light and wholeness as well.43 This is to say that, in the very figure of Apollo, there is an ambiguity, a play between the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian,” between wholeness and fragmentation, between order and disorder. And indeed, only the éclat, the ex-plosion of the Apollonian unity, can secure the sublime transcendence of the delimited whole.44 Neither the statue nor what remains of it constitutes an object of contemplation; indeed, the very notion of a stable poetic object is refused here. In its place, we find not a fragment but fragmentation, a shattering force, a continuous process of becoming that grants the torso its power: the power to illuminate the life of the one who experiences its truth, and to open that life to a possible—indeed, necessary— transformation.

University of Wisconsin-Madison NOTES 1

Marianne Moore, Complete Poems (New York: Penguin, 1981), p. 63. “Whoever says fragment ought not say simply the fragmenting of an already existent reality or the moment of a whole still to come    We must try to recognize in this ‘shattering’    a value that is not one of negation.” Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), pp. 451–452; English translation by Susan Hanson, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 307–308. 2

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“   das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen   ” “Die Erste Elegie”/“The First Elegy,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1980), pp. 150–151. 4 “Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in Alexander W. Allison et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Poetry, rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), p. 715. 5 William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays (New York: Scribner, 1996), p. 89. 6 T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 51. 7 “Fragmentarismus ist ein oft erteiltes Stichwort und Aufbruchssignal der ästhetischen Moderne.” “Fragment,” in Karlheinz Barck et al., eds., Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, Vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 2001), p. 551. 8 “   le fragment est considéré comme son incarnation, la marque la plus distinctive de son originalité et le signe de sa radicale modernité.    Le fragment est bien le genre romantique par excellence.” Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’absolu littéraire (Paris: Seuil 1978), p. 58; The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 39–40. 9 Athenaeum fragment 24; quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, p. 101. 10 Schlegel, Critical Fragments, fragment 14; quoted in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, p, 82. 11 “Fragments compelled a new kind of detailed attention from minds already prepared by Poe and Symbolisme to find virtue in brevity, or by Pater to find it in the fleeting glimpse.” Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 51. 12 Kenner, pp. 67, 69. 13 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, p. 42; for Schlegel and Novalis, “[j]edes Werk ist wesentlich Fragment, jedes Fragment Werk.” Barck et al., p. 551. 14 See note 2. 15 Ibid. 16 “For beauty is nothing/ but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, / and we are so awed because it serenely disdains / to annihilate us.” See note 3. 17 A year after he stopped working for Rodin; see William Gass’s “Introduction” to Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin (1902, 1907), trans. Daniel Slager (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004). 18 Quoted in Gass’s introduction to Rilke, Auguste Rodin. 19 See the commentary accompanying two photographs of the statue in Monique Laurent et al., Auguste Rodin: Sculpture and Drawings, trans. Barbara Shuey (Paris: Beaux-Arts Magazine, 1987), p. 20. 20 Rilke, Auguste Rodin, pp. 44, 37; see similar comments on p. 32. 21 Rilke, Auguste Rodin, pp. 44–45. 22 Edward Snow writes that, while only a few of these poems are “actually about objects,” they all “have a material quality, and confront the reader with a sculptural, free-standing presence.    One is always aware of them as things made.” Edward Snow, “Introduction” to selections from New Poems [1907 volume], in Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems: A Revised Bilingual Edition, trans. Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2001), p. 4. 23 “Dieser Gott ist nicht der Beistand Zweier, / aber wenn er durch den Einen geht /                     ” Rainer Maria Rilke, New Poems, pp. 18, 19. 24

Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn, wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören,

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und ohne Füße kann ich zu dir gehn, und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören. Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich mit meinem Herzen wie mit einer Hand, halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen, und wirfst du in mein Hirn den Brand, so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours, trans. Babette Deutsch (New York: New Directions, 1941), pp. 37–38. 25 “In the fragment’s violence    quite a different relation is given to us—at least as a promise and as a task.” Blanchot, L’entretien infini, pp. 451–52; The Infinite Conversation, p. 307. 26

Wir kannten nicht sein unerhörtes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften. Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kandelaber, in dem sein Schauen, nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt. Sonst könnte nicht der Bug der Brust dich blenden, und im leisen Drehen der Lenden könnte nicht ein Lächeln gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Zeugung trug. Sonst stünde diser Stein entstellt und kurz unter der Schultern durchsichtigem Sturz und flimmerte nicht so wie Raubtierfelle; und bräche nicht aus allen seinen Rändern aus wie ein Stern: denn da ist keine Stelle, die dich nicht sieht. Du mußt dein Leben ändern. “Archaïscher Torso Apollos / Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, pp. 60–61 (translation modified). 27 Paul de Man argues, for different reasons, that the torso’s power comes from its fragmentary state: Only because the “true” eye of Apollo is not present is it possible for the whole torso to act like an eye; its power grows out of absence; see Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 44. 28 The two senses are brought together in the French verb éclater; see the subsequent discussion. 29

Wie manches Mal durch das noch unbelaubte Gezweig ein Morgen durchsieht, der schon ganz im Frühling ist: so ist in seinem Haupte nichts was verhindern könnte, daß der Glanz aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe; denn noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun, zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe und später erst wird aus den Augenbraun hochstämmig sich der Rosengarten heben, aus welchem Blätter, einzeln, ausgelöst hintreiben werden auf des Mundes Beben,

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der jetzt noch still ist, niegebraucht und blinkend und nur mit seinem Lächeln etwas trinkend als würde ihm sein Singen eingeflößt. “Früher Apollo / Early Apollo,” in New Poems, pp. 8–9. 30 Despite minor discrepancies from and innovations within the traditional sonnet form, it would be difficult to understand the form of the poem as fragmentary. Duhamel notes that the sonnet’s form it is “unusual” by virtue of its “conspicuous enjambments” and its slight modification of the standard sonnet structure, which is itself thereby rendered “somewhat deformed” (Duhamel employs the same word [entstellt], in fact, that Rilke uses to describe the potential state of the torso): “Es handelt sich um ein regelrechtes, aufgrund der auffälligen Enjambements allerdings ungewöhnliches Sonett, in dem auch die traditionelle Gliederung (Oktave-Sextett) in etwas entstellter Form (erste viereinhalb Verse - letzte drei Strophen) beibehalten bleibt. Der erste Teil, der praktisch die erste Strophe umfaßt, scheint eine Art Beschreibung des Torsos zu geben; der zweite dagegen, der fast ganz im Konjunktiv steht, beschreibt nicht, sondern erhärtet das im ersten Teil Ausgesagte–was im strengen Sonett keineswegs abwegig ist–durch eine Argumentation in der Form von Sonst- und Denn-Sätzen. Das Ganze mündet in den berühmten Orakel-Spruch ‘Du mußt dein Leben ändern’, der, gleichermaßen gebieterisch und bedrohlich, zunächst mal völlig im dunkeln bleibt.” Roland Duhamel, “Interpretationen und Interpretationsmethoden: Rilkes Gedicht ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos,”’ in Zeitschrift für Germanistik 11(1), 1990: 21–25, pp. 21–22. 31 Schiller’s discussion of Laocoön in “Über Anmut und Wurde” (Werke, Vol. 2 [Munich: Karl Hansen, 1966], 391–92) and Freud’s discussion of Michelangelo’s Moses in “Der Moses des Michelangelo” (Studienausgabe, Vol. 10, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1969], 217); see Lacoue-Labarthe, “Sublime Truth,” pp. 86–87. 32 See Jean-François Lyotard, “What is Postmodernism?”, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81. 33 “in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors in space rather than articulated sounds in time, and if these signs must indisputably bear a suitable relation to the thing signified, then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another can express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive.” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962), p. 78. 34 Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 115. 35 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La vérité sublime,” in Jean-Francois Courtine et al., Du Sublime (Paris: Belin, 1988), p. 144; English translation by Jeffrey S. Librett, in Jean-Francois Courtine et al., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 105. “The sublime says itself through light and glittering.” 36 From the Greek word al¯etheia—a resistance to l¯eth¯e, or forgetfulness, in other (Heideggerian) words, truth as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit). 37 A view that finds its clear echo in Kant’s analytic of the sublime. 38 Martin Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” in Poetry Language Thought (New York: HarperCollins, 1971), p. 104. 39 Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950); pp. 70ff.; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), p. 82. 40 Longinus, On the Sublime, 17.2.

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Lacoue-Labarthe’s is the most powerful reading of Heidegger in this context. Which Duhamel is right to associate with Dionysus; see Duhamel, “Interpretationen und Interpretationsmethoden.” 43 See Hölderlin’s letter of December 4, 1801, to Böhlendorff, in Hölderlin Werke und Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1969), II, 940–941 cited in Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. 1, pp. 103–104. 44 A movement that can be analyzed within the Heideggerian ontology of the finitude of Dasein. For a reading of this poem in terms of the struggle between the Apollonian and the Dionysian–though without reference to Heidegger –see Duhamel’s “Interpretationen und Interpretationsmethoden.” 42

VICTOR GERALD RIVAS

FROM PERFECT BEAUTY TO A CONSCIOUS LIFE An Elucidation of the Postromantic Import of Love and Friendship, Based on Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton

Nous sommes incapables et de vrai et de bien. Pascal

The first time that I read Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton, I realized that the love story that it contains seems to have a happy denouement a little after the middle of the novel, when there are still more than seventy pages to go, and although I knew that in the case of James a simple blink can give rise to a whole volume, I could not help wondering what the rest of the work would be about if love had triumphed over all the hurdles and there was apparently nothing more to say. Fortunately, I was utterly wrong in trying to measure James’s insight with my commonsense ideas concerning love (according to which the latter is mainly aimed at the consolidation of a couple) and in not realizing that if the story had come to an end, it was because the love that it stood for had to go on without the burden of the anecdotal that so easily misleads with regard to the everlasting strength of love whose expression is the only task of the writer, as James himself underlines: Really, universally, love stops nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which it shall happily appear to do so. He is in the perpetual predicament that the continuity of things is the whole matter, for him, of comedy and tragedy; that this continuity is never, by the space of an instant or an inch, broken, and that, to do anything at all, he has at once intensely to consult and intensely to ignore it.1

Therefore, although there was no longer any room for a shared future in The Spoils of Poynton, the lovers had to cope with the life that they had not been up to. Together with this, I realized that the work presented such an original and fascinating approach to the links connecting love, life, and consciousness that it required to be set out within the wider perspective of what love still means for a conception of existence that, like ours (and, in general, like whatever gainsays the romantic, substantial, or eternal identification of lovers), had ravaged the ideals whereby love itself was meaningful from 103 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 103–126. © 2008 Springer.

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Antiquity to Romanticism. Taking this into account, this essay will unfold the literary setting of the story in the light of the Western cultural and philosophical conception of love, which, independent of the diversity and contradictory character of its sundry formulations through time, has always included three elements: idealization, desire for company (whether it is really or imaginarily fulfilled), and, above all, consciousness.2 The preponderance of the last element, whose full sense will be clarified in the second section of this essay, betokens the extraordinary part that reflection plays in whatever manifestation of love beyond the relative length of the relations and the questionable sense of the illusions wherewith each lover projects the identity of the beloved one, which agrees, on the other hand, with the very hub of the Western conception of individual existence, that is, the determination of his own freedom that everyone must carry out by himself. At bottom, love is not reducible to an enduring relationship or to the mere search for company and pleasure, let alone to the happy ending that everyone would wish to find in real life; far from that, it demands everyone to be aware of his own being before the refusal of another will or before the resistance of circumstances, for when reality thwarts both ideals and relationships, the only way to overcome the failure is to concentrate on one’s own existence even at the cost of the deepest hope or of the highest ideal, which confirms that “the self most revealingly exposes itself not abstractly in accordance with predetermined psychological norms but existentially: in terms of aspirations, efforts and damaging miscalculations.”3 Thus, this essay will show that if the “spoils” whereof the title of the novel speaks are beauty’s and felicity’s, they also are the very substance of a conscious life, at least as it can be led in a time when the only absolute is the relativity of everything. I. U N C O E U R S I M P L E

The narrative in The Spoils of Poynton4 is deceptively dramatic, for independent of the excitation that it stirs up in the reader, it is ruled throughout by the same feeling: Mrs. Gereth, a middle-aged lady who has recently become a widow and who together with his late husband devoted her life to make of Poynton, the family house, the most beautiful dwelling of the world, rejects violently Mona Brigstock, the girl that Owen, her only son and the new master of Poynton according to her husband’s will, has chosen as his wife-to-be, for she considers that, despite her money and her beauty, the girl wants the exquisiteness required to understand the perfection that Poynton stands for; withal, the lady believes that Mona is incapable of loving her son because she is selfish and blunt. Now, the lady’s refusal becomes harder when she meets

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Fleda Vetch, a girl who is poor and not very beautiful but is nevertheless smart and tenderhearted; Mrs. Gereth comes very soon to the conclusion that Fleda would be the perfect wife for her son, and tries to further their relationship and to spoil Owen’s engagement with Mona by resisting the delivery of Poynton to him, which forces Owen to resort as mediator to Fleda, who has become the permanent guest of Mrs. Gereth. The girl then has to face the dilemma of either helping him to recover his heritage and, consequently, to marry Mona, or betraying his trust and supporting his mother, but, since her greatest wish is to help him, she opts for the first. In the meantime, and during his comings and goings from London to Poynton, Owen perceives how charming Fleda is and ends up falling in love with her, although he feels incapable of breaking off his engagement to Mona. After several incidents, Fleda, instead of taking advantage of the blatant attraction that she exerts over Owen, refuses to help him to make his choice and even stresses that he has to do his duty to Mona. For her part, and by a misinterpretation of the situation, Mrs. Gereth gives Owen back both Poynton and its treasures, which she had conveyed to the house where she was supposed to dwell in her widowhood. With his heritage recovered and bewildered by the would-be oddity of Fleda, Owen yields to the adamant Mona and marries her, whereas Fleda must stand the abyssal disappointment of Mrs. Gereth, who cannot help reproaching the girl with what she brands a preposterous heroism; notwithstanding that, the lady ends up forgiving her friend and asks again for her permanent company. More than a year later, Fleda receives a letter from Owen, who is abroad, as he has mostly been since his marriage, wherein he asks her to accept as a present what she considers the most beautiful treasure of Poynton. A storm breaks the day when she decides to visit the house, and on her arrival at the train station that is by Poynton, she is told that a fire has destroyed the house. The novel ends abruptly when she says that she is going to come back to London. This epitome shows the difference or rather the contradiction between the objective conditions of life and the way everyone deals with them, which is a lot more overt thanks to the psychological approach of the work to the personality of the characters, each one of whom acts in such a bewildering way that the reader must be very patient so as to fathom their real motives: “contradictions, inconsistencies, obstructive irrelevancies lie across our path and ‘deconstruct’ the story we thought we understood.”5 Moreover, this reminds us of the opposition of the transcendent and the imaginative planes that from the onset have framed the love experience in Western culture (and in literature): on the one hand, the assumption that love reveals a selfsubsistent realm that the lovers have to fulfill on the conditions of the profane or secular life wherein, nevertheless, everything is more or less abstract; and

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on the other, the imaginative wants and projections wherewith everyone tries simultaneously to assert himself over others and, through this, to yield his freedom without sacrificing the absolute value thereof. This double plane is supposed to work with no major problem after the mutual recognition of the lovers and thanks to the conscious fulfillment of the ideal realm, as most bad love stories tell us; however, the situation unfolds otherwise in The Spoils of Poynton, for the lovers in this case end up separating precisely after their having recognized each other, which corroborates what I said in the introduction, that the love story of the novel seems to have come to its denouement when Owen falls in love with Fleda, for that would have solved the conflict with Mrs. Gereth and, above all, would have agreed with the perfect beauty and happiness that Poynton stands for. From whatever outlook, this should have been the logical ending of the work both as a love story and as a symbol of how the vital strengths, which so often play havoc in human business when they clash against ideals, change all of a sudden into the wisdom that a lasting joy requires. Nevertheless, one must take into account that the unfolding of emotional needs seldom or never matches the ideal of a happy life, and the characters are not the exception to this rule; as a matter of fact, the protagonists always act contrary to what they are supposed to be after: Fleda dodges when she should be utterly explicit, Owen procrastinates when he should make his choice at once, and even Mrs. Gereth flinches when she should resort to the iron willpower wherewith she created Poynton. Oddly enough, the only antagonist of the work, Mona, makes the most of the emotional quibbles of the other three, and that is due to her stubbornness and greed, so that the one who is not up to beauty and happiness is the one who gets both of them, whereas those who deserve them end up thwarted by the greatness of their ideals, which shows that there seems to be no room for the fulfillment of love when ideals and vital strengths contradict one another. This means furthermore that in the absence of a transcendent framework of love (such as the Platonic world of Forms, the Christian glory, or the romantic identification of lovers post mortem), whatever sentimental link runs the risk of being reduced to an always aleatory identification between two individuals, which can be spoiled whether by conventionality, weariness, or even the abstract nexus of ideals and the psychological constitution of the individuals, which is precisely what happens with the characters of the novel insofar as they strive to project an ideal identity instead of an ideal as such, as we shall see later. In fact, although in matters of love the symbolic weight of personality is determinant, it cannot be isolated from the transcendence of love as a vital and ideal value; however intense love is, the difference between it and the beloved one must be kept, for otherwise the irreducible trend of psychological

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complexity swallows at once the transcendence of the mutual recognition and, with it, the moral import of the sentimental link. Let us begin with the reason why Fleda refuses to help Owen when he resorts to her in search of support. At first sight, it would seem that she is defending his honor from his own passion, as she tells him when he is about to declare his love for her: “The great thing is to keep faith. Where is a man if he doesn’t?”6 Owen cannot break his promises only because his feelings have changed or, which could be a lot more defensible, because he has realized that Mona does not love him and only wants to seize his heritage. Of course, on upholding such a standpoint, Fleda is aware that she is forcing him to bear the unhappiness implicit in the marriage with Mona, as if she were ready to sacrifice the man that she loves provided that he is up to the highest ideal (the fulfillment of a promise), that to top it all is meaningless in this case because Mona cares for such idea just because of her haughtiness and her wish to overcome the resistance of Mrs. Gereth. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding her being completely determined to compel him to keep his word, the real motive of Fleda is not the defense of an abstract conception of honor, but the wish to preserve Owen from whatever form of brutality, which she expresses eagerly: “[If a man is not faithful] he may be so cruel. So cruel, so cruel, so cruel!    You offered her marriage. It’s a tremendous thing for her.”7 Although Mona is greedy and selfish, Owen has created an ideal that is independent of her faults and that he must respect. Fleda would rather prefer that he were unhappy than he where unfaithful because he would save his own nobility from the fickleness and brutality of average men; thus, what could be interpreted as an aberrant sacrifice of him to honor or to an abstract ideal of humanity with regard to Mona is something utterly different: the wish that he is perfect although he must pay for that perfection literally with his life: “if he is not to evade the hazards of choice    he must take up the burden of his existence in full self-awareness.”8 Now, this wish does not agree with an objective value although Fleda mentions faith, because she deals with the matter in terms of psychological fulfillment: if Owen were unfaithful, he would not break a law, he would spoil his inner harmony, which, oddly enough, comprises some features that are usually branded faults, like submissiveness and total lack of imagination; at any rate, these faults are just for enhancing his personality: “He had neither wit, nor tact, nor inspiration; all she could say was that when they were together the alienation these charms were usually depended on to allay didn’t occur.”9 The unity of his personality fortifies itself with his faults beyond whatever standard and strengthens through her love, making her understand the part that she must play in his life: “She never knew the extent of her tenderness for him till she

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became conscious of the present force of her desire that he should be superior, be perhaps even sublime.”10 Her most intimate wish is not then that he is faithful or good, not even that he is perfect, if that means the identification with an ideal that anyone else could also embody, but that he is unboundedly himself. In other words, in her eyes, the perfection of Owen is tantamount to the expression of his way of being and, through that, to the affirmation of the full originality of his existence as such. As we see, Fleda applies to her love all the exquisiteness that she has showed in her admiration for Poynton: for her, loving him and reveling in the beauty of his house are the same because she has grasped the secret line of continuity between him and his dwelling, so that her idealization of him is simultaneously the expression of the ideal that Poynton so dearly embodies, whereby whatever harm to either of them would destroy the perfect unity of uniqueness and life that is the very pith of the beauty that she worships, which would furthermore throw her over the vulgarity of everyday wants and of the fight for a good match, a horror before which she would rather prefer to lose him forever. In any case, this highest idealization is just the half of the question, and by no means the most important, because it has been negative so far, for if Fleda had taken advantage of Owen’s declaration, she would somehow have been subjected to Mona although she had gained Owen, since it would not have even been clear at all if he had changed his mind with regard to the marriage because he had really fallen in love with Fleda or because he had been disappointed by Mona. This, which would be a quibble for common sense, is nevertheless the hub of the situation for Fleda, inasmuch as her wish is, on the one hand, Owen’s perfection and, on the other, to be loved by herself and not by anyone else, which would happen if Owen married her because he did not want to marry Mona anymore: There was something in her that would make it a shame to her forever to have owed her happiness to an interference. It would seem intolerably vulgar to her to have “ousted” the daughter of the Brigstocks; and merely to have abstained even wouldn’t assure her that she had been straight.11

Thus, with a farsightedness more appropriate for an analytical philosopher than for a girl in love, Fleda distinguishes between “being loved” and “being preferred” and refuses the would-be advantage that Mona’s coldness grants her, for although it seems that Owen loves her because of her kindness and grace and that Mona is dead for him, the very fact that he had not still been able to break off the engagement betokens undoubtedly that he was not beyond Mona and that at any moment he could have changed his mind again and deplored his having lost a girl that, in the idealization traced by memory, could very easily become the one that he should have married, as Fleda tells Mrs. Gereth:

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That he has done it, that he couldn’t not do it, shows how right I was.    That is to say, it shows that he was bound to her by an obligation that, however much he may have wanted to, he couldn’t in any sort of honour break.12

All this proves that although wariness plays a decisive part in Fleda’s attitude—together with the natural wish of being definitively free from an imaginary rival—it is nevertheless negative and does not agree with the utmost aim of the character: that Owen achieves perfection “just the way he is,” namely, by the unfolding of his nobility and uprightness, which she admires because their softness does not mean lackadaisicalness but a simplicity of heart that is unusual in a man as strong as he. In other words, Fleda’s psychological approach is very different from the fulfillment of a moral ideal because this prevails over the singularity of the individual, whereas Fleda heeds the absolute originality of Owen, whereof he is on the other hand mostly or rather totally unconscious, which is why she had to be adamant in demanding that he solves the problem despite the risk of losing him, as she also explains to Mrs. Gereth: “He would have been with me every day if I had consented. But I made him understand, the last time, that I’ll receive him again only when he’s able to show me that his release has been complete and definite.”13 Indeed, despite the purity and clarity of his feelings, Owen lives practically alien to them, and that is why he has resigned himself to deliver into Mona’s hands a beauty that she does not deserve and why he has furthermore started a shameful fight with his mother. On considering all this, Fleda reaches the conclusion that her love will be useless for Owen’s perfection unless she compels him to take on his own choices himself: He had no right to appear to wish to draw in another girl to help him to run away. If he was in a plight he must get out of the plight himself, he must get out of it first, and anything he should have to say to any one else must be deferred and detached.14

If Owen had been able to defy his own mother just to please Mona, he should likewise be able to defy Mona not so much to please Fleda as to prove that he would not repent of the step that he was going to take and that his heart would be free to love Fleda lucidly and passionately. Thus, notwithstanding the deep mistrust that Fleda feels with regard to Mona, her attitude about her does not stem from a grudge, but from the wish to save her ideal: Of a different manner of loving she was herself ready to give an instance, of which the beauty indeed would not be generally understood, inasmuch as the effect of the particular pressure she proposed to exercise would be, should success attend it, to keep him tied to an affection that had died a sudden and violent death. Even in the ardour of her mediation Fleda remained in sight of the truth that it would be an odd result of her magnanimity to prevent her friend’s shaking off a woman he disliked. If he didn’t dislike Mona what was the matter with him? And if he did, Fleda asked, what was the matter with her own silly self?15

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One sees clearly the opposition in this passage between the ideal and the psychological planes of love, which reaches such an intensity that it ends up collapsing over the ruins of a relation that was unattainable because of what life imposes: on the one hand, the sublime image of the beloved person as someone that should be as free and determinant as he is tender; on the other, the consciousness of the lover that unfolds through the impossibility of shaping reality; in the middle of these two planes, the loss of a full coexistence and the acceptance of conventionality and false feelings that nevertheless do not make up for a happiness spoiled by the own ideals. In other words, we see how the love paradigm that Western culture has built up from the Greeks onward is broken by the opposite strength of ideals that are finally barren and of an existence wherein there is no room anymore for happiness, which confirms that the three elements that make up the paradigm (that is, idealization, company, and consciousness) work separately instead of providing the perfect unity of transcendence and life: ideality is finally preposterous because it intends to merge the individual way of being such as it is and the projection of a would-be freedom whose fulfilment would require the excelling of the former. Now, far from being meaningless, this furthers the development of the consciousness of the lover that only can be obtained at the cost of company, which confirms that the novel demonstrates how profitable it is from a philosophical outlook “to identify the universal structures of experience through the detailed and disciplined scrutiny of the individual case.”16 In fact, if one analyzes Fleda’s feelings, it is clear that she wants to make Owen conscious of his freedom and at the same time to compel him to take it on by himself, a contradictory aim that is feasible just on the plane of illusion but not of absolute ideals, inasmuch as illusion mixes its elements, whereas ideality differentiates them so as to enhance their final fusion: thereat, the more the lovers had first been different from each other, the more their identification will be full thanks to love itself, which demands perforce the company and, also, why not, the slyness that Fleda has nevertheless set aside in her wanting to be faithful to Owen, without her noticing that the only way of fulfilling her wish was that Owen loved her and lived for and with her, but that was out of all question because he was not even able to safeguard his love for her from the grim clutches of Mona, which was why he so shamefully married a woman that he did not love. Taking into account all this, Fleda’s insight never is as touching as when she explains to Mrs. Gereth, after their having overcome to a certain extent the grief of their mutual defeat, how the situation was solved not by the strength of love but by the power that Mona exerted over Owen’s simplicity or rather weakness:

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The case is simple and logical enough. She’s a person who’s upset by failure and who blooms and expands with success. There was something she had set her heart upon, set her teeth about— the house exactly as she had seen it.    When the pressure was removed she came up again. From the moment the house was once more what it had to be, her natural charm reasserted itself.    There’s no need of imagining anything very monstrous. Her restored good humour, her splendid beauty and Mr. Owen’s impressibility and generosity sufficiently cover the ground. His great bright sun came out!17

It is startling how the character fathoms to the bottom the whole sense of her wretchedness without her flinching or repenting, which shows how Fleda “maintains her potentiality, her freedom, by rejecting circumscription. She will nor marry Owen and place herself within the frame of Poynton and its things.”18 On the other hand, this shows that Owen’s loss is much more terrible than Fleda’s because she at least knows that she lost him because of her own love, whereas he has missed both freedom and happiness, so as not to speak of the final destruction of Poynton, which I analyze later. Now, the worst of all this array of losses is that it springs from the very ideal that Owen stands for, the tenderness and the simplicity of heart that Fleda perceived from the first moment, which, notwithstanding her farsightedness and her devotion, explains why he was not up to the life she desired for him: how would he have been able to express freedom if he always was in a maze before the inner complexity of existence? No, he was doomed to failure precisely by the feature that Fleda did not dare to mention to Mrs. Gereth before or after the marriage although it was determinant throughout: his weakness. Despite his physical strength and doubtless personal courage, Owen was always bewildered by the fullness that life reveals through the determination of others’ will, as Fleda notes during their first meetings: “He was hollow, perfunctory, pathetic; he had been girded by another hand. That hand had naturally been Mona’s, and it was heavy even on his strong, broad back.”19 The weakness is so more evident because of its contraposition with a physical power that is, however, totally useless to pierce the passionate nature of life of which Fleda has such a deep intuition, so that she can see the fault in Owen as its contrary, as the most extraordinary of all the gifts: The very vision of him as he thus morally clung to her was the vision of a weakness somewhere in the core of his bloom, a blessed manly weakness of which, if she had only the valid right, it would be all a sweetness to take care.20

It is as plain as a pikestaff that what Fleda perceives in Owen is not so much weakness as that innocence that is the best feature of children: thanks to a grace that cannot be other than Poynton’s, he has reached his prime without having met evil, whereby Fleda deems all his deeds (including his shameful quarrel with his mother and his surrender to a woman who does not love

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him) like those blameless cruelties that are so frequent in childhood and that more often than not put elemental justice at stake when one considers their atrocious consequences. Thereby, it is not surprising that, in the very moment when Fleda finds out that Owen has married Mona, she feels at any rate that “it was his weakness she loved in him.”21 For her, as I have already said, Owen embodies that irresistible strength wherewith children triumph over the horrors and the meanness of adulthood, and it would be preposterous to blame him for the final failure of their relationship and the concomitant loss of his freedom; quite the contrary, she feels the imperious want to preserve him from the smuttiness thereof and keep his image in the aura of a childlike innocence that is, oddly enough, very similar to the all-embracing power of instinctive life that is beyond the subtle tissue of illusion and with all the more reason beyond greed and envy, which are incompatible with the scope of a full life because they stem from the meanness that someone only experiences when he is not capable of harmonizing his ideals and his vital drives. Thus, if Owen’s almost animal innocence or unconsciousness explicates, in accordance with Fleda’s view, that he had fallen so easily into Mona’s clutches, it also frees him from any guilt: it was simply a question of instinctive strength that by no means entailed preference or decision. He acted as blindly as children and animals tend to do, and walked into the trap. Now, although all this is for the unity of love idealization and consciousness, it hardly makes up for the flat fact that the lovers have lost their only opportunity of sharing life (which, of course, furthers the unfolding of the consciousness, for this has to reintegrate the scattered elements of love into a meaningful whole so as to set aside the failure thereof). In this case, the more Fleda succeeds in relieving Owen from the burden of his shortsightedness, the more she has to cope with the final meaninglessness the ideals show when one tries to fulfill them through a weak individuality, which is after all the character at stake here. Innocence or weakness does not justify anyone; on the contrary, man must at any rate be cautious with the deceptive condition of desire: after his having discovered thanks to Fleda a feeling completely different from domination or mere attraction, Owen should have married her, but he was carried away by desire, which is paradoxically the most elemental and most dispensable of all the drives between two human beings, for it stirs imagination independently or rather against experience, which confirms that it is much more powerful when it works in the absence of a real object or feature. Consequently, notwithstanding Fleda endeavors to see Owen’s behavior in the light of a drive untouched by evil or shame, his submissiveness is at bottom mean, above all because he is aware of the whole situation, as he tells Fleda:

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I knew I should have liked you better than any one in the world. But it wasn’t you who made the difference    and I was awfully determined to stick to Mona to the death.    You ask me if I don’t love her, and I suppose it’s natural enough you should. But you ask it at the very moment I’m mad to say to you that there’s only one person on the whole earth I really love, and that person    22

Since he speaks wholeheartedly, his would-be keenness is more preposterous after his having made the final choice: neither love nor honor helped him to resign desire and overcome the animal fear that he experienced before Mona, and this is more evident in the final meeting, when he sets the question once again as if it were just the outcome of what Mona has done and wanted: “I never looked at you—no to call looking—till she had regularly driven me to it.”23 Thus, it was not Fleda but Mona who moved him, and he could marry her because of that imperiousness that only physical lures posses, which reinforces, on the other hand, the serenity wherewith Fleda makes out his weakness: he did not exchange her love for Mona’s, rather, he exchanged love and freedom for an average life that includes pleasure only to the extent that it guarantees a handleable continuity; in his doing so, he followed the natural order of things, for after all is said and done, “weakness” is (at least in this case) nothing but a synonym of “individuality,” of the finite condition of existence that Owen could neither fulfill nor overcome because his feelings were, as it were, bounded to the simplest conditions of a relation, before which “transcendence,” “sublimation,” or even “freedom” are meaningless entelechies that average people do not heed at all, although they are the props of life for characters like Fleda, who express so their outright rejection of the “materialization of selfhood available in modern society.”24 In this way, and led by the extraordinary richness of her imaginative possibilities, Fleda is able to conciliate Owen’s procrastination with the instinctive vindication of an existence free from the burden of ideals, and thanks to it she releases herself of the bitterness that would otherwise have seized her, wherewith she paradoxically gets by bereavement and loneliness the full consciousness that she was supposed to enjoy in a companion for life. II. A C O E U R L U C I D E

The foregoing analysis has proved that postromantic culture is determined by the impossibility of conciliating the finite ground of existence with the philosophical conception of love that shaped Western tradition until Romanticism, and the reason is not hard to find: the juxtaposition of the psychological and the metaphysical planes of the love experience that had their respective realms in accordance with a theory of existence aimed at providing a transcendent

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sense to individuality, a theory that was reduced to a mental projection by the subjectivist framework of Modernity that from a certain slant culminated with the Romantic cult of the supremacy of interiority and feelings over objective reality and “abstract” reason, wherewith the difference between the ideals and their symbols vanished, which entailed that the former were no more the form of a common reality but the image or expression of a subjective drive, which is a lot graver if one considers that those ideals were the ground of the absolute value of the personality of everyone. In other words, if in the light of a self-subsistent or metaphysical ideal, love appears as the fulfilment of a unity that shapes existence thanks to its own potency and independently of the personality of each lover as such (or even against it), in the light of a psychological ideal or image, love hinges upon the emotional constitution of each one of the lovers, who must be taken as an absolute not beyond the relativity of his or her individuality but thanks to it, so that it is impossible to differentiate between their individual way of being and the symbolic value thereof or, on the other plane of the love experience, between the company that everyone is after and the felicity that love is supposed to supply, which leads to the contradictions and final disappointment whereof The Spoils of Poynton takes its main substance: as we have showed, Fleda was not even capable of touching Owen beyond a momentary impression that went mostly unnoticed before the lures of Mona; seen from the outside, her spiritual pleriplus was utterly useless, and the same can be said of the love conception that was behind her, for the would-be community of sense among idealization, want of company and consciousness was shattered by the crushing logic of life, by the aleatory nature of desire, and, oddly enough, by the own farsightedness of the heroine, who for some moments seems to be an outlandish daydreamer carried away by her gifts instead of mastering them: the problem of Fleda is, so to speak, that she is deeper than what she should be in order to get happiness, considering that happiness requires her to miss the fact that no one is as intense or as potent as he could be. Thus, the breakdown of an ideal that could instead have been fulfilled with a little more common sense and a little less exquisiteness betokens the collapse of the consciousness before the normal wants and lures of life and furthermore shows with terrible strength that the romantic identity of the metaphysical and psychological planes of love is utterly unsound or, in other words, that the transcendent value of love is not reducible to the psychological idealization of the beloved one. Now, if all this shows that Fleda Vetch is a romantic malgré lui, the very unfolding of the novel shows as a whole that she is a lot more than that. There is a feature of her character that prevents her from being considered a

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romantic heroine in the deprecatory sense of the word “romantic” (that is to say, “mawkish”), and it is James who underlines it in his preface: Fleda’s ingratiating stroke, for importance, on the threshold, had been that she would understand; and positively, from that moment, the progress and march of my tale became and remained that of her understanding   . Fleda almost demonically both sees and feels, while the others but feel without seeing   . The fools are interesting by contrast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever, and, as exemplified in the record of Fleda Vetch, for instance, “successful”, only through having remained free.25

“Understanding” and “freedom” form the unity of Fleda’s personality, and thanks to them the character makes up for the breakdown of her ideal or rather of the goal that she had proposed, the unbounded acceptance of Owen “just the way he was” and the accomplishment of a happiness whereto he was not up. This would have been impossible by principle if she had been an average romantic and had simply mistaken love for her illusions, for then she would not have been able to overcome the bitterness inherent to the loss of the beloved one. Nevertheless, she was from the onset aware that love would be meaningless if she were subjected to Mona’s wish to land a good match, whereby she always strove to keeping her relationship with Owen away from it, which was feasible at bottom because of the complexity of her ideal, which, as I just said, always was much more than the image of a future happiness and sprang from the intuition of a way of being that she furthermore perceived in the extraordinary beauty of Poynton, where every treasure reminded her of the devotion wherewith it had been chosen through years and years by Owen’s parents, although he was almost alien to that. Thanks then to the house, the contradictions among life, beauty, freedom, and happiness were solved as if by magic and without requiring the rows and the misunderstandings that so easily spoil coexistence, precisely because the former offered beforehand the ground, as it were, for getting rid of whatever selfishness, whereas on the other hand, this gift of the place proved that Fleda’s ideal was by no means a chimera but the symbol of the “eternal recurrence” of the fullness that she was after: if before them a couple of lovers had been up to such a beauty, Owen and she could also be. Therefore, if I have in the foregoing section focused on Fleda’s love ideal as a subjective projection, I must set it out now in the light of a sensibility that was not only hers but also Mrs. Gereth’s, Owen’s mother, who is the alter ego of Fleda because she provides the common sense that the latter wants so as to set aside the incidents of luck, the lurid strength of hope, and, above all, the drive of her own consciousness that passes over the efforts of a man like Owen. In other words, if Poynton stands for the fulfilment of

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the ideal, Mrs. Gereth stands for the experience and the shrewdness that love requires to triumph over the devastating power of time and the fickleness of desire. This double aspect of the character of Mrs. Gereth is explicit already in the second paragraph of the novel: Deep in her heart was a conviction that Owen would, in spite of all her spells, marry at last a frump; and this from no evidence that she could have represented as adequate, but simply from her deep uneasiness, her belief that such a special sensibility as her own could have been inflicted on a woman only as a source of anguish.26

Whereas for Fleda love lives on an unbounded confidence in others, for Mrs. Gereth it lives on the awareness of the weakness that is the fatal feature even of the best persons. In the average conditions of life, no one is entirely trustworthy because everyone acts under the strengths that he has hardly made out, which is why it is impossible at bottom to share the goals of someone else unless he had somehow reified them: far from the romantic assumption that there is a transcendent community of feelings and “reasons of the heart” (Pascal dixit) beyond the efforts of each one whereby it is feasible to find the indestructible unity of two souls that romanticism considers the very core of love and, through it, of social life, Mrs. Gereth would uphold that the only original community whereof everyone participates is the organic, instinctive, and unconscious one, which is utterly contrary to the so-called sublime identification of the lovers, which, of course, does not entail at all that there is no way of sharing a full life with someone, but that demands to have more shrewdness than a deep spirit. Man cannot trust his own sensitiveness because it carries him away instead of allowing him to share others’ ways of being when it has not been consciously formed, which is much harder in the case of a man because he, as Owen proves, does not care for the ideal condition of life, which is the cause of the peculiar weakness that he experiences before his own drives, which for their part are just organic wants: a man can beget great ideals, yes, but they will never mean life as such, that is, as the conscious unfolding of an imaginative identity, as Mrs. Gereth reminds Fleda: “Do you mean to say that [Owen] could see you that way, day after day, and not have the ordinary feelings of a man? Don’t you know a little more, you absurd, affected thing, what men are, the brutes?”27 Instead, sensibility or idealization of life is what endows woman with that extraordinary farsightedness that Mrs. Gereth and Fleda express each in her own way: the lady through the worship of beauty, the girl through the sigh of freedom. Now we must clarify whether these two aims are compatible, that is, if in spite of the final haplessness of the characters there is still a reason to assert the ideality of love beyond the outright testimony of facts that so

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brutishly has gainsaid it in the novel. And the work itself furnishes us with a clue on framing the friendship of the two characters in the beauty of Poynton. Contrary to the love ideal, that—as Fleda has proved—is more often than not misled either by desire or by illusion, the aesthetic and vital ideal that the house stands for is by its very essence universally shareable, and this condition allows it to be assimilated to the kind of ideality that rules friendship, for this is a relation entirely based on the participation of something that transcends the mere want of company or the penchants of each one: as a matter of fact, whereas in the case of love it is impossible to separate the emotional constitution and the would-be perfection of the beloved one, in the case of friendship the matter is altogether different because the ideal never is reducible to the person of the friend but it is from the onset identified as such (whether it is or is not noble in itself), which is why the betrayal of a friend cannot be forgiven, whereas the betrayal of a lover can be, for in this case desire and want of company or even routine are much more powerful than the mere ideal, which is instead the sole ground of friendship: there is no way of recovering it once it has been shattered. Now, this priority of the ideal, which is both psychological and chronological, by no means entails that it remains identical through time; on the contrary, the very sense of whichever friendship is to unfold and enhance the original ground, to fathom it through the common experience and become so more conscious thereof, whereby friendship (the same as the pleasure that beauty supplies) always demands the ideal, reflexive component that is instead very frequently set aside or is completely absent in love, where attraction or costume makes up for it with no problem. All these remarks intend to show why a character such as Fleda required per force the friendship of someone such as Mrs. Gereth, or, in other words, why the love ideal that the former sets out could not fully have been understandable without a friendship that supplied simultaneously a psychological prop and an aesthetic background, as happens already in the first scene of the novel, when Mrs. Gereth comes across Fleda alone in the park of Waterbath, the house that Mona’s family has crammed with all the horrors of bad taste and mawkishness, before which, by contrast, Fleda’s exquisiteness is more evident: “Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea, though perhaps not with much else; and that made a bond when there was none other, especially as in this case the idea was real, not imitation.”28 The first link between the two friends is then their common good taste, the intuition of how it is possible to overcome the challenges of life with the own sensibility: Fleda lacks money and even physical lures, but she makes up amply for her faults

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with her smartness and her friendliness, which brings out more clearly the inner lifelessness of Mona: Miss Brigstock had been laughing and even romping, but the circumstance hadn’t contributed the ghost of an expression to her countenance. Tall, straight and fair, long-limbed and strangely festooned, she stood there without a look in her eye or any perceptible intention of any sort in any other feature.29

As we see, the affinities and the oppositions of the characters are defined in aesthetic terms that also work as moral symbols independent of the concrete features of each one because they belong to the realm of imagination and free feeling that starts to unfold precisely when Fleda, at the beginning of the third chapter, visits Poynton for the first time; if all her life she has been subjected to the constant threat of need and desolation (she is motherless, her father, who lives scantily, has hardly taken care of her, and her only sister is about to marry a poor clergyman), at the sight of the house she experiences that pleasure that only the identity of life and beauty provides: They went at last, the wiseheads, down to Poynton, where the palpitating girl had the full revelation: “Now do you know how I feel?” Mrs. Gereth asked when in the wonderful hall, three minutes after their arrival, her pretty associate dropped on a seat with a soft gasp and a roll of dilated eyes. The answer came clearly enough, and in the rapture of that first walk through the house Fleda took a prodigious span. She perfectly understood how Mrs. Gereth felt—she had understood but meagrely before; and the two women embraced with tears over the tightening of their bond—tears which on the younger one’s part were the natural and usual sign of her submission to perfect beauty.30

The affinity existing between aesthetic accomplishment and friendship is at the heart of this passage: on the one hand, the act of sharing an imaginative world that unlike the artistic realm is offered to everyone as a common abode; on the other, the development of a feeling that goes beyond the mere delectation of the sybarite: Mrs. Gereth does not confine herself to showing her house to Fleda, she rather displays before her friend the life that she has lived, which by its exquisiteness is also the one that the girl has always sighed for; and inasmuch as it has been changed into a reality, whatever particularism or negativity is unconceivable. Poynton is not an estate that one makes over because of a legal disposition, since it only belongs to someone who is willing beforehand to live in accordance with it, which does not entail either the unbearable imposition of another taste because it shows the unity of experience and feeling that everyone can fulfill by himself; it is perfect as an artwork of interior design and architecture, but it does not have at all a museum-like atmosphere that prevents the dwellers from breathing at ease; on the contrary, it does not carries out a technical idea, it symbolizes a moral ideal, that is, the possibility of being happy in the same way as someone before

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had been, which is perceptible when Mrs. Gereth brings away the treasures to Ricks, the house where she must spend her widowhood, and they get there again a fascinating aspect that Fleda cannot help admiring despite her wish of convincing the lady to give them back to Owen: the image changes, the symbol remains. The transcendence of the ideal, then, instead of overshadowing the originality of everyone, demands it from a plane much deeper than that of aesthetic delectation, for it lives on the feeling of being the rise of an imaginative whole, a member of an organic process and also a link in an endless chain similar to the one wherewith ancient mythology intended to represent the unity of universe and the community of existence: it does not matter who the master of Poynton is or who devised it, provided that everyone is up to the beauty of the place, for this is not a sample of someone’s taste; on the contrary, it reveals perfection as such and everyone must enjoy it independently of every other consideration, for insofar as the aesthetic symbol provides the ground of a common recognition, everyone becomes simultaneously its original creator and just another of its usufructuaries, which establishes a sui generis familiarity among everyone, a truly generic sense that works through the sentimental affinities and shapes them beyond the individual temperament even when the person is rather dull, as it happens, for instance, with Owen, who, notwithstanding his seeming to be almost indifferent to the beauty of Poynton, is always engrossed in it and never takes it only as an estate although he is not able to grasp its exquisiteness as his mother and Fleda can. Thus, among the three protagonists of the novel, the familiarity whereof we speak brings respectively to light the symbolic identity of nature, creativity, and life that is otherwise known as beauty, whereas the only antagonist of the work, Mona, passes over it because, as Fleda says, “she doesn’t look with her eyes; she looks with her ears.”31 Mona is so vulgar that she enjoys something just when she asserts herself through it, in such a way that when she has finally triumphed over her would-be rivals, she revels in showing off her contempt for Poynton and prefers to stay abroad instead of taking full possession of the treasures that she so brutally fought for. From this outlook, Mona embodies a type very common in the cultural life, the sybarite, the pseudo-aesthetician who feigns a zest before beauty when the fact is that he does not care for it unless it is for satisfying his basest wants. For Mona and for the people of her kind, beauty never is a symbol, it is a stimulus that brings about an emotional outburst. Setting things out in this way underscores the intuition of James in having used a house to show how before the overpowering strength of beauty the respective way of being takes shape, just as it happens in the intimacy of one’s

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own dwelling, wherein everyone can reveal himself: the ideal familiarity that beauty begets among human beings is also the vehicle for each one of them to release his own sensibility from the blind determination of the natural drives and to recognize others. The final outcome of the aesthetic or imaginative experience is the consciousness of a full life, however much it demands overcoming the symbol wherein the process started: beauty must become the frame of personality, the strength of character beyond the symbolic purity of ideals so as not to be shattered by the multitudinous contingencies of life, as Mrs. Gereth has to find out after having been crushed by Mona. In fact, just as Fleda has to sacrifice her illusions before Owen’s freedom, Mrs. Gereth has to sacrifice her passion for beauty or rather her reduction of life to beauty so as to know the hard nature of human existence that she had disdained so stubbornly until then, although it waylaid her everywhere, as James says at the onset of the novel: The great drawback of Mrs. Gereth’s situation was that, thanks to the rare perfection of Poynton, she was condemned to wince wherever she turned. She had lived for a quarter of a century in such warm closeness with the beautiful that, as she frankly admitted, life had become for her a kind of fool’s paradise.32

Whoever passionately tries to leave aside or hide the nasty side of life will find it doubly hard to accept it all of a sudden, and do so without the original rebelliousness and rather with the odd satisfaction of one who overcomes his faults. Thanks to her lucidity and—why not?—to her humbleness before her sorrow, Mrs. Gereth gets a new life, not as beautiful as the one that she had enjoyed, but one that is much more concrete because it has to cope with shame: the loss of beauty, friendship, and consciousness go hand-in-hand, as the character realizes in the middle of her grief Her relation with her wonderful friend had, however, in becoming a new one, begun to shape itself almost wholly on breaches and omissions. Something had dropped out altogether, and the question between them, which time would answer, was whether the change had made them strangers or yokefellows. It was as if at last, for better or worse, they were, in a clearer, cruder air, really to know each other.33

In contrast to love, which so fatally blends the psychological and the symbolic personality of the beloved one, friendship distinguishes both of them from the onset because, as I said, it only thrives on the soil of a common ideal, which in this case is first conceived as the preservation of Poynton and the concomitant liberation of Owen and later as the understanding of how the finitude of existence, instead of being a sentence to perpetual loneliness, is the source of whatever consciousness and relationship, taking into account that “potentiality    is a part of being”;34 love is more often than not spoiled

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by the want of company, whereas friendship avoids that by demanding the mutual recognition through the mediation of the ideal, which in the novel is symbolized by Poynton or, rather, by the life that it communicates even beyond its aesthetic perfection, as I noted in commenting the marvelous effect of the treasures in Ricks and its independence from the personality of Mrs. Gereth or from the original owner of the house, a lady who never married and who lacked elegance. And it is again Fleda who grasps before Mrs. Gereth the inner potency of Ricks that throbs behind its apparent gracelessness; if despite the exquisiteness it looked like tinsel when it contained the richness of Poynton, Ricks recovers its real condition when it has been released from exquisiteness, exactly as the two women get a new spirituality when they have lost happiness by the natural unfolding of their ideals and not by an outer reason. Thus, beauty or the memory thereof are for revealing the authentic personality whether of persons or places and for accepting the familiarity that they offer, as Fleda remarks on showing her friend that, instead of having been bereft of life, she has won a new imaginative world in Ricks: Ah, the little melancholy, tender, tell-tale things; how can they not speak to you and find a way to your heart? It’s not the great chorus of Poynton; but you’re not, I’m sure, either so proud or so broken as to be reached by nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine—a faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break   . It’s a kind of fourth dimension. It’s a presence, a perfume, a touch. It’s a soul, a story, a life. There’s ever so much more here than you and I. We’re in fact just three!35

These last words emphasize the triadic, ideal framework of friendship that I mentioned and help us to understand how the familiarity of whatever aesthetic fulfilment lacks the determinist feature that is so frequently and wrongly linked with the transmission of culture: consciousness is the conditio sine qua non both of whatever friendship (which must be not mistaken for mere companionship) and of aesthetic experience, provided that the latter transcends the mere delectation before the works of imagination and comprises the complexity of existence as a whole, where, oddly enough, the revelation does not come, as it could have been expected, through the would-be master but through the disciple, the being eager to learn and share: if Mrs. Gereth’s common sense had been very useful for landing a good match or for any other business of practical life, Fleda’s poetic intuition is fundamental for enjoying life beyond the would-be success of her own intentions. The girl is likely to lack shrewdness or skillfulness, but she has depth to spare, and thanks to that, Mrs. Gereth discovers inside herself a new vitality although Mona has objectively defeated her. To get that, however, she must leave aside her masterwork, Poynton, and the life, her son included, to which she devoted all her strength, an exigency that would have shattered her if it were

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not for her friendship with Fleda. In contrast to what might seem to be the case, the drama of the novel does not lie in the loss of love and beauty, it lies in the overcoming of the bitterness that it implies, and here again the two friends must advance hand in hand, taking shelter in their union and in the freedom with which it endows them despite loneliness, and the fact that they are up to it beyond the iron resistance of the elder one or of the ingenuity of the younger one is the best proof of how the real subject of the novel is by no means the fight for the possession of beauty but the revelation of freedom beyond illusion: “The Spoils of Poynton is principally a drama of consciousness, a sensitive study of the complex processes by which individual subjectivity seeks to found and sustain itself in a coherent relationship with its experience.”36 Thus, if at the onset the friends were identified by their good taste and, more deeply, by the disdainful consciousness of their being superior to men (the narrator remarks at the end of the first chapter that Fleda “was prepared, if she should ever marry, to contribute all the cleverness, and she liked to think that her husband would be a force grateful for direction. She was in her small way a spirit of the same family as Mrs. Gereth”),37 they finally achieve real freedom, which is nothing other than emotional independence with regard to the determinations of memory or desire. This unselfishness, which people more often than not mistake for disappointment, is the real revelation of the two characters, and thanks to it they are able to see how beauty literally slips from their hands and, instead of at least going to their antagonist, founders into nothing, as it happens when they fear that Owen is lost forever; they are in a train station and all of a sudden a kind of hierophany takes place: They slowly paced the great grey platform, and presently Mrs. Gereth took the girl’s arm and leaned on it with a hard demand for support. It seemed to Fleda not difficult for each other to know of what the other was thinking—to know indeed that they had in common two alternating visions, one of which at moments brought them as by a common impulse to a pause. This was the one that was fixed; the other filled at times the whole space and then was shouldered away. Owen and Mona glared together out of the gloom and disappeared, but the replenishment of Poynton made a shining, steady light. The old splendour was there again, the old things were in their places. Our friends looked at them with an equal yearning; face-to-face, on the platform, they counted them in each other’s eyes.38

When everything seems to betoken helplessness, the conscious community of interest that friendship establishes together with beauty reveals itself, and what in a bad love story would have been the moment of the utmost mawkishness, the vision of an unbounded happiness either in vita or post mortem, becomes the acceptation of the hardest truth: that beauty glitters the same whether one is worthy of it or not, whereby none can claim to be its master, not

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even one who has given his in life for it, as Mrs. Gereth and Fleda have each in her own way. In contrast to what upholds the romantic faith in an eternal justice—or rather, in a permanent justification for all the nuisances and frustrations that everyone has to stand—the novel shows that the noble one does not receive anything from the world despite his deserving everything, and his only consolation is that beauty will at any rate prevail against the meanness and the vulgarity that so usually eat away the feelings of the average individual, although it is necessary for that that beauty lose its purity and mingle with the sensuous, brutal strength of life, which is tantamount to saying that it is only a vehicle, not an end in itself, as Mrs. Gereth has to unwillingly realize, something that, on the other hand, is by no means alien to the Western philosophical and cultural tradition, which from Plato onward has conceived beauty precisely as the medium by antonomasia to explain the identity of becoming and being that rules reality, or the identity of loss and overcoming that rules the sentimental experience, which would perhaps entail a negative conception of beauty for the postromantic approach if it were not by the condition that I have emphasized throughout this section: that beauty (or rather the impossibility of enjoying it as a pure form) supplies everyone with the common identity that is the very core of friendship and of the familiarity to everything, which is, for its part, the final aim of whichever conception of a full life. Vale. III. C O D A

It would seem that there was nothing more to say in the novel after the friendship of Mrs. Gereth and Fleda has to a certain extent made up for the grief that human conflict always spark off, or at least that is what I thought when I had still to read the final chapter and I tried inadvertently to measure again James’s genius with ideas concerning the development of a feeling, according to which, since Owen had been a blockhead on choosing Mona, he should be sorry for that forever, whereas his mother and Fleda would get a new serenity together and live happily ever after, by which the balance of the drama would be recovered and Poynton, the very hub of the conflict, would be spared. That is what I thought (or, rather, what I wanted), but, alas, the story turned out utterly otherwise: Poynton was destroyed by fire, and all the fuss about it was reduced to nonsense, which bewildered me because I had not expected that the only symbol of transcendence should share the fate of the protagonist’s illusions. Why had the defeat of Mrs. Gereth and Fleda not been enough to overcome sorrow? What did the loss of Poynton mean in the light of the unfolding of the whole work? Poynton’s destruction, which could be mistaken

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for a simple coincidence or for a punishment of love’s shortsightedness, is neither, but instead is the best proof of James’s insight with regard to the danger that a feeling brings about when it persists in contradicting the insurmountable passage of time, whose only advantage—if it perchance has one—seems to lie in showing the relativity of everything, including the noblest and highest ideals, which in this final chapter are symbolized by the emotion with which Fleda receives the letter wherewith Owen asks her to visit Poynton in order to choose as a present the most beautiful treasure of the house: She lived with her letter, before any chance came, a month, and even after a month it had mysteries for her that she couldn’t meet. What did it mean, what did it represent, to what did it correspond in his imagination or his soul? What was behind it, what was before it, what was, in the deepest depth, within it?    The passion for which what had happened had made no difference, the passion that had taken this into account before as well as after, found here an issue that there was nothing whatever to choke. It found even a relief to which her imagination immensely contributed. Would she act upon his offer? She would act with secret rapture.39

In spite of the certainty of his fecklessness, in spite of the irretrievability of their detachment, in spite, above all, of her shame, Fleda still wants to indulge her love for Owen, and the reason is clear: although whatever future between them had been marred, love is powerful enough to move imagination, which is an aim by itself before the gray horizon of a life like hers, permanently haunted by scantiness and forlornness. Disappointment is desirable, but solely when it is the spur that announces the new thriving of vitality; if it is not, it is better to live deceived, whatever say the defenders of absolute sincerity in matters of feelings and relationships, who are wont to pass over that; inasmuch as consciousness supplies the ground of the personal existence, man is what he thinks to be, which, of course, does not mean at all that thinking and daydreaming are the same, but that there is an imaginative conformation of the vital reality that hinges upon the strength of one’s own illusions, not upon the bare testimony of facts, as the development of the novel has proved so far: Fleda triumphed over the marriage of Owen because she sought from the onset a fulfilment and not a mere status, but she did not want to overcome her hope because it was the only link with the fullness that she had always been after, even before she met Owen and Poynton. However, as the myth of Pandora’s box shows (together with all the ancient conceptions of existence), hope is just the last and most obnoxious form of evil, the residuum of weakness that sticks paradoxically to existence with such a force that it is or seems to be impossible to wipe it out. As long as hope persists, one is at the mercy of whatever and leads an unconscious life, however much it might seem fortunate at first sight, simply because hope stems directly from desire and, in contrast to real trust, does not take into account experience,

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which in the case of Fleda is due to the passion for beauty that has survived the waning of the love illusion. Now, the problem here is the symbolic unity of both motives, which is blatant when she chooses the object that Owen had suggested in his letter: “At bottom she inclined to the Maltese cross— with the added reason that he had named it.”40 Although they never were together again, he would be with her forever, which would perfectly agree with the romantic conception of existence and love that shirks the hardness of both and upholds a symbolic or rather imaginative transcendence. This shows that romanticism, from this outlook, is just another sample of the nihilism that time and time again menaces the rationality of existence that Western thought upholds. James’s novel is not a romantic one, and the best proof is the devastation of the last form of ideality that it presents, the aesthetic one, which, instead of flinging the characters into desperation, opens for them a way to lucidity, as Fleda suddenly learns while she listens the roar of the fire: “Mixed with horror   , with the smell of cinders and the riot of sound was the raw bitterness of a hope that she might never again in life have to give up so much at such short notice.”41 With this, the work reveals that, although it does not have a happy denouement, it contains something that is much more important from a philosophic outlook: the configuration of freedom just as it must be lived after the devastation of whatever transcendent ideal. Iterum vale. Meritorious University of Puebla, Mexico

NOTES 1 See the Preface to the New York edition that James wrote for Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore (London: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 37. As a matter of fact, James speaks in the passage at issue of “relations” and not of “love,” but I paraphrased it because it matched my subject and also because James dealt very early in his development as a writer with the question of how to keep the interest of the reader without sacrificing the coherence of the work to the truisms of sentimentalism and, as it were, to the ever-present yearning for a happiness that life so rarely supplies. 2 As a matter of fact, the explanation in extenso of this triad was the original content of this introduction, but since it was directly aimed at the understanding of the conceptual link between love and existence in the light of the becoming of metaphysics, I decided to publish it separately, although I maintained some aspects thereof for the present analysis. 3 Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 136. 4 The edition of the work that I use is Henry James, Novels 1896–1899. The Other House. The Spoils of Poynton. What Maisie Knew. The Awkward Age, ed. Myra Jehlen (New York: The Library of America, 2003). Unless I mention it explicitly, the italics are always James’s.

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5 Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 8. 6 The Spoils of Poynton, p. 345. 7 Idem. 8 Merle A. Williams, op. cit., p. 139. 9 The Spoils of Poynton, p. 238. 10 Ibidem, p. 333. 11 Ibidem, p. 283. 12 Ibidem, p. 374. 13 Ibidem, p. 358. 14 Idem. 15 Ibidem, p. 284. 16 Merle A. Williams, op. cit., p. 5 17 The Spoils of Poynton, p. 385. 18 Millicent Bell, op. cit., p. 215. 19 The Spoils of Poynton, pp. 275–276. 20 Ibidem, p. 344. 21 Ibidem, p. 375. 22 Ibidem, p. 324. 23 Ibidem, pp. 341–342. 24 Millicent Bell, op. cit., p. 28. 25 I quote the fragment as it appears in the electronic version of the Preface, which is available at http://www.henryjames.org.uk/prefaces/text10.htm. 26 The Spoils of Poynton, c. I, p. 214. 27 Ibidem, c. XII, p. 307. 28 Ibidem, c. I, p. 214. 29 Ibidem, p. 217. 30 Ibidem, c. III, p. 225. 31 Ibidem, c. XXII, p. 385. 32 Ibidem, c. II, p. 218. 33 Ibidem, c. XXII, p. 384. 34 Millicent Bell, op. cit., p. 26. 35 The Spoils of Poynton, c. XXI, p. 381. 36 Merle A. Williams, op. cit., p. 163. 37 The Spoils of Poynton, p. 218. 38 Ibidem, c. XIX, pp. 368–369. 39 Ibidem, c. XXII, pp. 388–389. 40 Idem. 41 Ibidem, pp. 392–393.

ROBERT D. SWEENEY

VON HILDEBRANDS, FATHER AND SON, AND THE BEAUTIFUL

Adolf Ernst Robert von Hildebrand was the son of Bruno Hildebrand, a leading economist and the first major critic of Marxian economics. Bruno taught at Marburg, fought in the revolution of 1847, was exiled to Switzerland, and taught at Zurich, where he was also a successful railroad director and received citizenship; he later returned to Germany to teach at Jena. Adolf, the middle child of seven, was born in Marburg in 1847 and trained in Nuremberg at the Kunstgewerbe Schule and in Munich; he too studied economics and philosophy. After early successes with sculpture, frescoes (with Hans von Marees), and painting, Adolf (sponsored initially by Conrad Fiedler, the collector and art critic) took over an old monastery in Florence known as Villa San Francesco, built around 1483 and secularized in 1783. Here he established a kind of artists’ colony with von Marees, Fiedler, and others, and absorbed the influence of the heritage of that Renaissance city, especially from the work of Michelangelo. He married and had six children. The visitors to Villa San Francesco over the years, to what was called by R. W. B. Lewis in his book on Florence the “most brilliant salon in Europe,” included Rainer Maria Rilke, Henry James, Richard Wagner and Cosima (an enduring friend), Hugo Hofmanstal, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Straus. Franz Liszt would play concerts there.1 After 20 years in Florence (and with three other homes in Italy), Adolf won the Wittelsbach Fountain competition and moved with his family to Munich (as required) into a house of his own design (the Hildebrandhaus, now a library and exhibition hall), where the salon tradition was continued. He was knighted by King Ludwig of Bavaria (and thus added the “von” to his name). He taught sculpture at the Munich Academy of Arts and was responsible for major Grabmale and Denkmale, including the Wittelsbach and Father Rhine Fountains as well as others at Worms, Berlin, and elsewhere in Germany. He also made paintings, frescoes, portraits, and bas-reliefs; it was reliefs that he found most artistically fulfilling. There appear to have been three stages to his artistic output: the Florence period, the early Munich period, and then the period following his stroke in 1908, after which his sculpture was done in 127 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 127–135. © 2008 Springer.

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the workshop. Eventually he was eclipsed by the success of Auguste Rodin. One story has it that von Hildebrand wrote a critique of Rodin that he then suppressed for fear of worsening French-German relations right after the war. In any case, according to Lewis, even though “neoclassicism was out of favor at the time of his death,” in 1921, “his star seems again to be gaining ascendance; he appears to be assuming the significance in German art history that Rodin holds in France.”2 His worldwide influence, especially in Japan, has been described by Tetsuhiro Kato.3 Because Adolf was also trained in academic subjects, it was natural that he would turn to an explication of his sculptural theories, which he did especially in The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture,4 which became a widely quoted text. The arguments in that book are found in condensed form in “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” published by the Getty museum.5 The main focus of both works is the difference between the experience of form in nature and its expression in imagination and the art that follows from it. He shows how the artistic notion or representation of form (delimited space) differs from our naïve or everyday understanding of form and space, a difference based on a distinction between visual and kinaesthetic perception—visual perception referring to the eye at rest taking in a “distant view,” and kinaesthetic referring to the “near view” in which the eye is “required to undergo a series of movements in order to grasp the whole object.”6

Because the distant image on the retina is always two dimensional, our experience of the third dimension or the object’s plasticity is something gradually acquired with age. The kinesthetic enables us “to attribute to objects a form that is independent of appearance.”7 The appearance that depends solely on the object is called form, and this leads in turn to a distinction between “inherent form,” that is, a measurable and quantifiable form of nature, independent of its surroundings, and “effective form,” “the form that we perceive within a specific context, that is always relative and therefore dependent on ambient light, shadow, color and other objects.”8 “Artistic seeing    resides in a strong grasp of these sensations of form and not in the mere knowledge of the inherent form as a sum of isolated perfections.” The artistic form thus is always a subjective distortion of the so-called “truth of nature” in positivism, and so von Hildebrand claims that art is an autonomous world apart from nature. Such a view of perception enables the artist to utilize empathy (a pervasive theme in that era) so that we fill in “with feeling” what has been removed from the reconstructed but purely visual. For von Hildebrand, the sculptor goes in an opposite direction from the painter, who has to get the two dimensional out of the cubic; the sculptor

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by contrast uses a cubic form to create a “planimetric image.” This is best exemplified in sculpture as relief.9 Whereas painting has to incorporate the cubic, at least minimally, sculpture must work as a plane, although paradoxically still cubic, an achievement found not in sculpture in the round—which he considered incomplete sculpture, and which he disliked in any case— but in the sculptural relief. It has been claimed that von Hildebrand rescued sculpture from painting, but also, by Susan Langer, for instance, that his theory made sculpture too dependent on painting. In her acute comments on von Hildebrand, Langer sees him as inventing “virtual space”—in her theory, the illusory character of pictorial space that makes visual art possible, “visual substitutes for the things that are normally known by touch, movement, or inference.”10 Von Hildebrand’s neoclassical (and romantic) style can be said to be close to that of the Greek sculptor Praxiteles, whom he admired and mentioned in his book—a style that is sinuous, sensual, detailed. This can be seen by comparing, for example, von Hildebrand’s work with the newly discovered and installed bronze statue of Apollo in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Adolf von Hildebrand died in 1921, after having lost a good deal of his audience, partly due to the success of the work of Rodin. My interest in von Hildebrand stems initially from a visit to Florence and the Villa San Francesco with his son Dietrich, who was a professor at Fordham University after having fled the Nazis in 1940. Dietrich von Hildebrand grew up in Florence and its art world as the youngest of six children (all of the others were girls, and of the children but he were musicians and artists) and never attended school, but had tutors (to which we might ascribe his independence of thought). Along with Wilhelm Fürtwängler, later the noted conductor,11 he was tutored by Edmund Curtius until he entered the University of Göttingen, where he worked with Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and, especially, Adolf Reinach, and was involved in the establishment of the Jahrbuch für Phänomenologische Forschung, which published his thesis, “Die Idee der Sittlichen Handlung.” He was reputed to be Husserl’s best student, and Husserl’s comments on von Hildebrand’s dissertation were quite flattering even if somewhat reserved as to its building on Husserl’s work.12 Dietrich von Hildebrand contributed to the development of the early “Platonist” realism of essences that characterized the Göttingen period of phenomenology, so-called “realistic” phenomenology; this group included, besides Reinach and Scheler, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Alexander Pfänder, and Moritz Geiger. Its focus began with axiological ethics, but branched into such areas as the metaphysics of community, the philosophy of law, and aesthetics, as well as, on the part of Reinach, what is considered the

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forerunner of speech act theory. One further speculative note: A falling out with Husserl seems to have been due to the overtly religious rhetoric in some of von Hildebrand’s writing. After marrying, serving in a medical unit during World War 2, and converting to Catholicism, Dietrich began teaching at the University of Munich. An early outspoken opponent of Nazism, after Hitler’s takeover in 1933, Dietrich found teaching impossible, lost his position at Munich, and began writing against the Nazis. He was exiled from Germany five times, escaping to Florence and Switzerland, where he had inherited citizenship from his grandfather. In 1934, he moved to Austria to start a Catholic antiNazi paper with expectation of a professorship at the University of Vienna promised by then-premier Engelbert Dollfuss, who was assassinated shortly thereafter; the promise was kept by Kurt von Schussnig, but only in the form of professor “extraordinarius.” His hopes for refuge in Austria were dashed by the Anschluss; he was declared an enemy by von Papen because of his outspoken articles against the Nazis. He and his wife Irene (Gretchen) escaped initially to Czechoslovakia, then to Switzerland, depending on friends there for survival. He moved to Toulouse and taught briefly there; then, somehow, after a series of hairbreadth escapes from the Gestapo, he managed to emigrate with his wife and son Franz to Spain, Portugal, Brazil, and finally, with the help of the Rockefeller Foundation, to New York. He taught philosophy at Fordham University in New York until his retirement in 1964. He died in 1977. He published some 20 books in English; some of them were translations from German originals, and most were on what are generally regarded as religious themes. The Dietrich von Hildebrand Gesellschaft lists nine volumes in the Collected Works. Dietrich’s Ästhetik is in two parts (volumes) and totals more than 1000 pages.13 It exemplifies his rich background and total enthusiasm for the beauty of both nature and art—at least art of the pre-modern era. Part I was published posthumously in 1977 but was based on work done principally, I would estimate, in the 1920s, and some of it for the course I took from him in 1951. Part II was published in 1983. The first volume is on the essence of beauty, including the beauty of nature; the second on the essence of art, covering manifold types of art, including lengthy discussions of literature, music, and theater, and the interconnection of the arts.14 The fundamental premise is that beauty is a value-essence that can only be designated as the object of an intentional act called a value-response. Von Hildebrand’s delineation of this “objectivity” depends on his particular utilization of intentionality as a kind of one-way street—a one-directional vector. This allows value, defined as “important in itself,” to take on the status

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of absolute objectivity and to be seen as the source of moral norms—the ignoring of which he labeled “value blindness.” To be sure, there are two other modes of importance—the “objective good for the person” and “the subjectively satisfying” (actually a “pseudo-importance”; There are no continuous value gradations as in Scheler’s theory). It is this latter, the response to the subjectively satisfying—especially as pleasure—that provides a polar opposite (or foil) for value as object of value-response. Applied to aesthetics, it means metaphysical beauty is a value, a supreme value, as opposed to sensual beauty, which is merely an object of the subjectively satisfying. Values, and specifically beauty claims, are thus objective—self-standing essences and, consequently eternal, unchanging.15 Natural objects and art objects are “bearers” of the value of beauty; there are also what he calls “aesthetic values” that are, one can infer, “lesser” values that are somehow subtended to the absolute value of beauty, for example, the combination of libretto and music in a Mozart opera serves the overall beauty of the piece. Von Hildebrand also discusses the “ontological reality of the work of art” as an individual something, to be sure, but also as a spiritual something, as in architecture, where a building is more than a mere pile of stones but not a Geisteseele, and not a general “essentiality” either. So whereas the essences are eternal, necessary, and mysterious, he says, works of art are human creations, individual quasi-substances.16 The book contains effective argumentation in efforts at refuting classical subjectivists such as Spinoza (!), Hume, Kant, Santayana, and others, whose positions fail to recognize the objectivity of beauty. His allusions to classic works of art and music are rich and well-informed, reflecting his most unusual education, but they do not go beyond the nineteenth century. But although he gives us many illustrations of beautiful objects—the music of Mozart, Schubert, and so on—there is no real analysis of their givenness, no musical theory, for example (no “Tristan chord”). Indeed Dietrich repudiated any effort to define beauty, since, like all values (but here in particular degree), it is an object of an affective intuition. This intuition, presupposed for value responses in general, is sheer intuition because it is affective. Thus there is no talk of a phenomenological reduction, including the eidetic reduction, no stable core distilled from descriptive imaginative variations (at least not explicitly), no transcendental ego, no genetic phenomenology. Feeling is analyzed in a corresponding fashion: There is a closed-in, selfregarding centripetal character in the case of the response to the subjectively satisfying, and an open, centrifugal, self-forgetting character in the value-response to beauty. An example he gives is thirst: While in thirst the

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principium (determining factor) is the feeling and the importance of water the principiatum (the determined aspect), in joy or enthusiasm it is a value, for example, someone’s heroic moral act, that is the principium and our affective value-response the principiatum. Hence one cannot place the importance of the value of beauty in feelings of pleasure or need or striving. That would be to ignore the being-autonomy of values, their objectivity.17 Thus, while there are ordinary feelings of pleasure—sensual experiences that fall into the category of the subjectively satisfying—their intentionality (it appears) is a “counterfeit” one, since the vector goes from the self, as determined by an egoistic source. There is also the “objective good for the person”; here a certain objectivity is found, and therefore an intentionality, but it is intermixed with the subjective by reason of its dependence on individual judgment. But value-responses as such are the specifically spiritual feelings that are marked by a full-blown intentionality, which is the case with all “value-responses.” Thus, just as the response of love or the admiration for a generous act are spiritual value-responses, so also is the aesthetic value-response (Wertantwortung). For example, being moved by the qualities of a Mozart or a Wagner opera, we experience reverence, awe, enthusiasm, admiration, possibly even joy—all appropriate value responses.18 Not surprisingly, Dietrich von Hildebrand lost his audience in philosophy, not just because of the loss of academic positions and the distracting turmoil (most would say heroism) in his life in the 1920s and 1930s, but also because of what has been seen as a certain “intuitionism” or even a fideistic dogmatism, an insistence on bringing the “supernatural” into philosophical discussion—and deliberately so since it stemmed from his all-consuming religious commitment. Among his peers already in Germany he was unpopular for writing on subjects like marriage, virginity, and purity; indeed, he initiated the discussion that became the theme of Casti Connubii—the encyclical of Pius XI. His emphatic endorsement of a connection between religion and philosophy might be considered a dogmatism or even a fideism, but his phenomenological focus on experience counterbalanced such tendencies. In any case, his late-appearing Ästhetik, for all its richness and enthusiasm, does not seem to touch modern sensibilities (except, perhaps, in discussing Richard Strauss). To return to the father, Adolf, is to recognize another dogmatism, namely, a kind of romantic neoclassicism, which found its expression in his sculpture, reliefs. and some paintings. But it was also developed in the celebrated texts that explained his approach to sculpture and art in general in very informed passages, and which ended with a proclamation of an ahistorical timelessness, or an outright eternality for art. Speaking specifically of Michelangelo, but

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in effect generalizing, he writes, “all distinctions of time, circumstances, and individuality are reduced to nothing before the universal and eternal laws that govern and always will govern artistic creation.”19 Moreover, Adolf also had strong arguments when he complained about the “historical” approach to art, for example, and claimed that from it arises “the misconception that art is a subjective manifestation of our unartistic side, thereby stripping it of any criterion of objective value.”20 Dietrich von Hildebrand echoed this in his statements about all great art as he identified it, for example, in the chapter on the “Objectivity of Beauty” and throughout Volume II, but always it is the values embodied in the masterwork to which “eternality” is ascribed. Even though I have found no reference to his father’s work or any appreciation of his theories (and in his course in 1951 heard no such reference; although I recall a privately expressed strong dislike of Rodin’s work on his father’s behalf), still, in his treatment of sculpture a similarity to his father’s attitude is quite pronounced: for example, in the portrait bust, the importance of avoiding contortions and distorted expressions; or the naked figure as an object of reverence through “transposition”: “Only through transposition can the figure as such become the bearer of new artistic values, through which the beauty of the represented body in nature can be captured.”21 As another example, Dietrich refers to Michelangelo’s “dying Slave,” in which the transposed artistic metaphysical beauty combines in an “unprecedented way the ecstatic intensity of pain, nobility, the depth of dying.” There is here a “Körpergefühl” (“body-feeling”), Dietrich argues, that “has a great influence on the artistic quality of the figure” and must be captured by the sculptor.22 In other words, for all their differences, father and son shared a similar conception of beauty, at least in art (Adolf does not talk about the beauty of nature except implicitly). To a degree they suffered the same fate: They lost their audiences, and, I would surmise, for similar reasons: Adolf for his neoclassical style combined with a romanticism that seemed outdated, especially in contrast to his contemporary, Rodin; and in Dietrich’s case, even though his maintaining his intuitionism (and supernaturalism) to the point of a fideistic dogmatism earned him celebrity status in certain quarters,23 there was also an isolationism even from fellow Catholic philosophers, especially Thomistic philosophers. However, both Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain were active in defending him in his exiles, and Maritain was a major help in getting him located in the United States, for all of which Dietrich was most appreciative. But it is also clear that Dietrich took brave political and religious stands that made him go counter to cultural trends and so helped to lose him acceptance.

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ROBERT D. SWEENEY CONCLUSION

In the light of the foregoing considerations, I would venture to add that I believe a hermeneutic phenomenology, such as Paul Ricoeur’s, applied to aesthetics (although he wrote little on the subject), might be more successful in helping us to understand beauty and feeling than Dietrich von Hildebrand’s— or Adolf’s, for that matter—since it can capture both the historical—the temporality of art—and its individuality. Thus it can do justice to the longevity of a work, that is, to what Ricoeur calls the transhistorical or even the “sempiternal” without becoming Platonist and without ignoring the fact that both styles (rule governed) and works have their origin in a point in time for a certain audience and yet manage to transcend that point because of what Ricoeur calls “monstration.” Hermeneutic phenomenology stresses the context, the historicity, and especially the reception of the work of art, and yet finds a “moment sempiternel” and a prophetic dimension: “its capacity to transcend immediate utility” “that is exhausted in the historical” and a “monstration renewed endlessly as being always other although the same, [that] constitutes the link between the sempiternal and the historic.”24 As with many contemporaries, beauty is not central to Ricoeur’s aesthetics, but it is important nevertheless: “To the degree that all beauty elevates us, in particular by its rupture with the utilitarian, it reveals a potential ethical meaning, because it demonstrates that everything does not enter into the commercial order.” Thus Ricoeur even allows for a kind of transcendent character to beauty, but one with no breath of eternality as such. An aesthetics that would combine such historical sensitivity with other components of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, especially the metaphor and narrative theories, along with affective intentionality and the decentered self, could well be the best hope for delivering on the promise of a phenomenological aesthetics. But these comments are not meant to contradict, only to complement and balance the “Platonism” (or “Augustinianism,” a term preferred by Dietrich) of the von Hildebrands, who have left us at least a small heritage both of beautiful art and an explication of value-response to the beautiful. John Carroll University NOTES 1

For the information on the Hildebrand family, I am indebted to Alice von Hildebrand, The Soul of a Lion: Dietrich von Hildebrand (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000). This is a biography based principally on notes left by D. von Hildebrand. Also see R. W. B. Lewis, The City of Florence: Historical Vistas and Personal Sightings (New York: Henry Holt. 1995);

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and H. B. Brewster, The Cosmopolites (Norwich: Michael Russell, 1994). Lewis represents an interesting sideline to the von Hildebrand story: He is connected distantly to the Brewster family, one of whom was on the Mayflower but returned to England; in Germany a Brewster was married to a daughter of the von Stockhausen family, a scion of which married one of the von Hildebrand daughters and was the mainstay of the family during the difficult prewar years and beyond. Brewster included this account in the family history cited earlier. 2 Op. cit., p. 229. 3 “The Concept of Nature in Hildebrand’s Theory of Painting and Sculpture,” available at http://web.kyotoinet. 4 English translation and revision with the author’s cooperation by Max Meyer and Robert Morris Ogden (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1907). 5 Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Introduction and translation by Harry Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou) (University of Chicago Press, 1994). 6 Op. cit., 236. 7 Ibid., 237. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 235. 10 Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York, Scribner’s, 1953), p. 37. 11 A curiosity: Dietrich von Hildebrand and Wilhelm Fürtwängler were each engaged to the other’s sister—Wilhelm to Bertele, and Dietrich to Maerit—but neither couple married. 12 Edmund Husserl, “Urteil über Hildebrands Doktorarbeit,” in Briefwechsel, Band III. Die Göttinger Schule (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), pp. 125–126. 13 Regensburg: Verlag Josef Habbel, 1977, 1984. For further information on the Gottingen School, see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, Vol. 1, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 169–171. 14 Ästhetik (Edited by the Dietrich von Hildebrand Gesellschaft) (Regensburg: Verlag Josef Habbel, 1977, 1983). 15 Dietrich von Hildebrand, op. cit., I, 81. For more on von Hildebrand’s value-theory, see Dietrich von Hildebrand, Christian Ethics (New York: McKay, 1953). 16 Ästhetik, I, 81. 17 Ibid., II, 354. 18 Ibid., II 355. 19 Adolf von Hildebrand, “The problem of form in the fine arts,” 280. 20 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Ästhetik, II, 270. 21 “Nur durch die Transposition kann die Figur als solche ein selbstandiger Trager neuer kuntlerischer Werte werden, zu denen die Schönheit des dargestelten Korpers in natura beeintragt.” Ibid., II, 172. 22 Ästhetik, II, 270, 23 Both Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII) and Cardinal Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) considered him the outstanding philosopher of the twentieth century. In any case, Dietrich’s aesthetics deserves far more study than can be given here. 24 These quotations are contained in an interview, “Arts, langage et hermeneutic aesthétique,” with J.-M. Brohm and M. Uhli (September 20, 1996, in Paris), available at http://www.philagora.net/philo-fac/ricoeur-e.htm.

RAYMOND J. WILSON III

MEASURE OR EXCESS The Unity of the Aesthetic, the Ethical, and the Political in Dante, Marlowe, and Molière

Through time, measure and excess have alternated as dominant guides in the realms of the aesthetic, ethical, and political. In the medieval era, “measure” dominated people’s thinking, as revealed in the hell that Dante depicts in his Inferno. The architecture of hell is such that those guilty of worse sins are punished deeper in hell. People who are guilty of more than one sin are punished for their worst sin. Here is where some problems arise for the contemporary reader. Myrrha, for example, is punished in the tenth subcircle (or Bolgia) of the Eighth Circle, at the edge of the central pit, the very bottom of hell (XXX). “Moved by an incestuous passion for her father, she disguised herself and slipped into his bed,” says the translator John Ciardi in his note. Myrrha is not punished for lust; the lustful are punished way up in the Second Circle, just below unbaptized children and pagan philosophers who did no harm but cannot enter heaven because they lived before Christ came. She is not punished for incest; in Dante’s system, incest is violence against nature, punished in Circle Seven. Rather Myrrha “falsified another’s form and came/disguised,” says Dante (XXX, 40–41). She was lustful and did commit incest, but she is punished for her worst crime, impersonating another. In this essay, I hope to explain this and other problematic placements in hell and expand the insight. To foreground the unity of aesthetics, ethics, and politics, I begin with Aristotle, who starts his Nicomachean Ethics by comparing ethics to other goal-oriented or end-seeking activities: “health is the end of the medical, ship of shipbuilding, victory of strategy, and wealth of economics” (p. 408). Ethics too must have a goal, an end: “clearly this end will be good and the supreme good” (p. 409). “If this is so,” he says, “we must endeavor to comprehend, at least in outline,    what science or faculty makes” the supreme good “its object” (p. 409). Aristotle’s stunning answer is “the political” (p. 409): “Politics rules what people may do and what they may not do,” he says, and “it follows that its end will    be the good of mankind” (p. 409). Having unified the ethical and the political, Aristotle ties both to the aesthetic: “as with a flute player, a sculptor, or any artist,” a person’s goodness lies in 139 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 139–154. © 2008 Springer.

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his function. Aristotle of course identifies humanity’s special function in “the active life of the rational part of man’s being” (pp. 412–413). This means not only “being obedient to reason,” but, more generally, also “possessing and exercising reason and intelligence” (p. 413). When Aristotle asks how a man becomes ethical, he connects the ethical even more closely to the aesthetic: “Harpists” become harpists, he says, “by playing the harp” (p. 414). He claims that we get the virtues “by first practicing them, as we do in the arts. For it is by doing what we ought to do when we study the arts that we learn the arts themselves”; so a man becomes temperate by “doing temperate acts” (p. 414). A man becomes brave by “doing brave acts” (p. 414). Aristotle is aware that this formulation lies open to the charge of circularity, but his insistence of the unity of the aesthetic and the ethical is exactly his defense against the charge. If a person makes pleasant sounds by accident, he points out, we do not call him a musician; it is only when a man makes pleasant sounds because he has studied the art of making pleasant sounds that we call him a musician. Players of instruments are said to be good players if they perform the specific function of the instrument well; so, in the realm of ethics, “the virtue or excellence of a man” lies in his ability “to perform his proper function well” (p. 418). And this requires moderation; he says “excess or deficiency” are both “fatal to excellence but the mean state ensures it” (p. 419). It is “the mean or the best good, which signifies virtue” (p. 419). Perfect goodness would require always finding the exact center point between the extremes, but Aristotle is generous, granting the difficulty of finding the exact mean at all times, and he allows a man who deviates “a little” from the mean to still be called good, reserving blame for the “one who deviates a great deal,” and even conceding that “it is not easy to decide in theory how far and to what extent a man may go before he becomes blameworthy” (p. 422). Such things, he says, “depend on circumstances, and our judgment [sic] of them depends on our perception” (p. 423). Unstated but strongly implied is the idea that a person becomes ethical by studying the ethical people of his society, just as a person becomes a good flutist or harpist by studying the good practitioners of these instruments. What if, as circumstances change, what is praised and blamed changes or even reverses? Apparently moderation (measure) was praised in Aristotle’s society, but what if excess becomes the praised attribute? What if men admired in society are the ones who seek the extremes? This is a question that Hubert Dreyfus takes up. In his essay “Ethical Expertise,”1 Dreyfus says It seems that beginners make judgments using strict rules and features, but that with talent and a great deal of involved experience the beginner develops into an expert who sees intuitively

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what to do without applying rules and making judgments at all. The intellectualist tradition has given an accurate description of the beginner and of the expert facing an unfamiliar situation, but normally an expert does not deliberate. He does not reason. He does not even act deliberately. He simply spontaneously does what has normally worked and, naturally, it normally works. (p. 8)

Like Aristotle, who compared ethical decision makers to shipbuilders and flutists, Dreyfus compares the acquisition of ethical expertise to learning to drive and play chess. He agrees that a significant difference exists between his examples and the ethical situation: In driving and chess there is a clear criterion of expertise. In chess one either wins or loses, in driving one makes it around a curve or skids off the road. But what, one may well ask, counts as success or failure in ethics? It seems that in ethics what counts as expert performance is doing what those who already are accepted as ethical experts do and approve. (p. 8)

Dreyfus’ phenomenological investigation takes him to the exact point where we left Aristotle earlier in this essay: that one learns to be good by imitating the good people in one’s society. Indeed, Dreyfus quotes Aristotle at this point in his essay:“Aristotle tells us: ‘What is best is not evident except to the good man.’ (V1.12.) This is circular but not viciously so.” Thus, Dreyfus, like Aristotle, relies on the idea that people learn to be ethical by imitating those whom their society considers to be ethical. However, what if that changes over time? To continue the investigation, I return to Dante. In the Inferno, Ulysses is punished in the Eighth Circle, almost as deep in hell as Myrrha, for “evil counseling”—for urging his crew to go beyond the Pillars of Hercules; the Pillars of Hercules had been set up by the gods to warn men to go no farther. Ulysses’ words are practically an expression of the new spirit that was beginning to challenge the worldview of the medieval mind: “Shipmates    do not deny yourselves in the brief time you have on this Earth, the experience of the world beyond the sun.” Greeks! You were not born to live like brutes, But to press onward toward manhood and recognition. (XXVI, 106–11)

“Press onward”—go beyond the limits, expand the horizons—this is one of the worst sins! We can understand these placements in hell by analogy to the medieval cosmos that sets up a hierarchy with God at the top, followed by angels, humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects. All beings must accept the requirement of remaining within the limits of the level where the Creator placed them. It is a sin to go below the human level and be led by one’s lusts like animals, the fate of Francesca and Paolo, punished in the Second Circle, but it is a far worse sin to try to go above the human sphere, and so alchemists are punished in the Eighth Circle: “by practicing alchemy,” the sinner “falsified the metals” (XXIX, 137). Certain powers are proper only

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for the levels above humanity. The alchemists are not frauds, pretending to have power. Frauds are punished higher up in hell. Rather, alchemists have transgressed the limits laid out for humans; the actual possession of power forbidden to humans is a sin far worse than fraud. Accepting limits is, thus, a guiding principle in deciding whether an action is sinful and how bad a sin it is. Let us apply this to our opening question. In punishing Myrrha for impersonation, Dante is following a medieval adaptation of an essentially Aristotelian schema whereby in not accepting the limits her identity imposed on her, Myrrha committed a sin worse than lust or incest. One must accept the place into which one was created. One must not only not exceed the upper and lower limits of human experience, but must not even pretend to be a different human than the one God created him or her to be. What makes sense of all these placements is the idea that the master virtue is the acceptance of limits (measure). Thus, Dante unites the ethical and the aesthetic: Dante says that he must curb his genius. To create beauty is the realm of the aesthetic, and Dante says he must not create beauty beyond a certain limit. What is shocking is that he does not say to transgress the limits would mar his work aesthetically. Rather, he says it would be a grave sin; he thus unites the aesthetic and the ethical: more than usually I curb the strain of my genius, least it stray from Virtue’s course; so if some star, or better thing, grant me merit, may I not find the gift cause for remorse. (XXVI, 19–24)

This passage perhaps can serve as a clue to the other placements in hell mentioned in this essay that seem mystifying to the modern mind. Neither Ulysses nor the alchemists accepted their place. Let us call this quality of accepting one’s place by the term “measure.” Transgressing these limits would of course be “excess.” At the same time, Dante infuses his political self into the Inferno. Dante’s deep involvement in the politics of Florence is well known, as is his exile as a result of the political conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. He deeply inscribes the mentality emerging from this political life in the Inferno. His political philosophy parallels his worldview. Just as God is at the top of the cosmic pyramid, the emperor reigns at the top of the political pyramid. According to Ricardo Quinones, Dante, in a letter to the Florentines, “begins by declaring that the Empire was ordained by divine providence to be the guardian of civil life.” Dante calls for voluntary obedience to “sacred laws that copy the image of natural justice” (p. 91). In De Monarchia, Dante had not only a political position, but also “an ethical one” (p. 92). The universe has a single head, God, and thus, by analogy, Dante argues that the human political

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“enterprise ought best to imitate the larger whole,” and like the universe, “have a single head” (p. 92). The intimate connection of this political philosophy to the Commedia is made clear by the vital role played in it by Virgil, Dante’s guide. Virgil predicated his Aeneid on the idea that Aeneas was fated by a power beyond the Greek gods to go to Italy so that one of his descendants could found Rome. It was easy for later thinkers to see this power beyond the Greek gods as the Christian God. Dante carries this on to the assumption that God’s objective in fating the creation of the Roman Empire was to have a vessel to contain the rise of Christianity. Dante believes that a world state ruled politically by the emperor and ethically by the pope would create the ideal political-ethical situation, not only for peace and prosperity, but also for the flourishing of art and the intellect. Underlying all this is the idea that humans should gladly and joyously accept limits implied in obeying the emperor in the political realm and the pope in the ethical one. “The longing for the restoration of a universal empire, and its necessity for the attainment of human happiness, are also a central theme of the Commedia,” says Charles Till Davis (p. 68). As this medieval concept of accepting limits began to be more and more challenged, humanity found itself entering a new era: the Renaissance. On the issue of “measure” versus “excess,” we can see the Renaissance world as the struggle between the medieval concept that striving is a vice and the modern concept that striving is a virtue; again we see the interaction of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political. Christopher Marlowe’s life and writings illustrate this struggle. Son of a shoemaker, Christopher Marlowe was born in 1564, two months before William Shakespeare. Marlowe earned a scholarship to Cambridge University (something un-medieval there, already). A great poet and playwright in the aesthetic realm, his life story immediately intersects the political—he was rumored to be sympathetic to a clique of Catholic scholars in France, and the university was going to deny him his master’s degree because of it. But the Privy Council intervened. It asked that he be granted his degree “because it is not Her Majesty’s pleasure that anyone employed as he had been in matters touching the benefit of his country should be defamed by those that are ignorant in the affairs he went about.” Speculation is that he feigned sympathy for the anti-Elizabethans, possibly went to France as one of them, but was really spying for the Queen. Michael Feingold says, “A contrarian of epic stature,” Marlowe is “most often celebrated as an embodiment of rebellion in every form”; Marlowe is “a cynic about all received ideas of society and religion”. He was, “almost certainly a homosexual” in an era when that orientation carried the death

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penalty, “probably an atheist    and to round it off a glorifier of violence” who died violently (p. 20). At the age of twenty-three Marlowe had a tremendously successful play, Tamburlaine, about a shepherd who became a conqueror. Tamburlaine is depicted in some medieval-spirited Renaissance commentary as a scourge of God. Marlowe depicts him as a type of modern man (that is, a Renaissance man), with boundless energy, ambition, and the impulse to never be satisfied. Tamburlaine strives constantly for the ultimate. When one of his victims accuses him of bloody cruelty, Tamburlaine says, Nature, that framed us of four elements Warring within our breasts for regiment, Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds; Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend The wondrous architecture of the world And measure every planet’s wandering course, Still climbing after knowledge infinite, And always moving as the restless spheres, Wills us to wear ourselves [out] (II, vii, 18–26)

Marlowe’s Tamburlaine says that the advances in knowledge that result from the aspiring human mind teach us to aspire politically, to “never rest”: Until we reach that ripest fruit of all, That perfect bliss and sole felicity, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown. (II, vii, 27–30)

Tamburlaine’s speech expresses a complete rejection of the medieval virtue of accepting limits. “There is no hierarchy of blood,” says Stephen Greenblatt, “no divinely sanctioned legitimate authority,” no “obligation to obey,” nor even any “moral restraint.” As Greenblatt observes, Tamburlaine’s rise and the language Marlowe puts in his character’s mouth endorse only “a restless, violent striving” (p. 190). The play ends with Tamburlaine dominant, which must have shocked an audience raised on medieval morality plays. Greenblatt believes that this play expresses a glorification of excess, which had become inherent in the continental drift of the age’s culture. Marlowe’s great poetry, his aesthetic brilliance, stirs the reader to experience Tamburlaine’s life of excess as a positive. As Greenblatt says, “the magic that was drawing audiences did not reside entirely    in the hero’s daring vision,” but also in “the unprecedented energy and commanding eloquence of the play’s blank verse—the dynamic flow of unrhymed five-stress, ten syllable lines” (p. 191). Greenblatt

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admiringly describes Marlowe’s verse as “the dream of what ordinary speech would be like were human beings something greater than they are (p. 191). Marlowe’s life of excess continued, although, at age twenty-three, he had only six more years to live. Involved in a tavern brawl in which a man was killed in 1589, Marlowe was arrested but released. Marlowe died in 1593 under mysterious circumstances, which were reported to be a tavern brawl. However, his death occurred in a private house and the man who killed him had a background in espionage, facts that throw doubt on the official explanation of an argument over a bill. That the aesthetic and political are intimately tied up with the ethical is clear in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which embodies the conflict between the medieval view of striving as a vice and the new view of striving as a virtue. In Dr. Faustus, Marlowe’s prologue compares Faustus to Icarus, ostensibly reinforcing the medieval view that excess is a vice:    to Wittenberg he went    shortly he was graced with doctor’s name Excelling all    (13–15) Till swoll’n with cunning, of a self-conceit, His waxen wings did mount above his reach And melting, heavens conspired his overthrow! (19–21)

Faustus becomes “glutted with learning’s gifts”: He surfeits upon cursed necromancy: Nothing so sweet as magic is to him    (22–23)

Faustus has reached the limit of the human arts. He can reason well, and thus has reached the goal of the study of logic. He finds that the study of law “aims at nothing but external trash”; it is “Too servile and illiberal” for him (I.i. 33–34). Having saved cities from the plague, he cast aside medical books since all the people he saved will die anyway, eventually. Divinity teaches that the wages of sin is death and that we all must sin, and thus, Faustus concludes, all must die. If Faustus submitted to Dante’s concept that accepting the limits of human endeavor is a virtue, he would have stopped. Striving beyond these limits, Faustus plans to use the devil’s power to gain more knowledge. Referring to the study of magic, Faustus says, O, what a world of profit and delight, Of power, of honor, and omnipotence Is promised to the studious artisan! (I.i. 50–54)

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We see, here, as in Tamburlaine’s speech, the immediate jump to the realm of political power, reinforcing the notion that knowledge gives power. With devils at his command, Faustus can “make spirits    tell the secrets of all foreign kings” and create strange “engines for the brunt of war” (I.i. 83–84). However, the emphasis never leaves the idea of using forbidden methods to gain knowledge. He revels that his supernatural servants might “Resolve me of all ambiguities” (I.i. 76–77). He plans also to “have them read me strange philosophy” (I.i. 83–84). Threatened with going to hell, Faustus says he would be in Elysium and his soul would “be with the old philosophers!” (I.i. 59). Faustus has evidently been viewing or perhaps even touring the planets in the interim between Scene One and Scene Two, because as he enters he says, When I behold the heavens, then I repent And curse thee, wicked Mephostophilis, Because thou hast deprived me of those joys. (I.ii. 1–3)

Faustus says he would have repented before now “Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair” (I.ii. 23). What counts as “sweet pleasure” is aesthetic pleasure: “blind Homer” sang to him (I.ii. 23–28). Faustus now calls on Mephostophilis to give him knowledge beyond the reach of humanity at that time: Speak, are there many spheres above the moon?  Or  Are all celestial bodies but one globe As is the substance of this centric earth? (I.ii. 31–35)

The more Faustus knows of the created world, the more he sees the hand of the Creator. He dreads the damnation that faces him as a result of his bargain with the devil because it will deprive him of seeing God. To distract himself, Faustus stops using the potency at his disposal for gaining more knowledge. Nor does he use it to create or enjoy aesthetic beauty. Instead, he employs his great power to distract himself from the end toward which his course, unless changed, is leading him. These distractions range from playing a series of childish pranks to summoning Helen of Troy from the underworld to be his mistress. This last is the context of the famous lines that tie beauty, the realm of aesthetics, to the political realm of war and conquest: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Illium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. (V.i. 96–98)

Faustus thinks of repenting but is told “If thou repent, devils will tear thee in pieces” (II.ii. 87), a threat that is several times repeated. As the last day

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of his contracted twenty-four years draws to an end, Faustus says that “one drop” of “Christ’s blood” would save him if he repents, but he cannot, and he apparently descends into hell. In the epilogue, a speaker urges the audience to    regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may extort the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things, Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits. (V.iii. 4–9)

Although the play thus overtly endorses the medieval idea of limits or measure, the aesthetic quality of Marlowe’s stirring poetry covertly endorses the idea of striving or excess. Modern striving and medieval limits fight each other in the play, just as the clash of the two concepts of virtue defines the Renaissance. A student says, “see, here are Faustus’ limbs/All torn asunder by the hand of death!” (V.iii. 6–7). An implication not noticed for centuries is that since the devils warned Faustus numerous times that they would tear his body apart if he repented, the idea arises that perhaps Marlowe is allowing a concept to enter by the back door that Faustus might have repented and been saved after all. Of course, the event might be an ironic example of the adage that the devil is a liar and the Father of Lies. Faustus might not have repented and been torn apart anyway, and then gone to hell. Even so, the hint suggests that Marlowe wanted to tilt the interpretation in favor of Faustus’ salvation, just as excess won out over measure politically during the Renaissance. Marlowe’s heroes are over-reachers, striving beyond the limits set up for human beings; sometimes they are defeated as apparently Faustus was, but the grandeur of the language which expresses their struggle gives them a glamour that clouds the message “Do not be like them.” Thus the message sent by the aesthetic dimension interacts with the overt ethical statements in the play. Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, with its devil appearing on stage in a flash of gunpowder, its allegorical Good Angel and Bad Angel, and other outlandish antics might have been the type of literary work that Thomas Hobbes condemned sixty years later. Hobbes’ view expresses a swing in the prevailing aesthetic judgment of an era. He disagrees with those who “are not pleased with fiction, unless it be bold, not only to exceed the work, but also the possibility of nature” (“Answer to Devanant’s Preface,” p. 215). Hobbes says he is “dissenting from those that think the beauty of a poem consisteth in the exorbitancy of the fiction” because “the resemblance of truth is the utmost limit of poetical liberty” (“Answer to Devanant’s Preface,”p. 215). Hobbes’s aesthetic rejection of excess, he makes clear, is based on an assumption in the

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ethical universe of discourse: Hobbes believes that poets work well when they imitate “human life in delightful and measured lines” [italics added]. Poets accept these limits to “avert men from vice and incline them to virtuous and honorable actions” (“Answer to Devanant’s Preface,” p. 213). Hobbes knows that “novelty causeth admiration” but he requires that even the novel submit to “perspicuity, property, and decency,” that is, even novelty must occur in a total context of “measure” (“Answer to Devanant’s Preface,” p. 216). Hazard Adams says that Hobbes “proceeds to some remarks about whether or not the poet can properly exceed the possibility of nature in his inventions. Hobbes, in deciding that the poet cannot do so, seems to limit the poet to a kind of ‘realism.”’ Hobbes is “a rationalist and materialist” (p. 212). What had happened politically to produce a Hobbes? The result of constant striving by people of the Renaissance was chaos. Wars raged as proud Tamburlaine-like monarchs tried to expand the rule of their dynasties. Wars were made horrible by new inventions like cannon and gunpowder. There had always been heretics since the Church arose, but no heretic challenged the pope’s authority more boldly than reformers of the Renaissance, Luther being the prime example. Religious wars and civil wars swept Europe for centuries. In the 1640s, Hobbes’ house and barn were burned, and he fled to Catholic France, which had earlier had its own religious civil war, won by the Catholics. Ironically, France had just intervened in the German Thirty Years War on the side of the Protestants. Hobbes is consistent across the spectrum of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the political. In the realm of the political, a wave of reaction in the seventeenth century led to the view again that accepting limits was a virtue and to the acceptance (in many places) of the absolute ruler’s ability to keep the peace. Even so, the old medieval cosmos, in which the ruler has a divine right to rule, no longer provided a secure ethico-political foundation for supporting a monarch. Philosophers, Hobbes at their lead, sought to find a new justification for absolute monarchy, one in tune with the rise of reason. Excess thus created conditions that eventually led many people to yearn for a new era of “measure,” and when it came, its leading intellectuals dubbed their own era “The Age of Enlightenment.” One of the most representative literary writers of the Age of Enlightenment was Molière. We might profitably keep in mind that Molière shared his theater and was a virtual partner with the great writer of tragedies Pierre Corneille, one of whose critical works is “Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place” (1650), a vigorous prescription for “measure” and condemnation of “excess” in playwriting. Molière, in The Misanthrope (1666), ridicules taking anything to excess; specifically, in this play, Molière shows that even the

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virtue of honesty should be followed within limits. The issue arises in a disagreement between characters. Philinte believes that a person should use reason to decide when and if he or she should tell the truth or lie. His friend Alceste says, “I expect you to be sincere and as an honorable man never to utter a single word that you don’t really mean” (Act One): You ought to be mortally ashamed of yourself. What you did was beyond all possible excuse, absolutely shocking to any honourable man. I see you loading a fellow with every mark of affection, professing the tenderest concern for his welfare, overwhelming him with assurances, protestations, and offers of service and when he’s gone and I ask who he is—you can scarcely tell me his name! Your enthusiasm dies with your parting. Once we are alone you show that you care nothing about him. Gad! What a base, degrading, infamous thing it is to stoop to betraying one’s integrity like that. If ever I had the misfortune to do such a thing I’d go and hang myself on the spot in sheer self-disgust. (Act One)

To his friend’s protest that common courtesy compels him more than strict honesty, Alceste says, “I want us to be men and say what we really mean on all occasions. Let us speak straight from the heart and not conceal our feelings under a mask of vain compliment” (Act One). Philinte protests: “But surely there are circumstances in which complete frankness would be ridiculous or intolerable?” (Act One). “True reason,” Philinte continues, “lies in shunning all extremes; we should be wise in moderation. This rigorous passion for the antique virtues runs counter to the age and customary usage. It demands too much perfection of mere mortals” (Act One). The play progresses almost immediately from the ethical issue of honesty to the aesthetic issue of literary judgment; Alceste angers Orante by refusing to praise a sonnet written by Orante. The Marshals of France, fearing that the feud might lead to a duel, order the two to appear before them. Not even an order by this court of the nobility moves Alceste to praise a poem he felt was badly written. In this interface of the aesthetic and the ethical, Alceste is obviously striving for perfection in the virtue of honesty. As the play verges on the political, Alceste loses his lawsuit partly because he told the truth and his opponent lied but even more because he refused to lie to flatter and cultivate the influence of those who could help him. As the play ends, Célemine, Alceste’s beloved, agrees to marry him, but declines his offer to forgive her coquettish lies “provided you’ll agree to join me in my plan of fleeing from all human intercourse and undertake to accompany me forthwith into the rustic solitude to which I have sworn to repair” (Act Five). ˙ They break off their engagement. Eleante, who believes in plain speaking and who admires Alceste, had earlier expressed a hope that he would transfer his affection to her if Célemene rejected him. Now, however, she accepts the

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offer of Philinte, the play’s spokesman for the idea that reason prompts us to do everything within limits. Thus, The Misanthrope presents excess as contrary to reason, which brings us back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Striving for perfect honesty not only causes unnecessary pain, but also is foolish and worthy of being laughed at. Even in pursuing honesty, acting within measure is presented as the real virtue, guided by reason. And this play is not an isolated example of Molière’s position. Molière’s Tartuffe presents a similar theme, except that it deals with the virtue of piety instead of honesty. Orgon admires and seeks to emulate Tartuffe because Tartuffe embodies the idea of striving for perfect piety. Orgon condemns his family members for declining to emulate Tartuffe. Orgon says, You wouldn’t believe the lengths to which [Tartuffe’s] piety extends: the most trivial failing on his own part he accounts a sin: the slightest thing may suffice to shock his conscience—so much so that the other day he was full of self-reproach for having caught a flea while at his prayers and killed it with too much vindictiveness. (Act One)

The character in Tartuffe who parallels Philinte of The Misanthrope and expresses the play’s endorsement of reason is Cléante. Orgon’s brother, Cléante objects to Tartuffe’s behavior and to Orgon’s emulation of it on two grounds. The first is that even if the striving for perfect piety is sincere, such behavior contradicts reason; sounding a bit like Aristotle, Cléante says that men, “can never strike the happy mean: the bounds of reason seem too narrow for them.” Seeking an appropriate metaphor, Cléante, like Aristotle, turns to the aesthetic realm; men “must needs overact whatever part they play and often ruin the noblest things because they will go to extremes and push them too far” (Act One). Cléante’s second reason is that Orgon’s going to extremes in his own piety makes him vulnerable to “those white sepulchers of specious zeal,” “those professional zealots” who take advantage of the credulous to advance themselves. Cléante warns his brother that Tartuffe may be among those men “who use the [religious] passion for which they are respected to destroy us with a consecrated blade” (Act One). When things work out exactly as Cléante warned and Orgon is about to be destroyed by Tartuffe, Orgon says, “I’ll have no more to do with godly men. I’ll hold them in utter abhorrence in future. I’ll consider nothing too bad for them.” Cléante expresses the play’s endorsement of accepting limits in his reply: “There you go again! No moderation in anything! You are incapable of being temperate and sensible. You must always be rushing from one extreme to the other.” While Cléante begs his brother to learn to “distinguish between virtue and the outward appearance of it,” he reinforces the idea that the true

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controlling virtue should be in balance: “Be on your guard if you can against paying deference to imposture but say nothing against true devotion, and if you must run to extremes, better to err on the same side as you did before” (Act Five). The political here intrudes into the aesthetic and ethical discourse of the play. The King’s intervention ends Tartuffe, suggesting that the formula of “virtue equals accepting limits” is being deployed in support of the acceptance of absolute monarchy. This, after all, is the import of Thomas Hobbes’ almost contemporaneous Leviathan (1651), which proposes that men “without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition called war”—the war of “every man against every man” (p. 44). This is the famous state of nature in which “the life of man” is “solitary, poor, nasty brutish, and short” (p. 45). To escape this situation, men make a social contract in which the ruler’s part is to keep order and the ruled have only one duty, to obey the ruler. Locke and his echo, Jefferson, and Rousseau in a different way, were to develop the concept of a social contract as a philosophical basis for democracy, and some readers have difficulty believing that Hobbes is as much an apologist for absolute rule as he appears. However, “covenants without swords are but words,” says Hobbes, and in the words of Louis Pojman, these words support the view that “Hobbes proposes a strong sovereign or ‘Leviathan’ to impose severe penalties on those who disobey the laws” (p. 42). In any case, we see Hobbes having parallel concepts in aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and Molière shares this trilogy. In the political realm, Molière had to revise Tartuffe repeatedly before he was allowed to have his company perform it in public. “It has been suggested,” says JohnWood, “that in the original version,” played before Louis XIV, “Tartuffe was a priest” (p. 15), but even changing the main character to a layman apparently was not sufficient to allow production. The play was suppressed for “no less than five years,” as Wood tells us (p. 14). Only when Molière added a new Act Five with its adulation of the King did Louis give permission for and promise protection of the play’s performance. That this deployment of “reason” to support absolute monarchy need not be Molière’s prime goal is shown in the fact that the adulation of the monarch strikes one as going to the very extreme that the play otherwise condemns. Louis is accorded almost God-like qualities: We live under the rule of a prince inimical to fraud, a monarch who can read men’s hearts, whom no impostor’s art deceives. This keen discernment of that lofty mind at all times sees things in their true perspective; nothing can disturb the firm constancy of his judgement nor lead him into error. (Act Five)

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Although this near idolatry of Louis takes the virtue of loyalty to excess and thereby contradicts the play’s overt theme that reason dictates all things be kept within limits, the play’s ending implies that “measure” in politics means obedience to and trust in the ruler. Thus, this play too unifies the aesthetic, ethical, and political in a single endorsement of “measure” and rejection of excess. Measure and excess continue to vie in people’s minds through the subsequent eras. Several contentions remain plausible. First, for both Aristotle and contemporary phenomenology, ethics is an expertise that a person learns, like one learns an art. This carries an implication that a person learns to be ethical by imitating the people that society praises as being ethical, just as one learns to be a great violinist by imitating the violinists that one’s society considers great. Second, whether “measure” or “excess” is valued as being virtuous changes through the ages, at least in Western civilization. Finally, that this change occurs concurrently in three realms: aesthetics, ethics, and politics. Thus we should be able to derive insights into our age’s prevailing ethics and our age’s politics by looking at our age’s prevailing aesthetic in context of the key works of previous ages. If Marlowe’s Tamburlaine openly glorifies excess and his Dr. Faustus does so covertly, and if Molière’s The Misanthrope and Tartuffe endorse “measure,” then does Molière or Marlowe come closer to embodying the essence of our era? For Molière, we can easily relate to Tartuffe’s warning against allowing one’s religious zeal to become so excessive that it makes one vulnerable to being taken in by a religious charlatan. However, Marlowe may be even more relevant to today. Michael Feingold says, “The obvious affinity between Marlowe’s bleak vision and those of our own time” makes Marlowe our contemporary more than Molière is. Feingold gives examples “from the ultraviolent Terminators and Hannibal Lecters of filmdom to the wholehearted despair of Beckett’s desolate mindscapes” to show that Marlowe seems “in many unnerving ways” to express our contemporary mind-set. “Even the disheartening fixation on gratuitous cruelty in so many plays today finds an ancestor” in Marlowe, Feingold believes (p. 20). More our contemporary than is Molière, Marlowe sent out his character, Dr. Faustus, to expand human knowledge, and Faustus instantly understood that knowledge gives power to its possessor. How perfectly true the creation of nuclear weapons has proved Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century insight. However, Dr. Faustus quickly became disheartened by what he discovered and spent most of the play using his power, not to further advance knowledge, but to distract himself from the end he foresaw for himself.

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Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus appears even more eerily relevant to us when we consider that what dominates our age is an “aesthetics of distraction.” And in fact when we see the contemporary art forms designed to keep their audience continually entranced, not only for the television to be turned on at all times that humans are present in a building, but even to the extent of head phones constantly playing music beamed down from satellites circling the earth in geosynchronous orbits, we must ask a question. From the awareness of what end are we so desperate to distract ourselves? Do we fear to face the likelihood that the consequences of the advances our knowledge has allowed may be leading to some damnation akin to Dr. Faustus’ hell? The likely equivalents to Faustus’ damnation are numerous: nuclear war, global warming, economic collapse, various consequences of pollution, and/or worldwide pandemic spread by the web of air travel. If we live in an age dominated by an aesthetics of distraction, does that contribute to the success of a politics of distraction? Or do we fear to change our course as Faustus did because of some equivalent of being torn limb from limb? Marlowe’s character suffered both, let us recall. Will we find, ironically, that we are torn limb from limb like Marlowe’s character even while suffering our equivalent of his descent into hell? W. H. Auden in his poem “Ode to Terminus” recognizes ours as an age that glorifies excess, but in his address to Terminus, the Roman god of limits, Auden offers a glimmer of hope. After regretting that the poets of the age of excess are “discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor” and sinking “into a driveling monologue,” Auden turns to the god of limits: Venus and Mars are powers too natural to temper our outlandish extravagance: You alone, Terminus the Mentor Can teach us how to alter our gestures. God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis overtakes the sacrilegious technocrat, but blessed is the City that thanks you for giving us games and grammar and metres.    In this world our colossal immodesty has plundered and poisoned, it is possible You still might save us.   

Similarly, Marlowe may have left one little hint that Faustus was saved at the last moment, and, I suppose it is to a similar hope that we, too, must cling. Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa

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1

Dreyfus’ essay is a revision of the Aaron Gurwitsch Memorial Lecture presented at the 1989 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.

REFERENCES Adams, Hazard (1971), editor. Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971). Alighieri, Dante (c.1310). The Inferno (c. 1310), translated by John Ciardi (New York: New American Library, 1954). Aristotle (350 B.C.E) Nicomachean Ethics. In The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Louis P. Pojman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 407–423. Corneille, Pierre (1650). “Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place” (1650). In Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 218–226. Davis, Charles Till (1993). “Dante and Empire.” In The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,), pp. 67–79. Dreyfus, Hubert. “Ethical Expertise.” Available at http//:www.berkeley.edu, Departments, P, Philosophy, Dreyfus. Feingold, Michael (2006). Review of Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy by Park Honan (Oxford: Oxford University Press), The New York Times Book Review, January 29, 2006: p. 20. Greenblatt, stephen (2004). Will in the world: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York:Norton) Hobbes, Thomas. (1650) “Answer to Devanant’s Preface”. In Critical Theory Since Plato, edited by Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), pp. 212–217. Hobbes, (1651) Thomas. Leviathan. In The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, 2nd ed., edited by Louis P. Pojman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 41–52. Marlowe, Christopher. (1604) Dr. Faustus (New York: New American Library, 1969). Molière. (1666) The Misanthrope. Translated by John Wood (1959). In Molière: The Misanthrope and Other Plays (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 23–76. Molière. Tartuffe (1664, 1669). Translated by John Wood (1959). In Molière: The Misanthrope and Other Plays (New York: Penguin, 1989), pp. 97–164. Pojman, Louis P. (2004) The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press). Quinones, Ricardo J. 1979 Dante Alighieri (Boston: G. K. Hall). Wood, John (1959). “Introduction” Molière. The Misanthrope (1666). Trans John Wood (1959). Molière: The Misanthrope and Other Plays. New York: Penguin, 1989: pp. 9–22.

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And the better part of the soul is likely to be that which trusts to measure and calculation. Plato

In Republic X, Plato has the character of Socrates guide Glaucon in a dialogue intended to show the true nature of drawing, painting, and poetry. His purpose is to differentiate art and truth in order to reveal the true nature of the city “within” and the primacy of reason and virtue for the soul, which the seeker following the path of reason and virtue will discover to be immortal. According to Socrates, the arts of painting and poetry dwell on appearance and on mimesis, which, in a philosophy that proposes the irreducibility of Ideal Form, are secondary and even harmful to the needs of the soul. Drawing and painting “are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason, and    they have no true and healthy aim.”1 Similarly, the poet “is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitable.”2 All this is in contradistinction to something that cannot be imitated or represented: the wise and calm temperament, being always nearly equable, is not easy to imitate or to appreciate when imitated. [...]3

Socrates says that the instrument of the “wise and calm temperament” is measure. Here, according to Plato, measure is the rational principle that distinguishes truth and reality from opinion and illusion: It is commensurate with the true ethical and responsible nature of the rational human being, who turns to philosophy for the illumination of his or her life. In this context, the impurity endemic to mimetic painting and poetry makes them excessive to reason and virtue and companions to error, indulgence, and weakness. Excess here ultimately leads not to happiness but to more misery, because by subtle deception it distracts the seeker from truth. Happiness lies in the discrimination of this truth, the exclusion of all that is extraneous to reason, and consequently the renunciation of all that is foreign to virtue: Virtue dictates that we should follow the “higher principle” of “law and reason,”4 155 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 155–163. © 2008 Springer.

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eschewing any temptation to stray from what is the rational and by extension the optimum course of thought and action. By using the word ‘optimum’ in this sense I have implied that there is more than a trace of the ‘good’ that will, by the same “law of reason,” ensue as a result of following the reasonable course. There is a difference between what is meant by ‘optimum’ and what might be defined as the most expedient, the most practical, benefit to be had. In expediency, ‘good’ immediately becomes a relative term because that which is of practical benefit to one person may have any kind of negative outcome for another. Plato makes clear the equivalence of reason and its concomitant goodness by the following example, in which he gives advice on how we should respond to misfortune: That we should take counsel about what has happened, and when the dice have been thrown order our affairs in the way which reason deems best; not, like children who have had a fall, keeping hold of the part struck and wasting time in setting up a howl, but always accustoming the soul forthwith to apply a remedy, raising up that which is sickly and fallen, banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.5

The inference of this metaphor, in the context of a dialogue that concerns reason and the immortality of the soul, would appear to be the exigency of practical reason, that is, the operation of the rational mind in response to the inevitable importunities encountered in the face of life. The meaning of the metaphor seems to be how best to deal with the inner and outer difficulties of life without resorting to their representation, reproduction, and thereby their protraction through mimesis; the “healing art” implies overcoming those difficulties by recognising their transitory nature through the power of reason. This suggests that reason is transcendent, and therefore extraneous to the material and the temporal. Socrates advocates reason as a healer for the kinds of misfortune with which through its very nature life seems from time to time to assail us. In the metaphor, reason, in order to ‘make things better’ looks for a remedy. In doing so it acknowledges a good that transforms time and circumstance. It implies that nature, in the form of life’s difficulties, can be overcome by this good, while at the same time nature in the form of a remedy can be applied. The key to understanding nature is reason. In this mode, reason recognises one of two things. Either nature is ultimately beneficent if correctly interpreted, or reason must transcend nature to establish the good. But what the narrative of the metaphor cannot help implying by analogy is that reason itself is the remedy—the answer to the seeker’s questions—both the remedy and the physician in one. Implicit to both readings—the narrative and its metanarrative—is that reason is able to discern the real from the unreal. By realising that our suffering need not control us, we expose suffering’s transitory and therefore

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illusory nature. Therefore, if we concentrate on what is real—and remember, what is real is only recognised as such by reason—then our happiness is by default assured, and we will not waste time in bewailing that suffering which in its excessive nature will turn out in the end to be unreal and illusory. By the same token Plato urges the wise person not to take complacent comfort in imagined sympathy for the misfortunes of others, as represented in art’s mimetic fiction, but rather to keep the mind and action centred on what is real and at hand in and around his or her life and deal with that: If it is weakness to indulge in one’s own misfortunes, which will be seen to be illusory, then it is worse than weakness to enjoy imitated ones. Plato’s discourse on reason and opinion leads to a passage on the immortality of the soul. Plato demonstrates that corruption cannot destroy the soul, as it has no parts to be corrupted or destroyed. Also, if one were to measure the number of souls, the total would always remain the same, since, as they are immortal, nothing can be added to or taken away from their number. Following Plato, it would also be fair to reason, by the same argument, that nothing can be added to or taken away from the individual soul: in this case anything extraneous to the soul would, in effect, be excessive to its reality. But the very idea of an immortal soul seems, to the modern mind, to exceed rationality. It would appear that here—as so often happens in Plato—pure reason, the working of logos, gives way in the next breath to the uncertainty of mythos. We are led to ask why at this point in the discourse does the soul appear, and why does it seem to us to be independent of reason, of logos? At this juncture the road of reason appears to end and the domain of the soul to begin. There is a boundary line: On the far side of that boundary, the soul, complete and immortal in itself, has need of reason as a guide to its ultimate state of virtue, while on this side, reason transcends the temporal and is self-fulfilling. But if we fall on neither one side nor the other, then we are left in a peculiar gap. It is clear, of course, that for Plato mythos and logos were not as mutually exclusive as might be inferred through too rational an interpretation of his writing.6 This is what medieval scholastics found most attractive in his philosophy, and perhaps what more rationalist thinkers found lacking. The Good is concomitant with Reason in a way that invites a transcendental worldview, and Plato makes frequent reference to God and to the divine as somehow supporting the operation of reason, although in a way which is never made explicit, or indeed rationally clear. Perhaps this is because Plato knows that ultimately the notion of goodness cannot look to rationality for its authority. It forever escapes pure rationality: It is excessive to the exigent limits of rational thinking. Goodness

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cannot be measured. Indeed, at times it appears to contradict the imperatives of practical reason, and leads to actions that are —for the practically minded rationalist—foolhardy; on the other hand, the imperative to do good often seems in another sense to follow the most ‘reasonable’ course. So in a curious, mystifying way, Plato appears to contradict himself. The “better part of the soul” (but how can something which cannot be added to or subtracted from have inferior or superior parts?) “is    that part which trusts to measure and calculation”; but at the same time the good which will result from the rational act partakes of a general goodness that cannot be measured. Undoubtedly, here Plato might appear to have fallen foul of the slippery nature of language. In attempting to describe through logical discourse an irreducible reason, he finds that discourse is axiomatically subject to language, and something in the very nature of language defies logic and exceeds measure. Now, whether he ascribes the purity of the logos to speech, where speech is taken to be the expression of pure thought, and deems writing to belong to the excess of mimesis, or if their priority in the order of being were to be reversed, is of no consequence: We can see that in the end both are encompassed by language. Since thought is inextricably bound up with language, the imperative might therefore seem to be the realisation that only silence—verbal, graphic, and mental—can escape the duality of representation that is perpetually set up by iteration of the pure idea. Anything extraneous, superfluous, and excessive to silence will turn out to be just that. This would mean that any representation, any signification whatever of “the wise and calm temperament,” including Plato’s writing, is excessive. SIGNIFYING NOTHING

Strangely, Plato’s signification of the Ideal is subtly questioned in his account of Socrates’ encounter with Parmenides: But if, on the other hand, one were in itself, it would also be contained in itself; for nothing can be in anything which does not contain it.    But then, that which contains must be other than that which is contained? for the same whole cannot do and suffer both at once; and if so, one will be no longer one, but two?    then one cannot be anywhere, either in itself or in another?7

Now, taking Plato as our guide, for where could one find another so adept in the ways of discursive reasoning, we would have to ask in the first instance “whence comes the pure idea?” Who, or what produces it, and who or what produces the ‘who’ and the ‘what’? We enter into the chain of cause and effect, and will inexorably be confronted by the unwillingness of the modern mind to accept that there could be anything so archaic as a final cause. Within

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the play of language, the notion of a final cause would be the iteration of an idea, an idea signifying what Levinas might call the “unsayable” that finds itself at last, and finally, “said”: When stated in propositions, the unsayable (or the an-archical) espouses the forms of formal logic; the beyond being is posited in doxic theses, and glimmers in the amphibology of being and beings—in which beings dissimulate being. The otherwise than being is stated in a saying that must also be unsaid in order to thus extract the otherwise than being from the said in which it already comes to signify but a being otherwise. Does the beyond being which philosophy states, and states by reason of the very transcendence of the beyond, fall unavoidably into the forms of the ancillary statement?8

This would appear to indicate that Plato is in error, in the same way that all philosophy is ultimately in error, in that it attempts to bring into language, into discourse, that which is always already there within that language and discourse, but can only be known by its own “trace” and remains unsaid. According to Derrida, “Différance or the trace does not present itself, this almost nothing of the unpresentable is what philosophers always try to erase. It is this trace, however, that marks and relaunches all systems.”9 This would suggest that in reading Plato as we have so far, we are applying a certain method, a method that has down through the centuries taken a misinterpretation of Plato’s texts themselves as a paradigm. Commenting on another text where Plato appears to criticise writing and painting, the Phaedrus, Derrida suggests that our methods—ironically based on a ‘Platonic’ interpretation—may be suspect: Only a blind or grossly insensitive reading could indeed have spread the rumour that Plato was simply condemning the writer’s activity. Nothing here is of a single piece and the Phaedrus also, in its own writing, plays at saving writing—which also means causing it to be lost—as the best, the noblest game.10

How writing can be “lost” and saved at the same time is key to understanding Derrida’s approach not only within a tradition of Continental Philosophy where phenomenology has prescribed the grounding—if ‘grounding’ can indeed be used to describe the basis of a phenomenological approach—but also in any thesis where the idea, however subtle, retains a signified character. Where art is the theme of philosophy, and philosophy is tied to the methods already described, this is bound to happen. Art becomes an object to the subject of philosophy. But where philosophy feels the need to adopt other methods, that is, where the phenomenological trajectory is allowed to arrive at its ‘logical’ goal, there can in reality be neither subject nor object. The one is inextricably bound, reciprocally tied in with, the other. It is no accident that the very nature of art is found, by any method pursued with

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the true rigour and love of truth that philosophy demands, to be indeterminate according to the paradigms of an episteme prescribed by rationality alone. That rationality is at the root of how we normally perceive the world. The tendency of the ratio is to observe, not to participate. But art also opens up participation. In this sense art is characterised by its tendency, as noted by John Baldacchino,11 to “look with” rather than “at.” This “looking with” is a form of doubling that includes the ratio but admits of participation. It answers the question “how can we accurately observe something of which we are a part?” It achieves this, when it is truly in operation, by the progressive cancellation of all objective signifying to allow for one singular signification, the experience of the beyond-self in the Other. The measure of signification cancels itself out, and without measure there can be no excess. The ‘remainder’ of this curious equation, outside of measurability, can only be thought, if thought at all, as alterity. ART AS ALTERITY

Art is at once all-inclusive and all-exclusive. There is nothing that art cannot include, nothing that cannot be touched by its transformative power. On the other hand, art cannot be touched by anything. The social, the political, gender issues, race, all are extraneous —excessive—to what is truly real in art. Where, therefore, is art? It is everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere, in that everything can be art’s subject: as long as it is within the range of human consciousness, there is nothing that cannot be included by art. It is nowhere, in that its essence cannot be measured or defined by sociology, anthropology, psychology, or politics, or any such activity—nor even at the very last, in the discourse of the history and critique of art, in the idea brought into presence as the identity ‘art.’ In the same way, it is both everything and nothing. This nothingness does not mean negation. It means simply that something with no determined ontology cannot be reified or measured. The question of signification is partly a question of identity. As long as we can identify something through signification, we feel that we have caught the thing in its essence. But it has been shown by Derrida that signification is an endless chain. Just when we think that we have ‘pinned down’ the thing in question, we realise that what we have caught is simply another signifier. Instead of meaning occurring locally, as ‘presence’ in a logocentric scheme, we find that all things partake of meaning, a meaning which is given to us not only through our consciousness of them, but through whatever they give without signification—and this can never be pinned down.

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In an essay entitled The Pursuit of the Zero Point, Blanchot discusses the difficulty that literature has in reaching what Barthes had called “Degree Zero”: a return to a natural, visceral language in order to escape the entrapments of literature as a cultural construct. Blanchot points out that in order even to be aware of the need to do this, one must have already taken the step away from that language, a step which gives one the awareness of it and the need to return to it. And that synthetic step is literature. As always “that which is closest to us, is also what is least accessible to us.”12 So that Barthes’ indication of “the moment at which literature could grasp itself”13 might simply result in a kind of neutrality: To write without ‘writing’, to bring literature to that point of absence where it disappears, where we no longer have to fear its secrets which are lies, that is ‘writing degree zero’, the neutrality which every writer deliberately or unwittingly seeks, and which leads some to silence.14

This search around the “space of literature” poses a problem for anyone seeking an answer to art’s purpose in terms of historicism. This problem and its elusive solution are similar in structure to that problem of the aporia experienced in the antithetic positioning, in art theory, of postmodernism to modernism. In fact, as Lyotard explains,15 the most advanced works of modernism are truly postmodern; therefore the ‘solution’ to the problem of art’s historical telos, and its studied avoidance, are actually the same and mutually baffling. The ‘answer’ to what makes art in the context of the work’s position in time, if there is one, must lie elsewhere. When Levinas speaks of an interruption, an intervention, an event that is necessary to transcend the play of the same and the other, that event is for him the encounter with the face of the Other. With Derrida différance seems to point to a creative imagination that in the work of literature, especially, is able to transcend the difficulty of ‘presence’ in language. Blanchot sought the effacement of the “I” in literature in order that identification with the concepts of same and other might be minimised. And both he and Levinas saw in the existence of the il y a the possibility of an event that encompasses everything, subtly and invisibly, within an all-pervading existence that somehow transcends the ordinary relation of subject and object, the ever-present dualism that is concomitant to thought.16 One can see a way in which through literature and through art, selfeffacement is sometimes effortlessly achieved. Absorption in a book or a painting is a way of losing oneself in the life of an ‘other,’ the life of the work itself. The work of art or literature, if executed with the kind of purity advocated by Blanchot, might itself be entered as a pure life that becomes ‘me’ but without the self-consciousness of ‘mine’: Subject–object,

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here–there, the play of reality and illusion, of life and death, are allowed their forgetfulness and their assimilation. The Other in art is free to intervene, to interrupt, through the power of the imagination. The transcendence that results is a real experience, not a concept signified by art as a cultural construct. That construct of art is always grounded, however subtly, even as anti-art or art as subversion or irony, in the institutional. However, not all ‘art’ can achieve transcendence. The art that is most likely to succeed is that art done in the spirit that Adorno spoke of, art that springs from the intuitive quest for something “more”: Artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they once again become separated from transcendence.    Only in the achievement of this transcendence, not foremost and indeed probably never through meanings, are artworks spiritual.    Art fails in its concept when it does not achieve this transcendence; it loses the quality of being art. Equally, however, art betrays transcendence when it seeks to produce it as an effect.17

Of course, it is not only art that offers the ‘more.’ But the feeling that we in this case attribute to art is also attributable to life, if life is seen in a certain way–the way of art. Curiously, this means that everyone can indeed be an ‘artist’ if he or she is able to perceive alterity within the experience of life, the otherness that gives to us the “more”, the meaningful, the profound, and so on. It is not difficult, therefore, to see the value that art, real art, has. It actually stops being ‘art’ in a cultural sense; or rather it may remain art but transcends its own identity as art and simply becomes the face of reality. It is no longer a representation of itself, or of the ideal, but in a sense is the ideal. It has become the ideal through its recognition of nothingness, through its being life, one with life, not a reflection of it. Plato might well approve. Truth and art are seen to be the same thing. Art is no longer self-conscious, but an expression of reality, a reality which is truly poetic and creative, the reality of life. A part of this creative reality is that it is infinite. Real art expresses this infinity, not through signification, as, for example, the painter Malevich tried to do, but as far as it transcends itself and merges into the infinite in its absence of identification, its indeterminateness, its otherness or alterity. What we may call art is then the true ideal, which is of nothing, of infinity, not referring to a transcendent being, but partaking of pure transcendence in infinity’s light: Art not measurable, but as the effulgence of infinity’s infinite goodness, an excess of delight. Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, U.K.

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NOTES 1

Plato, Dialogues, trans. B. Jowett (Chicago: William Benton, 1952), [603], p. 431. Ibid., [605], p. 432. 3 Ibid., [604], p. 432. 4 Ibid., [604], p. 431. 5 Ibid., [604], p. 432. 6 Derrida makes this point very clearly, perhaps most notably in his examination of the khôra of Plato’s “Timaeus”. See Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. D. Wood, J. P. Leavey, and I. Mcleod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), “Khôra,” pp. 89–127. 7 Plato op. cit., “Parmenides”, [138], p. 492. 8 Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1988), p. 7. 9 Jacques Derrida, “The Almost Nothing of the Unpresentable,” in Points    Interviews, 19741994, ed. E. Weber, trans. P. Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 83. 10 Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 67. 11 Cf. John Baldacchino, “To Look With: Wei Li Zhu’s Art of Gentle Truth,” Introduction to Wei Li Zhu, Paintings (2006). 12 Maurice Blanchot, “The Pursuit of the Zero Point”, in The Blanchot Reader, ed. M. Holland, trans. I. Maclachlan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 149. 13 Ibid., p. 150. 14 Ibid. pp. 147–148. 15 Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington/B. Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). 16 Levinas also called this event “intellective intuition.” 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1997), p. 78. 2

TSUNG-I DOW

HARMONIOUS BALANCE Ultimate Essence of Beauty and Goodness, A Confucian View

I

The concept of harmonious balance (zhong huo) has been the core of Confucian-Taoist metaphysical principles for many centuries. In fact, it remains a fundamental principle with which one of the largest groups of humankind identify. In contrast to the rise of Western industrialized civilizations, where the political process of democracy became a fundamental current of human life stands the Confucian ideology of “zhong,” mainly derived from the Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong Yun) and the introductory explanation of the Book of Changes (Xi Ze) allegedly written by Confucius. The fundamental Confucian metaphysical contention set forth in the Book of Changes, later crystallized in the neo-Confucian ying yang taiji diagram, suggests a polar, dual structure to the universe. Interactions occur in an opposing yet complementary process, attaining a harmonious balance that sustains the existence of and change in things and events following a perpetual cyclical progression. The hexagram arrangements in the Book of Changes conclude with the statement: “complete but not yet” (ji ji wei ji). From the viewpoint of prevailing classical physics or Newtonian physics, in its law of causality and exclusion of the middle, this idea of non-causality and non-locality, which implies a state of both “yes” and “no,” is difficult to comprehend. At the same time, critics have argued that Confucian metaphysics prevented the emergence of modern science in China and contributed to the decline of Chinese civilization. Yet, in reality, this is exactly what Confucius contended, that all knowledge is the product of the human mind and is approximate and provisional. To know what is unknown is also part of knowledge (zhi zhi wei zhi zhi, bu shi wei bu shi zhi ye). Confucius taught that daily renovation was critical (re xing yu re xing). Of all knowledge, science is perhaps the most reliable. Surprisingly, the emergence of quantum mechanics revealed a principle of complementarity as defined by Niels Bohr, one of its founders. It seems to resonate with the Ying Yang dialectical monistic principle as portrayed in the Book of Changes. This coincidence led Bohr to adopt the neo-Confucian taiji diagram as his coat of arms. 165 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 165–172. © 2008 Springer.

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The study of quantum particle physics indicates that our world consists of two kinds of fundamental particles. Quarks and leptons interact in complementary contradiction, achieving a harmonious balance through a perpetual cyclical process effecting the existence and change of all things and events. Particles such as electrons never cease to spin. What gives an object shape and definition is its spinning particles operating in a dual structure to reach a state of symmetry. However, eventually this state of symmetry is altered and objects change. Thus, the state of symmetry and the state of asymmetry are constantly in cyclical progression in a complementary contradictory manner on two levels, macroscopic and microscopic, in perpetuity. Additionally, scientists have considered the superposition of symmetry and asymmetry as the ultimate reality of the universe (Kane, 2003). This proposed superposition seems to parallel the Confucian-Taoist concept of taiji ying yang, a unity of opposite, diverse elements in harmonious balance which sustains the existence and change in all events and things. Harmonious balance does not call for a precisely equal dual structure, but for proportions that allow opposing elements to complement each other, thus sustaining and fulfilling the meaning of life. In this ultimate unity of harmonious balance, Confucians contend that what is beautiful is also what is goodness (jin shan jin mei). Let us examine how this applies.

II

At our present level of understanding, we rely on direct observation of an object to ascertain its beauty. The beauty of an object involves sensual pleasure as perceived in our mind. Sensual pleasure appears to arise mainly from what we see. But the principle of quantum mechanics assures us that no one has been able to see an atom directly or isolate it except in the laboratory. In order to fully understand an object, we begin with an exhaustive study of its parts on a microscopic scale. But we have also learned that simply adding up the parts does not result in or reveal the whole object. Therefore, a holistic approach is necessary. Even though we can never completely know it, we perceive beauty predominantly from what we see. Our vision requires light to perceive. Yet, on a macroscopic level, where there is light there is also darkness. Light and dark alternate in nature, but never one to the exclusion of the other. Beauty is pleasurable because of light, while darkness negates that pleasure and creates displeasure. Thus, in a sense, a harmonious balance is derived from the interaction of light and dark, pleasure and displeasure in order to perceive and appreciate beauty.

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Studies of visual perception by Hubel and Weisel, among others, confirmed that what we see as beautiful is an object that triggers a pleasurable emotional sensation. The mind discriminates among different emotions to attain a harmonious balance between the interactions of opposites in a complementary process (Gregory, 1987, pp. 313–315; Carter, 1999, pp. 112–115.) What we see as an object is a representation or reconstruction in our mind. In addition to natural images, human beings can create artificial images of an object in our imaginations as well as concretely. Through artistic endeavor we recreate and embellish natural as well as artificial images that are representative of beauty. This effort to create pleasurable experiences is seen throughout painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and the performing arts. Advances in computer technology make it possible to create virtual reality, which often stimulates the sense of pleasure. Additionally, visual perception seems dominant over the other senses in relation to sensing pleasure. Taking this further, for us to enjoy a poem we must read it first. Twofold processes occur through the experience. Light, which is necessary to read, consists of photons that have a dual wave and particle structure. The poem or object upon which our eyes focus emits photons that strike the lens of our eyes, activating the neurons in the retina, the rods and cones. Following another dual process, the retina transmits a series of dots and lines to the visual cortex to generate the image. Previously, scientists thought only the central nervous system of the left, prefrontal cortex generated the instantaneous joy felt from something beautiful. Now, it has been determined that the mind refers the signals received to the memory and arouses the pleasure sites, which release endorphins or dopamines, triggering pleasurable feelings. In the meantime, it suppresses any unpleasant sensations from the limbic system. Again, not only do our brain’s left and right hemispheres have a dual structure, but so do the central and limbic nervous systems. Even at the most basic level, a duality occurs. It has been estimated that one hundred billion neurons are activated in our brain, each of which seeks a partner to make connections with, which lead to one hundred trillion interconnections that result in a pleasurable feeling (Wade, 2004). In the case of visual perception, the saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is literally true. The sequence in which visual perception occurs plays an important role. When an object is perceived, its color appears to strike the eye first. Color is the reflection of light and rests in the eye of the beholder. Knowing how the eyes focus on light explains not only how it is seen, but also what color appears pleasing. The wavelength of light is the determining factor (Dahm, 2004). However, what has been learned from the interactions between neurons and light from an object deals only

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with the neurons’ automatic, instinctive reaction to the object’s stimulus as perceived within its environment. In reality, the discriminatory power of the mind selectively targets the intended object. Otherwise, if the mind randomly perceived objects, the images would not make sense to the viewer (shi er bu jian). The conscious mind reconciles with the unconscious neurons in a harmonious balance to facilitate the pleasure of beauty. How consciousness arises from the brain remains uncertain. The brain is an organ of the mind, but it does not constitute the mind. Coincidentally, the pleasure of experiencing beauty, through sight or other senses, is not solely a subjective feeling. What happens if everyone in a community considers something beautiful but also disapproves of it? Then, the pleasure of its beauty may be compromised. Culture plays a role. There is a Chinese saying, “If all the people deem it is beautiful, then it is” (tien xia za yi wei mei, s wei mei ye). In traditional China, the deep red color of the peony was considered very beautiful and symbolized wealth and nobility. Yet, few have ever liked to see the red color of blood. Thus, context also plays an important role. Additionally, nudity is a highly acclaimed artistic expression in Western culture, but the Chinese, among others, hold it in disdain. In a different arena, scientists still struggle to explain why chimpanzees often cover their reproductive organs. Apparently, the unitary power of the mind, operating in its totality, integrates and unifies various complex elements, whether they are individual, societal, and/or environmental, to define how the quality of beauty is experienced. These interacting components operate in complementary contradiction to attain a harmonious balance and, in particular, reveal the beauty of works of art. For example, a single color without depth or variation would be monotonous and possibly devoid of beauty. The sensation of beauty, in general, arises from the contrast of brightness and darkness or high and low points in a composition. The unpainted field around a figure in a picture has an expressive effect on our senses and influences the quality of its beauty. Expanding on this thought to include the universe, other positional features such as upper and lower, left and right, or central or peripheral as they relate to one’s position in space and gravity reinforce one’s visual experience of the heavens and earth (Shapiro, 1994). Similarly, points of reference, such as high and low pitch, point and counterpoint, among others, effect how music is perceived. Recent studies indicate that auditory experience is especially sensitive to the entire harmonic complex, including sensory, cognitive, emotional, and aesthetic features (Gregory, 1987, pp. 449–505). The beauty of poetry also follows a similar pattern. Some lines are more influential than others; some words important, as well as rhythm and rhyme.

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III

From the foregoing analysis, there is an interplay of individual, social, cultural, and environmental factors that appear to operate in a progressive, two-level, complementary contradictory process, which generates the sensual pleasure of beauty. In addition to the primary, universal instinctive reflection of an object for the purpose of sustaining and enjoying life, there is a higher level of cognitive activity that appears to assist with fulfilling the meaning of life. At its primacy and yet most primal to the meaning of life is the role the instantaneous reflection of beauty and its sensual pleasure plays for a young female to attract a partner. Why is the focus on the female? The question may be as complex as why there are female and male dual structures for reproduction and the purpose they serve in the survivability of the species. No matter what, it warrants exploration. While both have commonalities, they also have fundamental contradictions. The female has double XX chromosomes and the physiological features that go with it as well as societal and environmental factors that contribute to a longer life expectancy than the single X chromosome male (Baierl, 2004, p. 120). Depending on societal norms, certain physiological features such as age, skin color, facial composition, eyes, body shape, and even make-up must be in harmonious balance for a female to generate the sensation of pleasure and attract a male partner. As Mencius remarked, “If the beauty, Xi Shi, whose countenance could subdue a town or nation (giong guo, giong cheng) became dirty and smelly, people would hold their noses and depart.” Primarily, the attractiveness of a female seems to affect the male and not vice versa. If the parameters are right, the male should seek a partnership. Of course, such an endeavor is not entirely pleasurable for the male because it is accompanied by the anxiety of possible rejection. It is important to note that incest is considered immoral, an offense to humanity. Centuries ago, the Chinese recognized the genetic defects often associated with consanguineous marriage and forbade it. In this instance, the sensual pleasure of beauty has been constrained by society for its own preservation. One-to-one partnership achieved through mutual consent in harmonious balance seems to constitute the root of happiness. The fact is that pleasure and pain are seemingly opposite; yet, they are, in a sense, complementary in the process of sustaining the survival of the human species. The feeling of pain in some situations is not entirely disadvantageous. We feel pain, we seek pleasure. Hunger is painful but it induces eating. On the other hand, overeating results in pain. Another example is childbirth. Having a child is a great pleasure, but the birth process is nearly unbearable for the woman.

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In reality, life must be enjoyable for the sake of sustaining the survival of the human species. In order to enjoy life, life must be meaningful. At some time we all ask the question, “What are we living for?” The life of a zombie cannot endure. In the search for an answer to the meaning of life, a religious interpretation is often invoked, but it is not the only answer. A momentary self-satisfaction through the perception of beauty, which occurs in a process of harmonious balance between subjective individual feelings and objective social consensus, is not enough to fulfill the meaning of life. Therefore, the sense of beauty is not confined to physical sensations only. The mind’s broader cognitive activities are crucial to attaining the goal. On this higher level, the satisfaction derived from the admiration of others for career achievements and efforts for the benefit of others can evoke the feeling of beauty and contribute to fulfilling the meaning of life. These feelings can be more profound and enduring than a mere momentary physical excitement. From this vantage point, the sense of beauty implies a moral value of goodness. Confucians contend that the utmost beauty coincides with the utmost goodness (jin shan, jin mei). There is a saying that the duty or function of an honorable person (jun zi) is to help others attain the goal of beauty (jun zi cheng ren zhi mei). It follows, then, that every piece of art or artistic expression carries a message to others, even if the artist’s only intent is self-expression. The nature of the social cognition of beauty strongly influences the fulfillment of the meaning of life. Art thus becomes an indispensable tool for education, for molding a person’s character or for propaganda. The role of Chinese landscape painting may serve as the best example. IV

The unique style of Chinese calligraphic landscape painting has been considered by the Chinese as the highest achievement in artistic endeavor. The principle of harmonious balance to attain beauty or the expression of beauty through a complementary contradictory process is well attested in these paintings. They are called “mountain and water” (shan shui) paintings. The mountains symbolize static motionlessness through huge, heavy, strong, and enduring imagery. The water symbolizes dynamic changeability through soft, penetrable, adaptable, fluid imagery. The two images, mountains and water, interact and integrate into a whole, reflecting the beauty of nature. Each painting is a miniature representation of the natural world crystallized on paper. It is not a photoimage of any real landscape on earth, but purely an artistic creation to express the painter’s view of the world and philosophy of life. Most often, the painting conveys the painter’s perceptions composed in

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a poem that is written in calligraphy on the top left of the painting. The work of art is the representational vehicle for communicating the meaning of the classical poem. Parallels can be seen in popular Chinese computer simulations or virtual reality programs. The painter or designer has to be proficient in classic Chinese and the viewer also has to attain a certain literary competence to appreciate and enjoy these simulations. According to Confucian precepts, once we realize we are part of nature and live in harmony with it, a feeling of beauty will prevail (zen yu tien tiao, ran ho tien di zhi mei sheng). The practice of feng shui in architecture and miniature gardens follows the same principle. Since filial piety has been the foundation of Confucian morality and Chinese society for centuries, figurative painting or artistic expressions depicting those ideas usually gained greater acceptance despite the universality of taking sensual pleasure from beauty. Portrait painting not only lacked exactitude, also but allowed the painter greater freedom to compose. There is a famous story regarding Zhu YuangZhang, the founder of the Ming dynasty (1368 A.D.). He was an illiterate peasant renowned for his unattractive countenance. After he was enthroned, a painter was summoned for an official portrait but disappeared without a trace. Another was called and happily departed with a reward. When asked how he succeeded, the painter answered that he painted the most imaginative portrait an emperor deserved, demonstrating Confucian values and harmonious balance. V

The role of harmonious balance in the existence and change in all things and events seems to be the foundation for a dual structure interacting in complementary contradiction. Humankind, from a Confucian viewpoint, is inseparable from nature and cannot depart from it if it is to survive (bu ke shu yu li ye). Life must be enjoyable in order for it to be sustained. Thus, the perception of beauty and therefore a sense of pleasure derived from it come into play. At the same, a merely automatic reflection of sensual pleasure is not enduring because, for the true enjoyment of life, life must have deeper meaning. To achieve the fulfillment of the meaning of life, cognition must be stimulated and the mind fully engaged. Thus, art and works of art have arisen to meet the needs of both the artist and the viewer. Through these efforts, the sense of beauty and the sense of goodness ultimately unite, reflecting the harmonious balance of the universe. Confucians successfully expressed harmonious balance in their calligraphic landscape paintings, providing a symbolic foundation for humankind to enjoy, to sustain, and to fulfill the meaning of life.

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E. Baierl, “Why Is Life Expectancy Longer for Women Then It Is For Men?,” Scientific American, December 2004, p. 120. Rita Carter, Mapping the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 112–115. Ralf Dahm, “Dying to See,” Scientific American, October 2004, pp. 82–89. Gordon Kane, “The Dawn of Physics beyond the Standard Model,” Scientific American, June 2003, pp. 68–75. Richard L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Meyer Shapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994). Nicholas Wade, “Ideas and Trends,” The New York Times, January 25, 2004.

VLADIMIR MARCHENKOV

THE DIALECTIC OF THE SERIOUS AND THE LUDIC IN MYTH AND ART

I

In the last chapter of Thomas Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, the hero, composer Adrian Leverkühn, makes a public confession about his pact with the devil.1 The scene is set in the Germany of the late 1920s to early 1930s, on the eve of the Nazi takeover, in Bavaria, the country of Richard Wagner and of the National-Socialist rallies since made famous by Leni Riefenstahl. Among the composer’s audience there is a poet, Daniel zur Höhe, who writes verses full of “violence, blood, and, world-plunder.”2 Leverkühn’s medieval speech about his transgressions makes the respectable society ill at ease, and at the peak of general embarrassment the poet exclaims,” It is beautiful.    One thinks one is hearing poetry.” The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, is of a different opinion about what he and the others are witnessing. “This aesthetic interpretation, however conveniently offered, was not tenable,” he comments. “What we heard had nothing at all in common with zur Höhe the poet’s tall tomfooleries.    This was dead sober earnest, a confession, the truth, to listen to which a man in extreme agony of soul had called together his fellow-men.” It was impossible, he remarks further, “to regard it as poetry,” for “one’s fellow-men are not meant to face such truth otherwise than with cold shivers.”3 The scene in Mann’s novel exposes modern man’s inability to handle a mythic situation and modernism’s irresistible inclination to reduce earnest reality to aesthetics. The penitent composer involved his guests in what was a mythic, real-life event. His audience, however, came from a world where such events had been stripped of their earnestness and were tolerated only as objects of “disinterested contemplation.” In the poet zur Höhe’s world, myth had been turned into art. As the narrator’s comments suggest, the process also involved turning life into play, “extreme agony of the soul” into “tall tomfooleries.” This paper takes a look at these two pairs of concepts—myth and life visà-vis art and play—to argue that their mutual necessity makes any attempt to privilege either pair a threat to art. To insist on this distinction and, moreover, 173 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 173–180. © 2008 Springer.

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to explain why it is necessary is especially important today because much current theory has a tendency to confuse the two pairs. In the meantime, the reduction of myth to art and life to play is fraught with problems, first and foremost, for the concepts of art and play themselves—despite the fact that such reduction is often intended to elevate them. The correct solution lies in grasping the dialectical nature of the relations among these concepts. Such an approach shows how and why art and play are at once different from, and necessary to, myth and life—and vice versa. The reality of myth and the seriousness of life make possible the artifice of art and playfulness of play. Conversely, the artifice of art and the playfulness of play, I argue, bring forth the reality of myth and the seriousness of life. II

Two relatively recent theoretical treatments of myth largely dominate today’s understanding of it: the views presented by Roland Barthes in his Mythologies and by Jacques Derrida in his essay “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Language of Philosophy.”4 Barthes’ approach focuses on myth as a mode of communicating ideologically charged, manipulative ideas, whereas Derrida meticulously explores the intricate relation between metaphorical and literal modes of expression. Barthes argues that myth dupes uncritically thinking masses into taking for granted certain aspects of life. Myth does so by making these aspects—undergirded as they are by racist, capitalist, religious, or sexist views—seem “natural,” as though they were arising spontaneously from the very fabric of life. In fact, however, they are, Barthes warns, carefully constructed messages that enslave people’s minds to particular hegemonist ideologies. Barthes contrasts the unreflexive naiveté of myth with the reflexive self-consciousness of poetry: Myth innocently pretends to be a story about our true experiences without even realizing that it is a construct, whereas poetry strives to gain access to the “nature of things,” understanding at the same time that it creates illusions rather than reality: Contemporary poetry is a regressive semiological system. Whereas myth aims at an ultrasignification    poetry, on the contrary, attempts to regain infra-signification, a pre-semiological state of language; in short, it tries to transform the sign back into meaning: its ideal, ultimately, would be to reach not the meaning of words, but the meaning of things themselves.5

I shall return to some of these ideas presently, and in particular to their origin in modern Western thought. Derrida’s essay has little to do, at first glance, with the problem of myth as such. His focus is on the metaphoric origins of philosophical concepts.

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He argues that metaphor is inescapable and any attempt to bypass it and to address the truth of the matter directly, in literal terms, is fundamentally misguided. It is impossible, according to him, to disentangle literal from metaphorical expression, and the metaphysical tradition that has tried to do so, from Aristotle onward, has labored under a delusion. Thus philosophy is “white mythology,” that is, a mode of discourse that relies on withered and bleached poetic metaphors. The value of these latter as concepts is directly proportionate to the degree in which their original vividness and poetic vigor have been effaced. In contrast to Barthes, Derrida does not argue that the language of poetry—presumably metaphorical by definition—provides, or at least tries to gain, a privileged access to truth; he rather insists that metaphor cannot be eradicated from philosophical discourse, and thus that whatever truths philosophy arrives at are suspect because of their inherent metaphoricity.

III

The erasure of the difference between myth and art is rooted in two wellknown modern tendencies: the reduction of myth to fiction in the discourse of the Enlightenment, and the Romantic elevation of poetry to myth. The corresponding erasure of the difference between life and play is likewise the result of, first, assigning reality exclusively to the immanent realm (the empirical world) in the course of the Enlightenment, and, then, stripping this immanent realm of reality and reassigning the latter to the aesthetic subject in Romanticism. Barthes’ treatment of myth follows the pattern established by the Enlightenment, according to which myth was an instrument of controlling ignorant minds by the self-serving priesthood in primitive societies.6 In Barthes’ hands this traditional theme of secular French criticism was adapted to new historical conditions in which cunning priests ruling over superstitious savages were replaced by the ideologues of late capitalism who insinuated false beliefs into the minds of uncritically thinking masses. His treatment of poetry, on the other hand, stems from Romanticism, in which poetic inspiration was given priority over all other modes of insight7 : [U]nlike what happens in prose, it is all the potential of the signified that the poetic sign tries to actualize, in the hope of at last reaching something like the transcendent quality of the thing, its natural (not human) meaning. Hence the essentialist ambitions of poetry, the conviction that it alone catches the thing in itself, inasmuch, precisely, as it wants to be an anti-language. All told, of all those who use speech, poets are the least formalist, for they are the only ones who believe that the meaning of the world is only a form, with which they, being realists, cannot be content.8

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Some differences of nuance notwithstanding, Derrida’s handling of the concept of myth is not all that different from Barthes’. Derrida seems to presume that myth is something inherently metaphorical and is more or less subsumed under poetry. The fact that, for Derrida, the metaphorical element of both myth and poetry remains insurmountable for philosophy suggests that poetic metaphor in his system of coordinates is a more basic way of accessing the truth—if indeed there is such a thing as truth—than philosophical concept. The difference between myth and poetry is that the former is not aware, as it were, of its own metaphorical nature, hence philosophy that is likewise unaware of its own metaphorical nature must be “white mythology.” The latter, that is, poetry, by contrast, is openly metaphorical (it is conscious of its own metaphoricity) and therefore superior both to the more naive mythology and the self-deluding philosophy.9 IV

Despite all sorts of anti-Romantic diversions in the twentieth century, we still live in a largely Romantic aesthetic world. In postmodernism, for example, one finds the continuation of the Romantic faith in art. Moreover, whereas Romanticism still found it necessary to contrast art to life in favor of the former, in postmodernism the next, more radical step was made: The concept of life was dissolved in the concept of art. Life was conceived not simply as infinitely malleable by art; such an attitude had already been present in Romanticism. In postmodernism, life as an independent concept vanished altogether. Its disappearance was the theme of the well-known doctrines about reality as a simulacrum and about art as creating infinite series of similitudes not rooted in any prototypes.10 Rather than elevating the aesthetic plane of human experience to the rank of genuine reality, this tendency results, however, in confusions that imperil the very concept of the aesthetic. V

As a tale about reality, myth is necessary for art. Art is a ludic reflection of reality—a reflection that does not conceal its own ludic (“unreal”) nature. But if reality vanishes, that is, myth disappears from the picture, then the very sense of reflecting it in art is undermined. If the seriousness of life were to be removed altogether, then the ludic nature of art would disappear too. One cannot help noticing that precisely this happens in modernity. As reality increasingly became problematic, calls to turn art into myth became louder and louder. This was the case with early German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel

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and Friedrich Schelling, late Romantics like Richard Wagner, and modernists like Antonin Artaud. The extreme manifestation of this aestheticism—and, doubtless, its utter perversion—was German National-Socialism, in which morality was suppressed by the ideal of a beautiful and strong rather than wise and loving Overman. It is at this dissolution of the seriousness of life in aesthetic games that the figure of the poet zur Höhe hints in Thomas Mann’s novel. The dependence between myth and art, however, is not unidirectional. Myth needs art just as much as art needs myth. This need is not limited to the well-recognized fact that myth uses the expressive means of art but reaches to myth’s most fundamental level. From the very beginning it was poetry that led the immediate reality enunciated by myth into the arena of consciousness and asked the implicit question: How is reality different from illusion? Reality assumes a distinct outline only with this question.11 There is an opinion in current scholarship on the relation between myth and philosophy that it hardly makes sense to speak of myth as a category prior to the philosophical discussion of it by the pre-Socratics and Plato.12 One can likewise say that myth first arises before consciousness qua myth only when it is set in contrast with art. The locus classicus for this moment is the beginning of Hesiod’s Theogony, where the Muses confess that they can both lie and tell the truth to mortals. When the Muses lie they poetise, their true stories are myths—but both need each other to be what they are. The same is true of the relation between life and play. Life that is not set in contrast with play loses its seriousness and reality. Or rather, its seriousness and reality remain unmanifested and unrecognized without such a contrast. VI

Barthes’ insight—that art opens a better avenue of access than myth to the true nature of things because it openly acknowledges its own mediated and reflexive nature—is quite remarkable, after all. Despite this hope, however, Barthes remains skeptical about art’s actual ability to reach this true nature of things: [T]he very resistance offered by poetry makes it an ideal prey for myth.    Truth to tell, the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology (p. 135).

Needless to say, such an “artificial myth” cannot be a myth by definition because it is consciously constructed and therefore loses that “naturalness” which is, according to Barthes, so typical of it. Skepticism, the ever-watchful

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critical posture of consciousness, appears to be Barthes’ ultimate proposed solution. This is doubtless the watchfulness of a philosophical mind. Derrida’s analyses, by contrast, deny the philosopher any hope of reaching the truth. Because of what we might for convenience call metaphorical supplementation [i.e., the impossibility of arriving at the ultimate metaphor in philosophical discourse]    no classification or account of philosophical metaphor can ever prosper. The supplement is always unfolding, but it can never attain the status of a complement. The field is never saturated (p. 245).

Instead of access to the genuine nature of things, philosophy falls, volensnolens, into the error of mythopoeia, from which, however, it was never free in the first place. Throughout its history, Derrida observes not without melancholy, philosophy has remained and remains today prisoner of the metaphoricity of its own language. Every time it thinks that it grasps the truth, it gets hold of something different from truth, for such is the nature of metaphor that is incapable of calling things by their real names. The circle is closed: In our quest for access to truth we moved from myth to poetry, from poetry to philosophy, but the latter leads us back to myth. Such a conclusion, however, is not inevitable. Derrida notes that the structure of metaphor includes both similarity and difference. The difference is rooted in what he calls “the decisive absence of the object.”13 Derrida points out that Ferdinand de Saussure called the mutual proximity of identity and difference in metaphor paradoxical, but in fact they are mutually necessary. Their opposition in metaphor is resolved into a dynamic equilibrium in which the metaphorical image is at once identical with and different from the reality that it points to. When Orpheus sings his lament for Eurydice, for example, Virgil calls him a nightingale that has lost its brood.14 Thanks to its identity with the image (Orpheus is like a nightingale) the reality becomes more universal; it acquires a broader reach and even suggests a world order in which nature and human beings form an emotional continuum. Simultaneously, thanks to its difference from the image (Orpheus is not a nightingale), the reality acquires a more definite and meaningful outline; Orpheus becomes the universal symbol of grief. Metaphor enriches reality, sets its meaning in higher relief, and at the same time it emphasizes the reality through contrast with the illusory nature of its mediating image. Such is art’s relation to myth and play’s relation to life. What Barthes’ and Derrida’s accounts deny is that anything new can emerge from the process of reflection—the latter itself being a metaphor. What I should like to claim in contrast is that all elements involved in the metaphorical process are constantly renewed by their mutual interplay and do not remain the same. The reflection in which both art and philosophy are involved is not

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something barren, uncreative, and terminating in the bad infinity of circular metaphoricity. On the contrary, the generation of identity and difference in mythical symbols, aesthetic metaphors, and philosophical concepts is the source of an intricate reality arising from its own interaction with play, of a constantly evolving myth that sustains and, in turn, is sustained by the openly “unreal” story of art. Ohio University NOTES 1

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, transl. H. T. Low-Porter (New York, Knopf, 1948), Chapter XLVII, pp. 492–503. 2 Ibid., p. 498. 3 Ibid., pp. 498–499. 4 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972; Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (eds.), Postmodernism. Critical Concepts, Vol. 1, Foundational Essays (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 233–299. 5 Mythologies, p. 133. 6 Bernard Fontenelle’s view, expressed in his essay “Of the Origin of Fables,” that myths were “crude philosophy” created by savage, ignorant, and credulous minds was supplemented by John Toland’s argument in Letters to Serena that they were instruments in the hands of “Priests, who allure others    to follow their Directions, which always tend to the Increase of their own Glory, Power, and Profit” (cf. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson Jr., eds., The Rise of Modern Mythology. 1680-1860 [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972], pp.12 and 35, respectively). 7 “The objective world,” wrote, for example, Friedrich Schelling, “is simply the original, as yet unconscious, poetry of the spirit; the universal organon of philosophy—and the keystone of its entire arch—is the philosophy of art” (System of Transcendental Idealism [1800], transl. Peter Heath [Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1997], p. 12). 8 Mythologies, pp. 133–134. 9 One might think that Derrida’s own philosophizing about this deficiency of philosophy should complicate such a thesis. The fact that philosophy can reflect upon its own shortcomings should presumably count in favor of philosophical self-awareness. But, Derrida would counter, even the concept of ‘concept’— to say nothing of that of ‘reflection’—are highly suspect metaphors themselves, and thus philosophy’s attempts to get above and beyond metaphor are doomed to failure. 10 The former was elaborated by Jean Baudrillard in his Simulacra and Simulation, transl. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and the latter by Michel Foucault in his collection of essays on the work of René Magritte, This Is Not a Pipe, transl. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), esp. p. 44. 11 This is the point that Martin Heidegger makes in his 1950 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 650–708. See particularly pp. 672ff.

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12

“The distinction between mythos and logos,” writes Kathryn A. Morgan, for example, “is a function of the rise of philosophical self-consciousness” (Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], p. 23. 13 “White Mythology,” p. 294, note 35. 14 Georgics IV, 511–513; in Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I-IV, transl. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 255.

REFERENCES Barthes, R. Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972). Baudrillard, J. Simulacra and Simulation, transl. S. F. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Derrida, J. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist (eds.), Postmodernism. Critical Concepts, Vol. 1, Foundational Essays (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 233–299. Foucault, M. This Is Not a Pipe, transl. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). Heidegger, M. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns (eds.), Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 650–708. Mann, T. Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, transl. H. T. Low-Porter (New York, Knopf, 1948). Morgan, K. A. Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Schelling, F. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), transl. Peter Heath (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1997). Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid I-IV, transl. H. R. Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

MACIEJ KALUZA

THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD AND REALITY

One of the significant problems of phenomenology, as well as existential philosophy, is the problem of the nature of the subjective feeling of disharmony with the world, known as the feeling of absurdity. As stated by Camus, man is deprived of meaning while struggling to find it, often suddenly, without any rational cause. Being deprived of faith in the harmonious relation between man and the world, the individual finds himself in a situation which can lead to contradictory solutions, which itself can be a proof of the weight of the problem. The solutions range from suicide (as in Kirillow’s suicide in The Possessed after his discovery of God’s nonexistence) to deep faith, based on Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum. This problem is more than of only historical interest, and still is of concern to philosophy. Since the beginning of existential philosophy, there have been many interpretations as to the epistemological foundation of the absurd. Camus stated the absurd as a fact, the foundation of the relation between humans and the world. Sartre sought to find an ontological interpretation of the problem, building categories of theen-soi and pour-soi as two different types of being. For Sartre, the individual discovers his existential openness, freedom, which anything and anyone else seems to be deprived of. The possibility of education, selfrealization, and confrontation with the absurd can lead to building a harmonious relationship with the world in which we fail to project our personal freedom onto anyone else; this leaves the problem of absurdity unresolved and impossible to resolve, as it would demand a synthesis of the two kinds of being, which contradict each other in their essence. The way the problem of absurdity is stated also leads to a serious problem, as stated by Esslin in his book on postwar theatre. The statement of absurdity as one of the features of the human condition using the same language previously used to describe the idea of harmony, the good, and truth creates a false view of the problem. The absurd cannot be rationally shown or described because it rejects the possibility of a rational embrace. One cannot recognize rationally what the absurd is, define it, and understand the definition because what is recognized in this way is not the absurd. Camus recognized the problem, and gave the solution as silence. Confronted with the absurd, we have to remain silent, because speaking while confronted with the absurd is 183 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 183–186. © 2008 Springer.

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always overcome by it; the experience of the absurd is inseparably linked with considering language as irrelevant to expressing the true role of absurdity. The most interesting part of the absurdist philosophy is that it leads to the rejection of one of the most important parts of any philosophy: its educative and communicative aspect. Knowing not only that anything said about the absurd does not help in recognition of the problem, but also that no spoken solution can overcome it, we are left between the radical vision of humanism as in the myth of Sisyphus or irrationality and faith constructed on mysticism or fideism. Accepting the absurdist vision of the relationship between man and the world, we are left alone with the aimlessness of existence, opposing which, as Camus states, is the only end of the individual. What is left unresolved, though, is the possibility to communicate, to create an intersubjective area between the absurdist and another human being in which the problem can be mutually recognized. If not by rational analysis and statement of the problem, how can we be educated about the role of the feeling of absurdity, alienation, and solitude of another individual? The way of perceiving and recognizing the role of the absurd, and thus creating a space for intersubjectivity in an area seemingly lost for communication, is not given by philosophy but by art, and seemingly by drama at most. Among many other very important playwrights of the twentieth century, I believe Martin Martin Esslin was right to say that Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Harold Pinter played a vital role in visualizing what Camus and Sartre spoke of in a manner that made the theory of the absurd congruent with the form of presentation. The essential aspect of absurdity in plays like The Chairs, Waiting for Godot, or The Birthday Party is not in the script or words of the actors and actresses, but somewhere beneath them, somewhere between the concept of the writer and the consciousness of the spectator, and very often in the unspoken, silent parts of the play. For this presentation, I focus solely on Harold Pinter and the possibility of interpreting his plays as acts of communication in which the individual is taught about the possible ways of perceiving absurdity. Pinter, while explaining his artwork, managed to treat a difficult philosophical problem with a lightness given to artists, trusting in the imaginative power of consciousness. What is even more important is what is not said but is shown in plays like The Dumb Waiter, The Room, and The Birthday Party. The spectator of Pinter’s plays is given a vision, almost deprived of the world, deprived of communication, in which an increasing menace is the only symptom of continuity, of the linear structure of the play. We do not observe a cycle in his early plays like The Room or The Birthday Party, in which time

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is divided into the past, vaguely remembered by the drama’s protagonists, and the present, which is static and interrupted only by intrusions from the outside world, represented by the appearance of two dark individuals. Communication between heroes and heroines seems crippled, leaping from the past to the present, as though created by consciousness living in both of the time modes. The scenography plays no vital role apart from the fact that we see a border between the outside world and the space occupied by people: a room, a house. The dialogues do not lead anywhere, and the only thing that increases is the feelings of sexual attraction, fear, domination, and helplessness. The spectator slowly starts to realize the condition of absurdity, by seeing the degeneration of characters, who fail to communicate on a semiotic basis, and recognizes the barrier that language has created between the individuals, or, as Pinter would say, they communicate only too well in everything that is unsaid. What Pinter is saying here is that regardless of the ontological status of absurdity as described by Camus and Sartre, it is easily recognized in society and is a problem concerning the method and the use of communication. People in Pinter’s dramas seek shelter; the outside world seems hostile and demonic, like the ocean observed by Roquentin, hero of La nausée, but they do not find empathy in other human beings, leading to the conclusion that Sartrean hell must be a silent one. If the world we live in is absurd, the vast part of the absurdity comes not from the en-soi, but from the pour-soi. One of the most interesting things that can be said about Pinter’s dramas is that, judging by their reception, they do communicate, they do educate, and can be seen as fundamental in proper recognition of the complex problem of the absurd. The absurd is not verbalized, spoken of, defined. Yet it can be felt, in the menace of communicative acts, as well as in the hostility of the outside world. Pinter has created works of art that demand participation of the individual and his knowledge of all the illusory bridges made between people to maintain stability. He does not prompt us to break down these bridges, but he certainly helps us to recognize their dangerousness. In The Lesson by Eugène Ionesco, words become a weapon, used in crime, an act of domination. This is also one of the most important elements of Pinter’s plays. The question of whether such a presentation of absurdity embraces the category, as diagnosed by Camus or Sartre, remains open, and I doubt whether it can be answered, as it depends on the subjective attitude of the observer toward the phenomenon, which, as was stated, defies rationalization or semiotic interpretation. What I am quite certain of, though, is that phenomenological analysis of the plays by the absurdists might lead to a better cognition of the category of the absurd. Is the absurd of the theatrical presentation of the theater parallel to the existentialists’ concept? Art does

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not answer the question of whether the experienced feeling of the absurd is of ontological origin, comes only from the internal disharmony of consciousness, or is only one of the side effects of development of our society, something that is likely to be overcome in social development. What Pinter wants to achieve in his plays is to allow the spectator to participate in his own struggle in understanding the problem. He does not give a third-act solution, and he often leaves a lot of space for despair and anxiety, without a healing power of catharsis. Yet, anxiety might help the individual to reveal his own answer to the philosophical diagnosis of the absurdists, or realize that his world is dominated by absurdity, which he can overcome or to which he can yield, and here I see an educative aspect of Pinter’s art: The decision of whether the absurd can be overcome is left to the spectator, as is the decision everyone must make in answering questions about the meaning and end of life. The question that Pinter strives to answer is not whether there is a crisis of communication; all he does is to show how well and comfortable we can feel in the world of illusions and how difficult it is to get to the point in which we grasp the true meaning of the existential openness of our being, seen not only as a burden, not only as a reward, but more important as a choice that we must make while building our conscious attitude toward life. Jagiellonian University, Kraków REFERENCES Albert Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe (Paris, Gallimard, 1942). Albert Camus, Le malentendu; Caligula (Paris, Gallimard, 1944). Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, NY, 1961). Harold Pinter, The Room (1957). In The Birthday Party, and Other Plays (London, Methuen, 1960). Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party (1957). In The Birthday Party, and Other Plays (London, Methuen, 1960). Harold Pinter, The Dumb Waiter (1957). In The Birthday Party, and Other Plays (London, Methuen, 1960). Jean-Paul Sartre, La nausée (Paris, Gallimard, 1938). Jean-Paul Sartre, Les mouches (Paris, Gallimard, 1943). Jean-Paul Sartre, L’etre et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris, Gallimard, 1943). Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis clos (Paris, Gallimard, 1945).

PATRICIA TRUTTY-COOHILL

TOO MUCH IS NEVER ENOUGH

For Stephen Colbert

Much too much is made of perfection. Consider all the time Verrochio and Leonardo spent designing the perfect horse! Perfection can be destructive: Remember how the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (when it was built in 1940 it was the longest span in the United States) collapsed because it vibrated in such perfect sympathy with the wind velocity? Perfection is a problem even for engineering. Do I need to remind you that even God got bored with his perfection, so he made us? the millipede? kudzu? Art is not about perfection, it’s about excess!1 You may say, “What about the Parthenon, that perfect example of noble simplicity, quiet restraint?” May I remind you that the Parthenon has too many columns? In one perfect glance humans can only count six columns across; the Parthenon has eight—too many! And, none of its lines are straight. The triglyphs and metopes are fudged; the end columns are squeezed together and tilted inward. What happened to measure? Art’s about playing with measure! Consider the caricature. Leonardo visualized the perfect man once, but he made hundreds of grotesques! Our president’s ears are really not the shape that Tom Toles gives them. He doesn’t really envision preemptive strikes on all those places, does he?2 And so I say, too much is never enough, and thank you, Stephen Colbert.3

INTRODUCTION

The topic of this year’s conference, “The Happy Choice: Measure or Excess,” should have been easy for me. After all, basic art history teaches Heinrich Wolflinian stylistic analysis: linear vs. painterly, planar vs. recessional, closed vs. open form, multiplicity vs. unity. These dichotomies can be seen when comparing a number of chronological styles: Classic vs. Hellenistic, Renaissance vs. Baroque, Neo-Classicism vs. Romanticism, Suprematism vs. Abstract Expressionism, Modernism vs. Post-Modernism. But this approach 187 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 187–194. © 2008 Springer.

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is too logical, too mechanical, too easy. Or is it? Can such obvious contrasts help us penetrate the realm of art? We have to let reason in, just a little. Remember what Wallace Stevens said: “The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”4 While this paper is no poem—I have read poems, and this is not one—it is my way of making my “experience, almost wholly inexplicable, acceptable”5 and responsive to the questions that Professor Tymieniecka poses, indeed, is forever posing. What is creativity? How does it happen? When and where?—But never why! We are human, after all, because we are creative. We live in a universe whose logos is creativity. My goal is to defend my bumper sticker and Mae West’s proclamation that “Too much of a good thing can be wonderful!” I’ll do this in two phases, first by examining the excessive preparation an artist makes in developing a work of art in Gèricault’s Raft of the Medusa; second, by comparing the choices of two masters of mid-twentieth-century American art, Mark Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. Then, I will use the comparison as I critique a great American film of 1983, Godfrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI: Life Out of Balance. The conflict in the reception of this film is the conflict we still experience: the film sends mixed messages because Reggio’s thesis is a tight as Rothko’s theory but his act of making is as open to the present as Rauschenberg’s. CONDENSATION COMES FROM EXCESS I want to reach that state of condensation of sensation which makes a painting–Matisse6

Too often we limit the work of art to what we experience of its surface the first time we encounter it. Too seldom do we realize the choices and the chances the artist has taken. A classic case is Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa of 1818. The grotesque story that resulted from 1816 political appointments and incompetence is a cautionary tale.7 In 1818, in Paris, the 25-year-old Théodore Géricault decided to make a painting of the event; after a year’s work it was exhibited. Determined to be as realistic as possible, he made sketches of bodies at the morgue of the Hospital Beaujon. Géricault’s painting is now a monument in art history. Horrific and full of suffering as it is, the work is indeed measured and, given the nature of the project, hardly excessive in its emotionality—in fact it is criticized for being idealized. If we look at some of the studies for the painting, we can see how many choices were made in position of the figures, in the position of the boat, the sail, the relationship of the boat to the horizon, the size of the rescue boat,

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and the proxemics with the audience. The Louvre painting is a distillation, a concentration of all of Géricault’s experiences in constructing the work; what we have are his final choices from all the possibilities he tried. In a successful work of art, the “wisdom” of the choices the artist makes enervates him and the work itself. The surplus, the excess of possibilities, therefore, is necessary to the work whether the choices are made from sketches or studies from which to choose or from the myriad of possibilities “in his head” that the artist has chosen not to use. Even when the excessive preparation is not hinted at in the final product, that product would not be possible without such preparation. For example, the force of the master calligrapher depends not only on the strokes executed, but on the myriads not made. The initial excess of experimentation and play is necessary to the end. Indeed, as John Baldacchino8 argues, art lies in the doing, not the product. And so excesses of doing are the material of art.

ART IN ACT The first man was an artist. Barnett Newman9

Art in act is best seen in Abstract Expressionism, a New York School of painting from the mid 1940s through the end of the 1960s, and well exemplified in Hans Namuth’s photographs of Jackson Pollock painting. Critic Harold Rosenberg explained “What was on the canvas was not a picture but an event    [its meaning was] not psychological data [as in Surrealism], but role, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation.”10 For this discussion, I will deal with the Abstract Expressionist theories in the person of Mark Rothko (1903–1970), a modern Romantic par excellence, and one who explained his art theory. Art, he argued in response to Regionalist Realism, was meant to transcend the mundane. Art was not to be explained through iconographic analysis nor understood through a set of notes, but rather art “should come out of a consummated experience between picture and onlooker.”11 The artist should have “faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed. Pictures must be miraculous.”12 And the artwork is the inevitable end of the artist’s action. It is a product, and a product that should conform to a specific set of rules enumerated in 1943 in the New York Times in a manifesto written by Adolph Gottlieb (1903–1974) and Mark Rothko with the help of Barnett Newman (1905–1970). The last three bullet points are of interest here.

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3 It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way–not his way. 4 We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal.    We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. 5    there is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

Such absolutism, such excess seriousness, engender a reaction. After a long bout of depression, Mark Rothko committed suicide in 1970. As my tenyear old neighbor Timur Beken once said, “Sanity is more important than simplicity.” “ W E L L , I F I T I S N ’ T A R T , T H E N I L I K E I T . ” 13

The work of Robert Rauschenberg (b. 1925) responds to the dicta of the Abstract Expressionists by operating to include a multiplicity of “objects” on his work. Leo Steinberg emphasizes that his combine paintings completely reverse the use of supports for traditional visual images up through the Abstract Expressionists—longer a vertical surface, but a flatbed that carries whatever the artist chooses to attach. As Leo Steinberg explains, they become “a part of a shakeup which contaminates all purified categories. The deepening inroads of art into non-art    alienate the connoisseur as art defects and departs into strange territories leaving the old stand-by criteria to rule an eroding plain.”14 Rauschenberg and the other artists of the Post-Modern, Neo-Dada, and Pop movements experiment not only with formal qualities of the work, but also with the underlying support of Modernism. The most obvious is the shift of axis from y to x—no longer a wall, but a floor, a table, a bed. No longer forcing art into an upright stance for the sake of visuality, no longer forcing the viewer “to see the world our way,” no longer grand and overwhelmingly “unequivocal,” no longer “tragic and timeless,” no longer about some one thing, these works reframe our expectations. They call out not to art but to world, to the mundane, the non-transcendent, the worlds of sensory objects, the attics of our experiences. John Cage explains: We know two ways to unfocus attention: symmetry is one of them, the other is the over-all where each small part is a sample of looking elsewhere, not just where someone arranged you should. You are then free to deal with your freedom just as the artist dealt with his, not in the same way but, nevertheless, originally    everything is in chaos still.”15

There is no single subject to Rauschenberg’s combines. Cage again: “Each thing that is there is a subject. It is a situation involving multiplicity.    There is in Rauschenberg, between him and what he picks up to use, the quality

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of encounter. For the first time.”16 In this case, the excess is included in the work, because Rauschenberg refuses to be limited to focus. “Were he saying something in particular, he would have to focus the painting; as it is he simply focuses himself, and everything    is appropriate, appropriate to poetry, a poetry of infinite possibilities.”17 The mood of Rauschenberg’s work is celebratory, celebratory of his and our immediate circumstances. Cage lets us in: Rauschenberg became a giver of gifts. Gifts, unexpected and unnecessary, are ways of saying Yes to how it is, a holiday. The gifts he gives are not picked up in distant lands but are things we already have    and so we are converted to the enjoyment of our possessions. Converted from what? From wanting what we don’t have, art as pained struggle [emphasis added].18

For Rauschenberg “Painting related to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)”19 By including an excess of material things, the artist allows each its own place as fact rather than symbol, and opens to existence rather than reference. His Canyon combine with its attached stuffed eagle20 seems to echo lines of Wallace Stevens’ Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too That the blackbird is involved in what I know.

P L A Y T H E P R E S E N T 21

Godfrey Reggio’s KOYAANISQATSI is a film that looks to the past, that is, the lost, and then plays the present.22 It is a film without dialogue, without narration; Philip Glass’s score sets the mood, cinematographer Ron Fricke’s slow-motion and time-lapse photography tell the tale. Critics at the time argued that the theme of the film, a Hopi word that Reggio translates as “life out of balance,” is belied by the beauty of the images of technological, mechanical society. The film’s message then, is not unequivocal, for technological society is presented as just an interesting as the beauty of nature. The title and Reggio’s early comments set him up for that criticism: KOYAANISCATSI is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds—urban life and technology versus the environment.    If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the ‘original’ is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself. We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.23

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In an early section of the film, “Organic,” we are soothed with images of waves, clouds, vast natural landscapes. After passing through some transitional scenes demonstrating man’s involvement with nature and the failure of some modern building, we enter into “The Grid,” the longest sequence in the film (about 22 minutes). We are brought up to speed and through timelapse photography given a special “view” of the conditions and movement of daily life in New York. This and the other sequences surely demonstrate loss of individuality through standardization. Yet while such an interpretation is congruent with the author’s intention, the time-lapse sequences had quite another effect on me. In placing his camera in a skyscraper high above the streets, he gives us a transcendent view of modern movement, sped up so that individuals become part of the pattern of color streams that pulsate through vessels of steel. It is the beauty of even these mechanical movements, the wit that compares us with the manufacture of Oscar Meyer wieners, that belies the artist’s intention. Happily, Reggio chose to accept the beauty of the beast. So we may consider his film in the same way that John Cage accepted Rauschenberg’s art as a “message that requires a blessing.” These are the feelings that Rauschenberg and Reggio give us: “love, wonder, laughter, heroism (I accept), fear, sorrow, anger, disgust, tranquility.”24 Reggio has tempered his intention with art and life; he has disarmed us and himself by showing the beauty of the beast. But this is what he expected, for in a recent interview, his philosophy is quite specific: KOYAANISQATSI is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. KOYAANISQATSI is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer. Art has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning, their own value. So while I might have this or that intention in creating this film, I realize fully that any meaning or value KOYAANISQATSI might have comes exclusively from the beholder. The film’s role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of KOYAANISQATSI is whatever you wish to make of it. This is its power.25

ART AND LIFE

The question is: How are we to define art? If art is about measure only, then any excess—especially that of the viewer—is injurious to its perfection. If art allows life—and not just pictures of life—into it, if art allows itself to be open to the alterity of life—an excess in the art-as-measure rubric—it will be possible to harness the forces of life, to work with them. If the artist

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is encouraged to accept the excess of life, he can take his proper place in society, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out in 1964: In the history of human culture there is no example of conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extension except in the puny and peripheral efforts of the artist. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenges decades before this transforming impact occurs. He, then, builds models of Noah’s ark for facing the change that is at hand.    It is this aspect of new art the Kenneth Galbraith recommends to the careful study of businessmen who want to stay in business.    [I]n the words of Windham Lewis, “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”

—and its excesses. Siena College, Loudonville, New York NOTES 1 Aesthetic excess is not to be confused with Aristotle’s ethical incontinence (Book 7); Dante, Inferno XI, 69–90, puts the incontinent clashing with bitter tongues in a vicious marsh, with driving winds and beating rains. This vice “offends God less and occurs a lesser blame than do its companions malice and mad brutishness” (Dante, Inferno, Translation by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander [New York: Doubleday, 2000]). 2 Tom Toles is a political cartoonist for the Washington Post. The cartoon of March 7, 2006, cartoon mentioned shows President George W. Bush in a press conference. In the balloon we read “This notion that the U.S. is getting ready to attack Iran is simply ridiculous. That being said, all options are on the table.” On the podium before him are Post-It notes saying, for example, “Attack Russia,” “Attack Iran,” “Attack Iraq again.” 3 See John Baldacchino’s essay in this volume for the value of comedy as the glue of the collage of fragments that is contemporary culture. 4 Wallace Stephens, “Man Carrying Thing,” 1949. 5 Wallace Stephens, quoted in New York Times obituary, August 3, 1955. 6 Henri Matisse, “Notes d’un peintre,” La Grande Revue, 25 December 1908; translation based on J. D. Flam, Matisse on Art (London, 1973), p. 31, reproduced in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 73. 7 In 1816 the British handed over a port in Senegal to the new Bourbon government. The Medusa was one of four ships that set out to make the official handover. It carried 250 dignitaries, including the new governor of Senegal, and a crew of 150. Its inexperienced and arrogant Frigate-Captain Hugues Duroy de Chaumereys sailed ahead of the fleet, and in a month ran aground on a sandbar on the west coast of Africa. Eventually the captain ordered the dignitaries onto six lifeboats and made a raft for the crew. The lifeboats towed the raft for a while, but eventually abandoned it about 4 miles from shore. The situation of the raft was gruesome, with sailors fighting and killing one another. Thirteen days later, when the raft was accidentally sighted by one of the fleet French brig, the fifteen men left who survived (they had to cannibalize the dead) were taken to Senegal, where five of them died. The ship’s captain’s report was leaked to the anti-Bourbon press in 1816; other accounts came out in 1817 (Henri Savigny and Alexander Corréard, Naufrage de la frégate le Médusa [Paris: Eymery]). Contemporary

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Royalist critics saw the painting as a savage criticism of the Restoration government; social critics of the day thought it was not critical enough. Lorenz Eitner (Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, London: Phaidon, 1972) points out that Géricault chose the least politically dangerous version from his sketches for this painting, which was submitted for a government prize. 8 John Baldacchino, “Between Illusions: Art’s Argument for ‘Weak’ Reality,” Human Creation between Reality and Illusion, Analecta Husserliana, Vol. LXXXVII, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), pp. 257–268, especially Part II. 9 Barnet Newman, in Tiger’s Eye, Vol. 1/1, October 1947, 57–60, as cited in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 566–569. 10 Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News, 1952, as cited in Modern Art, p. 280 11 Adolf Gottlieb and Mark Rothko with Barnet Newman, statement published in critic Edward Alden Jewell’s column, New York Times, 13 June 1943, as cited in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 562. 12 Mark Rothko, in Possibilities, Vol. I (New York, 1947), 84, as cited in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 563. See also Mark Rothko, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art, ed. Christopher Rothko (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, c. 2004). 13 Ibid. 14 Leo Steinberg, “The Flatbed Picture Plane,” in Other Criteria (London, 1972), pp. 61–98, esp. p. 98. 15 John Cage, Silence (Cambridge, MA., 1969), pp. 98–107, as cited in Art in Theory, 1900– 1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 717–721. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Combine painting of 1959: oil, pencil, paper, fabric, metal, cardboard box, printed paper, printed reproductions, photograph, wood, paint tube, and mirror on canvas, with oil on bald eagle, string and pillow. 21 Wallace Stevens, Mozart, 1935. “Poet, be seated at the piano. / Play the present, its hoo-hoohoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-rac, Its envious cachinnation.” For Mark Halliday (Stevens and the Impersonal [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991]), “the ‘cachinnation’ emanates from people who can’t find work and can’t find their children,    people whose ‘cries fill the streets, the adjective selected seems tellingly unsympathetic    the poet-pianist is estranged from the street people, at least so long as he devotes himself to Mozart’s ‘lucid souvenir of the part’: ‘If they throw stones upon the root / While you practice arpeggios, / It is because they carry down the stairs / A body in rags.” ’ Rauschenberg works in the eras of the Cold and Vietnam War rather than the Depression. I use the phrase isomorphically rather than as a similiarity. 22 The QATSI trilogy tells of the technological transformation of the planet. The 1988 POWAQQATSI’s overall focus is on natives of the Third World; the 1992 NAQOYQATSI means a life of killing each other (Hopi). The films have become cult classics. 23 The official KOYAANIQATSI website is http://www.koyaanisqatsi.org/films/koyaanisqatsi.php. The film was made between 1975 and 1982; MGM released the DVD in 2002. 24 Cage, op. cit. 25 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

DIANE SCILLIA

MINIMALIST ART “Less is More” or the Paradox of Boredom

Marcel Duchamp painted Tu ‘m (usually translated as “you bore me” or “tu m’emmerdes”) in 1918 and it was his last optical or retinal painting. This title and translation was used in the 1950s and early 1960s and played a major role in establishing boredom as an aesthetic criterion.∗ Compared with the austere Suprematist – Constructivist works of Malevich (his White on White is exactly contemporary with Tu ‘m), Duchamp’s painting is filled with images, even though they were done intentionally in a mechanical way that left no trace of the artist’s hand. Indeed Duchamp hired a professional sign painter to add the images to his painting!∗∗ Several Minimalist and Pop artists will point to Duchamp’s slick paint surface and his “outsourcing” of imagery as justifications for their own way of working. Kasimir Malevich’s paintings have no images – just pure shapes and color – and his paint is brushed on thickly. It is the evidence of the “hand” of the artist that we see on the surface of Malevich’s iconic White on White.∗∗∗ Together, these two paintings inspired the innovative art works grouped under the heading Minimalist. The spare, austere, “industrial” lines of Bauhaus design in architecture and other art forms picked up on Duchamp’s “mechanical” paint surface and on Malevich’s “purism.”∗∗∗ 1 We see this especially in the Barcelona Pavilion (1927/1929), which beautifully illustrates Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s dictum “Less is more.”2 Following Bauhaus ideals, applied decorations were banished as bourgeois and only a “revolutionary architecture” of pure form remained. Mies’ design can be summed up as beautiful materials, pure forms, crystalline ∗ David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 61–70, but especially p. 69, note 85 (in which he quotes Rosalind Kraus’ translation, that Tu ’m is simply ‘you’/‘me’). Compare Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp. A Biography (New York: Henry Hall, 1996), pp. 202–203. ∗∗ Joselit, Infinite Regress, p. 64, and Tompkins, Duchamp, p. 202. A. Klang signed his name below the pointing finger. ∗∗∗ John E. Bowlt, Russian Art of the Avant Garde (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1976; reprinted, 1988), pp. 116–135. Malevich’s painterly brushwork will influence later artists, like Jasper Johns (b. 1930) and Robert Ryman (b. 1930). Also see Troels Andersen, “Malevich, Kasimir,” in The Dictionary of Art, edited by Jane Turner (New York: Grove Dictionaries, 1996), Vol. 20, pp. 192–196.

195 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 195–206. © 2008 Springer.

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space. Modernity has stripped away the decadent icing of earlier styles. We see something similar in Piet Mondrian’s paintings of the late 1930s.3 These very spare, highly intellectualized modernist ideals had to be put aside when war broke out in Europe in 1939. With the end of World War 2, there was a revival of or a return to Bauhaus design in American architecture in the late 1940s and 1950s, when Walter Gropius was associated with the School of Design at Harvard and Mies van der Rohe was at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.4 Mies and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building in New York (1957/1958) was among the most important and influential buildings constructed in the United States after 1945. Modern domestic structures allowed wealthy individuals to relax and enjoy their leisure without guilt. Mies’ Farnsworth House (1949)—designed to sit in an open field as a weekend retreat from Chicago’s messy center city— and Johnson’s Glass House (1949–1950s)—set in rural Connecticut—became icons of this style.5 These, in essence, were the offspring of the country villas that Mies had designed in the 1920s, but now with clear references to some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas about how houses should relate to their landscape settings. This all too briefly held ideal of a postwar world at peace faltered after the Russians exploded a nuclear bomb (1949), the start of the Korean War (ca.1950–1953), and the onset of the Cold War (ca. 1955). The concept of “mutual assured destruction” was developed in the early 1960s as a means of keeping the two superpowers from launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack on each other. What had seemed to be a new period of peace and prosperity soon turned into one of heightened anxiety with the awareness that it could all end in a brilliant flash of light and a big mushroom cloud.6 This is the immediate background for my discussion of the Minimalist art movement and of the perplexing objects made in the mid 1960s (and into the 1970s and 1980s) that still challenge our conceptions of what art is.7 Surprisingly, it was right around 1960 that boredom came back into the art world, but it now took a different form than that in Duchamp’s Tu ’m. Whereas Duchamp’s title was thought to be pun about his finding optical or retinal painting boring (which was why he hired a sign painter to paint parts for him)—and was so taught at that time—what we see in works made from about 1960 to the 1970s was the aesthetics of boredom or the “boredom of omission”: the reduction or restricting of visual stimulation in the artwork itself.8 This intentional making a work of art “in order to bore people”— literally by omitting the usual expectations of the viewer—was something that Duchamp called a beautiful idea, but admitted that it was one he had never imagined. Duchamp likened this to John Cage’s silences.9

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Many viewers, when confronted by these Minimalist works of art, reject them visually as “boring to look at” (there is nothing to see) or as being devoid of content and meaning (they have no subject and are about nothing).10 In this, the Minimalist works were different from the earlier examples of monochrome or “purist” artworks dating from the 1910s through the 1930s.11 Malevich’s Suprematist paintings were a new type of icon; Mondrian’s paintings defined the world in clear spatial relationships. Ad Reinhardt’s blue or black paintings (1957–1960s) do not aspire to transcendence. His paintings are about painting. Nevertheless, Reinhardt’s slick surfaces (which share their almost “mechanical” brushstrokes with Duchamp’s Tu ’m) may even make us long for the tactile pleasures (i.e., the physicality) of Malevich’s or of Mondrian’s work.12 Carl Andre’s floor pieces or plains of the late 1960s, too, are relatively impoverished with regard to visual and tactile stimuli.13 There is no idiosyncratic touch of the artist in the tile-like metal units making up Andre’s floor piece, they are just mechanically produced forms and industrial surfaces that do not give us images to ponder. Although they define space, we feel no need to walk into the art work—indeed, viewers are reluctant to “break the frame” of his floor pieces. Their walking on Andre’s work underscores that it is just a floor—like any other—and further removes it from the status of a work of art. Donald Judd’s boxes, dating from about 1965, seem intentionally cold and without visual excitement.14 His boxes take up space—our space—but they just sit there. Viewers cannot even interact with them; they do not move. The colors seem sprayed on, and the manufactured nature of the materials (metal and Plexiglas) removes them from the handmade artisan traditions of earlier Surrealist constructions. None of this is especially enticing. All of these examples—whether by Reinhardt, Andre, or Judd—seem to deny us what we love about works of art, especially a narrative we can identify and the pleasure that we get when we examine beautiful forms made by skilled and careful craftsmen. No wonder many complain that Minimalist artworks are just another version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”—that there is nothing there. And why they are seen as a joke played upon the viewing public.15 Walking into a gallery where paintings by Reinhardt, floor pieces by Andre, and sculptures by Judd are displayed can be very instructive as well as extremely frustrating to those of us who teach courses in art history or aesthetics. Many viewers do not “get” Minimalist artwork; they refuse outright to accept the challenges each artist puts in his work, and their rejection goes beyond what we traditionally see as class bias or as reflections of differences in education. Extremely well educated people and poorly educated people both dislike these works.16 The negative responses may be due to preferences for easier,

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more accessible (or more easily understood) works of art. In my experience, many of the loudest critics of these artworks do not spend enough time looking at them: They take a quick span of the gallery, make some negative comment, and walk out. Every so often such a critic will walk through a gallery and criticize—loudly and curtly—each work. If you engage one of them in conversation before a work that he or she has just panned, after a few minutes of simply looking at it and of talking about it (even negatively), he or she frequently finds that it is more subtle and interesting than he or she first thought. This is also true of any critic in front of any artwork from another time period or culture. Perhaps Susan Sontag was right when she defined boredom as “only another name for a certain species of frustration.”17 The frustration and the boredom reside in the critical viewer, not in the artwork. For example, our hypothetical viewer needs to spend enough time with one of Reinhardt’s black paintings so that he or she can perceive the different blacks put there by the artist. Reinhardt was adamant about not leaving any trace of his hand or touch on his late canvases: These consisted of A Square (neutral, shapeless) canvas, five feet wide, five feet tall    (not large, not small, sizeless), trisected (no composition), one horizontal form negating one vertical form (formless, not top, no bottom, directionless), three (more or less) dark (lightless) no contrasting (color less) colors, brushwork brushed out to remove brushwork, a matte, flat, free-hand painted surface (glossless, textureless, non-linear, no hard edge, no soft edge).18

Reinhardt forces the viewer to work hard at seeing the very slight differences left on the surface. When his or her eyes adjust to the slight variations in colors, the viewer can begin to appreciate the careful trisected arrangement and to see how light helps us sort out shades of very similar colors, even ones of extremely low intensity or extremely high intensity. What this experience should do for the viewer is to trigger ideas about painting—about the act of covering a uniform surface as opposed to one broken up in a grid as this one is; about how “warm” and “cool” colors define space in the painting, so we perceive some of the color squares as closer to us and others as further away.19 He or she may even note the subtle brushstrokes remaining in Reinhardt’s colors. Reinhardt’s painting, which at first looked flat and uniform black, now has some of the same qualities as an early cubist still-life by Picasso.20 It is the viewer’s observation of the very subtleties put there by Reinhardt, coupled with this engaged viewer’s philosophical ruminations about painting as an art form, that activates Reinhardt’s painting, endowing it with the traditional “painterly” characteristics associated with earlier masterpieces of modern art.21 Reinhardt’s painting is boring only to someone who does not know what is there to see—that is, has not taken the time to let it (the painting) change what he or she sees.22

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Andre’s floor pieces also need time so the viewer can begin to differentiate the small variations in the almost identical metal units making it up.23 Andre did not just lay each one next to the other, he placed one and rotated the next 90 degrees. Every floor piece (and they are so called because they are on the floor, look like tiled floors, and can be walked on) reflects the simple fact that the manufacturing process “colors” each metal (lead, copper, aluminum) unit differently and that cutting each one also scars or polishes its surface with different patterns when seen from an angle. Yet another point of view, from the piece itself, is possible if the viewer walks on Andre’s floor. Here, the three-dimensional aspect of the floor piece is the major experience: As the viewer “enters” the space of the floor piece, he or she is inside of it (and is part of it), even as he or she is on top of it. Literally, the viewer becomes part of the art object.24 Initially, the critical debate about Andre’s floor pieces focused on their decorative and coloristic or painterly rather than their spatial or sculptural qualities.25 Andre’s statements make it clear that his floor pieces are three-dimensional art, that is, sculpture.26 Judd’s objects are also sculptures, and they often sit in the middle of a gallery, although he also made wall pieces that extend from the floor to the ceiling.27 In both types, Judd plays with our perceptions of solid form. His works are made of highly colored Plexiglas and polished metal plates, which have different optical qualities that enhance his pure geometric volumes and give the viewer additional views of the interior of the piece.28 Judd earned his M.A. in art history (from Columbia University) and, like Andre, was a painter before he began exploring the possibilities that led to his objects. He was frustrated with the ideal of painting as expressed by artists of the abstract expressionist generation and with the egoism of these painters.29 Judd’s solution, outlined in his critical reviews between 1959 and 1963, was to make “specific objects” rather than paintings or sculptures.30 Thus, the viewer needs to walk around Judd’s objects in order to perceive how the reflective surfaces work with the transparent Plexiglas surfaces. At the Art Institute in Chicago, for example, one approaches what looks like a box sitting in the middle of the gallery. As one moves around it, the metal plates reflect one’s image and the rest of the gallery, while the Plexiglas plates give one views of the interior of the box. These reflections and different views cause one to wonder what is “outside” and what is “inside,” and one realizes that the dark shadow he or she has been “reading” as the interior floor could also be seen as a hole extending several feet under the box.31 Judd’s complex at Marfa, Texas, was a testing ground for many of his experiments.32 There he could control some of the environments in which his artworks were displayed. His association with the Dia Foundation, which

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predated his purchase of the Marfa complex, resulted in the inclusion of one of Judd’s series in the opening exhibition at Dia Beacon in 2003.33 What our hypothetical viewer should understand about Minimalist artworks (and especially those by the artists cited here) is that everything affects them and that even our major traditional museum may not take the care they should with the particular gallery in which they are shown.34 This is but one reason artists like Judd tried to establish their own galleries to show their own artworks.35 When looking at these Minimalist works, the viewer should be receptive to everything outside the “frame” (e.g., the light of the space, the time of day, the color of the gallery walls, the floor itself, the placement of the works within the gallery—are they close to the window, to a doorway, to a wall, in a corner, or to another work of art?) as well as to everything “inside” the frame (how is work attached to a wall or placed on the floor), how is it lighted (spot-lighted? from above? from below?). In addition, he or she should be aware of the number of people in the room, what they are or are not wearing, where each is standing in relation to the artwork in question and to each other, their mood (collective and individual), if they talk with each other and what they say, the changes that occur when each one of them moves, the heat of the room, and the natural or all-over artificial light in the room (as opposed to that directed on the art work), as well as what the other viewers are doing (What are they talking about? What are they looking at? Are they annoyed? Frustrated? Perplexed? Amused?), and how perceptive each one of them really is all color our viewer’s response.36 Once a viewer responds positively to one of the artworks in a gallery, he or she will approach another. Just one person having a positive experience may be sufficient for even others to extend their stay and puzzle out “what is it that she saw in this thing?” Thus, the setup or arrangement of artworks within a gallery demands special care and consideration. By themselves Minimalist artworks are challenging to many viewers because the artist has removed so much of the “normal” stimulation we expect to encounter with a work of art—a narrative (or at least some suggestive or evocative title rather than the ubiquitous “Untitled”), recognizable images, variations in color or brush strokes, marks of the artist’s hands, and so on— and the artist has thrown back to the viewer the task of seeing what remains and of constructing the work.37 When one makes jokes about the artwork or criticizes it as an example of some fraud perpetrated upon the public, it merely proves that such a viewer is really jaded and cynical or is intellectually lazy. Each of the artists discussed here saw that “too much of a good thing” got in the way of their intentions. Reinhardt, Andre, and Judd stripped things

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down to the bare essentials in their works so the viewer can recover what is there, but what is not readily apparent to the insensitive observer. Everyone can see what is apparent—that the work of art is there. What you see is what you see.38 What you get out of the work of art depends upon what you put into viewing it. There are several steps one can follow when viewing these artworks to begin the process of finding what the artist left for us to see and appreciate. By this last word, I include all of the standard approaches, whether stylistic, iconographic, or sensuous, by which we usually “decode” a work of art. First, the viewer should be as close to the artwork as he or she can get (without setting off alarms) and should move around the work, seeing it from different points of view and angles. When moving, the viewer should make sure to take into his or her field of vision whatever else there is in the immediate vicinity. This includes other viewers and other artworks. You need to see all 360 degrees of a sculpture or all 180 degrees of a painting. These Minimalist works do not exist in a vacuum! Frequently, reflective surfaces of one play with those of an other, or the shadows cast by other people in the gallery enhance the surfaces of another artwork.39 Or the shadows cast by the artwork enhance itself.40 Other viewers can also “join” the artwork you are viewing [just as people seen through Duchamp’s Big Glass (in Philadelphia) become part of that painting for those seeing it from the other side]. Or spectators walking on one of Andre’s floor pieces define its vertical space for others in the same gallery. Color contrasts, surface reflections (particularly of other viewers within the space or of windows or of lighting), textures, shadows, and highlights and optical illusion can all be seen in these Minimalist artworks and are part of what the viewer should be looking for and responding to. Minimalist artworks are difficult. They demand the participation of engaged intelligent viewers. These works are understandable on their own terms, and the experience of spending time with them is rewarding. One can experience some of the same optical effects and distortions of perception as that caused by taking artificial stimulants or mind- and mood-altering drugs, without any of the dangers that that activity entails and without the risk of being jailed. The limiting of visual and sensory stimulation in order to enhance or to change perception is something that came into postwar art from Zen. As John Cage said, “Mushrooms are growing, we should be listening.”41 Kent State University

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1

For the Bauhaus, see Frank Whitford, Bauhaus (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1984), and Sherban Cantacuzino, Great Modern Architecture (London: Studio Vista, 1966), especially the section entitled “Walter Gropius: The Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany,” pp. 28–35. 2 Peter Blake, Mies van der Rohe. Architecture and Structure (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 23–70 (for Mies’ career to 1940), p. 28 (for his famous dictum), and pp. 51–57 (for the Barcelona Pavilion). Blake (p. 86) includes Edith Farnsworth’s rejoinder to Mies: “We know that less is not more.    It is simply less.” 3 Harry Cooper, “The Surface in Time: Notes on an Aspect of Mondrian’s Critical Reception,” in Harry Cooper and Ron Sponk, Mondrian: Transatlantic Paintings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 24–66. For Mondrian’s links to the Bauhaus, see Whitford, pp. 117 and 124. 4 David P. Handlin, American Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), pp. 232–267. Philip Johnson’s role in reviving Bauhaus design was also linked to his role as curator of architecture for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. There was a corresponding revival of Bauhaus ideas and design in Europe. 5 Blake, pp. 83–92. and especially pp. 84–85 (where he compares Mies’ house with that built by Johnson); and Handlin, pp. 239–240 (the Farnsworth House) and 234–244 (Johnson’s Glass House). 6 Serge Guilbert “Postwar Painting Game: The Rough and the Slick” in Serge Guilbert (editor) Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991) 30–84; and Benjamin H. D. Buchlob “Coldwar Constructivism” in Reconstructing Modernism 85–112. 7 For the earliest critical accounts of Minimalism, see Richard Wollstein, “Minimal Art,” Arts Magazine 39, no. 4 (January 1965) 26–32; Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (October/November 1965) 57–69: Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965) 74–82; Jewish Museum Primary Structures: Young American and British Sculptors (exhibition catalogue by Kynaston McShinn) (New York, 1966); Mel Bochner, “Primary Structures,” Arts Magazine 40, no. 8 (June 1966) 33–35; Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no.10 (Summer 1967) 12–23; and George Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1968). In addition, Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s New Paintings,” in New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940-1970 (curated by Henry Geldzahler) (New York: E. P. Dutton in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1969), pp. 403–425. Also see Jeremy Meyer, Minimalist Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 8 The limiting of visual stimuli certainly stems from the modernist masterpieces of Malevich, Mondrian, Gropius, and Mies, but is now coupled with the postwar influence of Zen Buddhism, which may best be seen in the koan-like statements in Ad Reinhardt, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (New York: Viking Press, 1975), and in Donald Judd, Complete Writings, 1959-1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1977); and in excerpts included in Battcock, Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, cited in note 10. 9 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, translated from the French by Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 99. For the importance of silence in Cage’s music, see John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hannover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), and David Revill, Roaring Silence: John Cage. A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992). Dorothy G. Shinn (Duchamp Effect: Influence of Marcel Duchamp on the Work of John Cage

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and Allan Kaprow, M.A. thesis, Kent State University,1994, Kent, Ohio, pp. 74–75 and 77–79) recounts the importance of Zen to Cage’s activities at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1952. For Cage’s influence on the Minimalist and Conceptual artists, see Kathan Brown, “Changing Art: A Chronicle Centered on John Cage,” in A John Cage Reader in Celebration of His 70th Birthday (New York: C. F. Peters, 1982), p. 129. Robert Rauschenberg’s white paintings of 1951 were done at Black Mountain College under the influence of both Cage and Joseph Albers. Jasper John’s White Target (1955) was painted within a year of his meeting Cage. Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki taught Zen Buddhism at Columbia University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Donald Judd and Allan Kaprow were M.A. students in art history. Also see Susan Hapgood, “Interview with Allan Kaprow (1992),” in Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada. Redefining Art 1958-62 (New York: American Foundation of Arts and Universe Publishing, 1994), pp. 117–119, on Cage attending Suzuki’s lectures at Columbia. 10 I follow Wollheim in including Reinhardt’s black paintings among the Minimalist works, even though his earlier paintings were abstract expressionist. Reinhardt (b. 1913) is older than Judd (b. 1928) and Andre (b. 1935), and he studied at Columbia University in the late 1930s and 1940s. The comments abstracted above were leveled at Reinhardt’s black paintings. 11 For example, neither Reinhardt, Judd, nor Andre spoke of any spiritual or transcendent aspects in their works. For Malevich’s roots in icon painting, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 20. For Mondrian’s theosophical ties, see Robert Welch, “Mondrian and Theosophy,” in Piet Mondrian. Centennial Exhibition (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971), pp. 35–51, and Virginia Pitts Rembert, “Piet Mondrian: ‘Clear Visions of Reality’,” in 600 Hundred Years of Netherlandish Art. Selected Symposium Lectures (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Department of Art, 1982), pp. 65–79, especially pp. 68–72. The artists and architects associated with the Bauhaus were not concerned with religious, spiritual, or mystical verities, but the clean lines and “pure shapes” (and proportions) seen in their works bear some mathematical or Platonic appreciation of the “ideal.” Donald Judd’s article on Malevich appeared in Art in America (March/April 1974) and was reprinted in his Complete Writings, pp. 211–215. 12 The matte quality of Reinhardt’s surfaces draws the available light “into” the canvas; in effect this works like a “light sink” (analogous to a “heat sink” or a black hole). The pictorial space of a Reinhardt is compressed within the frame and does not extend in front of or beyond it. Reinhardt’s 1962 description of the black paintings as quoted in Art as Art (cited in note 11) and in Thomas Crow, Rise of the Sixties. American and European Art in the Era of Dissent, 1955-69 (London: The Everyman Art Library, 1996), p. 118, bears further study, along with Harold Rosenberg, Anxious Object. Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press, 1966), pp. 52–54, and especially p. 53: “All of painting is to sink into Reinhardt’s black, square trapdoor, below the surface of which close scrutiny reveals a block-shaped cross marking the tomb of modern art.” 13 This empty sterility—together with the lack of content—was one of the most troubling aspects of Minimalist art for many critics. 14 According to Judd (Complete Writings, p. 187), “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing’s a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting.” The physicality or the physical presence of the work should be enough. Also see David Joselit, American Art since 1945 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2003), pp. 109–110, for an appreciation of Judd’s use of optical illusion to elucidate three-dimensional volume. 15 What such critics miss is that the “Platonic” purity of form coupled with the denial of narrative content points to a new kind of meditative art, one not based upon any single religious

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tradition. These objects were made to tell us something about the world, but this information is experiential not narrative. Similar complaints were made about Rauschenberg’s white paintings of 1951, John’s White Target (1955), and Ryman’s white paintings of the 1960s, even though surface plays a major role in those works. The lack of narrative seems, to me, to be the prime reason for the rejecting or panning of Minimalist works. 16 Nor surprisingly, the well-educated dislike them because there are no literary illusions (or narratives) and they have to work too hard at uncovering what the art works “means,” while the more poorly educated dislike them because they seem to negate the importance of the artist himself. With their denial of the artist’s touch (most frequently by subcontracting out the process of manufacturing the object), it is clear that “anyone could make them.” These positions are echoed in the responses of critic Brian O’Doherty and sculptor Mark Di Suvero as quoted in Daniel Marzona, Minimal Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2004), p. 18. The same criticisms surface during classroom discussions of Minimalist art. 17 Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 303. 18 For this statement of 1962, see Reinhardt, Art as Art; Anne Rorimer, New Art in the 60s and 70s. Redefining Reality (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001), 14–15; and Crow, Rise of the Sixties, p. 118. Compare Rosenberg, Anxious Object, pp. 52–54. In addition, see Patterson Sims, “Reinhardt, Ad(olph Dietrich Friedrich),” in Dictionary of Art, Vol. 26, pp. 126–127. 19 Rorimer, New Art, p. 14, cites Reinhardt’s distrust of color: “there is something wrong, irresponsible and mindless about color, something impossible to control.” One also needs to be able to view the paintings under the most trying of conditions, including where cast shadows establish patterns on the surface that were not intended by the artist. This was the case with Reinhardt’s painting in Chicago last summer. 20 Picasso, one of the acknowledged masters of early twentieth-century painting, used a very low-keyed palette in his cubist still-lifes painted between 1908 and 1912. These are spatially complex works, and this space is constructed through the modulation of areas of closely related colors. Viewers (and critics) see these paintings as visually more satisfying than Reinhardt’s spare, blank, and “touchless” surfaces. But Reinhardt uses color to construct space in the same way. 21 This parallels what Donald Kuspit, Redeeming Art: Critical Reveries (New York: Allworth Press and the School of Visual Arts, 2000), p. 310, calls the “dialectical or critical couple”: the art work and the receptive viewer. 22 Robert C. Morgan, End of the Art World (New York: Allworth Press and the School of Visual Arts, 1998), pp. 51–53, outlines something similar with what he calls “our boredom in relation to [Cezanne’s] disinterestedness. 23 See Jeremy Lewison, “Andre, Carl,” in Dictionary of Art, Vol. 2, pp. 12–13, for the key publications on this artist. 24 Joselit, American Art since 1945, p. 101, analyzes this well. Andre intended that his floor pieces be walked on. Once the viewer walks on the surface of the work, he or she cannot see it in its entirety, but others in the gallery can. Compare Carla Gottlieb, Beyond Modern Art (New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1976), p. 246 (citing Andre’s rationale for making horizontal sculptures): “so you can be in the middle of a sculpture and not see it at all—which is perfectly all right.” The full text appears in Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum 8, no. 10 (June 1970) 57. 25 References to rugs and carpets run through early critical accounts of Andre’s floor pieces. As in prayer rugs, the space created by Andre’s floor pieces is self-contained and self-limited and architectural. Prayer rugs are literally portable architecture.

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Diane Waldman, Carl Andre (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1970), p. 19, repeats Andre’s statement that what he did was “to place Brancusi’s Endless Column down flat, thus voiding it of its active and aggressive character: ‘Most sculpture is priapic with the male organ in the air. In my work Priapus is down to the floor. The engaged position is to run along the earth.’ ” 27 Marzona, Minimal Art, pp. 18–19 and 56–60. 28 The coloristic property and surfaces of his materials have been the focal points of discussion of Judd’s works since the late 1980s. Initially, it was the spare, austere handling of the industrial materials and the mechanical application of color, which (starting in 1964) he outsourced to the Bernstein Brothers. Critics, missing the nod to Duchamp, deplored Judd’s contracting out of the manufacturing of his boxes. 29 See Alfred Pacquement, “Judd, Donald,” in Dictionary of Art, Vol. 17, p. 677. Judd’s criticism (including that on exhibitions by abstract expressionists) appeared in Arts from 1959 to 1961 and in Arts Magazine from 1962 to 1965. These are reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, op. cit. 30 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Arts Yearbook 8 (1965) 74—82, reprinted in Complete Writings, 181–189. “Specific object” as a descriptive term had none of the architectural implications of “Primary Structure” or the graphic implications of “ABC Art,” two designations used for Minimalist works in the mid 1960s. 31 This is my response to seeing the Judd in Chicago, most recently in late June 2004. Judd’s Untitled (1969) in the City Art Museum of St. Louis, Missouri, is a very similar work but is made up of several boxes; see Rorimer, New Art, p. 21, and compare Gottlieb, Beyond Modern Art, pp. 177–179 and 240–244. Keith Miller, “Bridge over Blue, Review of Colour After Klein at the Barbican Art Gallery,” Times Literary Supplement (London) (June 10, 2005) 24, also touches upon the visual delights of Judd’s boxes. 32 Arthur Lubow, “The Art Land. The Soul of Minimalism Deep in the Heart of Texas,” Sunday New York Times Style Magazine. Travel Spring 2005 (March 20, 2005) 126–131. The published photographs of Judd’s series of concrete boxes set out in a field are especially evocative, but the highly reflective boxes arranged in his gallery at Marfa share references with the surrounding architecture. They look like they were designed to go in this space! 33 Michael Kimmelman, “The Dia Generation,” Sunday New York Times Magazine (April 6, 2003) 30–37, 58, 61, 72, and 7–77. Here, too, Judd’s series of boxes take on an architectural aspect. At Dia Beacon, the interior space was reconstructed specifically to show these works. 34 Compare Judd’s statements in “Artists on Museums” (originally in Arts Yearbook 9 (1967) as reprinted in Complete Writings, pp. 195–196. These remain major criticisms of traditional museum and gallery space by contemporary artists. Sometimes the artworks are too big for the allotted space. At other times, the space is too big or grand and the artworks are “lost” in their surroundings. Or the artworks “clash” with their surroundings. This can be seen in two illustrations in Marzona, Minimal Art, pp. 45 and 53, where the massive and space works fight the Rococo and neoclassical decorations of the exhibition rooms. Other criticisms center on poor lighting or the unsympathetic arrangement of artworks within an interior. For Judd’s comments, see “Complaints: part II” [originally in Arts Magazine (March 1973)] in Complete Writings, pp. 207–211. In recent years new museums of contemporary art, many of which are housed in former factory or industrial buildings, have opened. The most famous of these are Mass MoCA in North Hampton, Massachusetts, Dia Beacon in Beacon, New York, and the Tate Modern in London. William Feaver, “Donald Judd [at the] Tate Modern, London,” Art News 103, no. 3 (May 2004) 159, cites how Judd’s boxes work with the interior space of the gallery.

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Miller, “Bridge over Blue,” p. 24. The Judd sculpture in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, a vertical work of green boxes, is similar in format to that discussed by Miller, but the color statement is stronger and the complex shadows (cast by multiple light sources) played along the adjacent perpendicular wall, too, at least until that gallery was closed in spring of 2005. 36 Allan Kaprow, “The Best Use of the Past (and Present) is Misuse,” in “Jackson Pollock: An Artist’s Symposium, Part I,” Art News 66, no. 2 (April 1967) 33 and 59–61. The environmental aspects of viewing these works and the constantly changing nature of the viewing space have received some attention from critics. This, of course, also links them to Happenings and other examples of performance art that can be traced to the dance and theatrical works produced by the Constructivists and at the Bauhaus. 37 Morgan, End of the Art World, p. 53 suggests that Cezanne might have had something like this in mind in his 1904 Mont Sainte-Victoire (in Philadelphia): “Looking at this painting of Mont Sainte-Victoire by Cezanne, to really come to terms with it, is to enter into the process of boredom and begin building one’s personal experience with the work. In Zen, students or disciples    are asked to build ‘Mountains of the mind.’ To look at Cezanne’s mountain through this painting is to begin to build step-by-step an experience that is beyond all the hyperbole. It is an experience beyond what the media dictates. It is a level of understanding that exists on the most intimate level of vision. Real mountains are hard to get at. One has to view them carefully and begin climbing. Through boredom, one begins to take the first step, then the second, then the third. Eventually, the experience of the mountain begins to happen. It begins to take hold. Suddenly, you find yourself there.” 38 Frank Stella’s tautologic epigram was coined during a radio interview in 1964. For his full statement, see Rorimer, New Art, 15. In a sense, these artworks are like a Rorschach test, but without the ink blot. 39 Kaprow, “Best Use,” pp. 59–61; and “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” in Off Limits. Rutgers University and the Avant-Garde, 1957–1967, edited by Joan Marter (Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 1999), pp. 131–133, and especially p. 132 on his first responses to Rauschenberg’s white paintings. 40 “Interview with Allan Kaprow,” p. 132. Cage observed that Rauschenberg’s white paintings served as “airports for shadows and dust” and “mirrors of the air”; cited in Shinn, Duchamp Effect, pp. 78–79. 41 Cage was a world-renowned mycologist, and he lectured on this subject at the New School for Social Research in New York; see “Interview with George Segal,” in Off Limits, p. 144. Cage’s mushroom statement figured in several class discussions in Donald Goodman’s Aesthetics course at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in the fall semester 1966, where the cultural references ran the gamut from the psychedelic properties of various species to the threat of nuclear annihilation. See note 12 for Cage’s interest in and championing of Zen. Also see “Interview with Letty Lou Eisenhauer, New York City (April 26, 1996),” in Off Limits, pp. 149–150, for the influence of Zen on the artists at Rutgers, and Hapgood, “Interview with Allan Kaprow (1992),” pp. 117–119, for the influence of Zen on his art and that of his contemporaries.

BRUCE ROSS

DANCES WITH BEARS The Beginnings of Western Art

Cave art is 250 centuries old, and the Magdalenian cave art, which “constitutes approximately 80 % of all Paleolithic representations,” is 7,000 years in duration, according to Randall White, professor of anthropology at New York University and a leading expert on prehistoric life.1 The cave art in present-day France is regarded as the most impressive of all. One need only consider the so-called Chinese horses at Lascaux Cave,2 the mammoths of Rouffignac Cave,34 the ibex at Grotte de Font de Gaume,5 the hand prints and spotted horses at Grotte de Pech-Merle,6 or the line of sculpted horses at Le Cap Blanc.7 In a 2005 trip to these and related sites I confirmed the anonymous artists’ skillful use of rock formation to create dimensionality and superimposition and shading to evoke depth and narrative, often at great intervals between paintings or carvings. The use of cave bear scratches at Rouffignac Cave to depict the long hair on drawings of mammoths is a demonstrative example. What is of special interest is the relation of those artists and their respective culture to the animals depicted, particularly the cave bear. In this latter case, the bears’ cave scratchings may have had a direct effect on precipitating the idea of cave art. At Grottes de l’Ardèche humans were occupying the caves between 35,000 and 11,000 years ago. Here we find cave bear footprints embedded in the floor of the cave.8 We also find the delicate painting in red ochre of the outline of the bear that inhabited this cave.9 At the Grotte de Bara-Bahau we find an etching of a cave bear with one bulging eye, dating from 14,000 years ago, becoming a bas-relief because of the stone structure of that wall.10 During winter hibernation, the cave bears would scratch on the cave walls. In one case at Bara-Bahau, the artist created a human hand out of these scratchings.11 At Grotte de Combarelles, our guide said that a bear claw was used for such etching. It has been suggested that the canine teeth from which jewelry was made were taken from cave bears that died during hibernation.12 Above all, these instances suggest that the cave bear was a culturally important figure for these earliest attempts at representation in the Western tradition. There are many delicate engravings of the outlined female form in cave art. At les Combarelles, dating from as far back as 13,000 years, minimalist-like 207 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 207–212. © 2008 Springer.

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outlines of the female form occur.13 Far more male and female representations are, however, abstractions of sexuality, often using the technique of superimposition. At Combarelles, we have two figures of females next to each other with vulva symbols superimposed upon them, and in another place, superimposed male figures, at least one of whom has an erect penis.14 These engravings are unique in the context of cave art because there is a general lack of representation of human figures in comparison with animal ones. Of the male and female representations, there are far more abstractions of sexuality, such as fields of vulva symbols, a split triangle, or the parallel lines of the penis, appearing here and there in larger scenes. This has encouraged, following the reception of the images as “art,” the interest in all cave art as reflecting a fertility and hunting ethos. Many of the depicted images link human and animal figures. On an engraved antler from Grotte de Sturtz, on one side we have a reclining or crawling female figure and on the other a standing bull. The two are linked by a barbed symbol on the woman’s hip and the bull’s flank, obviously intending a parallel connection here.15 On an engraved bone from 15,000 years ago, from Site de Raymonden à Chancelade, we have a pendant made up of the four legs, head, and the back line of a bison flanked by seven figures.16 The intention of such painting becomes more obvious in the so-called scene of the bison and sorcerer drawn in charcoal at Grotte de Villars. Here the standing bull is facing and almost touching a peculiar human figure with long hair and a curved posture. The human figure can be seen to be dancing, perhaps in a trance.17 It is only a step away from this human dancer to hybrid human and animal figures that depict trance states connected somehow to fertility and hunting. The most famous of these images, called “the horned god” or “the sorcerer,” is a composite dancing figure from Grotte de Trois-Frères. It is made up of human legs and torso and paws for hands, a deer-like face with exaggerated antlers, something like a fox tail, and an erect penis. Also from Grotte de TroisFrères is another composite whose head and four legs and torso are those of a bison and whose back legs are those of a human.18 Another hybrid figure, from Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, represents a half-lion and half-woman.19 The so-called unicorn at Lascaux offers a deer-like figure with an unusually distended belly and two large antlers and a head, if seen correctly, that is human. It is unusual among the hundreds of animal figures in Lascaux. It is the last figure in a long line of such animals, and in fact seems to be coaxing them on.20 The only other human-like figure at Lascaux is the well-known bird-headed figure in “the pit.” This figure is part of a symbolic hunting scene. A charging bull with head lowered has a spear embedded in its entrails, which are falling out. In front of the bull is a figure with a human torso and feet and erect penis

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and a bird’s head and bird’s feet for hands. Beside him is a vertical staff with the figure of a bird on top of it and what appears to be an atlatl. The pit is six meters below the Great Hall where the unicorn was. Beside the scene is a departing rhinoceros and some dots, and across from it a single horse.21 Apparently these latter two images are not part of the hunting scene. Bird images are apparently very rare in European prehistoric art. Coincidentally, in a prehistoric rock art hunting scene from eastern Colorado, a figure that has been interpreted as “some form of bird” has also been recently interpreted as “supervisor of the hunt,”22 suggestive of the unicorn of Lascaux. In the pit scene we have a clear hybrid figure that incorporates both the hunting and fertility ethos, notwithstanding this may be a trance state, for it is certainly non-representational in a painterly sense. The bird-headed figure appears on the way to being gored. That it is falling or lying informs it as symbolic of a trance or dream state like those depicted in Native North American rock art. Whether of an animal, human, or hybrid animal–human, the imagery of being pierced in prehistoric cave art, as well as worldwide rock art, might be elucidated, in conjunction with the shamanic trance state, by imagery of the so-called “wounded man.” In terms of the cave art of France, there are only a few images of this figure. The guide at Grotte de Cougnac told us the lines embedded in the two figures there were representations of self-sacrifice, like Christ. One can think of the various Renaissance paintings of Saint Sebastian. Likewise, in an Inuit carving we find a shaman who is impaled by his own spear,23 or in a southern African rock painting we have a reclining human figure impaled by many arrows.24 Both of these figures have erect penises. Some strikingly similar symbolism is found in the little-known prehistoric giant mural paintings of the Comandu culture of Baja California. In one at Cueva de las Flechas, there are depicted four human figures with characteristic uplifted arms in homage to the sun and superimposed over a deer. One of the figures has a small animal leaning against his leg and seven arrows embedded in his body.25 In another, at San Borjitas, a number of human figures are impaled also, with six of these “arrows” in the central figure.26 In a final one, at San Matias, the image named “the king,” a standing figure with his arms upraised, is impaled with fourteen or so lines.27 At Grotte de Cougnac we find two “wounded men,” both appearing to be naked, one headless. One of the figures has three lines in his back; the other has seven lines embedded throughout his body. The latter appears to have an erect penis. Both are stooped over in the trance-like dance position mentioned before.28 Both are drawn inside an animal, the first inside an elk-like creature,29 the second inside the head of a mammoth.30 A third

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“wounded man” appears at Grotte de Pech-Merle, drawn in ochre 10,000 years ago. This figure is naked and pierced by eight lines, as well as being in the stooped trance position. It is also attached by a line to a glyph that our guide described as symbolizing shelter.31 There are a number of such glyphs in prehistoric cave art. Moreover, in much Native North American prehistoric images lines leading from a human’s head to a glyph represent contact with the spirit world, and such line glyphs are a prominent part of the Mayan written language. There may be a further stage to the wounded man in which the shaman takes the form of an animal. According to Pascal Raux in his Animism and the First Arts such trance states are depicted in cave art and are based on the ingestion of hallucinogenic substances. As part of that stage there is often vomiting and nosebleeds. Raux reproduces two such images of what he calls “shaman-bears,” one from Grotte de Trois-Frères and one from Grotte de Chauvet. The first is bleeding heavily from the nose and mouth; the second one from the nose and ears. Both are pierced by lines and covered by circles.32 Why are these not merely representations of an actually wounded bear? There are cave art depictions of animals embedded with arrows but not bleeding, and a few animal images bleeding but not embedded with arrows or spears. Further, none of the “wounded men” are likewise bleeding. However, most of the bear depictions are neither wounded nor embedded with lines, making these two bears special cases. The exaggerated profusion of blood also makes one wonder about the literal representation here. Thus, there is a bit of plausibility to Raux’s claim. The term “cave art,” however, may be partially considered a misnomer. In a 1988 issue of Current Anthropology33 David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson suggested that cave art representations were the product of trance states. They presented a model to explain the abstract images, natural representations, and hybrid animal–human forms, including those of bears in cave art. There are three stages in their model. In stage 1 the figures are geometric; in stage 2 the representational images of animals occur; and in stage 3 hybrid human and animal figures appear.34 If Lewis-Williams and Dowson are correct about the trance state stages, which appear to be plausible, based on a number of the cave art examples we have discussed, we might see the impaled and bleeding shaman-bears as occurring midway between stage 2 and stage 3. However, this is not to say that bears were not in fact hunted or defended against. At Grotte de Montespan there is a prehistoric clay model of a bear covered with holes left by spear thrusts.35 Therefore, in prehistoric imagery, a bear could be a natural bear, a symbolic bear, or a representation of an internal transformational bear.

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Accordingly, the surprising number of abstract forms in prehistoric cave art, including the spearlike lines, could be delegated to stage 1 of the Lewis-Williams and Dowson model. It is known, in fact, that cross-cultural experience of shamanic states produced by hallucinogenic substances or trance dancing causes tingling all over the body. Such states may offer an explanation for the spear-like lines and, furthermore, by analogy, an explanation of certain mystical experience, such as in Saint Teresa’s sense of being embedded by arrows. As for the surprising colored checkerboards and other geometric forms of cave art, these could be assigned to stage 1, for example, the colored squares at Lascaux36 or the engraved grid at Grotte de Bara-Bahau.37 We can find the beginnings of written language formation as we know it in these forms as well as the glyphs that are occasionally attached to cave art images. The grid pattern of the cave art period later shows itself as the grid pattern representing Mother Earth that is ubiquitous in the Vallée des Merveilles in southeast France of the Iron Age and appears as a symbol of a field in Sumerian. This is not unlike the embedded ox head in our letter “a,” ultimately derived from the Phoenician word “ox.” In a fortunate occurrence, in this burgeoning forth of human consciousness, natural landscape, imagination, and language formation, those marvelously engraved and drawn cave art figures of mammoths at Rouffignac incorporate the cave bear scratches on the walls of caves as the hair of these creatures.38 As for the prehistoric cave bears, there is evidence embedded as footprints and paw prints in the floor of some of these caves that bears may have danced with humans.39 On one period plaquette from the Dordogne, humans and bears in fact appear to be dancing together, at least in one dimension or another.40 Hunters and gatherers, the values of the artists who produced these and other cave art images may never be known completely. Perhaps, whatever the interpretation of these images, there is the art of it. NOTES 1 Randall White, Prehistoric Art, the Symbolic Journey of Humankind (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003), p. 22. 2 Brigitte and Gilles Deluc, Connaître Lascaux (Luçon: Editions Sud Ouest, 1995), pp. 25–26. 3 Marie-Odile and Jean Plassard, Visiting Rouffignac Cave (Luçon: Editions Sud Ouest, 1995), pp. 8–9, 11. 4 White, p. 41. 5 Postcard, Grotte de Font de Gaume. 6 Guide de visite de la Grotte du Pech-Merle (Boulogne: Grapho 12, 1999). 7 Alain Roussot, Visiter le Cap Blanc (Luçon: Editions Sud Ouest, 1994), pp. 16–17, 19, 21, 20.

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Bernard Gély, Grottes ornées de l’Ardèche, L’art des cavernes (Saint-Jomier: Editions le dauphine, 2005), p. 30. 9 Bernard Gèly, p. 26. 10 Postcard, Grotte de Bara-Bahau. 11 Postcard, Grotte de Bara-Bahau. 12 White, p. 121. 13 Monique and Claude Archambeau, Les Combarelles (Pierre Fanlac, 1997), pp. 12, 19, 23. 14 Monique and Claude Archambeau, pp. 12, 16. 15 White, p. 99. 16 Postcard, Site de Raymonden à Chancelade (Dordogne). 17 Postcard, Grotte de Villars. 18 Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Les chamanes de la préhistoire (Paris: La maison des roches, 2001), pp. 81, 52. 19 White, p. 72. 20 Archéologia 420 (Mars 2005), 31. 21 Archéologia 420 (Mars 2005), 22. 22 La Pintura, 33:1 (September 2005), 2. 23 David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 276. 24 Lewis-Williams, p. 276. 25 Harry W. Crosby, The Cave Paintings of Baja California (San Diego, CA: Sunbelt, 1997), p. 63. 26 Crosby, p. 115. 27 Crosby, p. 206. 28 Michel Lorblanchet and Francis Jach, Cougnac, les grottes magiques    (Gourdon: Images, 2004), p. 15. 29 Lorblanchet and Jach, p. 20. 30 Lorblanchet and Jach, p. 21. 31 Postcard, Grotte de Pech-Merle. 32 Pascal Raux, Animisme et arts premiers (Fontaine Cedex: Éditions Thot, 2004), p. 188. 33 David Lewis-Williams and Thomas A. Dowson, “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phemomenon in Upper Paleolithic Art,” Current Anthropology 29 (1988), 20:1–45. 34 Clottes and Lewis-Williams, p. 106. 35 Denis Viadou, Prehistoric Art and Civilization (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998), p. 110. 36 Viadou, p. 99. 37 Postcard, Grotte Ornée de Bara-Bahau. 38 White, p. 121. 39 Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls, Dordogne and the Lot (London: Cadogan, 2001), p. 51. 40 Alain Roussot, L’art préhistorique (Luçon: Éditions Sud Ouest, 1997), p. 117.

JAMES WERNER AND ELENA STYLIANOU

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF BEAUTY IN CONTEMPORARY TECHNOLOGY

It’s as though in the last days of your youth you loved a woman who was still beautiful, and you were always afraid, as you held her naked at noon, of the memory aroused by your embrace    It’s as though    All that remains is the perfume of the absence of a young form. George Seferis

As the arguments of this paper unfold, we hope to clarify that there is a growing need to escape from previous considerations of the aesthetically beautiful as something embodied in appearances, or in the “properties that consist of a certain composition of color and figure, causing delight in the beholder” (Locke, 1913). Art has always been defined by such acclamations of the beautiful, similarly to a woman who we need to sustain as beautiful through memory, through what we have already defined and known as such. Plato, however, would suggest that ultimately, beauty is to be found in nature’s processes and our relationship to those processes as natural beings. Nowadays, art is enforcing interdisciplinarity, an interchange between the real and the virtual world, that is established through digital technologies. Such considerations regarding the relationship between art and technology simultaneously establish a dilemma regarding the relationship between art and beauty. If we hold onto the idea that beauty is found in relationships to nature and natural occurrences, then there is an uncertainty as to whether art today manifests beauty. In the limitations of this study we focus on digital technologies as one of the multiple forms that technology takes today. The question concerns notion of beauty and the way it is challenged by the aesthetics of the digital. We present the idea of a new form of aesthetics, that of “techno-aesthetics”, as well as the notion of beauty as one that is based on transformation, emergence, and uncertainty—uncertainty of where the boundaries lie. Additionally, we 215 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 215–224. © 2008 Springer.

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discuss how fascination with progressive technology might hold the key to humanity’s reconnection with a fundamental beauty found within life itself, and its processes. Specific examples of artists, works are presented in order to support our arguments. I. A N E E D F O R R E D E F I N I T I O N

The Brazilian Waldermar Cordeiro (Fabris, 1997), a pioneer of computer art, asserted that art whose main emphasis lies on the material object restricts audience access to the work. Materiality creates a certain space that is already always prescribed by its creator. There is a restriction of free access to the work and therefore to its beauty, because it is a predetermined notion of what the beautiful is. However, beauty does not always lie in things that are aesthetically beautiful. Beauty as a property of things and of art, that causes delight in the beholder can no longer fully sustain its complete definition because of the possibility of contemporary art to be all but beautiful. Danto (2004) suggests that “it has become increasingly evident that ours is an era of radical openness in which everything is possible as art” (p. 27). The ultimate and defining goal of art is not the pursuit of beauty as it used to be earlier in history. Nowadays art parallels life, “not through representation or narrative, but in its process of emergence, uncertainty, and transformation” (Ascott, 2003, p. 361). Now everything can be considered as art. Part of art’s materiality as they shape the ultimate form of the artwork. Having said that, the search for a redefinition of beauty that would account for the radical openness that emerges in the area of the arts seems important. Spatiotemporal expansion and materials, concepts, conceptions, human bodies, empty spaces, space, light, sound, and energy, all become. With digital technologies and the move towards digital art, we witness dematerialization of art in a world that is mainly material. What happens, though, when art becomes independent of the physical existence of the object? How could we ever be able to define art’s beauty if we cannot locate it in a substantial form? Could we then just search for beauty in the essence of things? if we are able to find beauty even beyond materiality, in our relationship with natural occurrences. There remains a feeling of ambiguity. II. T R A N S F O R M A T I O N O F B E A U T Y : T E C H N O - A E S T H E T I C S

So    Let me submit to Art/ Art knows how to shape forms of Beauty/ almost imperceptibly, completing life/ blending impressions/ blending day with day (C. P. Kavafis).

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The artist Kirsten Geisler exploits the possibilities of digital technology to create artistic beauty. She develops women’s heads based on the results of research about our perception of beauty and she then designs them on the computer. Her work influences our perception of reality and materiality, which virtual. The simulation of real perception of beauty in the virtual space of digital technologies suspends reality itself by transcending it into a virtual experience. The materiality of a beautiful face becomes immaterial and timeless because of the fluidity of the digital space to and the ability of the later recreate a concept of beauty into something that escapes our everyday reality (Figure 1). Although Geisler’s “beauties” appear to fulfill every criterion of what seems to be the “ideal” of female beauty, they are profoundly irritating because of a total lack of expression in their elegantly proportioned faces. Also, they are irritating because the perfected clone confronted and compared with our ideal image is unpredictable. The readiness of those virtual “beauties” to communicate—laughing, winking, speaking—is evidently beyond our control. Geisler’s comparison shows that the stereotyped portrayal of women has reached such a degree of artificiality that the boundaries between the real world and the virtual world are becoming increasingly insignificant. So, while we look toward progress and technology for the future, the clone throws us back to the reality of our own humanity: We miss emotions, warmth, and things considered physical.

Figure 1. Dream of Beauty 2.0, 1999, Karen Geisler

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Geisler’s attempt to create beauty through the use of digital technology reminds us of Hegel’s Third Realm Beauty. This is the kind of beauty which “something possesses only because it was caused to possess it through actions whose purpose it is to beautify” (Danto, 2003, p. 68). The notion of beautification in its own turn takes us back to the idea of the distinction between reality and appearances, reminding us of the poet’s woman who is still beautiful but in its essence lacks of the young form. Nowadays, computer programs [are] capable of extracting the norm from as many images as one cares to scan into one’s machine.    The resultant morph is unlikely to match any individual we may encounter and it is similarly unlikely that an individual human being will perfectly exemplify the prevailing idea of beauty (Danto, 2003, p.74).

Current technologies indeed have the capability of beautifying what is already there. They do not change the essence of things, but rather their appearances. Hence the question is: “Are things beautiful because technology has the ability to beautify them, by creating a greater degree of symmetry and regularity in the appearance?” one has difficulty answering the question just by look at Geisler’s work, because the aesthetic result of the specific work’s content is antithetical to its title, Beauties. They surprise us with the confrontation of an oxymoronic schema of representation that seems to lead us back to the idea that a representation that lacks of physicality it is also one that lacks of beauty. This is the result of a lack of an “aura” that is derived from originality and from the impossibility of reproduction, which is the case for nature. However, the “aura,” as Claudia Giannetti (n.d.) says, “is a category of perception and can therefore only arise during the process of reception, it is not inherent to the originality or authenticity or uniqueness of the works creation— it is not bound to the material or the object, it is observer-dependent.” This opens up the space for the possibility of a new way of realizing beauty based on the use of digital technologies. This is a new form of aesthetics, that of techno-aesthetics. Digital technology allows for the aesthetics of dematerialization, since the object dissolves into bits and bytes of information that simultaneously create an alternative form of materialization. The object exists in a non-space, that of virtuality, and therefore has no physical or visceral substance. Duplication of time and space or of physical beauties (as in Geisler’s work) by technological simulation turns real time and natural spaces into interchangeable quantities. This is what Virilio described as an era of absence that brings forth aesthetics based on lack, loss, and dematerialization. This mirrors the woman that is still beautiful, because of the absence of the young form. Similarly, technology can no longer be defined solely in terms of its instrumentality or function, but rather as a matter of aesthetics and representation. It recalls the Greek idea

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of poiesis, of bringing forth “a form of unsecuring that is non-instrumental, and thus more closely related to artistic production (poiesis)” (Rutsky, 1999, p. 7). Therefore, not representing the functionality of the machine and the instrumentality of technology, but moving a step further by bringing technology and aesthetics closer to the initial notion of techne creates a new form of aura that defines beauty within the context of technology. Technology moves the definition of aesthetics into one that reflects the fusion between technology and art: Like technology [aesthetics’ definition] too comes to be seen as an unsettling, generative process, which continually breaks elements free of their previous context and recombines them in different ways. In this way, the technological and the aesthetic begin to ‘turn’ into one another (Rutsky, 1999, p. 8).

III. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D T H E ‘ N A T U R E ’ O F B E A U T Y

At its start, technological production originated as an artistic poiesis with technological innovation—a creativity venture. In other words, it was a working process of aesthetic discovery and realization through the venue of mechanical development. Heidegger suggested that through technological development we lost touch with a spiritual, transcendent connection that should exist in beings that belong as part of a larger nature—“Being” in this world (Heidegger, 1982). The process of discovery developed into a process of production whereby aesthetically driven aspirations were lost; productivity became only for the sake of production, whereby the perpetual process itself was fulfillment. Eventually technology became lost in a rationale of productivity. In attempts to regain an aesthetic relationship with technology through its production, humanity became caught in a cycle of production that further destroyed any aesthetic, spiritual relationship it held with being part of nature. In time, humanity would lose its connection with existence as part of a larger nature, outside of technological productivity. This productive process has cultivated an instrumental rationale in which we categorize every type of physical representation into a system of justification that lies within truth and falsity and for instrumental purposes. Yet, in spite of Heidegger’s theory, recent developments in digital technology have presented us with visual stimulation that holds hope for an aura in technological rationality. An artwork can always be grounded in intention and rationality by some means. It is human made, and therefore we can come to terms with it, and resolve our relationship to it within the confines of human understanding. A transcendent aesthetic experience found in nature lacks this relationship.

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Resolution within a transcendent experience in nature can only result from the interference of rationality. Cultural, social constructs become a divergence from the initial transcendent connection within the experience of nature in attempts to resolve nature’s sublime. Attempting to come to a resolution with this experience leads to a false conclusion, and actually is an escape from continuous confrontation with the situation. This is one of art’s ultimategoals: to present us with something that fulfills an aesthetic revelation that extends beyond the confines of human explanation. This can happen in art only momentarily due to the nature of art’s manifestation through humanity’s own creative endeavors and our ability to resolve them. Nature, however, can re-present the unexplainable moment infinitely. While completely rational in technological terms, often experiences through new media in contemporary art transmit an aesthetic beauty that holds a relationship with the viewer that is resolved in a similar manner to the way that human-made objects are resolved: with a rational explanation as to how they were made. Techno-aesthetic experiences often accentuate an observerdependent aura that is based on the medium’s originality, authenticity, or uniqueness. And yet at the same time that rational explanation seems to also fit within the definition of those aesthetic experiences in nature that are left unresolved. Therefore, some digital experiences lie in the range of both explanations. In these experiences, beauty becomes a notion of logical, instrumental grounding within a system, object, or technological item of some sort that replicates the beautiful, spiritual experiences of nature. Through this technology, we are permitted to explore and create visually in a way that re-presents the world in a manner that allows us complete control over a constructed environment that we can physically interact with and still elude resolution with. The artist Casey Reas approaches natural beauty by pushing the phenomenal nature of computer simulations. Reas designs programs that are self developing. Given just a few parameters to follow, these programs are left to evolve into “environments” by their own evolutionary processes. In MicroImage (Figure 2) the concept of “emergence” refers to the generation of structures that are not specified or programmed. Similar to nature, in these systems of digital organisms are generated by cause and effect reactions. Reas explains:1 In Microimage structure emerges from the discreet movements of each organism as it modifies its position in relation to the environment. The structures generated through this process cannot be anticipated and evolve through continual iterations involving alterations to the programs and exploring the changes through interacting with the software. (Reas, n.p., 2003)

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Figure 2. Left: MicroImage, 2003. Right: Process 6, 2005. Casey Reas

In his piece Process/Drawing, Reas creates an environment where human engineering mimics the growth of organisms: [Reas’ artwork] employs the paradox in the qualitative nature of human perception and the quantitative rules which define digital culture. Relations are created between evolved natural systems and engineered synthetic systems. Organic form emerges from precise mechanical structures. Strict minimal rules are tempered with intuition to form dense kinetic surfaces. (Reas, n.p., 2003)

The twentieth century was witness to the growth of consumer culture fixated on creating simulacra. Jean Baudrillard believed that in a society of simulation, progression would foster what he called “hypertelia”: a fated catastrophe when the sophistication of a model outdoes the reality it attempts to comprehend (Butler, 1999). By attempting to capture some pre-existing real or express a reality outside of empirical perceptual presence, we delve deeper into an object-oriented system. But, however ill-fated or ‘unnatural’ digital simulation may be, it still holds value that satisfies a need for aesthetic fulfillment of pleasurable, “beautiful” experiences. While Kirsten Geisler’s digital representation of Beauties alludes to the fact that beauty extends beyond the simplicities of symmetry and cosmopolitan design, Rea’s art alludes to the same concept by directly presenting Plato’s notion of beauty through the nature of digital algorithms. Given the concepts of these artists’ works and Plato’s notions of beauty in all the processes and perceptions of life, we can begin to understand how this current state in the evolution of technology has allowed for the concept

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that beauty in nature ultimately encompasses new technology and its simulated realities as well. As mentioned before, one characteristic of beauty can be equated to the nonresolved within nature. Hence, beauty is that which cannot be rationalized: nature and its infinite aesthetic. In the technology of digital experiences, the original denial of nature in an aesthetically beautiful situation has allowed for the reunification with the fundamental need for understanding “Being.” These artists’ endeavors to relate how beauty is perceived in the advent of new technologies exemplifies this. Rather than being realized through the reintroduction of natural experiences, these ontological questions are reborn from what has been suggested to be the nemesis of “Being”: technological progress. There is the loss of an instrumental grounding by way of a transcendent experience of technology. In this situation, Baudrillard’s notion of “Hypertelia” falters. For that matter, Heidegger’s notions of a lost aura through technological production must also be reassessed. We are left with the burden of redefining the questions of “Being” in a way that includes technological rationality as a priori to humanity’s understanding of it. Plato (1993), however, seems to have foreseen this dilemma. For him beauty is first recognized in nature—as Kant would suggest—through a ‘disinterested’ judgment of the natural; through the immediacy of an experience before the interference of rational thought. Reason, then, forces us to form thoughts of beauty into ideas, which eventually lead to institutions of thought. Only after we reach a loving relationship with all the various human creations of knowledge and form that we construct do we realize that beauty lies within all of it as a working system together (Plato, 1993). We come full circle to the original notion of nature in beauty, beauty in nature. It is only after this journey through the love of knowledge and form (physical or digital forms) that we can no longer employ notions of constructed forms or sensorial perceptions as a complete beauty within anything. The beautiful becomes the experience of life and everything in it. In a technological experience of beauty, the beautiful is simultaneously represented in the simulation of the real, and the de facto notion that this beautiful experience lies completely within a technological production. Through its own processes technology has re-established a path toward understanding an all-encompassing beauty by transcending its own instrumental definitions. Humanity has a need to rationalize everything. In our quest to further knowledge through scientific and technological innovation, each new discovery raises new questions and new discoveries. The purpose is not to replicate our physical world, but to produce more work to perpetuate ontological endeavors, continually raising new ideas and constantly making

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the world new to us. (Lyotard, 1984, p. ix). One trait of beauty is a love of immortality via renewal; beauty lies in the love of generation (Plato, 1993, pp. 30–34). In other words, beauty lies in that which perpetuates humanity -the natural process of life and death it represents our desire for the future. Therefore, in the sense of a scientific rationality, the beautiful is still something fleeting, something humanity is searching for in a particular logical construct. Hence, our desire for the perpetuation of technology and digital forms, which leads to the perpetuation of humanity into the future, can be seen not just as an ongoing search for beauty, but as part of the beautiful cycle of life in itself. Teachers College, Columbia University NOTE 1 In the description of MicroImage, “the choice of the words organism, ecosystem, environment, and clone are used abstractly. The word ‘organism’ can be replaced by ‘system’ or ‘machine.’ The use of terminology grounded in biology is used to emphasize the relation between the synthetic software structures used in the project and biological structures found in the natural world.” (Reas, 2003).

REFERENCES Ascott, R. (2003). Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Butler, R. (1999). Jean Baudrillard—The Defense of the Real. London: Sage. Danto, A. (2003). The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago: Open Court. Danto, A. (2004). Kalliphobia in contemporary art. Art Journal, 63(2), 25–35. Desmond, W. (1986). Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Diffey, T. J. (1991). Aesthetic instrumentalism. In The Republic of Art and Other Essays, pp.159–174. New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. Fabris, A. (1997). Waldemar Cordeiro: Computer Art Pioneer. Leonardo On-Line. Available at: http://mitpress2.mit.edu/ejournals/Leonardo/isat/spec.projects/fabris.html. Giannetti, C. Aesthetic Paradigms of Media Art. Media Art Net. Available at: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/aesthetics_of_the_digital/aesthetic_paradigms/. Goldsmith, M. T. (1999). The Future of Art: An Aesthetic of the New and the Sublime. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Heidegger, M. (1982). The Question Concerning Technology. New York: Harper & Row. Locke, J. (1913). Webster’s Dictionary. Available at: http://www.dictionary.net/beauty. Lyotard, J. F. (1984). The Post Modern Condition. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Mattick, P. (2003). Art in its Time: Theories and Practice of Modern Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Plato. (1993). Plato Symposium and Phaedrus (Unabridged). New York: Dover.

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Reas, C. E. B. (2003). Process/Drawing. Available at: http://www.reas.com/ Rutsky, R. L. (1999). High Techne: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

ARTHUR PIPER

BEAUTY AND TRUTH IN SCIENCE AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Debates about beauty, truth, and science often draw on the sense of awe that our understanding of nature itself inspires. For example, the technologies of scientific imaging are often held to capture previously unavailable visual realms in a way that advances our collective knowledge and extends further our sense of wonder at the power of science and at nature made spectacle. Recent successes in imaging the topology of the brain and the flows of blood that attend cognition are just one such example. Contemporary texts aimed at disseminating the visual work of scientists, such as the one edited by Ann Thomas,1 invite us to reflect on the way that aesthetic judgments about nonart images cross the supposed boundaries between the human and natural sciences. We may be able to talk of beautiful radiographs, molecule models, and equations almost as easily as we might talk of great works of visual art. Yet the link between the scientific conception of beauty and debates about beauty in phenomenological aesthetics, for example, is at best tenuous. While the aesthetic decisions that go into making images in science are akin to those that are taken by artists in their work, the talk about beauty that attends the images of science tends to border on the apparently superficial.2 For example, the English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, whose work I consider in this essay, suffers little discomfort in using the word “pretty” as a synonym for what he regards as “beautiful.” One only has to thumb through the pages of this volume to see how many aestheticians follow the same linguistic practice to appreciate that we are dealing with fundamentally different types of discourse. However, rather than following the distinctions drawn up in classical phenomenology between the human and natural sciences that would lock those discourses into separate domains of knowledge, I propose to limit the scope of this essay to two writers who were developing their ideas on beauty at roughly the same time—Paul Dirac and Martin Heidegger. Furthermore, I shall restrict myself to comments on non-mathematical papers by Dirac—the inventor of an equation by that name—and to the idea of beauty contained within Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.”3 I suggest that what might be called the structural conditions for beauty to arise out of truth are remarkably similar in the works that I have selected by each of these 225 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 225–238. © 2008 Springer.

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thinkers, even though the opposite appears to be the case at first sight. In this limited sense, this paper examines the specific role that beauty plays in relation to truth. One aspect of this relationship might be called the beauty of truth, since what is truthful for Dirac and Heidegger seems to be beautiful too. In addition, both thinkers suggest that truth has a universal structure, or origin, but the historical dimension of contingency introduced alongside this structure ultimately undermines metaphysical assumptions about its universality. I conclude by reflecting on how these texts by Dirac and Heidegger represent a phase of modern discourse that has since been replaced by postmodern, or post-structuralist, thought in both physics and cultural theory. SCIENCE AND ART

I have chosen Dirac and heidegger’s because the statements they make about the relationship between science and art make this kind of conciliatory reading look intractable. They reinforce the view that any link between the two domains of knowledge is tenuous and superficial. The apparent intractability of this reading comes, in part, from the way that each thinker distances himself from art, in the case of Dirac, and science, on the part of Heidegger. For example, when Dirac studied at Göttingen in Germany in 1927, he lived with fellow physicist Robert Oppenheimer, who was accustomed to reading Dante in the original Italian in his leisure hours. Dirac is thought to have once said to Oppenheimer: “How can you do both physics and poetry? In physics we try to explain in simple terms something that nobody knew before. In poetry it is quite the opposite.”4 In other words, poetry is only true in a trivial sense—it mists over the obvious—while science is true in a novel and deep sense. It creates truth. Similarly, in the artwork essay, Heidegger downgrades the status of science as a way of understanding the world in favor of the truth-giving power of art: science is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as science passes beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of beings as such, it is philosophy.5

And art: “Art lets truth originate.”6 So again, science is trivially “correct,” almost a derogatory term for Heidegger, whereas art creates a new truth that is deep and original. Looking from where we stand today, what might be called the poetry as “stuff and nonsense” argument of Dirac and the science as “trivially correct” argument of Heidegger are based on assumptions that art and science are just completely different types of knowledge, each with its own peculiar, essential

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characteristics. While I would not suggest that the human and natural sciences are the same, this paper challenges the view that the kinds of knowledge obtained in those different disciplines can be so easily and firmly delimited. The main purpose of this essay is to blur the boundaries between the two discourses by showing how their arguments share structural similarities that have similar theoretical consequences. If such an exercise is feasible, perhaps discussions about the relationship between them could be shifted onto more fruitful ground within phenomenology7 and science and assist in creating better cross-disciplinary work between the two. An inspiration to this essay is the approach attempted by the art historian Martin Kemp, who has sought “structural” similarities in the visual artefacts of both art and science.8 In applying this intuition to texts, a certain willingness to look at the phenomena of theory without disciplinary prejudice is required. It suggests, perhaps, the need to reconsider our attitude toward the word science itself, which became associated solely with the study of the natural and physical world from the mid-1800s onward. According to Otis, “Until that time it had denoted any sort of knowledge or skill, including the ‘science’ of boxing.”9 Such reflection may help us build upon the notion of science developed by Husserl to describe phenomenology in relation to its specific domains. Without wishing to challenge the objectivity of contemporary science, perhaps by treating its texts as a form of human discourse amenable to social analysis, as the products of shared social aptitudes and beliefs, we can circumvent the lingering and dulling effects of positivism and give science its head back so that it can reflect on its own activities.10 Such a move would involve a revision of Heidegger’s position on science and technology to show that he constantly conflates the activity of science with the attitude of scientism—the view that science alone holds the key to understanding human endeavors. While this essay does not provide a scholarly account that would do full justice to Heidegger’s views, the alternative view I am suggesting is best expressed through a critique of two aspects of his position that are overly reductive. My point is not to reformulate the phenomenological view of science through a critique of Heidegger, but to understand how his own position and that of a theoretical physicist might come to share common assumptions. In particular, their manifest reflections on the nature of historical time in philosophy and physics introduce a latent relativistic notion of truth that undermines its supposed universal structure. Apart from the obvious fact that Heidegger shares with Dirac the view that the human and natural sciences form distinct and separate realms of knowledge, there are two other assumptions that he makes in his analysis that are important here. First, Heidegger assumes that science is a homogeneous

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field of activity,11 and second, that this activity is best defined by, and understood through, its conceptual grounding in mathematics. The two assumptions are intimately interrelated because, for Heidegger, mathematics presents the grounds for the possibility of science by providing both a way of viewing the world and by producing a world of objects that are understandable in a uniform way. Mathematics is the origin of science. The science of Newton is revolutionary precisely because it destroys the Aristotelian concept of being, in which each thing has its own nature according to its particular kind. For Newton, nature is reduced to a congeries of bodies of essentially the same kind that are in need of categorization and ordering through measurement.12 Fundamentally, this modern science understands things by applying a priori laws to their observation: Science is not observational in nature, it is axiomatic.13 As such, the scientific view reduces its objects to a set of predetermined, abstract properties. In doing so, it overlooks the realm of practical meaning that provides the context for our everyday understanding of Being.14 While there is certainly power and subtlety in Heidegger’s argument, it shares positivist assumptions about the priority of physics in descriptions of nature. The philosopher Nancy Cartwright has challenged what she calls the “pyramid”15 structure of the natural sciences, which places physics at the top of a hierarchy of disciplines descending in order of their ability to describe the world on firm foundations. Physics sits on top of the realm of knowledge like a feudal king on his throne and is next only to God. Its vassals, in order of priority, include chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, history, and psychology. The further from physics one moves, the less foundational is the descriptive account of nature. Unlike Heidegger, Cartwright sees that when science is viewed in light of its own empirical activities, it is better understood as a heterogeneous set of disciplines that work incredibly effectively in some areas and fairly poorly in others. In addition, this heterogeneous world looks curiously Aristotelian: “as appearances suggest, we live in a dappled world, a world rich in different things, with different natures, behaving in different ways. The laws that describe this world are a patchwork, not a pyramid.”16 In this patchwork, physics is dethroned in a democratizing process that gives equal rights to all other forms of knowledge. Aligned to this alternative view of the natural sciences is the belief that science is best understood by looking at what scientists do rather than what they say about it. This critique would put into question the priority Heidegger affords to the conceptual analysis of the essence of science and its grounding in mathematics. Instead, it would be grounded primarily on practice. While an ethnographic approach has been adopted by sociologists of science from the 1970s, many scientists have also cast doubt on the kind of conceptual

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justifications given by researchers in writing up the results of their experiments. As the 1965 Nobel Prize winner and molecular biologist François Jacob said, Science is above all a world of ideas in motion. To write an account of research is to immobilize these ideas; to freeze them: it’s like describing a horse race from a snapshot. It also transforms the very nature of research; formalizes it. Writing substitutes a well-ordered train of concepts and experiments for a jumble of untidy efforts, of attempts born of a passion to understand.17

In other words, science writing is an act of window dressing that tends to reify science practice. The conceptual analysis of the way that science is grounded in mathematics, while still crucial, could not by itself define its total essence in the way that Heidegger claims. Given that Heidegger shares with the quantum scientists of the early twentieth century both the positivist assumption about the priority of physics as a discipline in a homogenous realm of natural sciences and an approach to describing science through the philosophical exegesis of its conceptual framework, it might come as less of a surprise to us that his and Dirac’s arguments share common structural similarities that are the subject of this essay. THE PLACE OF BEAUTY

On one issue, at least, Dirac and Heidegger are united. Each, in his way, seeks to contest the prevailing view in their own disciplines that beauty and truth do not belong together. In his essay “The Relation between Mathematics and Physics,” Dirac argues that since the advent of modern physics in Newton’s time the guide to truth had been the “principle of simplicity.”18 This guiding principle, however, had become suddenly defunct with the appearance of Einstein’s theory of relativity. A different criterion as a guide to truth had to be found that could take account of the new complexity. Dirac writes, What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating. The theory of relativity introduced mathematical beauty to an unprecedented extent into the description of Nature.19

For Dirac, when beauty occurs in mathematical form, truth is at hand—or, following the advent of relativity theory, beauty becomes a signifier for truth. Heidegger also broaches the issue of the place of beauty quite early in the artwork essay. He proposes that beauty and truth should belong together, with truth as the primary function of art: “The essence of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.”20 This appears to go against one

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of the standard views that he outlines in the essay, which confines beauty to the realm of philosophical aesthetics: “until now,” he says, “art presumably has had to do with the beautiful and beauty, and not with truth.    Truth, in contrast, belongs to logic. Beauty, however, is reserved for aesthetics.”21 One of Heidegger’s aims in the essay is to change this view. Buried within this statement is a critique of the subjectivization of art, which reduces the truth of art to an aesthetic experience that is unique to each viewer because it is based on perceptual sense data. When beauty is properly reconciled to truth later in the essay, it is as a kind of shared social and historical revelation “shining”22 in the work—a signifier that points to the historically collective truth of the artwork. However, neither Dirac nor Heidegger spends much time clarifying the meaning of beauty in the texts in question, where it is clearly a key term. It could be argued that beauty, while given a central place in the conceptual landscape of each thinker, is itself a bit of an empty term—a linguistic marker, the purpose of which is to emphasize the heightened profundity of the truth in question. As empty as these two concepts of beauty appear to be on the surface, even at this level they are different in at least one respect. Dirac appears to hold the kind of subjectivist view of beauty that Heidegger objected to in the passage quoted in the previous paragraph. For example, during a radio interview with the physicist and writer F. David Peat, Peat says: “The papers you produced have been universally considered beautiful. Were you guided by notions of beauty?” To which Dirac responds, Very much so. One can’t just make random guesses. It’s a question of finding things that fit together very well. You’re solving a problem, it might be a crossword puzzle, and things don’t fit, and you conclude you’ve made some mistakes. Suddenly you think of corrections and everything fits. You feel great satisfaction. The beauty of the equations provided by nature is much stronger than that. It gives one a strong emotional reaction.23

In other words, beauty evokes an individual emotional response from the viewer, the strength of which can be gauged in direct proportion to the value of the truth content of the equation. But insofar as Dirac talks about the role of mathematical beauty in research, he is much closer to Heidegger. The remainder of this paper aims to make some of those connections clear by exploring how the interrelated concepts of beauty and truth fit together. In particular, I show that the structural conditions for beauty to arise out of truth are similar, which entails looking at how the truth relating to beauty is structured. There are six points at which Dirac’s and Heidegger’s theories of the beauty of truth are similar: 1. Beauty is the signifier of truth. 2. Beauty is most intensely present when the truth is at its most profound. 3. Beauty denotes the creation of new and original knowledge.

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4. The search for truth is self-sufficient and not directed by extraneous factors. 5. Truth and beauty are historical in nature. 6. The truth that beauty reveals is nonutilitarian. So far, I have discussed, or touched upon, points 1 to 3 and 5. What follows focuses primarily on exploring the historical nature of the beauty of truth and the nature of truth itself. TRUTH AND ART

The relationship between beauty and truth in Heidegger’s artwork essay is both intimate and cryptic. Beauty is a kind of truth related to the essence of the subject portrayed in the work and the material of the art object. Heidegger compares this beauty to light—like the light shining through and intermixing with the leaves above a forest clearing. He says: “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment.”24 Heidegger suggests that truth, for which he uses the Greek term al¯etheia,25 means something like being unconcealed. Unlike the Newtonian understanding of things, the way that objects are understood by the artist is by letting the material nature of the artwork and the objects depicted within it speak for themselves. Whereas scientific thinking decides in advance how to grasp the meaning of objects—through measuring their extrinsic properties, such as extension and motion—the artistic way of knowing is a way of bringing beings out of the concealment in which they hide during our everyday dealings with them. Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time of the way that we tend not to notice objects as material things in going about our daily business, unless they are broken, provides a contrast to both the scientific and artistic views of the world.26 In art, things are neither understood in advance according to axioms nor seen as useful equipment that subtends and serves our intentions, but are seen for what they are in their individuality. The work of art is a process engendered by the artist that enables us to see this truth by coaxing things out of the way they tend to hide from us in daily life. Art appears to achieve this process by a certain de-realization of its own materiality. As George Pattison notes, Heidegger constantly switches emphasis during his discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes between the painting itself and the shoes as real objects.27 This experience of simultaneously perceiving the art object as both a thing and a representation is key to understanding Heidegger’s idea of truth. What happens at this perceptual level is mirrored in the conceptual schema he develops out of this analysis. If the work of art is a work of truth, then it reveals the world of the society out of which it arises—here the world of work of the

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peasant woman—at the same time as concealing the concrete physical nature of the art object. In other words, we see through the picture, as it were, into the world of that society. In our intentional relationship with the picture we see art as art and not as the object which it also clearly is. On another level, however, it is the resistance of the physical qualities of the painting or sculpture to any definitive, propositional meaning that keeps the possibility of art open. The temporal fixing of the “world” of the peasant woman together with the physical “earth” of the artwork, the materials of which are presented as they are in themselves—pigment, oil, canvas, stone, and so on—enacts the cultural truth of the time to which the work belongs. Because the art object fundamentally reflects the struggle between the way that a society understands itself and the ineffable, irreducible part of the world that remains outside of understanding—concealed, what Heidegger characterizes as “earth”—then our understanding of art and society is always partial because historical and we are always able to go back to the artwork as a resource for thinking the truth. Finally, each work of art creates a part of that total truth belonging to its historical epoch in both reflecting its historical origin and instantiating it. In short, Heidegger suggests that truth in each historical period has an overriding structure that both reveals that society’s engagement with the environment that it has created and conceals possibilities that a different historical epoch would allow. As an object, the artwork enacts this tension. It sets up a view of the world that arises out of a particular historical culture— thereby framing the world—and prevents us from seeing the alternative view of a different historical culture to our own. The structural conditions for beauty to arise out of truth depend on this revealing-concealing28 structure of truth. Beauty shines in truth when it reveals phenomena in their essential nature. Science is unable to achieve this because its axiomatic approach subjugates things to a determinate rule that does violence to the true essence of its objects. The a-historical revealing-concealing structure that belongs to truth is uncovered by Heidegger in his analysis of how we perceive the art object as a work of art. But while the truth of science shares with art this same structure, its overall effect is destructive rather than creative. PRETTY MATHEMATICS

In 1956, Dirac wrote on a blackboard in Moscow University: “Physical laws should have mathematical beauty.” As we saw, Dirac suggests that beauty takes precedence over simplicity as a guide to truth with the advent of the more complex mathematics that relativity and quantum physics demanded. Simple mathematical equations and the Newtonian view of motion could no

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longer give accurate descriptions of the observations that had been made about the behavior of atoms and, in particular, the electrons that exist around the nucleus of each atom. For example, according to the rules of classical physics, electrons should have orbited around the nucleus of the atom like planets around the sun. However, they should have also been subject to small but constant losses of energy so that, eventually, the electrons would collapse into the nucleus. These theories could account neither for the stability of atoms nor for their observed behavior. Quantum physics suggested that electrons gained or lost energy in discrete packets—quanta—so that electrons inhabited one of a number of specific zones that were at a measurable distance from the nucleus. In undergoing such discrete energy gains or losses, the electron jumped from one state to another quickly rather than gradually, and they were thought not to be to lose energy below a certain minimum level. This theory accounted for the stability of electrons in relation to the nucleus.29 In 1928 Dirac published the following equation, which sought to bring the new atomic theory, the calculations for which were still based on Newtonian physics, in line with relativity theory:        i  − eA x + m  x = 0 x Without going into the complexities of quantum mechanics, which would be beyond both the scope of this essay and my knowledge of the field, one can say that the Dirac equation synthesized contemporary theories about the nature of electrons and the data of experiments into a single, mathematical account of how electrons behaved in relation to the nucleus of the atoms to which they were attached.30 It described the electron by using four separate wave functions, including its magnetic properties and the fact that an electron spins. In particular, it translated the equations developed in quantum mechanics by Werner Heisenberg and Erwin Schrödinger, which utilized complex versions of Newtonian mathematics for wave equations, into calculations that took account of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Over time, the significance of Dirac’s work was understood and built upon in, among many other applications, the development of brain scanning technologies, such as magnetic resonance imaging—which utilizes the spin and magnetic properties of electrons—and positron emission tomography—which takes account of the existence of anti-matter that was suggested for the first time by the equation. Dirac was later to say of his discovery, The resulting wave equation for the electron turned out to be very successful. It led to correct values for the spin and the magnetic moment. This was quite unexpected. The work all followed from the study of pretty mathematics, without any thought being given to these physical properties.31

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The important point to note is that the creation of the equation was based on playing with numbers—the interpretation and application of the equations to physical reality came later.32 It was a claim that Dirac made on many occasions when asked about his research methods.33 Whether or not the mathematics had any practical application was considered by Dirac to be a matter of luck.34 What counted most was that the equation elicited a feeling of beauty. There are, perhaps, two initial structural intuitions that can be drawn in comparing Dirac’s and Heidegger’s accounts. Dirac’s suggestion that the numbers in the equations should be allowed to stand in relation to each other for their own sake suggests a parallel with Heidegger’s concern for allowing the material nature of an artwork speak for itself. We should not be put off making this comparison by the thought that mathematics inhabits, in some senses, an ideal realm. The relation between non-physical objects may be beautiful, just as much as the marks on paper in which they are embodied. In addition, the equation can be seen as a reflection of the truth belonging to the historical period out of which it emerged, at the same time as helping to instantiate it anew. For example, the Dirac equation is a product of the prevailing relativity theory, which it helped to instantiate by disposing of the residual classical elements in quantum theory. More speculatively, Dirac’s reflections on the change in the nature of physics could usefully be cast into the revealing-concealing structure of truth that we discerned from Heidegger. Dirac suggests that the description of nature in Newtonian physics was grounded upon the mathematical equations that formed the basis of this branch of science. But because Newtonian physics provided a “scheme of equations of motion,”35 it could not provide a deep account of bodies at rest. In other words, it had no meaningful way of describing the stability of atoms, as we saw earlier, nor could it account for the creation of the universe. In Heideggerian terms, Newtonian physics revealed the uniformity of objects in motion while concealing the properties of bodies at rest, or what are known as initial states in physics. On the other hand, quantum physics provided a description of how initial states change during quantum jumps (when an electron changes its position around the atom). This introduced a level of complexity new to physics and that did not rest on the classical concept of motion. Yet because the new physics dealt only with the probability of jumps occurring, it was not determinate in the Newtonian sense. For example, one could predict the outcome of many jumps in terms of the probability of their behavior with great accuracy, but not the outcome of an individual event. For Dirac, “The quantum

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jumps now form[ed] the uncalculable part of the natural phenomena, to replace the initial conditions of the old mechanistic view.”36 In the new physics more of nature fell outside of mathematics than before, but the incompleteness of the theory was tied up with the phenomena to which it related. Again, the revealing-concealing structure of physics seems to have shifted with quantum theory, suggesting that the nature of truth in science is not immutable, but historical. This idea of the historical nature of scientific description can be supported from Dirac’s related reflections on cosmology: At the beginning of time the laws of Nature were probably very different from what they are now. Thus we should consider the laws of Nature as continually changing with the epoch, instead of as holding uniformly throughout space-time.    Further, as we already have the laws of Nature depending on the epoch, we should expect them also to depend on position in space, in order to preserve the beautiful idea of the theory of relativity that there is fundamental similarity between space and time.37

For Dirac, like Heidegger on art, if physical laws have mathematical beauty, then those laws are specific to both the time and the place in which they arise. Truth is both historical and geographical in the widest sense of those terms, even though the laws of physics have a revealing-concealing structure in relation to the nature which it describes.

REFLECTIONS ON SCIENCE AND PHENOMENOLOGY

Dirac and Heidegger developed their ideas on truth and beauty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, although the actual texts relating to these concepts were published at a much later date. Perhaps that helps to account for the structural intuitions I have suggested that their work shares: in particular, the application of historical contingency to questions of truth. The idea that truth is dependent on a definite conceptual framework that holds fast in every time and place is germane to both theories. But what is to guarantee the universal claim that truth always has the same revealing-concealing structure if it is dependent on historical contingency? Nothing. In my view, such a claim belongs to the tradition of modern philosophy and physics that started with Descartes and Newton, but begins to end with Dirac and Heidegger. Their theories are contradictory on the question of history in the same way. If I have been able to blur the boundaries between these discourses, it is because they share a common philosophical heritage. The disciplinary boundaries that have grown up in professional thinking through the expansion of the university system since the 1800s masks such common intuitions.

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Postwar “framework relativism” has become more prominent in both postmodern physics and cultural theory: indeterminateness, undecidablity, and a plurality of viewpoints have become part of the lexicon of physics and cultural theory. For example, early quantum theorists were happy to discuss the implications of uncertainty in the behavior of electrons in experimental situations while at the same time dismissing the potential implications of the behavior of the electrons in the measuring equipment. The experimental framework was treated in classical terms, while the observed phenomena were treated in terms of the new physics. Once the framework of classical physics is removed, uncertainty spreads unchecked and produces a plurality of possible states with no absolute way of deciding between them. As Paul Davies has said regarding contemporary cosmologists, If the entire universe is the quantum system of interest, there clearly does not exist a wider macroscopic environment, or external measuring apparatus, into which quantum fuzziness can fade away.    This means serenely accepting the full range of quantum alternatives as actually existing realities.38

This framework fuzziness and its competing versions of reality resonates in the work of many of the cultural theorists who came to prominence in the latter part of the twentieth century. For example, when Jacques Derrida writes “there is no outside text: il n’y a pas de hors-texte,”39 he means that there is no single, guiding text through which to read the others. The structural similarities between deconstruction and the views developed independently in quantum physics are too great to be ignored.40 The point of blurring such disciplinary boundaries in the way that I have attempted here is to encourage nonreductive cross-disciplinary studies within phenomenology. For the study of science, that would mean distinguishing between becoming involved in an open dialogue with science and technology and engaging in the much-needed critique of scientism, not in continuing to conflate the two in the way that Heidegger attempts. In Cartwright’s dappled world, the regions in which phenomenological analysis is most effective may also have to be redefined and clarified. If natural science is no longer a universal way of describing human experience, should phenomenology still aim at universality? The place of beauty in this new configuration is, of course, the subject of other essays in this volume. But I hope that I have been able to show that the currents informing such debates may be fruitfully considered from a cross-disciplinary perspective.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Edward Harding, who sparked my interest in Paul Dirac’s work, and the members of the Critical Theory Reading Group at the University of Nottingham, who commented on an early draft of this essay. I also thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom for their continuing financial support. Department of Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham, U.K.

NOTES 1

Ann Thomas (ed.), Beauty of Another Order: Photography in Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997). 2 For the distinction I make between images in science and images of science, see my “Sensible Models in Cognitive Neuroscience,” in Analecta Husserliana XCI, p. 112. In short, an image in science is considered from the point of view of science practice where visual artefacts are treated as tools; an image of science is regarded primarily through its perceptually visual characteristics. 3 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), rev. expanded ed., David Farrell Krell, (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 143–212. 4 Quoted in Abraham Pais, “Paul Dirac: Aspects of his Life and Work,” in The Genius of Science: A Portrait Gallery of Twentieth-Century Physicists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 49—76. 5 Heidegger, op. cit., p. 187. 6 Ibid., p. 202. 7 See, for example, Patrick Heelan, f“Hermeneutics of Experimental Science in the Context of the Life-World,” in Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction, Don Ihde, (ed.) (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1986), and Don Ihde, Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998). 8 Martin Kemp, Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 9 Laura Otis, “Introduction,” in Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. xvii. 10 “Positivism, in a manner of speaking, decapitates philosophy,” Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, David Carr, trans. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 9. 11 Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings: From Being and Time (1927) to The Task of Thinking (1964), rev. expanded ed., David Farrell Krell, (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 271–305. 12 Ibid., p. 286: “All natural bodies are essentially of the same kind.” 13 Ibid., p. 291.

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14 In the artwork essay, Heidegger’s critique of things rests on the distinction between (ontic) beings as objects and (ontological) Being as the realm of meaning. 15 Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 1. 16 Ibid., p. 1. 17 François Jacob, Of Flies, Mice and Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 127. 18 Paul Dirac, “The Relation between Mathematics and Physics,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 59:122–129 (1939), p. 123. 19 Ibid., p. 123. 20 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” p. 162. 21 Ibid., p. 162. 22 Ibid., p. 181. 23 The interview with Paul Dirac was conducted by F. David Peat and Paul Buckley in the 1970s and broadcast as part of the CBC radio documentary series Physics and Beyond. The interview was more recently published in Glimpsing Reality: Ideas in Physics and the Link to Biology, rev. ed., Paul Buckley and F. David Peat, (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). I refer to the web version, which is available at: http://www.fdavidpeat.com/interviews/dirac.htm. 24 Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” op. cit. p. 181. 25 Ibid., p. 176. 26 See, in particular, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), pp. 95–102. 27 George Pattison, The Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 97–98. 28 The phrase is Ihde’s. See Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979). 29 For a non-mathematical account of quantum theory, see John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For a classic text on its philosophical implications, see Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (London: Penguin Books, 2000). For a dramatic treatment of the relationship between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, two of the founders of the field, which includes an excellent ‘Postscript,’ see Michael Frayn, Copenhagen, rev. ed. (London: Methuen, 2003). 30 For a basic introduction to the Dirac equation, see Frank Wilczek, “A Piece of Magic: The Dirac Equation,” in It Must be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, (ed.) Graham Farmelo (London and New York: Granta, 2003), pp. 132–160. 31 Paul Dirac, “Pretty Mathematics,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 21:603–605 (1982), p. 604. 32 For an alternative view that suggests Dirac used drawings to work out his theoretical positions, see Peter Galison, “The Suppressed Drawing: Paul Dirac’s Hidden Geometry,” Representations 72:145–166 (Autumn 2000). 33 Pais, op, cit., p. 69. 34 Dirac, “Pretty Mathematics,” p. 603. 35 Dirac, “The Relation between Mathematics and Physics,” p. 128. 36 Ibid., p. 128. 37 Ibid., p. 128. 38 Paul Davies, “Introduction,” in Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy, p. xvi. 39 Jacques Derrida, “   That Dangerous Supplement   ,” in Of Grammatology, corrected ed., Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 158. 40 Arkady Plotnitsky, Complementarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), draws comparisons between deconstruction and quantum physics as anti-epistemological movements.

CHRISTOPHER WALLACE

ACTION AND THE OPEN WORK

INTRODUCTION

In this paper I will introduce some connections between the philosophy of action and art. I specifically intend to make links between the philosophy of action and artworks called ‘open works.’ These links will become apparent when we see Umberto Eco’s application of the term ‘open work’ as a category of artwork and Paul Ricoeur’s application of the same term as a description of action. I then introduce an explanation of the ‘open work’ and look at some examples. This helps to define the types of artifact under discussion. I also sketch out the ‘natural attitude’ to action and show how the emphasis shifts as the interpretation of action moves from a phenomenological to a hermeneutic interpretation. WHAT DO PHILOSOPHIES OF ACTION HAVE TO DO WITH A PHILOSOPHY OF ART?

We could say that the actions of art practice produce a special kind of knowledge. Many practicing artists talk about the advantages of practical knowing over theoretical knowing. Practical knowledge points toward an “intelligence of action” (Pakes, 2004). It could be said that practical knowledge looks for values related to effective conduct in a situation. It involves knowing what to do in the world, whereas it could be said that theoretical knowledge attempts to articulate the world as a series of propositions that describe the world. Philosophies of action offer an alternative epistemology. A philosophy of action also becomes relevant in the creation of artworks when the emphasis is on the act of creation rather than on the product of creation. In his Ethics, Aristotle discusses ‘practical wisdom,’ making the classic distinction between praxis (action and doing) and poeisis (production and making). According to Aristotle, to understand artistic activity as a question entirely concerned with the ‘making’ and ‘production’ of objects is a distortion of the 239 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 239–262. © 2008 Springer.

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Figure 1. Jackson Pollock at work, 1950

underlying values in the order of creativity. Emphasis should also be placed on the ‘action’ and the ‘doing’ of artworks in the context of orienting oneself toward theoria: “pure philosophical contemplation” (Ackrill, 1981, 138). The most widely recognized relationship between action and art should also be briefly mentioned here. This occurred in the ‘action painting’ of Europe and the United States in the 1950s (Figure 1). Sartre’s declaration that “there is no reality except in action” (Sartre, 1948, 41) from his influential essay Existentialism and Humanism resonated throughout this period. However, when refracted through our current historical situation, an assessment of action and art requires a broadening of definitions. THE ARTIFACTS OF ART: EVENTS, OBJECTS, AND OPEN WORKS

The relevance of action will also become apparent when we consider its relation to the kind of artifacts that are the focus in this paper. In identifying the artifacts of art, if we restrict our categories to performance events, art objects, and open works, then we arrive at the following: Performance events: dance, theatre, music—temporal situations (Figure 2). Art objects: paintings, sculptures, designed products, installations—static things (Figure 3).

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Figure 2. Fluxus performance group Hi Red Centre, Street Cleaning Event, 1966

‘Open works’: a thing that invites situations—artist/artwork/participant ratio is highlighted (Figure 4). Action helps to explain performance events because action occurs in their preparation and also during the temporal artefact to be viewed. The ‘work’ to a large extent is the action. Action only partially explains art objects. Process and intention can be explained by action. Practical knowledge occurs in practice. However, the outcome—the object—to an extent becomes autonomous. The ‘work’ is not action, but transcends action through interpretation and meaning. In investigating the ‘open work’ we broaden our interpretation of artefact and process. Action explains the process of creation for the artist but also explains the participatory process of the viewer. Action occurs on both sides of the ratio artist/artwork/participant. The ‘Open Work’ An ‘open work’ may be described as an artwork in which the recipient is invited to complete or participate in its creation. Within modernism, a number of associated terms precede the ‘open work.’

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Figure 3. Carl Andre, Pyre, 1971

The ‘objet trouvé’ of Dada is one term. The influence of works such as Duchamp’s shown in Figure 5 is arguable, but an important aspect of his practice, which points to an ‘openness’ in creativity, is the idea that an artwork may be created via a simple act of selection from the world of mass-produced objects. The ‘cut up’ novel is another term. The unbound, loose-leaf work by B. S. Johnson shown in Figure 6 allows the reader to assemble the work in any chosen order. The ‘chance’ of Fluxus is an additional term. The work by composer John Cage shown in Figure 7 is a musical score for the work Fontana Mix. We can see that it leaves a lot to a musician’s imagination. All of these examples summon a more ‘open’ approach to creativity. Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’ is derived from his interpretations of such ‘Antiform’ experiments. This interpretation involves the following: The presence of co-authorship. An explicit intention to encourage a diversity of interpretation. An absence of clear temporal or spatial resolution.

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Figure 4. Yoko Ono, Painting to hammer a nail in, 1964–1966

A focus on ‘vitalism’ rather than ‘beauty.’ The resultant works are not conventionally ‘beautiful.’ An ability to be considered as a metaphor for a ‘contingent’ representation of reality. Such works are conditional under certain circumstances. Who participates in them, and how are they participated in? The ‘Work in Movement’ Within his category of the ‘open work’ Eco identifies a more radical way of addressing an approach to interpretation. Looking at contemporary musical composition of the 1950s and 1960s, he defines a subcategory called ‘works in movement,’ which is described as including “unplanned or physically incomplete structural units” (Eco, 1989, 12). These ‘units’ would be completed by the participant in the act of receiving. For a ‘work in movement,’ it is

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Figure 5. Marcel Duchamp, Trap, 1917

suggested that resolution is of marginal importance. The participant will never hear the definitive work; he or she will hear only that one specific possibility of interpretation at that singular instant. Eco indicates that “Every performance explains the composition but does not exhaust it” (14). The presentation of a ‘work in movement’ therefore presents a whole new series of challenges for its producers. Eco identifies the most important of these as being the status of the artist’s control in a work in relation to the capacity of the works openness to generate aimlessness and confusion. He suggests that the ethos of a ‘work in movement’ is not to invite shapeless and general engagement to the extent where the work’s initiating form becomes distorted. The point is to provide: “an oriented insertion into something which always remains the world intended by the author” (19). Examples Figure 8 shows a work by Dadaist Francis Picabia called l’Oeil cacodylate from 1921. This large collage was done by about fifty friends as they dropped

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Figure 6. B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates

by his apartment. Each was invited to take his turn at the canvas, which was eventually covered with a scattering of collage elements, signatures, puns, doodles, aphorisms, and greetings. This early example of an ‘open work’ points to its origins in the idea of a kind of protest against art-with-a-capital-A. It is a criticism of the myth of genius. Figures 9 and 10 show “involuntary sculptures” by Paris-based Hungarian Surrealist photographer Brassai from 1932. Brassai spent time on the Paris Metro and in theatre and cinema foyers documenting the unconsciously folded and rolled tickets that were left behind by passengers and customers. Figures 11 to 13 show a work by Brazilian artist Lygia Clark called The Beasts from 1960. This is a participatory sculpture made out of a series

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Figure 7. John Cage, Fontana Mix, 1958

Figure 8. Francis Picabia, l’Oeil cacodylate, 1921

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Figure 9. Brassai, Involuntary sculptures, 1932

of metal plates connected with hinges. The viewer is invited to select new positions for the work. Figures 14 and 15 show work by the Austrian Sculptor Franz West called Adaptives started in 1970. West solicits a bodily, as well a contemplative, response to his sculpture. He describes them as operating as “a prosthesis for (non-technological) culture” (Benezra, Curiger, and Fleck, 1999, 17). Figures 16 to 18 show work by the Austrian artist Erwin Wurm from the Do it series from 1996 to 2001. Viewers were invited to ‘wear’ a pullover. Wurm’s ironic instructions are to “Get into the right position and stand quiet as long as a polaroid photo is made by the guard. You may pin the photo on the wall or take it with you.”

Figure 10. Brassai, Involuntary sculptures, 1932

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Figure 11. Lygia Clark, The Beasts, 1960

Figures 19 to 21 show work by the Droog design group of Holland called Do Products from 2000. For Do hit, one is provided with a large square of 1.25-mm sheet metal and a hammer. One is instructed to hit the metal into the desired chair form. For Do scratch, one is provided with a light box covered in black paint. One is invited to scratch text or an image onto the light box

Figure 12. Lygia Clark, The Beasts, 1960

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Figure 13. Lygia Clark, The Beasts, 1960

to create your one’s customized light. For Do add short leg, the stability of the chair is the responsibility of the user. Figures 22 and 23 show a work by Mexican sculptor Gabriel Orozco called Yielding Stone from 1992. A ball of Plasticine equal to the weight of the artist was left to roll around the streets of Monterey, California, between October 8 and 14, 1992. It bears accumulations of anonymous human traces.

Figure 14. Franz West, Adaptives, started in 1970

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Figure 15. Franz West, Adaptives, started in 1970

All of these works look to the recipient or viewer for their physical completion and can be seen to embody, to a greater or lesser extent, the characteristics of an ‘open work.’ In these examples we see that there are various modes of openness within an ‘open work.’ Some ‘open works’ result in a single object that accumulates a collective series of acts. Others result in numerous objects that vary slightly from participant to participant. There are also degrees in which participants are free to act. The more controlled ‘open works’ have instructions; in others there are no explicit instructions, but participants are informed prior to their involvement in the work; and in the least-controlled works, participants are not even aware that their actions are part of an ‘open work.’ The ‘open work’ acts as a ‘trap’ of action. I would like to suggest that philosophies of action can lead us to a fuller understanding of what such works may mean.

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Figure 16. Erwin Wurm, Do it series, 1996 to 2001 ACTION THEORY

Action theory provides us with a very specific explanation of what counts as action. A general definition might be, “For there to be an action, a person has to do something”; this involves “bodily movements” and some kind of

Figure 17. Erwin Wurm, Do it series, 1996 to 2001

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Figure 18. Erwin Wurm, Do it series, 1996 to 2001

“purposiveness” (Craig, 1998, 37). In thinking about “bodily movement,” the focus can become extremely narrow and very complicated. How far back in the chain of spatially extended movement can actions be located? Do we stop at muscle movement or the firing of nerve ends? In thinking about purposiveness, we can say that an act is caused by a “mental item” (Borchert, 1996, 3). In considering what an action is, we can follow Alfred Mele, who splits the question into two subsidiary questions:

Figure 19. Droog design group, Do Products, 2000

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Figure 20. Droog design group, Do Products, 2000

1. What is the difference between an action and a non-action? 2. How do we ‘individuate’ action? (That is, how do we distinguish one action from another?) Explanations of the question concerning the differences between action and non-action are numerous, but the basic versions are as follows: 1. Action is a reasoned response to prior psychological beliefs and desires. (This is the “commonsense” view influenced by Aristotle.) 2. Action is the effect of prior mental states and events. (This is the more modern version, influenced by discoveries in natural science.)

Figure 21. Droog design group, Do Products, 2000

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Figure 22. ‘Yielding Stone’ by Gabriel Orozco from 1992

Figure 23. ‘Yielding Stone’ by Gabriel Orozco from 1992

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The basic versions of action “individuation” can be categorized as follows: 1. The fine-grained version: An action is a collection of related actions. 2. The coarse-grained version: An action may be understood as a single act “under different descriptions” (Borchert, 1996, 4). One may sign one’s name and in doing this act, also sign a check. One may draw a circle and draw the sun. 3. The componential version: An action may be understood as a large act composed of smaller, more basic actions. In this sense we have a hierarchy of actions. It could be said that this approach can become overly analytical, and it is arguable whether this has anything to do with creativity. For the time being, I shall withhold judgment on these matters and consider another route toward an understanding based on the commonsense view. Ethics or Poetics? It should be noted here that a distinction must be made between Aristotle’s accounts of action in his Ethics and his accounts of action in his Poetics. In the Ethics, action is considered within the world of ordinary affairs and actual events. Action occurs in practical contexts in relation to practical reason. In the Poetics, action is discussed as an element of tragic drama. Ordered action creates a plot in tragedy. “A tragedy is a mimésis of an action” (Poetics 1449b, in Cooper, 1997, 34). So through exposure to mimésis, an action becomes, in different contexts, a ‘representation’ or ‘imitation’ that “bounds and finishes off the confused luxuriance of real nature” (Lucas, 1968, 266). While acknowledging the importance of this idea of mimésis in art, and the role of action as a representation or action as a poetically modified constituent of a work, I will concentrate more fully on action as it is more plainly understood in ordinary affairs. PRACTICAL REASON AND CREATIVITY

In Aristotle’s reflections on the theory of action we see the foundation of the most influential and what could be described as the commonsense view of human action. In this view actions become a reasoned response to prior psychological beliefs and desires. In these terms we would achieve legitimate grounds for a theoretical analysis of the position of ‘practical reason’ when engaged in creativity. However, explanations of ‘practical reason’ in this paper will not be solely oriented toward a precise and narrow ‘rationality.’ It is recognized that creativity resists attempts to be defined in terms of “applying routine technical skills” (Pakes, 2004, 3) and that creativity may be “by

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definition an operation that is not norm-governed” (3). Favored explanations of ‘practical reason’ will instead rely on descriptions of creative processes that do not necessarily proceed from proposition to proposition. So, in a move away from ‘rationality,’ I look at two of the many aspects of Aristotle’s theory of action: the role of desire in action and the role of the agent’s knowledge in action. Desire to Act There are two central accounts of action in Aristotle’s theories that are most relevant to the creative act. An ‘action’ may be analyzed as an event that is an “intentional process supported by practical reason” (Charles, 1984, 104). Here ‘action’ may be identified as the acceptance of a desire to act on a conclusion arrived at through thought and inference. An ‘action’ may be analyzed as an “intentional process not supported by practical reason” (104). Here ‘action’ is a desire to act on the perceptual imagination based on pleasure. In the former, desire is rational; in the latter, it is sensual. In the context of practical knowledge, desire is like a judgment. One judges a proposition and acts on its conclusions on the basis of whether one’s actions are good. So in having a rational desire, one is active toward the greater good. In having a sensual desire, one is active toward the perceptual imagination. One pursues pleasant perceptions and avoids painful perceptions. Aristotle, however, does not believe that on their own either of these explanations can fully describe an action. He warns us that “Intellect itself, however, moves nothing” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, 1139a, 35, in Charles, 1984). Aristotle asserts that human action must be jointly considered as being caused by a desire to act and by an intellectual goal formed prior to an act, that is, thought or the perceptual imagination. For Aristotle, without desire there is no action. Agent’s Knowledge in Action From another perspective, an agent’s knowledge is considered in action. This is described by David Charles when he breaks an action down to causally and teleologically basic acts. Consider an action understood as events 0 to a7, 0 - a1 - a2 - a3 - a4 - a5 - a6 - a7. Here 0 is the ‘mental event’ (desire and intellectual goals in Aristotle’s terms), a1 to a6 are the ‘intermediate’ actions (nerve firings, muscle movements), and a7 is the movement (the distinct teleologically basic act).

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It is during the intermediate actions a1 to a6 that we can say that that “non-inferential knowledge” occurs (Charles, 1984, 78). This is where actions undergo monitoring and one experiences immediate feedback as one acts. Knowledge here operates at the level of dexterity, habit, or impulse. This has been described elsewhere as ‘know-how.’ These intermediate actions are described by Charles as “agent’s knowledge” (97). This is knowledge that operates outside the logic of propositional knowledge. It supplies us with an interpretation of action that is not explained in terms of a static future purpose or a static prior decision. Causes and goals become combined in our explanation of an action. The role of an agent in action is also described by Charles as an “intrinsic constituent” (Charles, 1984, 104). One does not isolate various roles for oneself in an action. “As an agent, [one] does not stand in an external relation to a distinct intransitive event, but is a constituent in the action itself” (105). He characterizes an agent in this situation as a “distinctive type of subject of change” (107). An agent is not a static and objectified cause of action. He emphasizes the experience of a subject in transition during action. An agent is an integral and changing component during the events of action. By selecting these elements of Aristotle’s interpretation of action, I intend to achieve a more fully phenomenological appreciation of action. By acknowledging the importance of desire in action and the role of the agent’s knowledge in action, we have the beginnings of a sketch of a ‘natural attitude’ to action. PHENOMENOLOGY OF DECISION

Paul Ricoeur bases his theory of action on an interpretation of decision. He explains action as being primarily identified with the body as a source of ‘motives.’ These motives emerge from ‘decisions’ oriented toward a specific ‘project.’ He starts by trying to establish the “lower limit” (Ihde, 1971, 35) of motivation. This is the point at which voluntary actions meet involuntary needs. This lower limit is the point at which one’s body as an object in nature meets with one’s intentional “personal self” (35). At this lower limit, things like breathing begin to move toward the voluntary. For example, an unnoticed breathing rate becomes a sharp intake of breath when one is surprised. For Ricoeur, these ‘needs’ may be understood, but this understanding reveals only one aspect of this lower limit of motivation. ‘Needs’ are more fundamentally identified as being experienced. ‘Needs’ are lived, not known. From this lower limit of lived need, he establishes a “circular relation of motive to project” (35), which is a dependency that carries the body toward the world. A motive always “overreaches the body” (37).

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Having established a reciprocal model of decision, Ricoeur goes on to apply the model to an interpretation of action. Action is viewed as a reciprocal relation between ‘effortless’ action and ‘effort in action.’ Ricoeur suggests that in normal action we do not notice our bodies. The body is “passed over” (Ihde, 1971, 41). Ricoeur states, “the action traverses the body” (41). He also explains that to be captured in its full meaning, action must be characterized as lived. It must be captured in the same way that needs are lived. Action may be known, but this fails to illuminate our full experience. At its lower limit, we have action that is full of effort, and at the upper limit, we have action that is effortless. For Ricoeur, a full reflection on the body in action only occurs when an action requires effort. The recognition of the body undergoing adaptations in the effort to overcome obstacles to action leads to a “crisis [in] the docile organ of the body” (Ihde, 1971, 42) and a disruption of the natural attitude. For Ricoeur, this crisis between the object body and the personal body has a positive outcome leading to a fuller reflection on action. However, it also has a negative outcome in the tendency of action to ‘expose’ the voluntary self to its potential as an object. Human agency, specified as physical force, becomes an “object among objects” (1971, 1971:44). For Ricoeur, the two discourses of objective understanding and phenomenological explanation become confused. The phenomenology of action as an event gives way to an objective analysis of the forces at play between objects. In this way, the object body of natural science absorbs the personal body of lived experience.

HERMENEUTICS OF ACTION

From this phenomenology of action, Ricoeur moves to a hermeneutics of action. He attempts to counter the ‘harsh’ treatment of natural science’s objectification of action by applying the more sympathetic treatment of the human sciences. So instead of measuring things and events that are naturally created, he interprets things and events that are humanly created. This shift in Ricoeur’s thought is influenced by J. L. Austin’s examination of the speech act. Austin stresses the “special nature of acts of saying something by contrast with ordinary physical actions” (Austin, 1962, 113). Austin also declares “speech acts ‘cause’ in a fundamentally different sense than the way physical causation occurs” (113).

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ACTION AS DISCOURSE

To achieve a clearer understanding of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic treatment of action, it is necessary briefly to summarize his explanation of language alongside his explanation of action. Ricoeur states that language manifests itself as a spoken or written discourse. He identifies the accompanying features of these two discourses and explains action in these terms. He creates four categories to help us understand what occurs during discourse: temporality, who speaks, reference, audience. Temporality Ricoeur states that spoken discourse may be identified as an ‘event’ that “appears and disappears” (Ricoeur, 1981, 198). We speak, and it is gone, but the system of language endures. We speak, and we are often inconsistent and incoherent, while the system of language has an ideal framework of rules. Written discourse, on the other hand, is identified with ‘meaning’ that is “fixed” (Ricoeur, Ricoeur, 198): “the saying vanishes but the said persists” (92). Once written, what an author “meant to say” (201) no longer strictly coincides with what the text says. For Ricoeur, action may be seen as a kind of utterance in the same way that Austin understands the speech act as an utterance. Therefore, just as language can be understood as ‘meaning’ in written discourse and as an ‘event’ in spoken discourse, the ‘meaning’ of an action and the ‘event’ of action may be detached in a similar fashion. An action as an ‘event’ may ‘appear and disappear,’ but it may also be ‘fixed’ as ‘meaning.’ Ricoeur asks: How can an action become an inscription like writing? Speaking metaphorically, he describes how events leave their “marks on time” (Ricoeur, 1981, 198). This embodiment of action is characterized by “the eclipse of the event of doing by the significance of what is done” (15). Who Speaks Ricoeur states that during the ‘event’ of spoken discourse one is aware of “who is speaking” (Ricoeur, 1981, 198). There is a person attached to what is being said, and there are corresponding physical incidents to enhance the ‘event’ such as gesture, intonation, and so on. In written discourse, Ricoeur suggests that ‘who speaks’ no longer has such an active influence on a text. The text becomes ‘de-psychologized.’ An author’s intentions and a reader’s intentions during reading have different “destinies” (Ricoeur, 1981, 139). Ricoeur suggests that just as a text “breaks its moorings” (Ricoeur, 1981, 202) from its author, “our deeds escape us” (206). When we witness someone

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gesturing we do not need to ask who moved; however, as actions accumulate into complex patterns, they appear to become separated from their basic origin. In such situations actions become written in “social time” (206). However ‘social time’ does not only ‘appear and disappear’ as an event, it endures as an account of human action in the form of a “social inscription” (214) becoming registered and recorded. The formal version of this record is ‘history’ and the informal version is ‘reputation.’ Reference For Ricoeur, spoken discourse always refers to something other than itself. It has a “situation” to which the discourse refers (Ricoeur, 1981, 201). Things may be shown and demonstrated directly. This occurs in what Ricoeur describes as an “ostensive” manner (202). Written discourse no longer refers to a shared ‘situation.’ Ricoeur suggests here that a written discourse is now free to engage in “non-ostensive reference” (Ricoeur, 1981, 202). A written discourse does not demonstrate things in the world as speech does. A written discourse instead offers a “proposed world” (142). This ‘proposed world’ in written discourse leads to a positive distance between author and reader. It opens up a state of “power-to-be” in the world (142). Actions are also understood to transcend their ‘situation’ depending on their importance. Just as written discourse surpasses the ‘shared situation’ of dialogue, the meaning of an act may exceed its original context. An important action may be judged by its aptness in “new historical situations” (Ricoeur, 1981, 208). Its value rests in its flexibility in meeting the demands of a future course of events. Audience Ricoeur explains that spoken discourse is addressed to a specific listener or group of listeners. It is “addressed to an interlocutor equally present to the discourse situation” (Ricoeur, 1981, 202). In written discourse, the author is not present with the reader. In Ricoeur’s terms, a text is potentially addressed to “whoever knows how to read” (Ricoeur, 1981, 202). So just as spoken discourse has specific listeners and written discourse has a universal readership, action is judged by the ‘universal readership’ of history. In this sense, Ricoeur describes human action as an “open work” (Ricoeur, 1981, 208). Actions may be generally open to future interpretations, and their significance rests on how they meet the requirements of such future interpretations. In a sense, this is where their meaning may be said to reside.

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CONCLUSION

In describing Aristotle’s interpretation of desire and the role of agent’s knowledge in action, the ‘natural attitude’ to action is partially defined. In following Ricoeur’s interpretation of action as it is lived for a ‘personal self’ through to his description of action as a discourse, the hope is that a new perspective on the philosophy of action can begin to emerge, a perspective that is shaped by the issues which frame the ‘open work.’ According to Ricoeur, in looking at action in relation to our examples of ‘open work,’ in order to achieve a fuller understanding we should pay attention to the following: The significance of what is done, not the event. How a work leaves a social inscription. How apt such works are in new historical situations. Who the future recipients of such works are. We could also say that ‘open works’ attempt to reveal action as a lived experience, not just as an objectified force. Following Aristotle, we are able to say that such works reveal to us one characterization of the role of an agent in participating in such works. An agent becomes a subject in transition. Finally, again following Aristotle, we also see the importance of desire in action. After all, for an ‘open work’ to be completed, and therefore to be successful, one must have a desire to participate in it. Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, U.K. REFERENCES Ackrill, J. L. (1981). Aristotle the Philosopher, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Benezra, N., Curiger, B., and Fleck, R. (1999). Franz West, Phaidon Press, London. Borchert, D. M. (Chief Ed.) (1997). The Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (Supplement). Macmillan, New York. Charles, D. (1984). Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, Duckworth, London. Cooper, D. E. (1997). Aesthetics: The Classic Readings, Blackwell, Oxford. Craig, E. (Gen. Ed.) (1998). Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, Routledge, London. Eco, U. (1989). The Open Work, Hutchinson Radius, London. Ihde, D. (1971). Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois. Lucas D. W. (1968). Aristotle Poetics with Introduction, Commentary and Appendices, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Mele, A. R. 1997. Action Theory. In: D. M. Borchert, Chief Ed. The Encylopedia of Philosophy (Supplement), New York, Macmillan. pp.3–4.

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Pakes, A. (2004). “Art as Action or Art as Object? —The Embodiment of Knowledge in Practice,” Working Papers in Art and Design 3. Available at: http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes/ research/papers/wpades/.vol3/apfull.html. Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sartre, J. P. (1948). Existentialism and Humanism, Methuen, London.

MATTI ITKONEN

LIVED WORDS RE-REVISITED The Opacity of the Transparent. A Time-Dweller’s Voyage in the World of the Film Titanic

PRÉCIS

Dear Reader, you are about to set out on a postmodern—if not indeed a postmodernistic—journey; world and self fall apart, each reflecting the other and their shared non-existence. One note in the resonance of that polyphony is the subject’s awareness of his own mode of being; the voices of philosopher, researcher, film character, and possible reader together construct that fugue. The final result is a kind of meta-analysis—a conscious re-appraisal of the analysis proper. Summa summarum; here before you, my fellow in experience, is a magic lantern born of lived flesh, a mark of esteem for Marcel Proust, whose beam of light cuts through the infinity of our seemingly common darkness.

MOTTO 1 The years spin out like a golden thread of days; and there, that’s me, a boy in the picture from school, fair-haired and far away, looking at the years strung out— endless, so it seemed. There was no death, only this moment now, dense and satiate with its own being. The days of manhood shook that solid frame, dispersed it part from part. Who was it photographed the class? He saw me through the lens: boy without a yesterday. No wrinkles, only boyhood. Back then in that snapshot— do I still know?

263 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 263–280. © 2008 Springer.

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In a film the imagined reality is free to move forward or back, because it in fact constitutes a timeless, ubiquitous artefact present. While in drama the action forges relentlessly on, creating a future, a fate, the fantasy mode is an infinite now. (Langer, 1953, p. 415)

FRAGMENTS FROM THE ALL-PRESCRIPTIVE MEDIA REALITY

This journey of the mind may commence with a clearance procedure providing the traveler with a set of introspectional precepts by way of a prior censorship. For the moment at least, then, the truth may dwell in words. Aamulehti: “Ironic in itself how dependent is even James Cameron on the computer and technology. Without them the Titanic film would never have been made.” (Selkokari, 1998, p. 24.) Helsingin Sanomat: “I would say without further ado that one can go to see ‘The Titanic’ even if one knows the outcome. I am moreover of the opinion that if the film does not answer the viewer when he asks why those people die or why they must die, then it was made in vain.” (Oksanen, 1998, p. 5.) Keskisuomalainen: “The film opens in documentary fashion with Rose as an old woman recalling for the people investigating the hulk those bygone days. Cameron thus combines a number of time levels and accomplishes the shifts between them with effortless elegance.” (Valkola, 1998, p. 13.) Me Naiset: “[Rose’s] confession carries the viewer with it and detaches him from time. After the film one had actually to check by the clock that three hours had indeed passed do quickly.” (Eronen, 1998, p. 112.) Nyt: “Real persons and events are skillfully woven into the fictive narrative. The self-confessed Titanic freak Cameron has seen to it that historical details tally down to the very manufacturers of the original objects.” (Sinisalo, 1998, p. 32.) Syke: “The Titanic film is fully deserving of the éclat. It is a masterpiece technically, but it is also a fine film. Nor need we fear a sequel—unless Cameron gets to hear about the Estonia.” (Ahonen, 1998, p. 16.) In order now to proceed on our journey I must first delve into the origins of experience—without a life lived there would after all be nothing but a ready-chewed media reality.

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MY WORLD

There is often a great deal of talk—without anything substantial being said—as if the whole content were no more than a sign we all share. From the standpoint of philosophy and the lived world what is essential is to study the traces, the furrow left as we pass on our way—an empty place engraved by absence. (See also Itkonen, 1997, pp. 53–54; 2004; 2005; 2006.) The term ‘experience’ is open to two construals—explicit in the German pair Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The former refers to what is being gone through now in its immediate completeness, for example, when two people are face to face; the latter is something that may constitute an object of reflection. Erlebnis is always immediate; Erfahrung—in the terms of phenomenology—may for its part be divided into predicative, conceptualized, and pre-predicative, as not-yet-conceptualized experience. For the purpose of this journey of ours the difference is extremely important and meaningful. (See also Grathoff, 1978, p. 126.) How is experience possible? And its verbalization—the appraisal “from without” of some bygone self? The situation must be considered with the eye of the philosopher within us. According to Alfred Schutz, my direct experience of the world belongs to the sphere of the immediate and pre-reflective consciousness. I live in an unstructured present ever in flux, ever renewed as it recedes and vanishes. In the terminology of Edmund Husserl this primitive and pre-phenomenal stream may be described as immediate Erlebnis and as Erfahrung as we live through it. I would characterize this ceaseless flow with Henri Bergson’s concept of the inward stream of duration (durée)—an unremitting approaching and departing of myriad qualities. In this flux there are no objects of consciousness; it contains no discrete phenomena that I could comprehend as clearly distinct from each other and imbued with meaning. (See Thomason, 1982, p. 64.) To be able to interpret an experience as something meaningful I must distance myself from that flux of time. Standing aside and apart from the stream of experience, I can recognize individual components in it, I can separate them from it and consciously reflect upon them. The key here is the concept of reflection or observation. Bergson speaks of ‘attention à la vie,’ a fluctuating reflective attitude or disposition that I may adopt—that I do adopt in my ordinary awareness of immediate experience. Precisely this reflection upon existence, and this alone, transforms pure pre-phenomenal experience into consciously apprehended content. The moment I reflect upon life it may be conceived in its myriad aspects. In the absence of this reflective

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process, again, there can, according to Husserl and Schutz, be nothing but pre-predicative experience, a kind of fons et origo, a substrate awaiting my essential constitutive attention. (See Thomason, 1982, p. 64.) I cannot, however, in principle reflect upon my own present. Awareness of experience in the stream of time becomes instantly a remembered ‘havingjust-been-thus.’ Recollection alone raises experience out of the irreversible flux and thus makes of consciousness memory. (See Thomason, 1982, pp. 64–65.) I must still elucidate the intertwining of experiencing subject and world, the philosophical notion of point of view. ONLY MINE?

The existence of the world is to me obvious, since it constitutes an axiom only in my own experience and consciousness. This consciousness is the source of meaning of the world and of every fact that is objective in the worldly sense. By means of the transcendental epoché, however, I perceive that everything which belongs to the world—even my own existence as a human being—obtains for me only as a content of experiential understanding— apperception—in the modality of assurance of existence. As a transcendental ego I comprise a self who understands—apperceives—actively and passively. This apperception takes place in me even though its operation lies concealed in pre-reflection. In the act of realization, world and human Being are for the first time constituted as existing. Every sign or proof of worldly beings, every mode of demonstration of their existence—pre-scientific or scientific—lies from the outset in me as a transcendental ego. (See Husserl, 1981, p. 320.) It may be that I owe a great deal, perhaps almost everything, to others; yet even they are to me first and foremost ‘others.’ These, ‘my others,’ receive from me all the meaning and validity that they may possess for me. As a transcendental ego I thus comprise a subject entirely responsible for everything that has existential meaning for me. Aware of myself as such a subject, I stand by merit of transcendental reduction above other worldly existence, above my own human life and mode of being. This position of absolute ‘superiority,’ which is or which could be valid for me in any of its given contents, means of necessity the position of the philosopher. (See Husserl, 1981, p. 320.) This absolute superiority is a position that phenomenological reduction bestows upon me. I do not thereby lose anything of what existed for me in my state of naiveté; least of all do I forfeit anything whose actual existence has been demonstrated. In this position I know the world as it is and know

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it now, for the first time, as it has been and must in its true nature ever be: I know it as a transcendental phenomenon. Thus I have brought out a new dimension to the questions I raised, a dimension that has never before been posed with regard to reality existing in precisely this mode. Only the answers to these new questions will reveal the concrete and complete existence of the world and its entire and ultimate truth. (See Husserl, 1981, p. 320.) The foregoing ‘magnification’ of ego-bound existence was indeed necessary, but from the standpoint of reality also extremely limited—‘oneeyed.’ In order to proceed to an analysis of the notion of the oneness of space (and time) I need another ego—his positional opposition. In constructing the notion of intersubjectivity in the world of ordinary common sense I avail myself (with the help of Alfred Schutz) of the phenomenological account of space and time. I find inadequate here Husserl’s elucidation of the problem of phenomenological constitution of the other. The problem of intersubjectivity lies not between transcendental egos, as Husserl would have it; it subsists solely as a matter of the everyday in the mundane world. In that world, intersubjectivity is taken as a complete, indisputable proposition. Philosophers describe in phenomenological terms this perfectly natural attitude in order to understand how and why the ‘other’ exists. If they demonstrate the existence of the alter ego in this mundane world, this cannot be refuted by any metaphysical or ontological suppositions or presumptions. But now it is time I resorted to my philosopher’s eyepiece. (See also Gorman, 1977, pp. 44–45.) I set out by focusing on the subject’s spatial perspectives or prospects. The location of my own body constitutes the ‘here’ element, the body of my fellow man the ‘there.’ Even if I were to transpose myself into my companion’s ‘thereness,’ his body would still form a ‘there’ to me, even while this—my thereness—would be for him ‘here.’ I can thus never take my place in my fellow-being’s ‘here’; this notwithstanding, I can nevertheless join him in an essential sense in a mutuality of perspective in that I perceive the objects of the world in the same way from his ‘there’ and my own ‘here.’ Such reciprocity of viewpoints is taken for granted in the realm of common sense; this means that objects and events in experience are ‘available’ intersubjectively and appear in more or less the same guise to all normal people. (See also Gorman, 1977, p. 45.) This argument of community draws upon Husserl’s stratified concept of appresentation, which, briefly, envisages a pairing or coupling between one existing object of perception and another of like kind. The appresented, simultaneously appearing object, which is as it were contained in the original, can never itself actually present itself. In the case imagined, the body of ‘my

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other’ appresents my conscious ego as I perceive or understand my own body and my self as inseparable. When we describe the non-interchangeability of the ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ of discrete selves, the reciprocity of viewpoints is seen to be a sine qua non for the divided, intersubjective world. (See also Gorman, 1977, p. 45.) Now my philosophical search directs its focus on the depths of the ocean, or rather, on the point where my consciousness as a bystander meets the lived drama of the Titanic. THE OPACITY OF THE TRANSPARENT

The situation may be outlined in terms of the difference in nature between the experienced and the imagined, theorized reality. This entails a particularly thorough inquiry into the qualities of the actual and the fantasy worlds. One crucial element in the analysis is the concept of biographical situation. The difference between the biographical situation of an ordinary individual—myself included—and that of a theoretician, for example, a film critic, is not confined to an ordering of models. My body has meaning as my consciousness of it dictates in the course of normal experience. It is the center, the zero point, in the set of coordinates by which I order the objects about me. Seen from the position of my body—at any given moment—those objects, and also the bodies of others, are ‘there’ from the standpoint of my ‘here.’ This topological ordering, moreover, embraces the whole of the world that is within my reach, which in turn entails my possibilities, my capacities to move and hence the validity of any outlines I may draw up for future action. In the last analysis the wanderer of the world is after all subject to the severity of time—bound to the clock within him, the process of ageing, and death. The recognition of death as a token of our innermost temporality, an omen, is the form in which the ontological structure of all beings subsists. These observations prompt me to draw a number of conclusions. As an agent I possess the ‘here’ position of my body, I have a world within my reach and the possibilities for future action. At the same time I live under the temporal reality in which ageing and death are inherent. My ageing and my death I define in my capacity as an agent-ego who is a concrete human being and who possesses his own world. The theoretician, as theoretician, lacks all of these adduced characteristics; as a theoretician he has no zero point, no ‘here,’ no temporal reality. In a word, when I as an agent say that I am speaking as a man of sound mind, and when the theoretician says he is speaking purely as a theoretician of whatever may emerge, no uniform or parallel mode of formulation will be

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attained. (On the entire foregoing section see also especially Itkonen, 1999, pp. 121–129, and Natanson, 1986, pp. 34–35.) The opacity of the transparent appears in fact on two levels: (1) Experienced, lived reality never fully opens up to the theoretician who has not himself passed along some given way. The world as something set before us, something presented, is inaccessible to the fantasist, the theorizer. The reason for this lies in the absence of experiential content, the element of an unlived body. Imagination and depiction—re-presentation—are detached from the world of living, they constitute mere as-it-were dimensions. (2) The lived component in any two individuals is never uniform; even a shared reality is appraised with one’s own eyes, not another’s. Something, it is true, may be understood of the life situation of one’s fellow being, but always there remains the perpetual mystery of otherness, the veiled dimension of ‘thereness.’ Let us turn now to a closer scrutiny of this pseudo-transparent modality. My fellow being’s lived experience is never open to me in its entirety. To tell the truth, my companion’s stream of experience is—like my own—an unbroken continuum of which I may observe only isolated sections. If I were capable of apprehending my ‘other’s’ experience to the full, we would be the same person. We do not, however, differ only in the extent to which we are capable of discerning each other’s lived lives; we also diverge in that when I become aware of some particular sequence or aspect in that other’s experience, I arrange what I see in my own meaning context. In the meantime, however, the other will have set this same in his world of meaning. Thus I will invariably interpret my companion’s experience from my own point of view. (See also especially Schutz, 1984, p. 106.) Even if I possessed the fullest possible knowledge of my ‘other’s’ entire range of meaning contexts at any given moment and could thus set his whole experiential ‘repertoire’ in order, I still could not answer the following question: “Would the meaning context in which I arrange my fellow being’s lived experiences correspond completely to the meaning context he operates with?” I presume that the answer must invariably be negative because the stance each of my ‘others’ takes with respect to his experiences will be different from my manner of appraising them. (See also especially Schutz, 1984, p. 106.) If I nevertheless review the whole of my store of knowledge regarding the lived experiences of my fellow beings, and then subject this structure to close scrutiny, at least one thing will be borne upon me: everything I know of that other’s conscious life is in fact based on my knowledge of my own lived experiences. My lived experience of that other is constituted simultaneously or quasi-simultaneously with his. My direct experiences of others are thus always

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associated, conjoined ‘intentionally’ with the simultaneity or apparent simultaneity of that community of being. In other words, my lived experiences of my fellow beings can come into play in an intentional sense only in simultaneity or as-it-were simultaneity (via e-mail or the like; I shall revert to this theme in future work). Only thus—looking back at what has already slipped away—can I synchronize my meaningful experiences with the past experiences of any of my fellow beings. (See also especially Schutz, 1984, p. 106.) How is it then possible to overcome this barrier, to pierce that apparent opacity of perspectives? Or is it necessary to do so? I now approach closer to the reality of the Titanic. WITH WHOSE EYES?

1. Adjusting the Focus My analysis sets out from the nature of the viewer’s experience as consciousness: from a philosophical outline clarifying the nature of being of the film. My experience of this film—when I watch it and pay no heed to theories of perception—is quite specifically an experience of just this, and just this kind of ‘Titanic’ film, which appears to me in a certain fashion and which possesses its own unique defining characteristics. These its properties are manifested according as I see my object from an angle, from a distance or close up. At the same time a clear or a vague memory means a memory of an object clearly or vaguely perceived. Even my most erroneous judgment constitutes a judgment of some real content. The nature of consciousness in which I live as my self entails intentionality; consciousness is always consciousness of something. Consciousness by its very nature contains—as modalities of being—presentations (manifestations), probabilities, and non-being, as well as modes of appearance, goodness, values, and so on. Phenomenological experience must—as reflection—avoid all manner of explicatory interpretation and prior construals. Its account must accurately reflect the concrete contents of experience; it must be possible to draw an appropriate picture of the way any given lived content has actually been experienced. (See also, e.g., Husserl, 1980, p. 52.) 2. The Spectator’s View As I sit in the local cinema my external reality is a Saturday afternoon in January 1998. This is a fact I cannot override; and again, I cannot focus my analysis without defining my concrete perceptions.

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The role of the spectator in the ontology of a film (at this stage I no more than inch the door open; later we shall make our way into the ‘film-room’ itself) might be illustrated by adapting the aforementioned difference between the theoretician and the experiencing subject. As a mode of presentation a kind of dialogue might be envisaged between possible worlds. Proposition a: Only moments or periods in the agent-subject’s life project constitute his acts proper. Here the notion of a project also embraces the horizon of the subject’s protracted plans insofar as the verifiable concrete circumstances attending his outlined activity possess an at least in some measure clear-cut position in his plans. Response a: The only element of action attributable to me in my capacity as a film viewer is the viewing of the film. My time dimension is pure present; even though the film ranges over the time span from 1912 to 1997, both of these points are for me part of my ‘now.’ Any future temporality I may envisage extends at furthest to the closing scenes of the film. I am not, it is true, conscious of these aspects as the story unfolds; I am as it were within the events, constantly present in them. The only evidently reasonable project I can conceive in this context is (at least partial) relinquishment of my existence as a conscious being; this is the only means of “letting the film be” —to step into the stream of its narration and leave the imagined world to its own devices. Proposition b: The entire structure of life plans—even though at any given moment fixed and consistent - is inevitably altered as the agent-subject passes from one moment of internality to another. Precisely such a structure of life projects has a decisive influence on the full meaning of any of his acts. Hence that meaning itself must change with the constant modification of the overall structure. Response b: In this context it might be well to speak of two levels of life project: real and apparent. I shall revert to the project of the film character at a later point; for the moment I confine my attention to my own part, and specifically as a viewing—experiencing—subject. A more appropriate designation would in fact be ‘quasi-project’; my moments of internality are entirely bound up in the events and the fates depicted in the film (that is, unless someone sitting near me starts talking!). My task is to implement the act of viewing. I may live a moment of Rose’s fate, but I am nevertheless present in that reality only in some vicarious capacity. Though the action of the film presses on, I remain ever in my position as a spectator; I behold sorrow, I hear laughter—yet I am fettered (at least physically) to my own present. The matter might be crystallized by saying that my life project consists simply in being and letting the aesthetic truth unfold. Then I would be living the film (and not vice versa).

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Proposition c: The agent-subject can know the scheme of life projects in its explicit form only partially; the structure can be ‘captured,’ comprehended, only approximately in the focused beam of real attention. The composition of a life structure can thus likewise be laid bare only in part. In every given moment there is a brightly illumed core that is surrounded by the ever-expanding horizon of darkness. Core and horizon together constitute the explicable and yet inexplicable background against which a planned concrete act is clearly discerned. Precisely thus a moment or a period in the scheme for its own part brings about a unity. Response c: As a viewer I can grasp of Rose’s life what the film director chooses to reveal (either directly or by implication) together with what I create in my mind. It may indeed be difficult to distinguish the viewer’s life perspective (as I have done in the foregoing) from the vicissitudes the film’s characters are seen to pass through. The adduced problem inherent in the incomplete nature of any account of a life project now appears thus: As I view the screen and the experiences of one now familiar human being (Rose), I can no longer be sure what I am being told and what I am telling myself. The illumined core consists in my transposing myself into the events of the film, my perpetual present moment, in which Rose passes through a sequence of events spanning eighty-five years. That expanding and darkening horizon I referred to contains the consciousness of other viewers and the veiled past and future of many other figures in the film. Yet in spite of all that to-me-inaccessible background, the act of experiencing, seeing, participating brings about a unity in which Rose becomes me and I become Rose. Proposition d: Everything described in the foregoing, however, is open only to the consciousness of the agent-subject and remains inaccessible to the ‘control’ and the approach of the observer; his access to the actions of the subject is confined to realized acts—he can note only parts of the subject’s undertakings. If such a witness were to set about truly describing what passes in the mind of the subject as he goes about some act, no matter how trifling and insignificant, he would be obliged to step into the whole process of the agent’s time stream; thus he would need to be able to go into the entire history of his personality, the originating phases of his subjective life projects, every skill and experience, and his every expectation of future states of affairs. To do all this the observer would need to have gone through every scene and setting in the agent’s inner life—experienced the shared succession, tempo, and fullness of every station on that journey; he would have to become the object of his own witnessing, as Bergson stressed. (On all of these propositions see especially Schutz, 1978, pp. 39–40.)

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Response d: Perhaps my awareness as a spectator might be called cosmic time—the sky above the landscape—which pervades a fragment of (the film’s) biological time. The ultimate result is a kind of one-way spatial impression: I (at least as I write this) am also completely consciously living cosmic time. Though I do not know everything about Rose’s life, I can nevertheless in my ‘protracted present’ see the course of her life; Rose fulfills the promise she made to Jack in the icy sea. She flies, she rides in a man’s saddle, has children, and dies in her warm bed at the ripe old age of 102. I observe everything that to Rose is either memory or anticipation at any given point in her life. I thus live in the dimension of immediacy, of presentation, detached from the temporality of the film. This situation is imbued with an interesting stratification of awareness; I shall return to this as the analysis proceeds. Jack knows only that the sea divides him from Rose (one present moment in the film). Rose knows that Jack does not know that she has kept her promise (from the viewpoint of the scene just alluded to, a future ‘now’ in the film). I am aware of both of these levels of knowledge; my present moment is at once the reality of the film’s past, present, and as-yet-unrealized ‘now.’ Here I am thus at one and the same time an observer and the object of my observation. Rose, for her part, can be only the ‘object’ of my perception. True, the boundary fades: I am both Rose and myself, then vice versa. When the film closes, I do not for the moment know myself; something is gone— one life, one experience, one fate—and I am alone in my role as a mere spectator. (See also Viljanen, 1954, pp. 339–340.) 3. Reflections from the Past Franz Brentano’s analysis of primal sensation—proto-aesthesis—includes the notion of seeing the past; all seeing, also the reviewing of the days that have slipped away, appears as present. When Rose looks at a painting of herself, her mind is filled with all the lived meanings that were once present. I too as spectator learn of her backward-looking perceptions, where the past exists concomitant with the present moment. The whole is as it were a space of inwardness, an interiorization of the mind. Brentano also distinguishes an infinite continuum in the process of beholding things in the past: what is seen, what that object has seen, and so on. Rose in her awareness does not experience her milieu in such stratified form; in terms of general time she is either in her actual present moment (1997) or in the heyday of the Titanic (1912). Rose’s attention—and that of the characters to whom she recounts he story—passes back and forth between those poles. At the end of her tale the camera—taking the spectator with it—assumes the omniscient role of cosmic

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time; one might here construct a kind of stairway of memory, in which the first step—remembering as such—could set out from the present moment. As a spectator I can take a peep backwards from my seat in the cinema in 1998 either to Rose’s old age or to the moments she spent with Jack. This step might be called from presence to all points of absence. The second step represents the point at which my omniscience takes its origin; I can, for example, jump to the scene in which Rose arrives in New York harbor immediately after her rescue. She changes her surname and takes a new course in life. Perhaps this phase is a kind of halfway house, in that here other characters are still part of the narrative reality. Nonetheless we have already shifted from present to past; the moment of remembering from which we behold more remote absence is also beyond the bounds of presence. This step might be conceived as the incipient rememberedness of memory. At the third step the film characters—or their ‘conscious lives’—are no longer involved in the course of events. I can shift from the present—in Brentano’s terms—for example, to past time 3, where Rose has herself flown in a plane; from that point I can behold earlier events, for example, her arrival in New York. Thereafter I can return to the actual present. Or I may choose to focus my attention on, let us say, the span of past time 2; there, through the eyes of Rose, now a mother, Jack drowning, the launching of her career, Rose straddling a horse man-fashion. The sky above the landscape seems to free me at least in part from the fetters of time; consciousness may pass between present and remembered now-moments and choose for itself a suitable vantage point from which to survey events and persons long lost to sight. Thereafter comes the return to the present of my own reality. This stage of remembrance I might call the step of omnipotence. (On the entire foregoing section see Brentano, 1981, p. 37; Itkonen, 1994, pp. 193–223; 1998, pp. 5–9.) STORIES

1. Rose’s Journey of the Mind My passage from 1912 to 1997—has it really contained in itself those 85 steps in time?—has demanded a great deal. Under that same clock I have dwelt in three different dimensions; at the outset it kept the hours of my ardent love, the glow of youth; just now on the research vessel it showed me the past, my memories, and soon I shall be there again where Jack awaits me all dressed up in a fine suit. Clock, I love you, pointer to new presence, community. Now I stand at the foot of the stairs; in a moment Jack will turn his face and

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smile. Dear God, how much lies buried in those years of absence. Can you help me, scholar? What is it I see? How can I see? I shall do my best. I hope you will not be disappointed. Let me begin from the claim that you can see nothing without also looking at something that has already been. Memory links your past to the present, enticing countless fragments from the stream of time to conjoin in that single perception of yours. In this way your experience, which has slid past in the moving stream, is captured and ordered—it exists in your awareness for just this brief span. Things recollected in actual memory—the items within that ‘picture’—are located in the past and hence are neutral and possibly unapprehended. An approach to those pictures, to their immediacy, you may accomplish yourself in your capacity as a self who may find herself confronted by—may sometimes succeed in encountering—the inevitable; this constraint means that you must reconcile yourself in any given case to whatever particular present circumstances may emerge. Memories return because they are useful for the purposes of some task to be undertaken in the presence of this. To be honest I should mention that these buried memories of yours do not remain constant; they alter in accordance with the immediate context. Let me try to be still more precise. Prompted what I have just said, I would claim that no two experiences of yours—inevitably linked to different moments in the stream of time— could ever be uniform. For the contexts of your experience to be perceived it is necessary that they no longer exist; what you perceive is ever and always already the past. What appears in the light of consciousness, again, is perpetually connected to an actual situation; and here the more immediate elements in your past are directed toward the future and impose upon it in order to fulfill it. Something of the ‘light’ of consciousness falls upon that position of yours that lies in the more remote past, and the lighted fragment of it proves useful for your present situation—that is, your immediate past. The end remains in the dark. In thus discharging these two tasks your memory assumes two forms in keeping with them: 1. Being in the true sense spontaneous, self-prompting, your memory, your picture of the past, carries with it in consciousness experiences already put behind you and enables you to envision them. Let Jack turn; then, you will once more see him smile. The clock is now measuring the moments of love. 2. Being bound to the memory of a living organism, your recollections enable you to react to a separate present situation, this faculty in you selecting by association and eliciting appropriate elements from your past. Look at Jack’s smile; it is once more full of you. Go up to him, feel his warmth. What once was is with you again. The rest is illusion.

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The second modality of memory is the lived picture of your corporeal being; it contains pragmatic associations with your one-time prevailing situation. The warmth of lips, the vigor of hands, the glow of other flesh—reach out and claim them. Thus I died to be born again and begin a life! (On the entire foregoing section see especially Srubar, 1984, pp. 18–19.) 2. A Philosophical Expedition Contrariwise In analyzing styles of appraisal, the point of departure must be taken in elements peculiar to everyday life. Thus the characteristic features of that province of meaning provide likewise the opening to this story. Aamulehti Philosopher: One must consider that characteristic extension of awareness that is known as expansive attention, full observation of life! Critic: That is precisely what I have done. The mechanical element plays the chief role; the observation of artificial reality is man’s present and future—a futuristic protraction of an otherwise so inadequate consciousness. Helsingin Sanomat Philosopher: One must aspire to the epoché of natural attitude, abstinence from doubt. Critic: Rubbish! It is my business to know what goes on in people’s minds and what is good for them. My objective is enlightenment—to tell people what the film director himself has not understood. When I set the spectator on the right track he may learn something essential. Refinement of the connoisseurship of the cinema goer is after all a privilege of the leading paper in the land. Keskisuomalainen Philosopher: One should appreciate work as a special mode of manifestation of man’s spontaneity, his autonomy. Critic: Quite so. I have revealed something that is essential to the ‘worker’ in the field of film aesthetics; I have depicted in words the expressive potential of the camera. The living and lived picture should indeed exist solely as a specific form of its own; and as such it should be evaluated: as nothing else! Me Naiset Philosopher: What must be seen as most essential is experience of self, some kind of overall selfhood. Critic: I moved into the film, detached myself from time and place. For a while I was Rose, not myself, and I was whole, filled with the progression

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of the narrative. I severed my ties to the everyday until the dial of the clock restored the mundane world and my ordinary vulgar self. Nyt Philosopher: It is impossible to find anything else if one belittles our shared intersubjective world and our social activities. Critic: Eureka! There lies the very core of film reality. Cameron has not forgotten the truth; he has included what is absolutely the most essential— fidelity to his model. The people in the film, the Titanic itself, the crockery, the lifeboats, and all manner other trivial circumstances tell of the director’s respect for the viewer. Together, in a process of social intercourse, truly great films are born. Syke Philosopher: It is of great meaningfulness to analyze the standard time by which we regulate our lives as the intersection of inward duration (durée) and cosmic time in the context of intersubjectivity in ordering and composing the time structure of the social world. (On the words of the philosopher see also especially Cox, 1978, pp. 25–26.) Critic: Standard time was now ripe for the making of this film—adequate technology, a past sufficiently distanced (1912), and an intersubjective, universal theme. Sitting there in the audience, I experienced a time prior to my own, my own bodily temporality, and besides this something yet to come. I was an intersecting point between what has been, what is and what is not, a crossing-point with the capacity (and the obligation) to make predictions. 3. The Researcher’s Complacent Sanctimony Life’s grinder seems to make mincemeat of all. The man on the crank often defends himself by saying ”The difference between the slaughterer and the benefactor is a small one.” EPILOGUE IN HONOR OF PROFESSOR ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA: THIS AND THAT PRESENT—THE MUTUALITY OF SELFHOOD AND TIME I Time flows through me like boiling lava. It gouges its channels, engraves its passage deep within. I must be prepared.

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University of Jyväskylä Translated by Robert MacGilleon

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahonen, M. (1998). “Se kelluu sittenkin.” Syke. Keskisuomalaisen liite 17.1, p. 16. Brentano, F. (1929/1981). Sensory and Noetic Consciousness. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint III. Translated by M. Schättle and L. L. McAlister. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Cox, R. R. (1978). Schutz’s Theory of Relevance: A Phenomenological Critique. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Eronen, P. (1998). “Valtameren rakastavaiset.” Me Naiset 30.1, 5 (45), p. 112. Gorman, R. A. (1977). The dual vision. Alfred Schutz and the myth of phenomenological social science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Grathoff, R. (1978). “How Long a Schutz-Parsons Divide,” in The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Edited by R. Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 125–130. Husserl, E. (1964/1980). “The Paris Lectures,” Translated by P. Koestenbaum, in Phenomenology and Existentialism. Edited by R. S. Solomon (1972/1980). Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, pp. 43–57. Husserl, E. (1941/1981). “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” Translated by R. C. Schmitt, in Shorter Works. Edited by P. McCormick and F. A. Elliston. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 315–323. Itkonen, M. (1994). Zenit-ulkoisesta sisäiseen. Askeleet fenomenologiseen aikaan ja sen tajunnallistumismoduksiin Eeva-Liisa Mannerin lyriikassa. SUFI, Vol. 11. Tampere: Cityoffset ky. Itkonen, M. (1997). “Dialogic or Dialogistic? Dialogicity or Dialogism? A Word of Warning against Rigor Metodologiae,” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Human Studies 1 (20), pp. 47–58. Itkonen, M. (1998). Voinko minutella? Filosofisia puheita itsekasvatuksesta. Tampere: TAJU. Itkonen, M. (1999). “Alter et Alter. The Two Faces of the Mirror,” Translated by R. MacGilleon. Phenomenological Inquiry October (23), pp. 107–132. Itkonen, M. (2004). “Bel Esprit. An Assay in Depth-Aesthetics,” Translated by R. MacGilleon, in Analecta Husserliana. Vol. 81.Metamorphosis: Creative Imagination in Fine Arts Between Life-Projects and Human Aesthetic Aspirations. Edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 101–122. Itkonen, M. (2005). “Sana, kuva, elämä. Kaikuja ja heijastuksia entisajoilta,” in Työ, voima ja yritys. Toimittaneet V. A. Heikkinen, S. Inkinen, and M. Itkonen. Haaga-Sarja 10. Helsinki: Haaga Instituutin ammattikorkeakoulu, Haaga Tutkimus, pp. 75–107. Itkonen, M. (2006). “From the Station to the Lyceum. In the Footsteps of a Wanderer in Time,” Translated by I. Gurney, in Analecta Husserliana. Vol. 90. Logos of Phenomenology and Phenomenology of the Logos. Book Three: Logos of History in Logos of Life. Historicity, Time, Nature, Communication, Consciousness, Alterity, Culture. Edited by A.-T. Tymieniecka. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 501–520. Langer, S. K. (1953). Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art Developped from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Oksanen, K. (1998). “Miksi me kuolemme?” Helsingin Sanomat, Cosa 16.2., p. 5. Natanson, M. (1986). Anonymity. A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Schutz, A. (1978). “Parsons’ Theory of Social Action: A Critical Review,” In The Theory of Social Action. The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons. Edited by R. Grathoff. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 8–124.

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Schutz, A. (1932/1984). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Translated by R. M. Zaner and T. Engelhardt, Jr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Selkokari, A. (1998). “Titanic tuo katastrofin lähelle.” Aamulehti 16.1, p. 24. Sinisalo, K. (1998). “Uppoamaton Titanic. James Cameronin suuruudenhullu unelma muuttui matkalla intiimiksi rakkaustarinaksi.” Nyt. Helsingin Sanomien viikkoliite 16.1, pp. 31–32. Srubar, I. (1984). “Bergson’s Contribution to Schutz’s Project,” in Helmut R. Wagner and I. Srubar, A Bergsonian Bridge to Phenomenological Psychology (Current Continental Research 204). Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, pp. 17–20. Thomason, B. C. (1982). Making Sense of Reification. Alfred Schutz and Constructionist Theory. Hong Kong: Macmillan. Valkola, J. (1998). “Myyttisellä matkalla valtameren sydämeen.” Keskisuomalainen 16.1, p. 13. Viljanen, L. (1954). “Sillanpään ajanelämyksestä.” Parnasso 8 (5), pp. 338–342.

MÜNIR BEKEN

IMPENETRABLE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND VALUE IN ACADEMIC MUSIC COMPOSITION

INTRODUCTION

Some years ago I attended “June in Buffalo” at the State University of New York at Buffalo. The weeklong event attracted student composers from all over the United States. Some of the most famous composers of the time were also part of the gathering.1 Perhaps the seeds of this paper were planted during one of the “June in Buffalo” meetings where a student composer’s work was severely criticized by the other composers for its apparent tonal mannerism and for “lacking sophistication.” He tried to defend his composition by saying that he just felt more comfortable in this particular aesthetic domain. I even recall him becoming really upset when another 19-year-old composer attempted to comfort him by saying “we know you are capable of writing better compositions.” What’s more, as if this was not enough humiliation for the young composer, later at a formal concert some composers in the audience booed his composition for solo piano. At the time, this composer was working on his doctorate in composition at Yale University. So, it is not that he did not know any better, but he simply chose this particular style. This made me look at the structure of this closed art world and the historiography created through a process of collecting highly selective names and events. Furthermore, it made me reconsider the concept of value of a musical composition, such as the one by the aforementioned student composer, within and outside of that art world. There were so many extra-musical associations that had a considerable impact on the immediate evaluation of his compositions. I further imagined other contexts in which that composition could have possessed much higher or lower value. This paper is a preliminary study that explores several aspects of musical art worlds, historiography, and how a piece of revealed information shapes our experience of any given musical composition. It engages several disciplines such as economics, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and phenomenology. I am neither a philosopher nor an economist. I will simply attempt to connect threads from variety of methodologies and discuss the complexities of issues in different contexts. 281 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 281–286. © 2008 Springer.

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ACADEMIC COMPOSITION DEPARTMENTS AS AN ART WORLD

Based on John Rahn’s work (Rahn, 2001), within “the community [that] recognizes the existential value of individual, personalized spontaneity, which crystallizes the act of art in the work of art” (p. 158), perhaps one could consider the academic circles as a philosophically unified space, “not in an aesthetic dimension, but an anthropological one” (p. 148). In fact, when mentioning the value of craftsmanship in musical composition, Rahn makes the distinction between “uncomprehending audiences” and “those who are actually capable of perceiving the music” (p. 150). “The community” and the academic art world are clearly outside of the “cultural environment which legitimizes mass taste and commercial values above all else” (p. 150). Howard Becker describes the nature of similar institutionalized art worlds in his sociology of art (Becker, 1982). In these complex societies a variety of agents function at different phases of the artistic production as a whole. Interestingly, Becker points out the significance of “the ability of an art world to accept    [the art work] and    [the artist]” (p. 227). Obviously, change itself is an unchanging aspect of the society of academic music composition as an art world. Nonetheless, a tradition of a quest for the newness and originality has remained constant since beginning of the twentieth century. Hence, the pursuit of “new” music in academic circles and societies may be considered as a defining feature of its ability to accept the artwork and the artist.

THE NATURE OF NEW

“Iannis Xenakis has referred to ‘the profound necessity for music to be perpetually original—philosophically, technically, aesthetically” ’ (Rahn 2001, p. 158). Besides originality as necessity, Rahn mentions the dimensions of craftsmanship and of expression that may have a considerable impact on the value of a new musical composition. Music may or may not evoke an emotion, but “the listener recognizes that the music expresses” that emotion (p. 150). Tonal music has a set of assigned meanings that have been developed over a long period of time. The value in a musical composition where no specific emotion is intended, therefore, lies in “the pleasure of learning,” “satisfying curiosity,” and “increasing our abilities” (p. 151), which became particularly significant with the abandonment of tonality during the twentieth century. The “old” is considered pejorative and is rejected categorically. Hence, if Xenakis’ statement is true for the academic art world, then the most important disqualifier in the creation of a new composition is the presence of tonality that

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dominated the “old” Western music for centuries. In other words, a complete absence of a key or tonal center is essential for new music. According to Charles Wourinen, for example, “serious composers of the mainstream” must no longer employ tonality, and he considers the ones who use tonality in their compositions as “backward-looking” (Wourinen, 1979, p. 3).2 Rahn also remarks on the existence of such composers “who lean back in the overstuffed armchair, in the embrace of dead musical tradition, as it were musical couch potatoes, themselves unmoving amid familiar immeubles, living on inherited wealth” (Rahn, 2001, p. 150). Naturally, other backward-looking compositional techniques and noninnovative approaches diminish the value of compositions. Rahn and others, however, never problematize the authority that judges these concepts, for example, aestheticians and art critics in both aesthetic and sociological contexts. When we examine the circumstances of human musical experience, although we teach music in a historical context, people do not start listening to medieval music first. Listeners encounter the Western music repertoire in a non-chronological order. Hence, the concept of the new in practical terms is completely different for ordinary audiences, and it remains more a historical label. IMPENETRABLE HISTORIOGRAPHY AND VALUE

Time is an essential component of tradition. Thus, academic circles view the tradition of Western Classical music in a time-based paradigm in which historical compartments are created for selected composers. Furthermore, based on the compositional style, certain time periods are superimposed on groups of composers with occasional style, certain time periods are superimposed on groups of composers with occasional misfits. Composers who write in old-fashion styles, like Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943), have been excluded from the historiography. While similar time-based paradigms may be nonexistent or vague in most other musical cultures, they are very specific and significant in the Western tradition. According to Rahn, The problem arises for composers who do not wish necessarily to repeat the technical solutions and achievements of the past, whose musical minds are bent on exploration rather than colonization. Colonization is defensible, even noble, if the territory is unoccupied. For creators of original art, there is no knowledge base built into the audience. (Rahn, 2001, p. 150)

Hence, as avant-garde composer Stuart Smith effectively stated, contemporary composers attempt to create personal niches in the unoccupied territories

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of this historiography.3 Today securing a place in music history requires something original and new in a composer’s style. The specifics of a composition may be new, but that alone does not add value to it in this specific context. I remember as a young graduate student asking for a recommendation letter from my mentor at a major research university. I mentioned that I studied with a student of Gabriel Faure; my mentor immediately reacted by stating that he wished that I could say that I studied with a student of Arnold Schoenberg or with Milton Babbit instead of Faure, who was known for his more accessible compositional style. In other words, unlike Schoenberg or Babbit, Faure was not a part of the recent historical canon; therefore, this historical misfit’s name would not add any value to the associated parties. Composer Steve Reich advises other composers not to think like historians and make appropriate adjustments to fit into the time period they are in,4 but in general, belonging to a pedigree of composers and name dropping often enhances the value of composers along with their compositions. VALUE IN ECONOMIC THOUGHT AND MUSIC

The economic theories of Smith, Marx, Jevons, Marshall, or Ricardo attempt to explain the concept of value for commodities that are often manufactured items. Perhaps artistic value could be compared to value in economics as well. Becker’s institutionalized art worlds and their participants with specific roles in these social spaces may also be compared to economic systems. The valuer, similar to art critics and aestheticians in art worlds, determines the value of a commodity. A musical composition may have a negligible monetary value, but if its artistic value is confirmed within the academic art world, it may provide other units of value for its creator. Like most other cultures, rewards other than money such as positive artistic criticism, praise, and recognition (by self, colleagues, audiences, historians, family, friends, etc.) are considered very important as alternative ways of determining value. The resulting prestige may lead to indirect ways of earning money and other opportunities too. Utilitarians would say value is “in the mind of the beholder.” Hence who decides what goes into the mind becomes extremely significant. Advertising is often used in order to stimulate the demand for a particular commodity. It may provide information that enhances the experience of consumption and it adds artificial value to the product. Cultural conditioning that lead us to buy certain products also exist in music. The role players in the art world reveal a crucial piece of information in order to enhance the experience of music.

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Consequently, for example, introductory lectures precede most contemporary music concerts. The high end of art demands a system of confirmation of the value of the commodity (art work). This is accomplished by an institutionalized art world that provides a motive of buying by producing the data that confirm that it is the real thing—another piece of information. CONCLUSION: PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSICAL EXPERIENCE

Art could be considered as a label for an experience—not necessarily created but appropriated by humans through objects and performances for humans—in which art exists outside of its other functions than being just art. The circular nature of this definition—or rather a statement that avoids a definition—leaves human expression and transmission of artistic knowledge as problematic issues. Various types of experience include perception, imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of hearing, our musical experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation. An “induced aesthetic value” (Rahn, 2001, p. 148), which by definition includes extra-musical associations, adds meaning to our experience. This type of intentionality imbedded in extra-musical information shapes our perception and overall experience of any given musical composition. Historical and contextual information adds dimensions to our experience as part of our consciousness of our cultural environment. It also provides us clues about the dichotomy of genuine versus fake. In the academic world, aesthetic decisions are made by a demographically very small group of composers, and so the criteria by which new pieces are judged within the academic context is very narrow and closed to innovation. A highly selective set of principles that sprang up during the twentieth century seems to dominate the aesthetic choices that students composers have to make. So, if we look at this body of music in 200 years, it will probably represent the “period eye” of our time.5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Sally Hawkridge for her assistance in writing this essay. I am especially indebted to Professor Richard Shirey for his guidance in the field of economics and his very helpful comments on the first draft. University of California, Los Angeles.

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1

George Crumb, Donald Erb, David Felder, Lukas Foss, Philip Glass, Bernard Rands, Augusta Read Thomas, Steve Reich, Roger Reynolds, Harvey Sollberger, Nils Vigeland, Charles Wuorinen, and Joji Yuasa were some of the participants in this event in the year 2000. 2 “But while the tonal system, in an atrophied or vestigial form, is still used today in popular and commercial music, and even occasionally in the works of backward-looking composers, it is no longer employed by serious composers of the mainstream” (Wuorinen, 1979, p. 3). 3 Personal communication. 4 Personal communication at “June in Buffalo,” 2000. 5 Baxandall, 1988.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bannock, Graham, Baxter, Ron, and Davis, Evan. 2003. The Dictionary of Economics, 4th ed. Princeton, NJ: Bloomberg Press. Baxandall, Michael. 1988. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Becker, Howard. 1982. Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press. Beken, Münir. 1998. Musicians, Audience and Power: The Changing Aesthetics in the Music at the Maksim Gazino of Istanbul. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Maryland. Black, John. 2002. Oxford Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1985. “The Social Space and the Genesis of Groups.” Theory & Society, Vol. XIV, November, pp. 723–744. Cage, John. 1973. M Writings ‘67-’72. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. Hunt, E. K. 1992. History of Economic Thought: A Critical Perspective. New York: HarperCollins. Morgan, Robert. 1992. Anthology of Twentieth-Century Music. New York: W. W. Norton. Morgan, Robert. 1998. Source Readings in Music History, Vol. 7. New York: W. W. Norton. Partch, Harry. 1974. Genesis of a Music. New York: Da Capo Press. Radice, Mark. 2003. Concert Music of the Twentieth Century. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Rahn, John. 2001. Music Inside Out. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International Imprint. Schwartz, Elliott, and Childs, Barney. 1998. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. New York: Da Capo Press. Smith, Stuart, and DeLio, Thomas. 1989. Words and Spaces: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Musical Experiments in Language and Sonic Environments. New York: University Press of America. Stein, Leonard, ed. 1984. Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wuorinen, Charles. 1979. Simple Composition. New York: Edition Peters.

ANDREW JAY SVEDLOW

HERMENEUTIC PHENOMENOLOGY OF MARK ROTHKO’S PAINTING

The task of this essay is to uncover the personal significance, and therefore reveal some of the meaning of a 1949 Mark Rothko painting in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is with sober suspicion that the author approaches this six feet nine inches by five feet six inches stretched canvas (Figure 1). It is in the spirit of hermeneutic phenomenology that an attempt to share the conventions and value of the work is unfolded through the word. Unable, of course, to impart the beyond verbal syntax of the work, it is hence the word that will have to suffice. The Rothko is approached with the idea of its existence as a text in the world not so much as an entity to be read, but as a product that points to the interplay of artist, world, and audience. With the assumption that the author is hardly omniscient in interpreting the work and at the same time empowered to try to decode a meaning from within it, it is the consciousness of the self that spreads across the canvas as much as the layers of light fabricated by Rothko. This self, as defined by Paul Ricoeur, is “not the narrow and narcissistic ‘I’ of immediate consciousness but is the subject founded by understanding itself.”1 Without mistaking the interpreter as the focal point of the interpretation with the object of desire, the author’s Being draws near the Being of the work catalogued by the National Gallery as Rothko number 1986.43.138. Linking with the sensual lay of dark, floating lozenges upon larger lozenges of yellows and greens, the concreteness of experiencing the colors and their interplay becomes the basis for the existential event. The painting provides a front line on which to battle toward a glimpse of the tension between the thusness of the work and the oughtness of painting as understood by the author. It is in this place where both the viewer and the painter strive to meet. The author is transformed by the interplay with the painting and segues from a stance of Being to one of Becoming. The painting’s nature, or thusness, is not captured through one meaningful experience; rather, it is in constant flux as it intersects and crosses paths with the changing nature of the viewer. This transaction leaves the significance of the exchange as the defining element of the painting. The change within the viewer is more an aspect of desire to 287 A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XCVII, 287–293. © 2008 Springer.

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Figure 1. Mark Rothko, untitled, 1949

be transformed by the painting than the presencing of the painting itself. The painting resides in real time and physical space as a continuing opportunity for further interaction. The question of the painting’s existence is a battle between pragmatism and postmodern hermeneutics. Certainly the painting exists and has a tangible, and quite hefty, material presence. Its care and handling, as well as its insurance value, attest to its physical reality. It is its metaphysical presence as a defined medium for unmoving interpretative analysis that comes into play as one enters and exits the hermeneutic circle. Arriving at an interpretation of significance of the Rothko comes about through repeated interplay and repeat visits. The practice of interpreting and reflecting on the painting provides the platform for initial reservations and conceptions about the work to be dispelled and new queries to be added to the contemplative process. The nature of the work, that is, of the work of contemplation, leads to a nature of Becoming.

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A formalist approach, whether normative or analytical or manifest or latent,2 is descriptive in light of the particular and non-generalized methodology of phenomenology. The softness of this approach should not be taken as an aggravating circumstance but as an affirmation of the disinterest in validating the experience or in pontificating a universal judgment. The particular-ness of the experience in and of itself inherently contains aspects of the unspoken universals of which the words here in point to. THE QUESTION

What about this painting elicits the particular aesthetic responses of the interpreter? How does the interpreter come to know and understand the a priori set of assumptions and conventions that are part of the habituated self and those sets of practices that are able to be discerned within the circle of the familiar and conscious and unconscious experiences? As a hermeneut, the first assumption is plain, that the interpreter accepts that there is not any one particular objective valid interpretation of the painting as text. In addition, it is accepted that the potential to transcend the circle of experiences that constitutes the self or Being of the interpreter is possible. By returning to the imagery of the Rothko, a resonation of meanings becomes evident out of the interplay between the painting and the interpreter. Obliquely, with a glance here and there, the painting is pursued. Through direct contact and through the meta-communications of hardcopy and digital reproduction an opening begins to manifest itself. This pore is where the full complexity of the painting seeps through. The bracketed experiences of looking, contemplating, and reflecting act as a bridge connecting the becoming self-knowledge of the viewer with the potential meanings of the painting. The form of the painting is both simple and complex. It is elusive. The ink-dark velvety blue of the dominant lozenge in the middle of the canvas recedes and moves forward at the same time. It sits before the green form below, which Escher-like sits behind the yellow background, which acts as foreground as it moves upward along the canvases’ boundaries. A thin layer of deep purple touched with alizarin crimson sits above and astride the larger blue block. This horizontal band is capped by a thinner slash of red, which in turn is surrounded and consumed by a subtle lozenge of yellow within yellow and beige, and throughout hints of other colors emerge and recede as glance turns to stare to gaze to trance to a turn toward another image. It is all too easy to shift from the perceptual aspects of the work to the conceptualizing of those perceptions into the imagery constructed by prose. Because Rothko’s mature work blurs the traditional philosophical line

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between the distinctions between form and content, it is hardly worth the attempt to describe the forms as content as they shift, creating new content at each viewing. Unlike the valid inference pattern of every a form is b, ergo every non-a form is non-b, the Rothko form is sometimes a, b, non-a, and non-b. Sometimes this shift happens within the bracketed experience of any particular viewing, further complicating the formal logic that has come to be the default practice of interpretation. The structure of Formalism becomes de-emphasized, yet so does the more Aristotelian concern for adducing form in contrast to content. The value of the Rothko, consequently, is neither in its constant nature nor in its reference to a valid contextuality. The value is in the quality of the experience that is the interplay between the interpreter and the changing perceived appearance of the painting. BACKGROUND

Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, on September 25, 1903, committed suicide in his studio in 1970. The details of his life are well traced in books and websites: from his immigration to Portland, Oregon, at the age of ten and his two-year course of study at Yale University on a full scholarship, to his days at the Art Students League and his teaching children at the Brooklyn Jewish Center, to his leap to fame in the 1940s and 1950s, and finally to his legendary status as a member of the New York School. The historical data of his biography provide a sort of pathos of information that taints the interpreter’s work with background noises and images of archetypal tragedy and romanticism. As an ardent student of Max Weber at the Art Students League, he was introduced to that Russian-born American’s own infatuation with non-Western art forms. Weber’s later work was infused with a cabbalistic mysticism that manifested itself in dream-like paintings of rabbis and Jewish scholars. Rothko’s encounter with Weber creates a connection for the interpreter between Weber’s reveries of culture and heritage, lost and found, and those of Rothko’s pursuit of new forms by which to feel the aura of the transcendent. The perceived bond between these two Russian Jewish émigrés and their non-traditional paths to spiritual fulfillment, and frustration, inform the encounter with Rothko’s untitled painting of 1949. The particular painting in question has been highlighted and reproduced in a range of literature and textbooks. This image has been used to connect Rothko to a variety of constructed views of twentieth century art and history. From a 1990 article entitled “Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism”3 to a range of illustrated catalogues on American painting, to the Menil Collection

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catalogue, Mark Rothko: The Chapel Commission,4 the 1949 piece in question has served many masters their unique purposes. In the last thirty years, the painting has been exhibited at the 1978 retrospective of Rothko’s work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and in 1998 through 1999 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The author chose this particular untitled painting without consciously realizing that in 1983 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had organized an insightful examination of Mark Rothko 1949: A Year in Transition. In phenomenology there is no such thing as coincidence. It is therefore interesting to see that across more than two decades and a continent, the work of Rothko from the year 1949 would produce such a resonate chord in more than one interpreter’s work. In fact, this agreement and tacit connection between diverse and disparate voices is a pointer to the power of Rothko’s paintings of that era to elicit similar favorable and contemplative aesthetic responses. The continued life of the painting in question has within it the capacity to accommodate dissimilar interpretations of meaning. Hence, the work not merely has an inherent set of reducible forms waiting to be read and agreed upon, but it also acts as a platform for the interplay of conscious and unconscious intentions of both the artist and the viewer. The viewer’s ability to share the object of desire with the self and the other is informed by the knowledge of Rothko’s life, the movement of mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionism, the presence of the individual painting, the habituated self of the interpreter, and the atmospherics of the moment. The physical instrumentality of the painting as an object of reverie began at the moment before Rothko encountered the whiteness of the blank canvas in 1949. Being informed by this biographical data does not necessarily make formalism irrelevant in the interpretative process. The complexity, or simplicity, of Rothko’s arrangement, depending on your viewpoint, is unique to Rothko. Whether the uniqueness of Rothko’s internal framework to the painting is the determining factor to its meaning is an impossible question to answer in a relativistic world. Non-objective paintings by their nature suit formalist interpretation due to the lack of reference outside of the work itself. The internal structure becomes the narrowest and easiest pathway to contemplate and share the work’s presence. Rothko’s un-Kantian painting, without recognizably mimicking nature, still has all the significant form to satisfy a formalist with the essential qualities of the structure of a non-objective work of art. It would be a shame, however, solely to interpret Rothko’s painting purely in terms of the basic principles and practices of design. Certainly, the story of the Rothko, and the phenomenological musing surrounding it, carry much more significance than merely the description of

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the color, line, form, texture, harmony, and compositional structure. Such a sharing of the internal dialogue of the formal properties of the painting leaves the poetic and mythic monumentalism of the art aside. In the phenomenological hermeneutic approach to penetrating the conventions and cultural meaning of the painting, it is necessary to get a sense of the conventions and notions of art that were prevalent in Rothko’s personal life and in the milieu in which he existed. Being informed by his biography provides insight into what he held to be the significance of his aesthetic choices. Knowing the painting and the context of its inception expands the viewer’s circle of understanding of the work. FROM EXPERIENCE

In the practice of the Socratic method, the interpretation of the Rothko unfolds from the interpreter’s experience. In the stance of absolute subjectivity the question “What limits to the freedom of inquiry exist?” is posited. Can the Rothko mean anything, or can it have any and all forms of significance? Are there boundaries to the experience? In reflection, the boundaries are the limitations of this interpreter. However, are there only so many potentials of interpretation expressed by the canvas? Is a better understanding of self all that an interpreter comes away with from the experience, and is this a negative attribute of the experience? If the interpretation of the painting is purely a consideration of the consciousness of the interpreter and a reflection upon the pathways to that consideration, then does it matter what the Rothko is? The painting in question is not stated clearly. Its ambiguity is its depth. It provides a field of four dimensions in which to explore the solipsistic play of the experience. The colors and floating forms move, metaphorically, in a three-dimensional space, receding and advancing in the mind’s eye. The fourth dimension of time brackets the experience to provide an encounter worthy of reflection, one that has a beginning and an end. The interpreter approaches the experience with a sense of hope (having overcome the suspicious nature of the first encounter): hope that the work of art will impart something more than a momentary entertainment of the senses. How is it that the light-filled canvas can provide anything more? There is no apparent reference within the transaction with the painting that would suggest hope. No inference of any fall from grace or judgmental position is posited. Any myth building associated with the interpretation has its conceptual limits. The tension of the light, color, and form, along with the dimensional interplay, pushes the interpreter towards a myth-laden tension. The painting

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has the potential to act as a center of experience, a place located, symbolically, at a common source of the spirit of creative action. Like a lost paradise, it has the potential to transcend time and space. This painting takes place before any fall from a paradisiacal state, or perhaps it is the artist’s struggle through the labyrinth of his heroic internal turmoil that places us in this aura of peacefulness. Through the obstacles of the blank canvas, Rothko leads us through his heart and soul to the quiet place beyond the rage. Rothko’s vigorous investigation of color and light, the formal and basic principles of painting, provides a harmoniously vibrant environment in which to resonate with the ineffable sound of the cosmos. THE TRAP

The gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., to the National Gallery of Art has, since 1997, had its copyright in the hands of Christopher Rothko and Kate Rothko Prizel. The painting, as with the reproduction rights for it, is a trap. Much like an orchid, the painting lures in its cohort with an array of both flashy and delicate colors and subtle forms. The sweet nectar of the orchid pulls the unaware insect into its innermost reaches in order to deposit a bit of pollen on its back, and the bug squeezes through the orchid’s tight opening and emerges on the other side. The insect flies off to be enticed again by another orchid of the same species, where the cycle is completed and the pollen stripped off by the orchid as the insect squeezes through yet another alluring opening. Thus the orchid uses the insect for its own purposes. The interpreter is not sure to what purposes the 1949 untitled Rothko painting at the National Gallery of Art is using him. It is certain, that like the insect, he will be trapped again by other Rothkos. University of Northern Colorado NOTES 1

Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971), p. xvii. 2 Richard Wollheim, “On Formalism and Pictorial Organization,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59, No. 2, Spring 2001. 3 Stephen Polcari, “Martha Graham and Abstract Expressionism,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 4, 1990. 4 David Anfam, Carol Mancusi-Ungaro, and Paul Winkler, Mark Rothko: The Chapel Commission (Houston, TX: Menil Collection, 1996).

INDEX

Ackrill, J. L., 240 Adams, Hazard, 148 Ahonen, M., 264 Alighieri, Dante, 139, 141, 142, 143, 193, 226 Ascott, R., 216 Austin, J. L., 258, 259 Baierl, E., 169 Barthes, R., 161, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178 Baudrillard, J., 81, 83, 84, 179, 221, 222 Baxandall, Michael, 286 Becker, Howard, 282, 284 Benezra, N., 247 Borchert, D. M., 252, 255 Brentano, F., 273, 274 Butler, R., 221 Cage, John, 190, 191, 192, 197, 201, 202, 203, 206, 242, 246 Camus, Albert, 183, 184, 185 Carter, Rita, 167 Charles, D., 256, 257 Cooper, D. E., 255 Corneille, Pierre, 148 Cox, R. R., 277 Craig, E., 252 Curiger, B., 247 Dahm, Ralf, 167 Danto, A., 216, 218 Davis, Charles Till, 143 Derrida, J., 159, 160, 161, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 236 Dreyfus, Hubert, 140, 141, 154

Eco, U., 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 243, 244 Eronen, P., 264 Esslin, Martin, 183, 184 Fabris, A., 216 Feingold, Michael, 143, 152 Fleck, R., 247 Foucault, M., 179 Giannetti, C., 218 Gorman, R. A., 267, 268 Grathoff, R., 265 Greenblatt, Stephen, 144 Gregory, Richard L., 167, 168 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 35, 39, 44, 48, 50, 61, 96, 97, 219, 222, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 234, 235, 236 Hobbes, Thomas, 147, 148, 151 Husserl, E., 39, 45, 46, 62, 129, 130, 227, 265, 266, 267, 270 Ihde, D., 257, 258 Itkonen, M., 265, 269, 274 Kane, Gordon, 166 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 27, 29, 31, 131, 222 Langer, S. K., 129, 264 Locke, J., 45, 151, 215 Lucas, D. W., 255 Lyotard, J. F., 22, 76, 77, 78, 94, 161, 223 Mann, T., 34 Marlowe, Christopher, 139, 143

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INDEX

Mele, A. R., 252 Morgan, K. A., 180 Morgan, Robert, 204

Ricoeur, P., 39, 134, 239, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 287 Rutsky, R. L., 219

Natanson, M., 269

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 183, 184, 185, 240 Schelling, F., 51, 177, 179 Schutz, A., 265, 266, 267, 269, 270 Selkokari, A., 264 Shapiro, Meyer, 168 Sinisalo, K., 264 Smith, Stuart, 283, 284 Srubar, I., 276

Oksanen, K., 264 Pakes, A., 239, 255 Pinter, Harold, 184, 185, 186 Plato, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 17, 18, 26, 29, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 90, 97, 106, 123, 134, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 177, 215, 221, 222 Pojman, Louis P., 151

Thomason, B. C., 265, 266 Valkola, J., 264 Viljanen, L., 273

Quinones, Ricardo J., 142 Rahn, John, 282, 283, 285 Reas, C. E. B., 220, 221, 223

Wade, Nicholas, 167 Wood, John, 151 Wuorinen, Charles, 283, 286