Philosophical Connection
Our philosophical discussion dealt primarily with the possibility of "another world"--a world beyond the world, a life after life, a metaphysical realm. "Metaphysical" means literally "beyond nature"--beyond everything that can be perceived by the senses, and beyond space and time. The difficulty with talking about metaphysical beings and entities is not that "nobody has yet come back to tell us about them" (in the way 600 years ago nobody had come back to Europe to tell people about America and its inhabitants), but rather that we do not understand narrations that describe beings or things that exist outside space or time, and that cannot be perceived in any way whatsoever.
Somewhere in paradise Robin Williams shouts "Time doesn't exist here!" But the very utterance of that statement takes time. And it is plainly visible that Williams does not only cross spaces, but that his and our senses are fully involved in the story. What we see is a phantastic story in this world, not in a metaphysical "beyond." (Which suggests that the film deals with earthly and human problems in the form of a poetic myth.)
Yet, the film is full of suggestions that the conception of a life after life is to be taken literally, that the story is meant as a metaphysical statement. That should present some puzzles for a thoughtful viewer ....
Metaphor and Metaphysics
Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy
The 20th Century Critique of Religion
Roughly at the beginning of the 20th century a new type of philosophy began to develop, a type that distinguishes 20th century thinking from all previous types of thought. This type of philosophy is usually called "Analytic" or "Linguistic" philosophy. Among its most prominent founders were Bernard Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and among its most noted characteristics is the fact that philosophers do not talk about the world directly anymore, but about statements concerning the world. The immediate subject matter of "Analytic" or "Linguistic" philosophy is not reality, but language. The explicit exploration of the facts of the world is deliberately left to disciplines which specialize in the collection of hard data, the natural and social sciences, or to any other fields of strictly empirical research. Philosophy, by contrast, confines itself to the painstaking clarification of concepts, and it does so through the logical and semantic analysis of the linguistic signs and structures through which we communicate about reality.
This is not to say that 20th century philosophers have simply become philologists or linguists. Analytic philosophers still try to shed light on such traditional philosophical problems as the nature of the mind, the basis of morality, the definition of Art, etc. But they do so by paying attention to the details of language in a way that earlier philosophers would have found excessive and unnecessary. Analytic philosophers are convinced that no valid insights can be gained without scrutinizing the way language mediates and shapes our perception and understanding of the world.
This re-definition of the subject of Philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century was offered because, among other things, philosophers experienced something like a professional identity crisis. Philosophy used to be a very comprehensive field, namely (as the original Greek term philo-sophia says) the love of "wisdom". And this wisdom included not only the art of living a good life, but also the knowledge of everything in the world from astronomy and mathematics to the nature of human society and the inner workings of the soul. In Antiquity there was no kind of knowledge that was not worth being mastered by a philosopher. Mastering everything that was known, however, became increasingly difficult as the body of human knowledge increased. In time specialization became inevitable. Physics and mathematics were separated from Philosophy to become independent disciplines, and so eventually were chemistry, biology, arts and letters, and in the end even psychology and the exploration of the mind. The question arose as to what was left to do for Philosophy proper. Two core fields remained, Logic and Metaphysics--Logic as the systematic exploration of the laws of correct thinking, and Metaphysics as the systematic exploration of the ultimate nature of Being. And although much of the advanced work in logic was also done by mathematicians, no other discipline laid claim to the two fields, and Philosophy for the time being was saved from academic extinction.
Within philosophy, however, a fierce controversy developed. While more traditional philosophers tried to maintain Metaphysics as a legitimate academic enterprise, early Analytic philosophers attacked it as a pseudo-science, as a reservoir of conceptual confusions with an undeserved reputation of depth which should belong to the realm of religion and faith rather than the world of sober, rational inquiry. Leading Analytic philosophers were adamant in their stance that the only legitimate thing left to do for philosophers was logical analysis and conceptual clarification. Everything else was either empirical science, or--literally--nonsense. As Ludwig Wittgenstein put it in his trailblazing Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science--i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy--and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one. ...Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
At the end of the 20th century it has become clear that the older types of philosophy have survived this "linguistic revolution" (just as forms of figurative painting have survived the revolution of Abstract art). At most universities such schools of thought as Phenomenology, Existentialism, or Marxism coexist with various strands of Analytic philosophy. The main point that should be noted, however, is the fact that what is new and most characteristic for 20th century philosophical thinking is the widespread change from talking about the world directly to talking about statements about the world. It is this that sets 20th century thinking most clearly apart from traditional philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born in Vienna, but received the professional part of his education in England, where he first studied engineering, and then mathematics and Analytic philosophy. Bertrand Russell, his teacher and friend, soon came to think of Wittgenstein as a philosophical genius who was effecting major break-throughs in the Theory of Logic and Philosophical Analysis. During World War I, while fighting in the Austrian army, Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus, a slim volume which became one of the classics of 20th century philosophy. It inspired the group of rebellious philosophers that became known as the "Vienna Circle," and it provided the main basis for Logical Positivism, the school of thought that was most actively engaged in eliminating Metaphysics from Philosophy.
After the war, Wittgenstein (a millionaire by inheritance) gave away all his money, gave up Philosophy, considered becoming a monk, spent two years designing and building a radically modernist house for his sister, and finally decided to make a living as a school teacher in the Austrian country side. It was not until the end of the 1920s that he could be persuaded to return to the University of Cambridge and to professional Philosophy. He spent the rest of his life teaching and critiquing his own earlier work, significantly radicalizing his deconstruction of Metaphysics and traditional Philosophy. Although he became ever more dissatisfied with academia as a way of life and inquiry, his philosophical influence was enormous among young professional philosophers. His Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953, is one of the profoundest and most important books of 20th century philosophy.
Analytic Philosophy started out as a wholesale critique of older fields of philosophical inquiry. By targeting Metaphysics (traditionally considered the indispensable foundation of Philosophy) it aimed at the very heart of the discipline. In his Tractatus Wittgenstein stated rather bluntly that Philosophy as such was finished, a thing of the past. And an important by-product of this critique of Metaphysics was a new kind of critique of religion--at least of any kind of metaphysical religion. This new kind of critique will be considered in what follows. Earlier critiques of religion had taken a variety of forms. Critics had argued that religion was an illusory solution to real social problems, that it was feeding on unresolved psychological conflicts in people's minds, that it was based on fear and intimidation, and that its organizers, the caste of priests, were exploiting the ignorance of the masses whom they continued to keep in the dark. Historians had documented the abuses of power that had emanated from religious institutions--the burning of "witches", the persecution of heretics, or the nurturing of a spirit of intolerance that led to massacres and wars. There was finally the growing recognition of the great variety of past and present religious faiths, a variety that made the claim to exclusive truth by any one of them seem arrogant and benighted.
Running through all these critiques of religion, however, was a basic contention that seemed to damn it foremost, the contention that the key assertions of almost all religions were either wildly improbable or outright false. Dogmas like that of the immaculate conception of Mary seemed to fly in the face of modern scientific reason, tales of miracles were unacceptable to people who were familiar with the laws of nature, and faith in an immortal soul or a deity of which there was no empirical evidence increasingly looked like mere superstition. In a globalized culture that was characterized by an increasing power of human beings over the formerly mysterious forces of nature, belief in science and its demands for empirical evidence became something like a dominant creed. Belief in a supernatural world began to look like an hypothesis that would never be proven true. It was the idea of empirical evidence or proof that seemed to make science and religion forever incompatible.
The Analytic critique of religion differs from such thinking in that it does not say that religious assertions are unproved or false, but that they cannot be understood. And they cannot be understood not because they are difficult or complex, but because they are literally without sense. Religious statements, in other words, are neither true nor false, but literally non-sense. Strictly speaking they are not statements at all, but just so many empty sounds or marks on paper. To illustrate: The statement "Pigs eat corn" is true. The statement "Pigs fly by flapping their ears" is false. The statement "Pigs gorban toves" is neither true nor false; it is nonsense. According to the above Analytic philosophers, key religious statements are essentially like "Pigs gorban toves"--wordlike formulations without sense. Nobody can either believe or disbelieve "Pigs gorban toves." Because before one can either believe or not believe a statement one has to understand it, and that we are not capable of in the case of religious or metaphysical utterances.
Statements can be nonsensical in different ways. "Pigs gorban toves" is nonsensical on the face of it. So, presumably, is Lewis Carrol's famous poem "Jabberwocky": "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe ..." Other statements are nonsensical as well, but at first sight they look as if they had a meaning. "My feelings weigh 1.74 pounds" would be an example, or "The inflation rate is bright yellow". At first sight certain religious statements look like regular statements as well. Statements like "The dead warrior is passing on to another world", or "God sees everything" certainly do not look as nonsensical as "Pigs gorban toves." Yet they are, according to the above Analytic philosophy. Their lack of meaning, however, has to be shown by a more detailed analysis.
"Pigs gorban toves" is unintelligible because two of its "words" have no meaning. It is one of the ways in which a sentence can fail to make sense. It is often argued that that is the case with one of the key statements of Theism, namely "God exists". This statement is said to be nonsensical because one of its words cannot be satisfactorily defined--"God". To say "God exists" is like saying "Toves exist." Nobody can say whether it is true or false, because nobody knows what it says. Nobody can thus either believe or refuse to believe it.
If "God exists" is nonsense, then a key statement of Atheism is nonsensical as well--"God does not exist". Even the Agnostic "I do not know whether God exists" would not make any sense. Neither Theists nor Atheists nor Agnostics know what they are talking about-- their "statements" are nothing but empty signs or sounds. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" was Wittgenstein's recommendation. The only thing an Analytic humanist might say here is: "I am so far away from religion, I am not even an Agnostic."
It will not be necessary here to get into the controversy of whether "God" can be satisfactorily defined or not. The case is worth mentioning as a schematic illustration of the way in which the Analytic critique of religion is different from previous critiques, and how Analytic philosophers talk about statements, and not about the world. (The case may also be interesting in connection with the idea that there are more relaxed ways of being non-religious than Atheism--the doctrine which often seems to confirm too much by its passionate denial.) To further indicate, however, the peculiar sensibility of Analytic philosophy, the following controversy is worth mentioning.
There has in recent years been a discussion among theologians about whether God is male or female (a discussion which is similar to the one about whether God is "Black" or "White"). Masny feminist theologians find the description of God as "father" as offensive as earlier thinkers found the description of God as an authoritarian "lord" (which seemed to reflect the feudal world of monarchs and serfs). In certain circles the determination of God's gender has therefore become a matter of great political importance. The question in this controversy is, then, whether the traditional or the feminist description of God is true. An Analytic philosopher would have trouble entering the fray on either side. An Analytic philosopher's first question would not be whether the assertion "God is female" is true or false, but whether it can be understood at all. How can God have a gender? Since presumably in the case of God that is not a matter of genitals, is it a matter of social role, such as being the father (rather than the mother) of Jesus? What exactly would make God male rather than female in this matter? Is God's gender a matter of disposition toward humankind? Is the occasional genocide that Yahweh initiates something typically male, something a goddess would not do? Or is God's love something that reveals a more female character? Such questions seem unanswerable and strangely inappropriate. In thinking about them they seem to cease even being questions. The question whether God is male or female begins to look like the question whether Lake Huron is male or female. There is no way to tell. But a question that has no possible answer is not really a question. What looks like a question turns out to be just a series of sounds--"language on a holiday", as Wittgenstein was to call it in his later philosophy.
To further exemplify the problems of meaning that arise in connection with religious statements it will be worthwhile to take a closer look at a seemingly unproblematic statement like "God sees everything". The statement seems clear and easy to understand; it could easily be uttered in conversations about religious matters. Yet, upon closer inspection it reveals all the difficulties that Analytic philosophers have in connection with metaphysical propositions. The difficulties in question are, in fact, such that they inspired a whole theory concerning religious statements, a theory meant to solve these difficulties.
It is obvious why a sentence like "God sees everything" would be puzzling to anyone who gives some explicit thought to its meaning. Seeing is something that involves persons-- functioning eyeballs, suitable viewing positions, and other physical details that cannot very well be connected with God. God, after all, is said to be non-physical But how can a non-physical being see? To see without a body seems to be as impossible as sneezing or having an orgasm without a body, or as impossible as a smile without a face or a mouth. The word "see" does not seem to mean anything in connection with a non-physical being, as little as such words as "sneeze", "smile", "shudder", or even "mirth". To say that someone both sees and is non-physical appears to involve an outright contradiction.
The way out of this difficulty seems to be the idea that religious propositions are not straightforward statements, but rather "similes", "metaphors", or "allegories": Sentences like "God sees everything" cannot be understood literally, but only as symbolic pictures of something that cannot be conveyed directly. God's "seeing" would then be like the seeing that human beings perform, but also different in that it is not physical. The question is: Does this solve the problem of the intelligibility of religious statements? Does it help to understand how a non-physical being can be "watchful", "wrathful", "loving", or also "black" or "male"?
In his "Lecture on Ethics" of 1929 Wittgenstein offers the following critique of the idea that religious statements are similes or metaphors:
"... For when we speak of God and that He sees everything, and when we kneel and pray to Him, all our terms and actions seem to be part of a great and elaborate allegory which represents Him as a human being of great power whose grace we try to win, etc, etc. ...Thus in ethical and religious language we seem constantly to be using similes. But a simile must be a simile for something. And if I can describe a fact by means of a simile I must also be able to drop the simile and to describe the facts without it. Now in our case as soon as we try to drop the simile and simply to state the facts behind it, we find that there are no such facts. And so, what at first seemed to be a simile now seems to be mere nonsense"(The Philosophical Review 74 (1964): 9-10).
The gist of Wittgenstein's criticism is his reminder that a simile has to be a simile for something. Consider the following case: It is possible to describe the security system of a building as if it were a superhuman person. One could say of it that "it is behaving very oddly tonight", or, on account of its electronic eyes, that "it sees everybody entering and leaving the building". One can also say that it "admits" or "refuses entrance" to visitors, depending on whether the latter insert the proper cards into the appropriate slots. The regulating computer of the system can be said to be "startled" when fed with unforeseen data. It is clear that in this and similar cases anthropomorphic expressions like "seeing", "behaving", "being startled", etc. are not used in a literal sense, but rather metaphorically. A building's security system does not really see, etc., but rather functions in a way which in certain respects is analogous to what human beings do when they see, refuse entrance, are startled, etc. Thus, such expressions as "seeing" can be considered similes when they are used outside the sphere of those human activities in connection with which they are developed and normally learned and applied.
What is important here for Wittgenstein's contention is the fact that the metaphorical expressions can be replaced by literal descriptions of what is actually happening in the above security system. Instead of saying that it "sees" people entering or leaving one can describe the functioning of photosensitive cells, of impulses transmitted through wires to the regulating computer, and so forth. One can, in other words, describe the functioning of the security system by either using metaphorical or non-metaphorical terms, and whenever there are questions about the intelligibility of the metaphor, one can have recourse to the non-metaphorical description. It is the possibility of such recourse to non-metaphorical language which Wittgenstein finds lacking in the case of religious language. Thus, while it is clear that God does not see in the way human beings do, it is not at all clear what God does do when he "sees". In his Tractatus Wittgenstein writes: "To understand a statement is to know what is the case if it is true"(4.024). But we do not know what is said to be the case when someone says that "God sees". It follows that we cannot understand a text which says that "God sees everything". It also follows that we do not understand whatever else is said about God's activities, dispositions, and plans, as all these anthropomorphic reports fail to be translatable into direct descriptions of the alleged metaphysical facts. We simply do not know what seeing without eyes could possibly be, or feeling without a body, or planning for a future without an appropriate social and physical context. In trying to imagine such things as seeing without eyes we may momentarily call up all sorts of pictures (as when a painter represents God as a man floating on a cloud), but none of the pictures will fit into a coherent description or concept. In the end a sentence like "God sees everything" will remain a series of sounds without sense.
The matter of images is very important for religion. One could say that a great deal of the vitality of religion depends on suggestive pictures. There is not only the concept of Man as an image of God, and God as an image of Man, but the whole idea of "another world", of a non-physical realm "beyond" the physical world, is sustained as a series of images, as an elaborate metaphor. Certain burial practices are instructive here. In many cultures chieftains and warriors were buried with all their weapons, together with food and drink which would help them to survive during their journey to and in the Other World. The Vikings even fitted a boat in which the dead person was sent on his way. The burial customs indicate that both the journey and the Other World are imagined on the model of traveling and existing in this world. Life after death is pictured as something which strongly resembles the life before death. All the manifestations of life in the Other World are images of life as we know it here and now.
But there is an unbridgeable gap between the two worlds. The world in which we live and learn language is physical in many ways, a world of the senses, while the Other World is said to be a spirit world, a non-physical realm, even a world "beyond space and time". This means that there is no possible boat that could make the passage from here to the Beyond. Even the Vikings must have known that a boat and a corpse would not land in the Other World in the way boats might land on the shore of another continent. What separates the spirit world from this one obviously is something much more unmanageable and altogether different from what separates two continents. It is an ontological difference, i.e., the spirit world and this world represent two different kinds of being--more different from each other than even a rock and a mathematical equation. They are so different from each other that the whole image of a passage from the one world to the other breaks down. One can invoke the image of a passage, but it finds no intelligible application. The image can be maintained as a metaphor only as long as one does not think more closely about the details that would be involved. Metaphysical images are powerful as long as one does not seriously think.
Once certain questions are asked, the entire conception of Another World falls apart. Given that the Other World is not physical, or beyond space and time, no specification of it is possible at all. Even the description of it as being "beyond" the world is unintelligible. ("Metaphysics" derives from the Greek "meta" = "beyond", and "physis" = "nature", and from at least the Middle Ages on the word was used as a term for a world that lies "beyond" the physical reality of space and time. But it is clear that the Other World cannot lie "beyond" the physical world in the way in which Kazakstan lies beyond the Caucasus mountains.) As long as one thinks of the Other World as something like another shore or continent, or some sort of world that involves physical things, there is something one can think. But as soon as one is serious about the non-physical nature of the Beyond, all thoughts will cease, and only word shells remain. The suggestive Viking image of the journey will be without basis, and so will any other depiction of a putative transcendence. The unthinkable cannot be thought, and thus there is nothing to confirm or deny. The problem of Metaphysics ("is there another world?") has not been solved, but dissolved. "The rest is silence."
The exposure of metaphysical language as nonsense is a central part of Wittgenstein's work. It is part of an attempt to rid the mind of a host of pretentious verbiage and confused conceptual clutter in the way modernist architecture tried to cleanse the urban landscape of false facades and pointless ornaments. (The house that Wittgenstein built for his sister between 1926 and 1928 is a good manifestation of the minimalist spirit of his work.) The whole sense of his philosophy is to show the vanity of much of traditional thought: "[Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, what cannot be thought"(Tractatus 4.114).
Yet, Wittgenstein's relation to religion is not as clear-cut and simple as some of his fellow-philosophers had wished. Although he rejected any sort of metaphysical speculation or belief, in the Tractatus he made statements as the following: "There is indeed the inexpressible. It shows itself; it is the mystical"(6.522). Wittgenstein also repeatedly read and was deeply impressed by Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief, and numerous things he said and did with regard to his lifestyle strongly suggest that he was intent on living something like a religious life. ("Wittgenstein", a comedian recently suggested, "was a saint. He was a godamn saint!")
How could Wittgenstein reconcile an obvious respect for religion and religious lifestyles with his uncompromising rejection of all metaphysics? The Logical Positivists of the so-called Vienna Circle, who based most of their anti-metaphysical conclusions on analyses from the Tractatus, did not quite know what to make of Wittgenstein's remarks about "the mystical". In conversations (later published by Friedrich Waismann) Wittgenstein offered the following explanation:
"Is talking essential to religion? I can easily imagine a religion in which there are no doctrines, in which, therefore, no talking occurs. Obviously, the essence of religion cannot have anything to do with the fact that talking occurs, or rather: if talking occurs, then this is itself part of the religious act, and not a theory. And it does not matter, therefore, whether such words are true, false, or nonsensical".
Religion, in other words, is not theory, but a practice--a way of life. It is also not based on a theory, on a belief, but emanates from a pre-rational or non-rational attitude or disposition. People first have the desire to worship, then they provide (in most cases) the stories that seemingly explain their desire. If there are doctrines, they are based on what people already do or want to do. What people do is not based on the doctrines. Throughout his work Wittgenstein always emphasizes the primacy of practice before any theory; it is part of his new and revolutionary understanding of language and philosophy.
In The Gospel in Brief Tolstoy has Jesus say: "You do not believe me, because you do not follow me". This is exactly how Wittgenstein sees the matter. The traditional understanding is that one first has to have a belief (or "theory"), and then one acts on the basis of this belief. But that, according to Wittgenstein, is rarely the case. Most of the time it is not the word that is at the beginning, but the deed. The primacy of theory in human interaction is a relatively late development, and it occurs only in special circumstances. Most of what people do happens independently of reason and language, on a more primal level.
This understanding of religion as primarily a practice, as a way of life, is at the heart of the following piece by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It was written around 1923, and is posthumously published under the title "On Similes". It is a comment on the idea that religious statements are similes or metaphors:
"Many complain that the words of the wise are only similes, but unusable in everyday life--and that is the only life we have. When the wise man says: 'Go beyond', then he does not mean that one should go to the other side, which one could certainly do if the result of going would be worth it--but he means some legendary beyond, something we do not know, which he himself could not determine any more specifically, and which therefore is of no help to us here. All these similes really want to say only that what cannot be grasped cannot be grasped, and that we knew already. But what we labor on every day are other things.
To this someone said: 'Why do you resist? If you would follow the simile you would have become similes yourself, and thus already be free of your daily drudgery'.
Someone else said: 'I bet this is a simile, too'.
The first said: 'You win'.
The second said: 'But unfortunately only in the simile'.
The first said; 'No, in reality. In the simile you lose'."
Those who complain about the words of the wise complain about their unintelligibility, the unintelligibility of metaphysical statements. When the wise man says: 'Go beyond', then clearly he does not mean this in a literal sense--as if he had said: 'Go to the other side of the river', or: 'Go to another part of the world', or even 'Go beyond your individual interests'. To "go beyond" in the sense suggested by the wise man seems to refer to a realm which lies beyond everything that can be described in language--and thus it does not seem to mean anything at all. The difficulties concerning the determination of the "legendary beyond" are obviously the same as those arising in connection with the description of anything transcendent: the expressions used in pointing to the transcendent seem to be used like expressions used to point to some area of the world, yet it is clear that the transcendent cannot be anything like an area of the world (the "seeing" of God cannot be like the seeing of human beings). Consequently, the words of the wise do not seem to convey anything, they seem to be "useless".
The whole line of thought implied in Wittgenstein's critique of metaphysics and alluded to in the first part of Kafka's "On Similes" is challenged by the first speaker in Kafka's piece. The first speaker's reply to the foregoing complaint is: "Why do you resist? If you would follow the similes you would become similes yourself, and thus be free of your everyday drudgery". What this speaker is suggesting is to ignore the above difficulties and to follow the words of the wise, and the visions these words conjure up. The point of the words of the wise is not to give a description of a transcendent world, but rather to encourage people to act or to live in certain ways. What is intended by these words is not theory or insight, but practice.
But how can one follow statements which one does not understand? By interpreting the words as best as one can--by following the vision which (hopefully) is prompted by the words. The vision is not described by the words, but rather prompted by them. They may also be prompted by music, drugs, or a whack on the head by a Zen master. The person who "follows" the words of the wise is not to get entangled in questions of theory, in questions of the correct meaning of words. That would be a misunderstanding of what the wise man does when he says "Go beyond". Rather, the person who follows the words will act or live in a certain way--will live, for example, as if he or she expected to be soon in a very different country, face a day of judgment, etc. And by doing so the person may prompt others to do likewise, i.e., be a "simile" himself or herself.
The second speaker, not seeing the practical point of the words of the wise, i.e., still thinking that the words of the wise convey an attempted description of a transcendent world which has to be deciphered, understood, responds by saying that the advice to follow the words must be a simile, too--which is confirmed by the first speaker. What the second speaker has in mind is the idea that the advice to follow the words is as problematic as the original exhortation to "Go beyond": If one cannot understand what "the beyond" might be, then one also does not understand what it is to go there. From the second speaker's point of view everything the wise men say is language which has yet to be translated into something understandable--metaphors for which direct descriptions are needed.
The first speaker, by saying "You win", seems to agree with the second speaker: Yes, the advice to follow the words is a simile, too. The second speaker, wishing to press his skeptical attitude toward the words of the wise, opines that he is right (has won) "only in the simile", i.e., only from the viewpoint of someone who thinks that the words of the wise have a metaphorical meaning, that they imply the description of a transcendental world--which he, the second speaker, does not accept. (The second speaker, like all those who complain about the words of the wise, thinks that all metaphysical language is nonsensical.)
At this point the first speaker (by saying that the second speaker wins in reality) states that the second speaker has been mistaken all along, and mistaken in a much more fundamental way than the second speaker himself ever suspected he could be. He is right in saying that the first speaker's first remark was "a simile, too", but he is mistaken about what a simile is. Throughout the dialogue the second speaker took it for granted that a simile is at least implicitly a metaphorical description of what he wishes to see described directly, a transcendental reality. Throughout the dialogue, in other words, he took it for granted that the issue at hand was whether religious language is meaningful by being metaphorical, or nonsense. The first speaker's final remark reveals that the real difference at issue is between construing the words of the wise as described descriptions of transcendent matters at all, whether as successful descriptions or as failing ones, and taking them as expressions of a different kind all together.
According to the first speaker the words of the wise have nothing to do with describing, even implicitly, some "legendary beyond"; they are not metaphysical utterances. The words of the wise are practical: they are prompters, stimulants, or tools to activate those who are listening. To elucidate how these words can be practical without at least implying a description of a transcendental world, it might be helpful to compare them with the statues or images of God in places of worship. It would obviously be wrong-headed to look at such statues and images as attempts (either successful or failing ones) to picture God, to provide some sort of portrait the likeness of which could be tested at a future date by an act of eschatological verification. The function of such images is rather to remind, exhort, or awe people who participate in a certain way of life. They do not depict or fail to depict, but inspire.
The first speaker's final remark, in short, is a criticism of the position of the second speaker and all those who complain about the unintelligibility of the words of the wise. He points out by his final remark that all those who find the words unintelligible expect something from these words which they cannot possibly give, and which they are not intended to give. Those who look at the words of the wise as a possible description of a transcendent world commit what Analytic philosophers sometimes call a "category mistake", and the course of the dialogue in Kafka's piece shows that nothing further said by the wise will succeed in making the original words more understandable unless the above misconception is overcome, and people like the second speaker see what kind of words the words of the wise are. Recognition of the category mistake involved in the dialogue of "On Similes" could be called the point of Kafka's piece.
From Jorn K. Bramann: Traveling Light (1998)
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Socratic Philosophy
1. an introduction to philosophical thinking as such through a presentation of the work of Socrates;
2. a narrative description of the world in which Socrates lived, the society of classical Athens;
3. an application of Socratic ideas in later developments of Philosophy, particularly today.
A few words about each of the components:
1. What is Philosophy? The literal translation of the Greek word "philosophia" is "love of wisdom" (from "philos"= love, and "sophia"= wisdom). That origin of the word is still highly relevant, as will be seen, but not quite sufficient for a definition of what Philosophy is. Obviously, one needs to know what constitutes wisdom before one can know what a lover of it is.
The word "wisdom" can have several meanings. In ancient Greece it could mean, for example, the thorough knowledge of such things as mathematics, astronomy, literature, and music. A wise man in that sense was a person who knew a great deal more about these things than most other people. The wisdom that is relevant for Philosophy, however, is somewhat different. It is a special kind of thoughtfulness--a thoughtfulness that can be described as follows:
When people think about themselves in a serious way they often take, as it were, a step back from themselves and their lives and ask such questions as: Is this the person I ought to be? And does what I do most of the time ultimately make sense? Is what I live a real life? (Time and again inquisitive people have wondered whether there is real life before death ....)
Widening their inquiry from personal matters to broader concerns, thoughtful people will ask: Is this society, of which I am an active or passive part, the society I want it to be? Is it a good society? Is it just? Are there meaningful alternatives to our way of life? And what exactly is justice, anyway?
Widening their awareness still further, people develop such questions as: What are the ultimate goals of humanity? What is the meaning of life? Is there any meaning to life?
The pursuit of these questions will quickly bring up such related questions as: How can one find valid answers? What can we really know? What exactly is knowledge?
Organized religions and social traditions have shaped most of the moral concepts and rules by which people live. Different religions and different societies often seem to differ, however, in what they consider to be good or bad. What is good in one society is often considered evil in another. A thoughtful person will not want to be naiv or arbitrary about any such moral convictions; a thoughtful person will ask for convincing reasons why the moral demands of this or any other society should be accepted by free and intelligent beings.
Philosophy is the activity of seriously asking such questions, and of possibly answering them. Philosophers are individuals who do not blindly pursue their everyday purposes within the confines of unquestioned beliefs and established practices, but who look beyond everything that is given in order to inquire about ultimate purposes and justifications. They are not content with what people usually accept as justifications, but try to go beyond such convictions to determine whether accepted justifications are in fact sound. To be a philosopher is foremost to raise critical questions where most people simply believe and accept. It is to be a professional skeptic--and to accept answers (if at all) only after an intensive investigation of all reasons for doubting generally accepted convictions. Philosophy, one could say, is the art of doubting what most people rarely or ever doubt: the foundations of their everyday lives.
The first well-known thinker who explicitly and systematically introduced this kind of questioning into Western civilization was Socrates. The basic principle of his activity as a lover of wisdom was his often quoted statement "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates thus defined Philosophy as critical self-examination, as the will to not just live life, but to constantly question and evaluate it at the same time. Life, according to this conception, does not consist in simply existing in the world, but in developing a conscious relationship to this existence. Human beings should not be just doers, but should exist more as knowers, as knowers of themselves and their world. They should not pursue their practical goals like the instinct-driven creatures of an ant hill, but rather deliberately and reflectively--with a comprehensive understanding of what their lives and activities are ultimately about. Socrates thus set new standards for what it is to be human. The teachings of Socrates imply that people can fail, and fail utterly, to be human beings.
By systematically and persistently asking such questions as "What is (true) virtue?", "What is (true) justice?", or "What is (true) knowledge?", i.e., by casting doubt on commonly accepted notions of virtue, justice, or knowledge, Socrates more or less created Philosophy as we know it. After Socrates his friend and disciple Plato did not have to do much more than to add some more questions, and to attempt some famous and infamous answers, to delineate the body of concerns that constitute the core of Philosophy to this day. After reviewing the work of the philosophers that contributed their efforts during the twenty-four hundred years, the 20th century philosopher A. N. Whitehead concluded: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Socrates's work has never become outdated (in the way in which ancient Greek astronomy, for example, has become outdated). Socrates's questions and teachings are as relevant today as they were in 5th century Athens. It is for this reason that an introduction to Socrates's thoughts and activities is as pertinent an introduction to Philosophy as an account of more recent philosophical endeavors. To understand Socrates is to understand Philosophy--at least in its Western form.
2. To start the study of Philosophy with Socrates does not only have the advantage of clarifying an important beginning of Western thought, but also of providing an insight into the reasons why Philosophy ought to be pursued. In studying the discussions that Socrates had with his friends and opponents we learn not only what philosophers think, but also what prompts their arguments and pronouncements. Philosophy rarely exists in a social vacuum; it usually emerges in response to problems and challenges that come from the outside world. In the case of Socrates that becomes particularly clear, as all his thoughts are not the result of writing in solitude, but of discussions with others--of direct social interaction.
Plato (the main biographer of Socrates) provides a great deal of social context for the thoughts of his teacher, even if some of his descriptions are fiction. He presents a fascinating picture of the society that brought about Western philosophy. Since Plato could presuppose a great deal of knowledge of classical Greece that later became lost, however, further historical material has been added here. The history of Athens at the time of Socrates is a significant and suspenseful story, a story that can be reconstructed from the writings of Plato's contemporaries, particularly from the histories written by Thucydides and Xenophon. These histories, as will be seen, add much meaning to the philosophical deliberations of Socrates.
3. For Socrates Philosophy was a matter of how to live one's life. In subsequent centuries the love of wisdom became a great deal more academic, something that could be as remote from people's practical concerns as a game of chess. One reason was the increasing degree of specialization that befell Philosophy as much as any other area of knowledge. Professional philosophers could fill volumes on the question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it--without being able to say how an answer to this question would make any difference to anyone. Philosophers can argue such a question from nine to five and then live as unphilosophical a life as anyone else. Another reason is the growing historization of Philosophy, the tendency to painstakingly research what others have thought about a problem, and then consider the result as an accomplished task of Philosophy.
"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers," Thoreau writes in Walden. And he adds: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, .... It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." There would be not much sense in studying the thought of Socrates if one could not learn something important from it for one's own existence. Philosophy should make a difference in people's lives, and not exhaust itself in the contemplation of quaint puzzles or the satisfaction of an antiquarian curiosity. An application of Socratic ideas to situations of our own century is therefore an essential part of the present Introduction to Philosophy, an application that will actually highlight the very meaning of statements that would otherwise be nothing but cultural window dressing in an otherwise barren and uninspired life.
2. a narrative description of the world in which Socrates lived, the society of classical Athens;
3. an application of Socratic ideas in later developments of Philosophy, particularly today.
A few words about each of the components:
1. What is Philosophy? The literal translation of the Greek word "philosophia" is "love of wisdom" (from "philos"= love, and "sophia"= wisdom). That origin of the word is still highly relevant, as will be seen, but not quite sufficient for a definition of what Philosophy is. Obviously, one needs to know what constitutes wisdom before one can know what a lover of it is.
The word "wisdom" can have several meanings. In ancient Greece it could mean, for example, the thorough knowledge of such things as mathematics, astronomy, literature, and music. A wise man in that sense was a person who knew a great deal more about these things than most other people. The wisdom that is relevant for Philosophy, however, is somewhat different. It is a special kind of thoughtfulness--a thoughtfulness that can be described as follows:
When people think about themselves in a serious way they often take, as it were, a step back from themselves and their lives and ask such questions as: Is this the person I ought to be? And does what I do most of the time ultimately make sense? Is what I live a real life? (Time and again inquisitive people have wondered whether there is real life before death ....)
Widening their inquiry from personal matters to broader concerns, thoughtful people will ask: Is this society, of which I am an active or passive part, the society I want it to be? Is it a good society? Is it just? Are there meaningful alternatives to our way of life? And what exactly is justice, anyway?
Widening their awareness still further, people develop such questions as: What are the ultimate goals of humanity? What is the meaning of life? Is there any meaning to life?
The pursuit of these questions will quickly bring up such related questions as: How can one find valid answers? What can we really know? What exactly is knowledge?
Organized religions and social traditions have shaped most of the moral concepts and rules by which people live. Different religions and different societies often seem to differ, however, in what they consider to be good or bad. What is good in one society is often considered evil in another. A thoughtful person will not want to be naiv or arbitrary about any such moral convictions; a thoughtful person will ask for convincing reasons why the moral demands of this or any other society should be accepted by free and intelligent beings.
Philosophy is the activity of seriously asking such questions, and of possibly answering them. Philosophers are individuals who do not blindly pursue their everyday purposes within the confines of unquestioned beliefs and established practices, but who look beyond everything that is given in order to inquire about ultimate purposes and justifications. They are not content with what people usually accept as justifications, but try to go beyond such convictions to determine whether accepted justifications are in fact sound. To be a philosopher is foremost to raise critical questions where most people simply believe and accept. It is to be a professional skeptic--and to accept answers (if at all) only after an intensive investigation of all reasons for doubting generally accepted convictions. Philosophy, one could say, is the art of doubting what most people rarely or ever doubt: the foundations of their everyday lives.
The first well-known thinker who explicitly and systematically introduced this kind of questioning into Western civilization was Socrates. The basic principle of his activity as a lover of wisdom was his often quoted statement "The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates thus defined Philosophy as critical self-examination, as the will to not just live life, but to constantly question and evaluate it at the same time. Life, according to this conception, does not consist in simply existing in the world, but in developing a conscious relationship to this existence. Human beings should not be just doers, but should exist more as knowers, as knowers of themselves and their world. They should not pursue their practical goals like the instinct-driven creatures of an ant hill, but rather deliberately and reflectively--with a comprehensive understanding of what their lives and activities are ultimately about. Socrates thus set new standards for what it is to be human. The teachings of Socrates imply that people can fail, and fail utterly, to be human beings.
By systematically and persistently asking such questions as "What is (true) virtue?", "What is (true) justice?", or "What is (true) knowledge?", i.e., by casting doubt on commonly accepted notions of virtue, justice, or knowledge, Socrates more or less created Philosophy as we know it. After Socrates his friend and disciple Plato did not have to do much more than to add some more questions, and to attempt some famous and infamous answers, to delineate the body of concerns that constitute the core of Philosophy to this day. After reviewing the work of the philosophers that contributed their efforts during the twenty-four hundred years, the 20th century philosopher A. N. Whitehead concluded: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." Socrates's work has never become outdated (in the way in which ancient Greek astronomy, for example, has become outdated). Socrates's questions and teachings are as relevant today as they were in 5th century Athens. It is for this reason that an introduction to Socrates's thoughts and activities is as pertinent an introduction to Philosophy as an account of more recent philosophical endeavors. To understand Socrates is to understand Philosophy--at least in its Western form.
2. To start the study of Philosophy with Socrates does not only have the advantage of clarifying an important beginning of Western thought, but also of providing an insight into the reasons why Philosophy ought to be pursued. In studying the discussions that Socrates had with his friends and opponents we learn not only what philosophers think, but also what prompts their arguments and pronouncements. Philosophy rarely exists in a social vacuum; it usually emerges in response to problems and challenges that come from the outside world. In the case of Socrates that becomes particularly clear, as all his thoughts are not the result of writing in solitude, but of discussions with others--of direct social interaction.
Plato (the main biographer of Socrates) provides a great deal of social context for the thoughts of his teacher, even if some of his descriptions are fiction. He presents a fascinating picture of the society that brought about Western philosophy. Since Plato could presuppose a great deal of knowledge of classical Greece that later became lost, however, further historical material has been added here. The history of Athens at the time of Socrates is a significant and suspenseful story, a story that can be reconstructed from the writings of Plato's contemporaries, particularly from the histories written by Thucydides and Xenophon. These histories, as will be seen, add much meaning to the philosophical deliberations of Socrates.
3. For Socrates Philosophy was a matter of how to live one's life. In subsequent centuries the love of wisdom became a great deal more academic, something that could be as remote from people's practical concerns as a game of chess. One reason was the increasing degree of specialization that befell Philosophy as much as any other area of knowledge. Professional philosophers could fill volumes on the question of whether a falling tree makes a sound if nobody is around to hear it--without being able to say how an answer to this question would make any difference to anyone. Philosophers can argue such a question from nine to five and then live as unphilosophical a life as anyone else. Another reason is the growing historization of Philosophy, the tendency to painstakingly research what others have thought about a problem, and then consider the result as an accomplished task of Philosophy.
"There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers," Thoreau writes in Walden. And he adds: "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, .... It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically." There would be not much sense in studying the thought of Socrates if one could not learn something important from it for one's own existence. Philosophy should make a difference in people's lives, and not exhaust itself in the contemplation of quaint puzzles or the satisfaction of an antiquarian curiosity. An application of Socratic ideas to situations of our own century is therefore an essential part of the present Introduction to Philosophy, an application that will actually highlight the very meaning of statements that would otherwise be nothing but cultural window dressing in an otherwise barren and uninspired life.
Critical Responses to Bramann's "Understanding the End of Art"
CRITICAL RESPONSES TO BRAMANN'S "UNDERSTANDING THE END OF ART"
Francisco Goya: "Why?"
After Bramann's presentation of his paper "Understanding the End of Art" during the Philosophical Forum debate on October 28, 1998, Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities Dr. Philip Allen responded with the following remarks:
(1) There is something disturbing about the suggestion that just as marginalized groups have begun to be recognized as producers of art, we now declare the end of art. (2) Even if a case could be made for the end of art by reference to the history of two-dimensional painting, it is far from clear that a parallel case could be made by reference to the other arts. (3) Great art is still being produced today, but it is outside the structure of the artworld and its social context. (4) The underlying purpose of art is to "make the hidden visible." It is not plausible to believe that art in this sense has (or could) come to an end.
Dr. Randall Rhodes presented his reply in the following paper::
It may be too pessimistic to contend that the cutting edge of the human spirit has far outpaced the developmental trajectory of art. That, rather than finding new modes of creation and enlightenment, art has sunken into a protracted state of disorientation and exhaustion. That, no longer purposive, art has become caught up in its own production and effete aestheticism. Yet, considering the whole context of its historical progress, art has been only incidentally purposive. Drafted into the service of political or social agendas, art has been periodically reduced to mass illustration and the aping of nature. However, ever since Plato and the advent of critical theory, art has been characterized as neither cognitive nor moral. Perceived as, at best, a shadow image of an imperfectly ordered planet, art has but one objective - to eschew the empirical and function as a phenomenal embodiment of dimly perceived metaphysical truths, an eternal representation of the innermost unfolding of the Idea.
Hegel's reading of art's developmental progress up the anagogical ladder, from the symbolic to the classical, and ultimately, to the romantic, locates the situs where the Idea is freed from the concrete image and the moment when it surpasses our understanding and wins our wonder. But Hegel's theoretical fallability in regard to art's history obscures the fact that art has been romantic since its inception. Mimesists have always been consigned to the lowest hierarchical ranks, or even to Hell, and Platonists, to the highest academic ranks and immortal fame. As practitioners of le beau ideal, Platonists find that truth lay not within the worldly referential, but in the liberation from it.
For example, Donald Judd's Untitled sculpture from 1967, celebrates minimalist abstraction. In its geometrical and textural purism, it rises upward, step by step, leading our vision to its sequential conclusion. It is an aesthetic transport to the world of divine exaltation, a phenomenal leap of faith above and beyond the limits of created and physical matter.
Playing Riegl against Hegel, a certain aspect of art's historical progress operates according to its own internal demands and structural concerns. This developmental chain is animated by the Kunstwollen, a larger will that moves throughout a culture with an inner inherent necessity to generate transition and movement. Yet while this stream of art suffers through slopes and movements, genetic and geological mutations, its organic living power of apprehension endlessly flows onward and upward. For example, a Persian rug, in its balance of florettes and vignettes, embodies this historical quest for compositional harmony and virtu. Though visually an interweaving of signs and "effete" aestheticism, it is not a harbinger of the end or death of art, but functions rather as a mandala diagramming chains of linear movement and romantic trains of associations.
The transaction of art consists of such a dialogue between author, sign, and reader. Tolstoy observed: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously,by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them." (What is Art?, trans. Maude, 1930)
Predicated on the reader's delicacy of imagination and susceptibility to sentiment, the semiotic reading of the presented lines, colors, and forms shall indexically point to the author's condition of soul and unite author and reader in a oneness through sympathy. "Not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art" (Tolstoy). As such pleasure may be indirect, intuitive, or reflective, the reading is indifferent to the objective basis of the preferent and free from a subservience to reason and understanding.
Mark Rothko's theoretical emphasis on infectiousness is evidenced in his painting Orange, Gold, Black, 1955. Rothko wrote: "I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anythingelse…I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" (Ashton, Rothko, 1983)
Rothko's expressionist canvas lies within the realm of the Poetics, a sensual celebration of the emotive aesthetic as read within the soaking paint, melting shapes, and breathing colors. Without absolutes, universals, balance or harmony, the signage floats unanchored along the edge of human consciousness.
While some critics state that art is dead as it has reached its conclusion in perfectly knowing itself, in knowing what it is, it would be more appropriate to recognize the collapse of critical, propositional, or epistemological structures. As the author is reduced to a sign maker, and his/her signs, hieroglyphs for feelings, art criticism must be repositioned. As the reader has no other means of recognizing a work of art than his/her feelings for it, art functions as a mirror, not reflecting objective but psychologistic truths. Through this venture into the narcissistic realm of projections and reflections, the reader sees the self as the other and the other as the self.
Carlo Maria Mariana's painting entitled To See Oneself in a Celestial Mirror, 1984, recalls Socratic constructs of love and Platonic metaphysics. The human is exalted as the divine, and the divine is anthopomorphized. Truth is sought in the drama within, and the powers without. Art's chromatic and calligraphic torsions and tensions shape a self-nourishing enthusiasm which continually spirals upwards culminating in a religious, phenomenological liberation of the reader.
Gary Hume's Vicious, 1994, executed in glossy paint on wood panel, similarly functions as a mirror, inviting the seeing of the self within the other's silhouette. Simulating the flatness of commercial sign painting, the brown skin functions as a palimpsest, a tabula rasa, onto which our private selves flow. The artist has not invented anything, but he has engaged everything. The work is made up of endlessly proliferating meanings which have no stable point of origin, nor of closure. Boundaries dissolve, signs cross fertilize, and new and ignored subjectivities (re)surface. Executed with the usual insolence of artistic genius, Art, according to Charles Beaudelaire, floats in a realm where "the working of latent heat allow no rest, but everything is in a state of perpetual vibration which causes lines to tremble and fulfills the law of eternal and universal movement." (Salon, 1848)
Susan Rothenberg's Blue U-Turn, 1989, depicts an indeterminate figure, drifting and twisting in its liquid environment. The figure's u-turn reflects this anti-historical about face, a deconstructive dissolution of physical being and reintegration of the self into the primal order. Art, as the filter of fundamental doubt and the religion of universal anguish, will continually reveal an unconscious symbolism that confesses this hidden course of sensibility for mankind and the Geist, "the innate symbology of innate ideas." (Heine)
Obviously, as Donald Judd observed, with the acknowledgment of these oblique shifts in frames and formats, linear history unravels and art history ceases to be developmental. If historicity is predicated upon a concreteness, then such epistemological frames must be abandoned. Walter Benjamin wrote:
"Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspective and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. "(One Way Street, 1928)
Now that the cultural past has been subdued through internalization, what should be the form of critical discourse? As the artist without hands remains truest to the phenomenological Idea, because he doesn't pollute it with the burden of objectivity, perhaps the true critic is one who never writes but senses his world without imposing texts upon it. All that remains in this decentered, unbounded world is the hermeneutic expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled, and the liberated human spirit and the Kunstwollen (the spirit of Art) will continue their upward journeys.
Dr. Bramann responded shortly by pointing out that he was not necessarily in disagreement with most of the contentions of the respondents: Paintings etc. are undoubtedly still useful by making the hidden visible, by giving voice to marginalized people, by arousing deep emotions in individuals, or by giving expression to people's feelings about the world. Nobody argues for the idea that people do not or should not paint etc. anymore. Rather, what Hegel and others aimed and aim at is a recognition of the fact that art as art has run its course, that what was peculiar to the nature of art was finally and explicitly realized after a long historical struggle and development. Feelings and understandings are expressed in many ways, not only artistically, and aspirations are voiced in other forms than aesthetic ones. With respect to such functions art is just one way of conveying things among many others. What sets art apart from such other forms of expression is its aesthetic dimension, its inevitable concern with means not only as means, but also as ends. This aesthetic dimension had to be grasped, and was grasped by being radicalized in the form of perhaps one-sided Abstraction and art for art's sake. After its full self-recognition in this radicalization art can go back to where it came from: Into midst of "real life," into more brutal struggles than aesthetic ones, into endeavors that may lead far beyond aesthetic contemplation.
Francisco Goya: "Why?"
After Bramann's presentation of his paper "Understanding the End of Art" during the Philosophical Forum debate on October 28, 1998, Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities Dr. Philip Allen responded with the following remarks:
(1) There is something disturbing about the suggestion that just as marginalized groups have begun to be recognized as producers of art, we now declare the end of art. (2) Even if a case could be made for the end of art by reference to the history of two-dimensional painting, it is far from clear that a parallel case could be made by reference to the other arts. (3) Great art is still being produced today, but it is outside the structure of the artworld and its social context. (4) The underlying purpose of art is to "make the hidden visible." It is not plausible to believe that art in this sense has (or could) come to an end.
Dr. Randall Rhodes presented his reply in the following paper::
It may be too pessimistic to contend that the cutting edge of the human spirit has far outpaced the developmental trajectory of art. That, rather than finding new modes of creation and enlightenment, art has sunken into a protracted state of disorientation and exhaustion. That, no longer purposive, art has become caught up in its own production and effete aestheticism. Yet, considering the whole context of its historical progress, art has been only incidentally purposive. Drafted into the service of political or social agendas, art has been periodically reduced to mass illustration and the aping of nature. However, ever since Plato and the advent of critical theory, art has been characterized as neither cognitive nor moral. Perceived as, at best, a shadow image of an imperfectly ordered planet, art has but one objective - to eschew the empirical and function as a phenomenal embodiment of dimly perceived metaphysical truths, an eternal representation of the innermost unfolding of the Idea.
Hegel's reading of art's developmental progress up the anagogical ladder, from the symbolic to the classical, and ultimately, to the romantic, locates the situs where the Idea is freed from the concrete image and the moment when it surpasses our understanding and wins our wonder. But Hegel's theoretical fallability in regard to art's history obscures the fact that art has been romantic since its inception. Mimesists have always been consigned to the lowest hierarchical ranks, or even to Hell, and Platonists, to the highest academic ranks and immortal fame. As practitioners of le beau ideal, Platonists find that truth lay not within the worldly referential, but in the liberation from it.
For example, Donald Judd's Untitled sculpture from 1967, celebrates minimalist abstraction. In its geometrical and textural purism, it rises upward, step by step, leading our vision to its sequential conclusion. It is an aesthetic transport to the world of divine exaltation, a phenomenal leap of faith above and beyond the limits of created and physical matter.
Playing Riegl against Hegel, a certain aspect of art's historical progress operates according to its own internal demands and structural concerns. This developmental chain is animated by the Kunstwollen, a larger will that moves throughout a culture with an inner inherent necessity to generate transition and movement. Yet while this stream of art suffers through slopes and movements, genetic and geological mutations, its organic living power of apprehension endlessly flows onward and upward. For example, a Persian rug, in its balance of florettes and vignettes, embodies this historical quest for compositional harmony and virtu. Though visually an interweaving of signs and "effete" aestheticism, it is not a harbinger of the end or death of art, but functions rather as a mandala diagramming chains of linear movement and romantic trains of associations.
The transaction of art consists of such a dialogue between author, sign, and reader. Tolstoy observed: "Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously,by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that others are infected by these feelings and also experience them." (What is Art?, trans. Maude, 1930)
Predicated on the reader's delicacy of imagination and susceptibility to sentiment, the semiotic reading of the presented lines, colors, and forms shall indexically point to the author's condition of soul and unite author and reader in a oneness through sympathy. "Not only is infection a sure sign of art, but the degree of infectiousness is also the sole measure of excellence in art" (Tolstoy). As such pleasure may be indirect, intuitive, or reflective, the reading is indifferent to the objective basis of the preferent and free from a subservience to reason and understanding.
Mark Rothko's theoretical emphasis on infectiousness is evidenced in his painting Orange, Gold, Black, 1955. Rothko wrote: "I am not interested in relationships of color or form or anythingelse…I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on - and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!" (Ashton, Rothko, 1983)
Rothko's expressionist canvas lies within the realm of the Poetics, a sensual celebration of the emotive aesthetic as read within the soaking paint, melting shapes, and breathing colors. Without absolutes, universals, balance or harmony, the signage floats unanchored along the edge of human consciousness.
While some critics state that art is dead as it has reached its conclusion in perfectly knowing itself, in knowing what it is, it would be more appropriate to recognize the collapse of critical, propositional, or epistemological structures. As the author is reduced to a sign maker, and his/her signs, hieroglyphs for feelings, art criticism must be repositioned. As the reader has no other means of recognizing a work of art than his/her feelings for it, art functions as a mirror, not reflecting objective but psychologistic truths. Through this venture into the narcissistic realm of projections and reflections, the reader sees the self as the other and the other as the self.
Carlo Maria Mariana's painting entitled To See Oneself in a Celestial Mirror, 1984, recalls Socratic constructs of love and Platonic metaphysics. The human is exalted as the divine, and the divine is anthopomorphized. Truth is sought in the drama within, and the powers without. Art's chromatic and calligraphic torsions and tensions shape a self-nourishing enthusiasm which continually spirals upwards culminating in a religious, phenomenological liberation of the reader.
Gary Hume's Vicious, 1994, executed in glossy paint on wood panel, similarly functions as a mirror, inviting the seeing of the self within the other's silhouette. Simulating the flatness of commercial sign painting, the brown skin functions as a palimpsest, a tabula rasa, onto which our private selves flow. The artist has not invented anything, but he has engaged everything. The work is made up of endlessly proliferating meanings which have no stable point of origin, nor of closure. Boundaries dissolve, signs cross fertilize, and new and ignored subjectivities (re)surface. Executed with the usual insolence of artistic genius, Art, according to Charles Beaudelaire, floats in a realm where "the working of latent heat allow no rest, but everything is in a state of perpetual vibration which causes lines to tremble and fulfills the law of eternal and universal movement." (Salon, 1848)
Susan Rothenberg's Blue U-Turn, 1989, depicts an indeterminate figure, drifting and twisting in its liquid environment. The figure's u-turn reflects this anti-historical about face, a deconstructive dissolution of physical being and reintegration of the self into the primal order. Art, as the filter of fundamental doubt and the religion of universal anguish, will continually reveal an unconscious symbolism that confesses this hidden course of sensibility for mankind and the Geist, "the innate symbology of innate ideas." (Heine)
Obviously, as Donald Judd observed, with the acknowledgment of these oblique shifts in frames and formats, linear history unravels and art history ceases to be developmental. If historicity is predicated upon a concreteness, then such epistemological frames must be abandoned. Walter Benjamin wrote:
"Fools lament the decay of criticism. For its day is long past. Criticism is a matter of correct distancing. It was at home in a world where perspective and prospects counted and where it was still possible to take a standpoint. Now things press too closely on human society. "(One Way Street, 1928)
Now that the cultural past has been subdued through internalization, what should be the form of critical discourse? As the artist without hands remains truest to the phenomenological Idea, because he doesn't pollute it with the burden of objectivity, perhaps the true critic is one who never writes but senses his world without imposing texts upon it. All that remains in this decentered, unbounded world is the hermeneutic expression of hope that the cultural space left by the demise of epistemology will not be filled, and the liberated human spirit and the Kunstwollen (the spirit of Art) will continue their upward journeys.
Dr. Bramann responded shortly by pointing out that he was not necessarily in disagreement with most of the contentions of the respondents: Paintings etc. are undoubtedly still useful by making the hidden visible, by giving voice to marginalized people, by arousing deep emotions in individuals, or by giving expression to people's feelings about the world. Nobody argues for the idea that people do not or should not paint etc. anymore. Rather, what Hegel and others aimed and aim at is a recognition of the fact that art as art has run its course, that what was peculiar to the nature of art was finally and explicitly realized after a long historical struggle and development. Feelings and understandings are expressed in many ways, not only artistically, and aspirations are voiced in other forms than aesthetic ones. With respect to such functions art is just one way of conveying things among many others. What sets art apart from such other forms of expression is its aesthetic dimension, its inevitable concern with means not only as means, but also as ends. This aesthetic dimension had to be grasped, and was grasped by being radicalized in the form of perhaps one-sided Abstraction and art for art's sake. After its full self-recognition in this radicalization art can go back to where it came from: Into midst of "real life," into more brutal struggles than aesthetic ones, into endeavors that may lead far beyond aesthetic contemplation.
Understanding the End of Art
UNDERSTANDING THE END OF ART
by Jorn K. Bramann
In my mystery novel Phantom Doors (G. Aston Nelson Books, 1998) one of the main characters is the art dealer Barry Ashton, who, somewhat like Hegel, believes that art has come to an end, that it has no genuine future anymore. ("Art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest possibilities, a thing of the past," Hegel stated in his Philosophy of Fine Art.) The following essay is an attempt to understand Ashton's position. Due to his immediate concerns, Ashton talks primarily about certain visual arts, about painting and sculpture. His theory, however, is meant to encompass all arts, and so does the following discussion.
"A specter is haunting the art world, the specter of the end of art," one may be tempted to say, and saying so would be prompted foremost by the following two considerations. First there is the widespread feeling--justified or not--that artists have for a long time failed to produce any work of real substance, that the community of artists has been lingering in a protracted state of artistic disorientation and exhaustion which could be only thinly disguised by such sensationalist shenanigans as sawing a cow into sections, or lining up plain bricks on the hardwood floors of expensive galleries and prestigious museums. Eric Hobsbawm's description of "the death of the avant-garde" in his history of the 20th century is indicative of this feeling: "The achievements of post-war modernist painting and sculpture were incomparably less and usually much inferior to their inter-war predecessors, as a comparison of Parisian art in the 1950s with that of the 1920s immediately demonstrates. It consisted largely of a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, ...." (The Age of Extremes, p. 517). Second, there is the impulse of the philosophy of history--usually associated with Hegel and Marx--according to which everything in the world is not only subject to change, but also to coming into being at one point in history, and to vanishing at another. Art, according to this thinking, has not always existed, and it may not always be with us. It is not only bound to go through the internal changes that by now we have accepted as part of art, but it will at some point also have exhausted all possibilities of self-renewal, and from then on be condemned either to sterile self-repetition, or to the production of "gimmicks."
Not surprisingly, the idea of the end of art has met with considerable hostility, not only on the part of those who have some sort of financial or otherwise tangible stake in it, but even more so by the true lovers of art. Art, after all, is not just one of those things that may or may not exist, with no serious consequences for anything else. Art represents an enormously important dimension of human life, a dimension that is as important as science, morality, or religion. Among educated contemporaries the suggestion that art has come to an end is the cultural equivalent of "God is dead." Nevertheless, the question whether art has run its course or not deserves serious consideration. The present state of the arts is, in fact, such that a closer look at the question may be imperative. The routine assertion that art has always come up with new things, and will therefore always find new and creative ways of renewing itself, is too flimsy a response to the problems that artists are facing at this point in history. (The introduction of video, laser, or computers into the production of art, for example, cannot count as "new forms of art," as apologists of "post-modernism" often assume. The forms and concepts that have come into existence with these new media fall well within the parameters of what modern artists have done before, slight variations and shifted emphases notwithstanding. It amounts to old wine in new bottles to an extent that even the wishful notion of post-modernism as such becomes rather suspicious.)
There is a sense in which the idea of the end of art, taken as an hypothesis, is clearly false. Even though a number of serious thinkers and observers of the art scene have suggested that art has indeed run its course, the actual production, appreciation, and collection of artworks has rarely been as brisk and widespread as it is today. To say that art has come to an end can hardly mean, then, that people have lost their interest in painting, sculpting, or producing any other kind of artistic work. The question therefore is: What does it mean to say that art has come to an end? What can people have in mind when they assert that it has no genuine future anymore?
Few people think that there is no use anymore for art as entertainment, as decoration, as expression of feelings, or in some other pragmatic function. People will always need buildings, for example, and it may not be bad if these buildings were designed more aesthetically than most of them are now. One may also surmise that people will continue appreciating well-drawn cartoons, all sorts of monuments, beautiful parks, etc.--long after art proper has become history. Besides, painting pictures or carving figures will always be good therapy for senior citizens and emotionally disturbed individuals.
Such undoubtedly worthy uses of art, however, are considered somewhat trivial by the true lovers of it. Using art in this way is felt to be not unlike the use of Mozart's music in state-of-the-art cow stables, where it causes cows to produce more milk, or the use of classical sounds to prevent teenagers from hanging out at certain public places. Art in its most emphatic sense is considered much more weighty than its use as entertainment, decoration, or the controlled release of emotions suggests. Thinkers who made art the explicit subject matter of their investigations have almost always agreed that "fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is ... free," free, that is, of all external, non-artistic purposes (Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art, Introduction, p. 8; tr. by F. P. B. Osmaston). It is in art as art that art reveals its true importance and substance, and it is in art's pure, non-utilitarian form that "nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess"(ibid., p.9).
But what is art as art--art in its highest capacity or purest manifestation? The classical answer to this is that art is the production of objects for aesthetic contemplation, whereby aesthetic contemplation is the perception of things for their own sake, in an act of "disinterested interest."
This is, of course, a very short formula for a complex state of affairs. It can be elucidated, however, by taking a look at certain developments that unfolded in Western art during the last six to seven hundred years. These developments provide a clarification of both the notion of art as art, as well as the idea that art may have run its course. For the facts of this period of art history constitute a trajectory that documents the movement of art toward a specific and significant goal. This goal is an end--both in the sense of purpose and in the sense of demise. Reaching the end of art is tantamount to fulfilling its innermost purpose, or of finally becoming what it essentially is. What, then, is this trajectory?
European art during the Middle Ages had largely the purpose of serving the Church and its teachings. Like philosophy, one might say, art was not autonomous, but an ancilla theologiae, a "handmaiden of theology." And one of its main tasks was the depiction of saints and Biblical events for the edification of the faithful. For a long time these pictorial representations tended to consist of stark, two-dimensional figures situated in front of flat backgrounds (often of real or painted gold). Compared to later European paintings, these images seem primitive, even inapt. What was of primary importance in these pictures was, after all, not their artistry, but their spiritual content, their "message."
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, the flat backgrounds began to be replaced by bits and pieces of three-dimensional space, by rudimentary indications of real landscapes. And while the formerly stark and schematic saints became ever more individual and realistic, artists became increasingly absorbed by the expansion and exploration of the physical environment of their figures, as well as by the mundane details of these figures' physical lives. Mary and child were not the sole focus anymore, but the holy figures in relation to spacious views of fields, rivers, and distant mountains. And Jesus dining at Emmaus was not a mere otherworldly prophet anymore, but was shown surrounded by lovingly depicted foods, plates, and other worldly objects. In time the landscapes and physical objects became more important than the spiritual figures situated in or among them. Trees or elaborately decorated tables took up more space than angels or saints. And by the 17th century, landscape paintings and food still lifes were well-established independent genres in the world of art. The interest in and competent depiction of physical reality had by and large replaced the chaste spirituality that is characteristic of the high Middle Ages.
This development of full-fledged landscape paintings and still lifes out of their rudimentary beginnings at the end of the Middle Ages is, of course, part of the much broader process of secularization that began with the Renaissance and resulted in the establishment of Modernity. What does this process imply for our conception of art? Two things: In the process of developing the landscape from a mere location for an important person to something that has value in itself, artists discovered and developed the importance of aesthetic perception. Landscape as mere location has a merely utilitarian or instrumental value; landscape as an object of aesthetic contemplation is valuable in itself. The contemplation or perception of things for their own sake is at the heart of the aesthetic. By passionately devoting themselves to the depiction of landscapes and a plethora of sensuous objects, artists demonstrated persuasively that physical reality is not only important, but also beautiful (in the sense of being an object of "disinterested interest"). And by thus turning their work into the medium of aesthetic contemplation, artists also began to emancipate art from being a mere handmaiden for something else to something that can exist for its own sake. By increasingly ignoring the extraneous purpose of serving the church and its teachings, they established (or re-established, if one keeps in mind certain pre-medieval epochs of art) the autonomy of art.
The ancillary or utilitarian role of art did not vanish altogether, of course. Churches still needed to be decorated, princes, cardinals, and rich merchants portrayed for posterity, and aristocratic visitors of palaces impressed by battle scenes and other painted pomp. But all this co-existed now with what one may call pure art. Since artists needed to make a living, to be sure, they often had to produce work that had non-artistic uses. But even in these cases artists managed to pursue their more proper interest. Many a portrait or picture of a saint was little more than a pretext for the artist to engage in the aesthetic pursuits he or she was interested in as an artist. In subtle ways art did not serve the patrons, but the patrons served art. Art as such, pure art, had become a consuming passion. It established itself as the basic "institution" of human life as which, by and large, we still accept it today.
Focusing on the physical and aesthetic aspects of the world was only a first major step in the development of art that led to today's situation. Artists quickly embarked on a further expansion of the domain of the aesthetic: the extraordinary refinement of the medium of painting itself. For with most masters of the craft painting did not remain just a means of depicting and exploring the world and its objects, but became a focus of interest in its own right. Ever more often interest shifted from the painting of objects to the painting of objects, from the what to the how.
In many cases, of course, the depiction of the things of the world went hand in hand with the delight in creating fascinating forms and textures as such. When Ruisdael paints the barks of certain trees or the surfaces of sylvan ponds, then he usually achieves both: the presentation of a brooding, almost haunted landscape, let's say, and the creation of surfaces and textures which in themselves would entice collectors to buy his work. And when Rembrandt and his school paint human faces, their infinitely nuanced surfaces are both: renderings of the human condition and riveting textures. But on the whole it is clear that the medium of painting increasingly became a focus of exploration in itself. Art began to become its own purpose.
In the case of some 17th century Dutch still life painting one could almost talk about hints at abstract art. When Willem Kalf, e.g., paints the traditional half-pealed lemon in his sumptuous compositions of foods and fine objects, then he often does not seem to be interested at all in giving a faithful reproduction of the real object, but more in dissolving the object in a display of color shades and texture nuances. With him, as with other masters, it is definitely not the object anymore which counts, but the creative way in which the object is presented. To some degree the object began already to become irrelevant for these painters.
It still took many generations for objects to disappear altogether from the canvases of artists, but it clearly became a sort of misunderstanding when people assumed (in accordance with the mimesis theory of classical Greek philosophy) that the essence of art was to depict reality. While that misunderstanding was natural in the case of people who rarely pay close attention to art, for most post-Renaissance artists it was quite clear that they were concerned with other things than producing mirror images of the world. Even painters that are usually classified as "Realists," such as Winslow Homer, often painted seascapes, for example, in which water, sands, and sky were mere pretexts to paint shapes and surfaces which were entirely satisfying in themselves, regardless of what they represented.
Very obvious and radical breaks occurred shortly after the turn to the 20th century. Abstract painters like Kandinsky and Malevich (together with theoreticians like Clive Bell) made it official, as it were, that the real painting consists of lines, shapes, colors, and textures, and not of any images or stories that they may also convey. And Cubist painters like Braque and Picasso demonstrated something similar by visually cutting real objects into pieces, and by recomposing the fragments into configurations that could not possibly exist in reality, but rather represented the requirements of artistic compositions on a canvas. The method of Cubism makes provocatively visible the fact that the real objects of the world are mere raw material in the hands of the artist who pursues his or her own--purely aesthetic--purposes. All of modern art demonstrates very clearly that as such art is not in the service of anything, but first of all an artificial creation with its own requirements and self-awareness. Only secondarily will purposes such as depicting certain aspects of the world come into the picture.
Again, all sorts of things were aimed at and going on simultaneously in art, as they are still today. To reduce all of art to the exclusive pursuit of the aesthetic would clearly be a falsifying kind of reductionism. (In view of Wittgenstein's remarks about definitions and "family resemblance" concepts, it may be important to emphasize that no Platonic "essence" of art needs to be assumed in order to make sense of Hegel's philosophy of art and its history.) Rembrandt showed us the depth of the human soul in his portraits, Goya the horrors of war and human cruelty, and van Gogh the darkness of life in his sun-drenched corn fields with crows. Often such non-aesthetic concerns as revealing some important truth about the world are presented in a sort of tense balance between aesthetic form and the non-aesthetic content of a work, and this tension itself could become the main focus of certain works.
Yet, the inner logic of the development of art mentioned earlier exists--as a long-term tendency that time and again manifested itself as the relentless, though not straight-linear, drive toward the ultimate end of art. The over-all trend was the persistent tendency of art to progressively rid itself of everything that could be seen as external purpose, and to become ever more conscious of itself as art. At the end of the Middle Ages it was the liberation of art from the long established practice of religious service. During the following centuries it was the liberation from faithfully depicting objects (a liberation which was subtle at first, but demonstrative and revolutionary with the arrival of modernism). After recognizing the essence of art in the purely aesthetic composition and appreciation of lines, colors, and textures, there was just one more step to take to reach the full self-realization and end of art: the liberation of art from itself--achieved by practicing artists as a logical conclusion of their own artistic endeavor.
If modernism was the radicalization of the inherent tendency of Western art to focus ever more intensively on itself as art, then it should come as no surprise that artists of the 20th century also radicalized the quest for the ultimate goal and fulfillment of art and its history. There was a good number of serious artists who felt compelled to raise the question of the end of art (even if they had never paid any attention to philosophers like Hegel). Marcel Duchamp is one of the earliest and best known among them, although by no means the only one. During the heydays of the modernist revolution Duchamp offered his "ready-mades" (his bottlerack, snow shovel, bicycle wheel, urinal, etc.) to demonstrate some sort of end of art. For him even the most modern art had become a sterile as well as pretentious institution that had nothing serious to offer anymore, once it had run through such revolutionary movements as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Abstraction. Duchamp decided that he and others might as well play chess from now on.
Later artists, however, as well as the art world at large, did not take Duchamp's hint. They began to incorporate ready-mades and other intended anti-art pieces into museums and into the general pantheon of artworks. As Duchamp complained in an interview: "When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottlerack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty!" (Duchamp to H. Riveter in 1962) Robert Rauschenberg, for one, became an open admirer of the beauty of Duchamp's bicycle wheel, and Duchamp himself, toward the end of his life, signed a limited number of replicas of this ready-mades to furnish rich art museums with these high-priced exhibits. As much as certain radical artists were disgusted with the whole art world and its dubious commerce, they could not prevent their very protest from being turned into art. By turning even anti-art resolutely or thoughtlessly into objects for aesthetic contemplation, the march of art through history seemed destined to continue forever.
The final move in the above trajectory of art did come, however--at just the time that Hobsbawm saw dominated by the production of second-rate modernist work and desperate "gimmicks," the time after World War II in general and the 1960s in particular. Neo-Dadaists of the "Fluxus" group, while also producing experimental work, fastened on the very aestheticism of the art world (the aestheticism that could potentially see everything as art) to recognize the end of art. In music Edgar Varese and John Cage had introduced ordinary noises into compositions, and thus denied the privileged status of sounds produced by artistic instruments. "Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look," Cage declared (Fluxus Today and Yesterday, p. 8). Analogously George Maciunas, the main theoretician for Fluxus, wrote: "There was no need for art. We had merely to learn to take an 'art attitude.' If people could learn to take the 'art attitude' toward all everyday phenomena, artists could stop making art works" (ibid. p.9). And at a Fluxus fest in Wuppertal in 1962 he elaborated:
"Rainfall is anti-art
a babble of a crowd
a sneeze
the flight of a butterfly
movements of microbes....
If human beings could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding them (from mathematical ideas to physical matter) in the same way they experience art, there would be no need for art, artists, and similar 'non-productive elements'" (ibid.).
The step from art to "art attitude" is a logical one: If the essential function of art is the production and composition of such things as lines, colors, and textures, then there is no reason why one could not intensively contemplate these things in ordinary objects as well--in the wood of weathered barns, in geological formations, or in slabs of textured pavements on which layers of dripped paint, spilled Cokes, and dried urine form the most intricate and nuanced patterns. Wind-sculpted rocks, decaying factories, nautical markers in ship channels, whole cities--all such things are possible objects of intensive aesthetic contemplation. It has, in fact, become a hallmark of the present situation that there is no direct correlation anymore between the artistic labor that goes into the production of an art object, and the richness of thoughts and perceptions that a viewer can get out of it. The aesthetic contemplation and interpretation of a rusted tank or the circuit board of a computer can be just as intensive and deep as that of a classical statue. Just as much can be written about these objects as about intentional art works. As Maciunas insisted: it is perception and "attitude" that count, not the inherent qualities of the object.
Art has reached its end, then, not by being abolished, but by being dissolved into everything else. It is essentially not different anymore from anything else, except that works of art are created somewhat more deliberately than other aesthetically perceived objects--usually with a greater emphasis on such aspects as balance or composition. (But even that is not necessarily true anymore: 20th century artists have often and deliberately used chance or accident in the production of their most avant-garde work.) Art at this point in history is not a certain class of objects anymore, but a way of seeing things--a (in the Kantian sense) transcendental principle of perception.
If an "art attitude" toward the world turns out to be the ultimate end of art, a most important goal has been reached. The end of art is neither a defeat, nor necessarily a ground for despair. The ability and practice to perceive and contemplate the world aesthetically is no mean feat. It is a goal entirely worthy of Hegel's high conception of art--well in line with the importance of morality, science, or religion. Aesthetic contemplation involves a crucial kind of sublimation--or spiritualization, if one prefers to put it that way. The viewer of a 17th century Dutch still life, for example, will not drool over the admittedly delicious foods and drinks, but rather appreciate the artist's transformation of these substances into color contrasts, textures, and balanced compositions. The artist thus changes the viewer from a consumer into a mind. A painted or sculpted nude, by the same token, is not pornography, but an occasion to transcend certain primitive impulses in the direction of a more detached contemplation (without thereby denying or destroying sensuality and sexuality). A culture that develops an "art attitude" will have a much richer experience of the world than one that knows nothing but "gut reactions" and utilitarian consumption. It is able to see more in a tree than just so much usable lumber, and more in the world than a land of opportunity where bulldozers chew up forests and neighborhoods in the dull and reckless pursuit of profit and convenience. "In the art attitude," one might say, "lies the preservation of the world."
Now that art has reached its goal, it can in good conscience engage again in activities that would have been (literally) improper at the time when it was still trying to find itself. Art is fully ready now to serve external, non-artistic purposes again. It can, of course, continue to create purely aesthetic objects. There is nothing particularly wrong with doing that, although doing so does not constitute the same almost heroic accomplishment anymore that it once was when art was still struggling to break away from extraneous purposes. But important and possibly novel tasks can be found in the area of utilizing the means of art in both the creation and dissemination of insights and knowledge. Political art comes to mind--such works as Kienholz's "War Monument," or those feminist works which effectively reveal repressive social structures and attitudes. That a good picture is worth a thousand words is surely worth remembering in this context.
A routine objection to this kind of work has often been the old saw: "This is not art, but propaganda!" This objection, however, has lost its meaning in a situation where art--pure art--has successfully accomplished its mission. It is true that Goya's "Third of May" or Kathe Kollwitz's anti-war drawings are not art in the sense of pure art; but so what? The task of liberating art from all external purposes, to realize its innermost potential, has been accomplished; the benefits of this liberation are ours. There was a time when it was important to insist with Hegel and others that "fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is free." Art had to develop its aesthetic potential fully, and to become fully clear about it by going to aesthetic extremes. Only philistines would resent Rembrandt's desire to do more in his commissioned paintings than faithfully execute the portraits of those who paid him for that, or write off as artistic narcissism and effete aestheticism Kandinsky's attempts to explore what there may be in the composition of pure lines, colors, and shapes. But truly creative spirits will not stop at this point, and it is not likely that the future will be with simply repeating what was once a great accomplishment. Entirely new forms of creation and enlightenment are called for after what has happened in art and on the planet during this century. The cutting edge of the human spirit and of art, one might say, will lie beyond the sphere art from now on.
*
The above was written for an oral presentation and debate. I have therefore refrained from discussing the seminal essay of Arthur C. Danto: "The End of Art" (published in a collection of essays entitled The Death of Art, ed. by Berel Lang, New York, 1984, and somewhat expanded in Danto's A. W. Mellon Lectures of 1995, published in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton, 1997, as well as in his "Approaching the End of Art," published in his The State of the Art, New York, 1987, and in "Narratives of the End of Art," published in his Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, New York, 1986). Danto bases his case of the end of art (a) on the fact that much of modern and contemporary art depends on, or even is identical with, theory, and (b) on certain principles of Hegel's historicist philosophy.
Modern art's relation to theory Danto describes as follows: "Now if we look at the art of our recent past ...what we see is something which depends more and more upon theory for its existence as art, so that theory is not something external to a world it seeks to understand: hence in understanding its object it has to understand itself. But there is another feature exhibited by these late productions which is that the objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness"(p. 31). Art, in other words, has become its own philosophy.
Art's relation to the philosophy of Hegel Danto describes as follows: "Hegel's thought was that for a period of time the energies of history coincided with the energies of art, but now history and art must go in different directions, and though art may continue to exist in what I have termed a post-historical fashion, its existence carries no historical significance whatever"(p.7). As an historical phenomenon art goes through an inevitable process of change; what is important in art progresses from something essentially sensuous or physical to something cerebral--to theoretical knowledge: "The progress in question is not that of an increasingly refined technology of perceptual equivalence [as adherents of the traditional mimesis doctrine used to think]. Rather, there is a kind of cognitive progress, where it is understood that art progressively approaches that kind of cognition. When the cognition is achieved, there really is no longer any point to or need for art. Art is a transitional stage in the coming of a certain kind of knowledge. The question then is what sort of cognition this can be, and the answer, disappointing as it must sound at first, is the knowledge of what art is"(p. 28).
I agree with almost everything Danto says in his essay, except with the last sentence of the above statement. And the contention of that last sentence is not a minor matter.
It is true, of course, that for Hegel history in general is a process of progressive self-recognition, and that at the end of its history art, too, knows what it is, knows its own nature. But self-knowledge is not the innermost nature of art, and it is misleading to suggest that throughout its development art was primarily driving toward self-recognition. My objection here is not that art has had other targets, targets that were much more pressing and immediate than the desire to know its own nature. I think it does make sense to talk about a central trajectory of art that manifests itself in the long run--apart from the variety of short-term tasks and goals that art has also had on the way. But the major trajectory of art is not one of increasing self-recognition as such, but the exploration and realization of the aesthetic. Self-knowledge, to be sure, was increasingly involved at many points in art's long drive to rid itself progressively of all external purposes as a way of finding itself, but in itself it was not the goal, the telos of the whole process. Rather, the self-knowledge that developed with the increasing concentration of art on itself was the recognition that it was centrally tied to aisthesis, to the specific kind of perception that constitutes both its necessary base and its possible limitation. Much of modern art has indeed become its own philosophy, as Danto has shown, but it is still a philosophy of art, not of knowledge.
Danto has been taken to task by a number of critics--in The Death of Art, as well as in the subsequent The End of Art and Beyond: Essays After Danto, ed. by Arto Haapala et al, Humanities Press, 1997. I do not think that any of the criticisms invalidated Danto's basic contention. Some of the critical observations were intriguing, however, and one challenge in particular must be disturbing to anyone who risks any generalization about works of art. Several writers in the above anthologies implied or said outright that Danto always talks about art in general, while actually thinking about a very limited class of works of art, a class that excludes such areas as non-Western art, very early European art, folk art, certain "post-modern" works, and so forth. Some of these writers concede that Danto's analysis does apply to the development of a certain kind of art, the art that many--with a sneer--call "high" art, but that the vast majority of works have never been troubled by "excessively" self-reflective concern with aesthetics, artistic purity, the nature of art, or art's ultimate destiny. The vast majority of artists have simply gone about their various tasks, ignored grand theory and "master narratives," and thus been immune to such thoughts as the possible "end of art."
That a growing tendency toward aestheticism and self-awareness is clearly visible only in a limited number of works is undeniable. The majority of objects that are called works of art may indeed be concerned with other things than themselves, their nature, or their ultimate purpose as art. To talk about a trajectory of art does imply a pointed selection from a great number of all kinds of works. Is there any justification, then, for making this selection? Are obviously aesthetic works of art somehow more important or noteworthy than, let's say, political or religious art? Is it true that "art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is free"? Can the trajectory of art from ancilla theologiae to "art attitude" claim predominance over any other of the developments that could also be traced in the long and varied history of what we call works of art?
It can. To give special consideration to the aesthetic in the history of art is not arbitrary, but justified by what art is. No matter how varied the forms and purposes of art may be, they are all tied to or mediated by aesthetic means. The sculpture of a goddess is a sculpture, the etching of a war crime is an etching, the gruesome drama of Richard III is a play, etc., and so it is inevitable that eventually artists and viewers alike will think about the nature of the medium in which their ideas, fears, or other concerns appear. They will wonder about the complex relationships that exist between "messages" and artistic means. They will discover that the means as such may have a weight and significance that at first nobody had noticed. They may find that sometimes the means may get in the way of what artists try to say. They may ask themselves whether the means may perhaps be more than just means, and whether messages had perhaps better be delivered in other ways than through art. The growing concern of art with itself and its aesthetic means, in other words, was inevitable, and the distillation of pure lines, textures, and colors from a long evolution of painting, together with the formulation of theories of specifically aesthetic perception, was a logical step for anyone who dealt with art in more than a perfunctory way. Art had to focus on the aesthetic because aesthetics is involved in everything it does. There are other trajectories that can be traced, and not all of art can be reduced to purely "formalist" endeavors, but the aesthetic is central to the arts in a way nothing else is, and thus a "privileged" focus for philosophical reflection.
Deconstruction and "Post-Modernism" have until recently dominated artspeak and academic enterprises like an ideology. Dogmatic Relativism was one of the hallmarks of this intellectual fashion: Everything in the world was a "construct." As in traditional versions of philosophical Idealism, nothing was real--neither historical developments, nor differences between important and unimportant, nor the inherent structure of things. It is not discriminating caution, but this a priori Relativism that prompted many theoreticians to disallow any significant generalization about art, and with it the kind of reflection that Danto initiated with his "The End of Art." Now that the decunstructionist fad is winding down, it is perhaps time to realize that the Relativism that reduces the world to an amorphous mass is just the other side of the coin of Absolutism, the habit of seeing no construction as arbitrary, and of perceiving everywhere just plain reality. A less sweeping methodological approach, in other words, may provide the space for a detailed and productive discussion of what Danto offered with "The End of Art."
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Copyright © 1998 by Jorn K. Bramann
by Jorn K. Bramann
In my mystery novel Phantom Doors (G. Aston Nelson Books, 1998) one of the main characters is the art dealer Barry Ashton, who, somewhat like Hegel, believes that art has come to an end, that it has no genuine future anymore. ("Art is and remains for us, on the side of its highest possibilities, a thing of the past," Hegel stated in his Philosophy of Fine Art.) The following essay is an attempt to understand Ashton's position. Due to his immediate concerns, Ashton talks primarily about certain visual arts, about painting and sculpture. His theory, however, is meant to encompass all arts, and so does the following discussion.
"A specter is haunting the art world, the specter of the end of art," one may be tempted to say, and saying so would be prompted foremost by the following two considerations. First there is the widespread feeling--justified or not--that artists have for a long time failed to produce any work of real substance, that the community of artists has been lingering in a protracted state of artistic disorientation and exhaustion which could be only thinly disguised by such sensationalist shenanigans as sawing a cow into sections, or lining up plain bricks on the hardwood floors of expensive galleries and prestigious museums. Eric Hobsbawm's description of "the death of the avant-garde" in his history of the 20th century is indicative of this feeling: "The achievements of post-war modernist painting and sculpture were incomparably less and usually much inferior to their inter-war predecessors, as a comparison of Parisian art in the 1950s with that of the 1920s immediately demonstrates. It consisted largely of a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks by which artists sought to give their work an immediately recognizable individual trademark, ...." (The Age of Extremes, p. 517). Second, there is the impulse of the philosophy of history--usually associated with Hegel and Marx--according to which everything in the world is not only subject to change, but also to coming into being at one point in history, and to vanishing at another. Art, according to this thinking, has not always existed, and it may not always be with us. It is not only bound to go through the internal changes that by now we have accepted as part of art, but it will at some point also have exhausted all possibilities of self-renewal, and from then on be condemned either to sterile self-repetition, or to the production of "gimmicks."
Not surprisingly, the idea of the end of art has met with considerable hostility, not only on the part of those who have some sort of financial or otherwise tangible stake in it, but even more so by the true lovers of art. Art, after all, is not just one of those things that may or may not exist, with no serious consequences for anything else. Art represents an enormously important dimension of human life, a dimension that is as important as science, morality, or religion. Among educated contemporaries the suggestion that art has come to an end is the cultural equivalent of "God is dead." Nevertheless, the question whether art has run its course or not deserves serious consideration. The present state of the arts is, in fact, such that a closer look at the question may be imperative. The routine assertion that art has always come up with new things, and will therefore always find new and creative ways of renewing itself, is too flimsy a response to the problems that artists are facing at this point in history. (The introduction of video, laser, or computers into the production of art, for example, cannot count as "new forms of art," as apologists of "post-modernism" often assume. The forms and concepts that have come into existence with these new media fall well within the parameters of what modern artists have done before, slight variations and shifted emphases notwithstanding. It amounts to old wine in new bottles to an extent that even the wishful notion of post-modernism as such becomes rather suspicious.)
There is a sense in which the idea of the end of art, taken as an hypothesis, is clearly false. Even though a number of serious thinkers and observers of the art scene have suggested that art has indeed run its course, the actual production, appreciation, and collection of artworks has rarely been as brisk and widespread as it is today. To say that art has come to an end can hardly mean, then, that people have lost their interest in painting, sculpting, or producing any other kind of artistic work. The question therefore is: What does it mean to say that art has come to an end? What can people have in mind when they assert that it has no genuine future anymore?
Few people think that there is no use anymore for art as entertainment, as decoration, as expression of feelings, or in some other pragmatic function. People will always need buildings, for example, and it may not be bad if these buildings were designed more aesthetically than most of them are now. One may also surmise that people will continue appreciating well-drawn cartoons, all sorts of monuments, beautiful parks, etc.--long after art proper has become history. Besides, painting pictures or carving figures will always be good therapy for senior citizens and emotionally disturbed individuals.
Such undoubtedly worthy uses of art, however, are considered somewhat trivial by the true lovers of it. Using art in this way is felt to be not unlike the use of Mozart's music in state-of-the-art cow stables, where it causes cows to produce more milk, or the use of classical sounds to prevent teenagers from hanging out at certain public places. Art in its most emphatic sense is considered much more weighty than its use as entertainment, decoration, or the controlled release of emotions suggests. Thinkers who made art the explicit subject matter of their investigations have almost always agreed that "fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is ... free," free, that is, of all external, non-artistic purposes (Hegel: The Philosophy of Fine Art, Introduction, p. 8; tr. by F. P. B. Osmaston). It is in art as art that art reveals its true importance and substance, and it is in art's pure, non-utilitarian form that "nations have deposited the richest intuitions and ideas they possess"(ibid., p.9).
But what is art as art--art in its highest capacity or purest manifestation? The classical answer to this is that art is the production of objects for aesthetic contemplation, whereby aesthetic contemplation is the perception of things for their own sake, in an act of "disinterested interest."
This is, of course, a very short formula for a complex state of affairs. It can be elucidated, however, by taking a look at certain developments that unfolded in Western art during the last six to seven hundred years. These developments provide a clarification of both the notion of art as art, as well as the idea that art may have run its course. For the facts of this period of art history constitute a trajectory that documents the movement of art toward a specific and significant goal. This goal is an end--both in the sense of purpose and in the sense of demise. Reaching the end of art is tantamount to fulfilling its innermost purpose, or of finally becoming what it essentially is. What, then, is this trajectory?
European art during the Middle Ages had largely the purpose of serving the Church and its teachings. Like philosophy, one might say, art was not autonomous, but an ancilla theologiae, a "handmaiden of theology." And one of its main tasks was the depiction of saints and Biblical events for the edification of the faithful. For a long time these pictorial representations tended to consist of stark, two-dimensional figures situated in front of flat backgrounds (often of real or painted gold). Compared to later European paintings, these images seem primitive, even inapt. What was of primary importance in these pictures was, after all, not their artistry, but their spiritual content, their "message."
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, however, the flat backgrounds began to be replaced by bits and pieces of three-dimensional space, by rudimentary indications of real landscapes. And while the formerly stark and schematic saints became ever more individual and realistic, artists became increasingly absorbed by the expansion and exploration of the physical environment of their figures, as well as by the mundane details of these figures' physical lives. Mary and child were not the sole focus anymore, but the holy figures in relation to spacious views of fields, rivers, and distant mountains. And Jesus dining at Emmaus was not a mere otherworldly prophet anymore, but was shown surrounded by lovingly depicted foods, plates, and other worldly objects. In time the landscapes and physical objects became more important than the spiritual figures situated in or among them. Trees or elaborately decorated tables took up more space than angels or saints. And by the 17th century, landscape paintings and food still lifes were well-established independent genres in the world of art. The interest in and competent depiction of physical reality had by and large replaced the chaste spirituality that is characteristic of the high Middle Ages.
This development of full-fledged landscape paintings and still lifes out of their rudimentary beginnings at the end of the Middle Ages is, of course, part of the much broader process of secularization that began with the Renaissance and resulted in the establishment of Modernity. What does this process imply for our conception of art? Two things: In the process of developing the landscape from a mere location for an important person to something that has value in itself, artists discovered and developed the importance of aesthetic perception. Landscape as mere location has a merely utilitarian or instrumental value; landscape as an object of aesthetic contemplation is valuable in itself. The contemplation or perception of things for their own sake is at the heart of the aesthetic. By passionately devoting themselves to the depiction of landscapes and a plethora of sensuous objects, artists demonstrated persuasively that physical reality is not only important, but also beautiful (in the sense of being an object of "disinterested interest"). And by thus turning their work into the medium of aesthetic contemplation, artists also began to emancipate art from being a mere handmaiden for something else to something that can exist for its own sake. By increasingly ignoring the extraneous purpose of serving the church and its teachings, they established (or re-established, if one keeps in mind certain pre-medieval epochs of art) the autonomy of art.
The ancillary or utilitarian role of art did not vanish altogether, of course. Churches still needed to be decorated, princes, cardinals, and rich merchants portrayed for posterity, and aristocratic visitors of palaces impressed by battle scenes and other painted pomp. But all this co-existed now with what one may call pure art. Since artists needed to make a living, to be sure, they often had to produce work that had non-artistic uses. But even in these cases artists managed to pursue their more proper interest. Many a portrait or picture of a saint was little more than a pretext for the artist to engage in the aesthetic pursuits he or she was interested in as an artist. In subtle ways art did not serve the patrons, but the patrons served art. Art as such, pure art, had become a consuming passion. It established itself as the basic "institution" of human life as which, by and large, we still accept it today.
Focusing on the physical and aesthetic aspects of the world was only a first major step in the development of art that led to today's situation. Artists quickly embarked on a further expansion of the domain of the aesthetic: the extraordinary refinement of the medium of painting itself. For with most masters of the craft painting did not remain just a means of depicting and exploring the world and its objects, but became a focus of interest in its own right. Ever more often interest shifted from the painting of objects to the painting of objects, from the what to the how.
In many cases, of course, the depiction of the things of the world went hand in hand with the delight in creating fascinating forms and textures as such. When Ruisdael paints the barks of certain trees or the surfaces of sylvan ponds, then he usually achieves both: the presentation of a brooding, almost haunted landscape, let's say, and the creation of surfaces and textures which in themselves would entice collectors to buy his work. And when Rembrandt and his school paint human faces, their infinitely nuanced surfaces are both: renderings of the human condition and riveting textures. But on the whole it is clear that the medium of painting increasingly became a focus of exploration in itself. Art began to become its own purpose.
In the case of some 17th century Dutch still life painting one could almost talk about hints at abstract art. When Willem Kalf, e.g., paints the traditional half-pealed lemon in his sumptuous compositions of foods and fine objects, then he often does not seem to be interested at all in giving a faithful reproduction of the real object, but more in dissolving the object in a display of color shades and texture nuances. With him, as with other masters, it is definitely not the object anymore which counts, but the creative way in which the object is presented. To some degree the object began already to become irrelevant for these painters.
It still took many generations for objects to disappear altogether from the canvases of artists, but it clearly became a sort of misunderstanding when people assumed (in accordance with the mimesis theory of classical Greek philosophy) that the essence of art was to depict reality. While that misunderstanding was natural in the case of people who rarely pay close attention to art, for most post-Renaissance artists it was quite clear that they were concerned with other things than producing mirror images of the world. Even painters that are usually classified as "Realists," such as Winslow Homer, often painted seascapes, for example, in which water, sands, and sky were mere pretexts to paint shapes and surfaces which were entirely satisfying in themselves, regardless of what they represented.
Very obvious and radical breaks occurred shortly after the turn to the 20th century. Abstract painters like Kandinsky and Malevich (together with theoreticians like Clive Bell) made it official, as it were, that the real painting consists of lines, shapes, colors, and textures, and not of any images or stories that they may also convey. And Cubist painters like Braque and Picasso demonstrated something similar by visually cutting real objects into pieces, and by recomposing the fragments into configurations that could not possibly exist in reality, but rather represented the requirements of artistic compositions on a canvas. The method of Cubism makes provocatively visible the fact that the real objects of the world are mere raw material in the hands of the artist who pursues his or her own--purely aesthetic--purposes. All of modern art demonstrates very clearly that as such art is not in the service of anything, but first of all an artificial creation with its own requirements and self-awareness. Only secondarily will purposes such as depicting certain aspects of the world come into the picture.
Again, all sorts of things were aimed at and going on simultaneously in art, as they are still today. To reduce all of art to the exclusive pursuit of the aesthetic would clearly be a falsifying kind of reductionism. (In view of Wittgenstein's remarks about definitions and "family resemblance" concepts, it may be important to emphasize that no Platonic "essence" of art needs to be assumed in order to make sense of Hegel's philosophy of art and its history.) Rembrandt showed us the depth of the human soul in his portraits, Goya the horrors of war and human cruelty, and van Gogh the darkness of life in his sun-drenched corn fields with crows. Often such non-aesthetic concerns as revealing some important truth about the world are presented in a sort of tense balance between aesthetic form and the non-aesthetic content of a work, and this tension itself could become the main focus of certain works.
Yet, the inner logic of the development of art mentioned earlier exists--as a long-term tendency that time and again manifested itself as the relentless, though not straight-linear, drive toward the ultimate end of art. The over-all trend was the persistent tendency of art to progressively rid itself of everything that could be seen as external purpose, and to become ever more conscious of itself as art. At the end of the Middle Ages it was the liberation of art from the long established practice of religious service. During the following centuries it was the liberation from faithfully depicting objects (a liberation which was subtle at first, but demonstrative and revolutionary with the arrival of modernism). After recognizing the essence of art in the purely aesthetic composition and appreciation of lines, colors, and textures, there was just one more step to take to reach the full self-realization and end of art: the liberation of art from itself--achieved by practicing artists as a logical conclusion of their own artistic endeavor.
If modernism was the radicalization of the inherent tendency of Western art to focus ever more intensively on itself as art, then it should come as no surprise that artists of the 20th century also radicalized the quest for the ultimate goal and fulfillment of art and its history. There was a good number of serious artists who felt compelled to raise the question of the end of art (even if they had never paid any attention to philosophers like Hegel). Marcel Duchamp is one of the earliest and best known among them, although by no means the only one. During the heydays of the modernist revolution Duchamp offered his "ready-mades" (his bottlerack, snow shovel, bicycle wheel, urinal, etc.) to demonstrate some sort of end of art. For him even the most modern art had become a sterile as well as pretentious institution that had nothing serious to offer anymore, once it had run through such revolutionary movements as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Abstraction. Duchamp decided that he and others might as well play chess from now on.
Later artists, however, as well as the art world at large, did not take Duchamp's hint. They began to incorporate ready-mades and other intended anti-art pieces into museums and into the general pantheon of artworks. As Duchamp complained in an interview: "When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottlerack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty!" (Duchamp to H. Riveter in 1962) Robert Rauschenberg, for one, became an open admirer of the beauty of Duchamp's bicycle wheel, and Duchamp himself, toward the end of his life, signed a limited number of replicas of this ready-mades to furnish rich art museums with these high-priced exhibits. As much as certain radical artists were disgusted with the whole art world and its dubious commerce, they could not prevent their very protest from being turned into art. By turning even anti-art resolutely or thoughtlessly into objects for aesthetic contemplation, the march of art through history seemed destined to continue forever.
The final move in the above trajectory of art did come, however--at just the time that Hobsbawm saw dominated by the production of second-rate modernist work and desperate "gimmicks," the time after World War II in general and the 1960s in particular. Neo-Dadaists of the "Fluxus" group, while also producing experimental work, fastened on the very aestheticism of the art world (the aestheticism that could potentially see everything as art) to recognize the end of art. In music Edgar Varese and John Cage had introduced ordinary noises into compositions, and thus denied the privileged status of sounds produced by artistic instruments. "Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look," Cage declared (Fluxus Today and Yesterday, p. 8). Analogously George Maciunas, the main theoretician for Fluxus, wrote: "There was no need for art. We had merely to learn to take an 'art attitude.' If people could learn to take the 'art attitude' toward all everyday phenomena, artists could stop making art works" (ibid. p.9). And at a Fluxus fest in Wuppertal in 1962 he elaborated:
"Rainfall is anti-art
a babble of a crowd
a sneeze
the flight of a butterfly
movements of microbes....
If human beings could experience the world, the concrete world surrounding them (from mathematical ideas to physical matter) in the same way they experience art, there would be no need for art, artists, and similar 'non-productive elements'" (ibid.).
The step from art to "art attitude" is a logical one: If the essential function of art is the production and composition of such things as lines, colors, and textures, then there is no reason why one could not intensively contemplate these things in ordinary objects as well--in the wood of weathered barns, in geological formations, or in slabs of textured pavements on which layers of dripped paint, spilled Cokes, and dried urine form the most intricate and nuanced patterns. Wind-sculpted rocks, decaying factories, nautical markers in ship channels, whole cities--all such things are possible objects of intensive aesthetic contemplation. It has, in fact, become a hallmark of the present situation that there is no direct correlation anymore between the artistic labor that goes into the production of an art object, and the richness of thoughts and perceptions that a viewer can get out of it. The aesthetic contemplation and interpretation of a rusted tank or the circuit board of a computer can be just as intensive and deep as that of a classical statue. Just as much can be written about these objects as about intentional art works. As Maciunas insisted: it is perception and "attitude" that count, not the inherent qualities of the object.
Art has reached its end, then, not by being abolished, but by being dissolved into everything else. It is essentially not different anymore from anything else, except that works of art are created somewhat more deliberately than other aesthetically perceived objects--usually with a greater emphasis on such aspects as balance or composition. (But even that is not necessarily true anymore: 20th century artists have often and deliberately used chance or accident in the production of their most avant-garde work.) Art at this point in history is not a certain class of objects anymore, but a way of seeing things--a (in the Kantian sense) transcendental principle of perception.
If an "art attitude" toward the world turns out to be the ultimate end of art, a most important goal has been reached. The end of art is neither a defeat, nor necessarily a ground for despair. The ability and practice to perceive and contemplate the world aesthetically is no mean feat. It is a goal entirely worthy of Hegel's high conception of art--well in line with the importance of morality, science, or religion. Aesthetic contemplation involves a crucial kind of sublimation--or spiritualization, if one prefers to put it that way. The viewer of a 17th century Dutch still life, for example, will not drool over the admittedly delicious foods and drinks, but rather appreciate the artist's transformation of these substances into color contrasts, textures, and balanced compositions. The artist thus changes the viewer from a consumer into a mind. A painted or sculpted nude, by the same token, is not pornography, but an occasion to transcend certain primitive impulses in the direction of a more detached contemplation (without thereby denying or destroying sensuality and sexuality). A culture that develops an "art attitude" will have a much richer experience of the world than one that knows nothing but "gut reactions" and utilitarian consumption. It is able to see more in a tree than just so much usable lumber, and more in the world than a land of opportunity where bulldozers chew up forests and neighborhoods in the dull and reckless pursuit of profit and convenience. "In the art attitude," one might say, "lies the preservation of the world."
Now that art has reached its goal, it can in good conscience engage again in activities that would have been (literally) improper at the time when it was still trying to find itself. Art is fully ready now to serve external, non-artistic purposes again. It can, of course, continue to create purely aesthetic objects. There is nothing particularly wrong with doing that, although doing so does not constitute the same almost heroic accomplishment anymore that it once was when art was still struggling to break away from extraneous purposes. But important and possibly novel tasks can be found in the area of utilizing the means of art in both the creation and dissemination of insights and knowledge. Political art comes to mind--such works as Kienholz's "War Monument," or those feminist works which effectively reveal repressive social structures and attitudes. That a good picture is worth a thousand words is surely worth remembering in this context.
A routine objection to this kind of work has often been the old saw: "This is not art, but propaganda!" This objection, however, has lost its meaning in a situation where art--pure art--has successfully accomplished its mission. It is true that Goya's "Third of May" or Kathe Kollwitz's anti-war drawings are not art in the sense of pure art; but so what? The task of liberating art from all external purposes, to realize its innermost potential, has been accomplished; the benefits of this liberation are ours. There was a time when it was important to insist with Hegel and others that "fine art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is free." Art had to develop its aesthetic potential fully, and to become fully clear about it by going to aesthetic extremes. Only philistines would resent Rembrandt's desire to do more in his commissioned paintings than faithfully execute the portraits of those who paid him for that, or write off as artistic narcissism and effete aestheticism Kandinsky's attempts to explore what there may be in the composition of pure lines, colors, and shapes. But truly creative spirits will not stop at this point, and it is not likely that the future will be with simply repeating what was once a great accomplishment. Entirely new forms of creation and enlightenment are called for after what has happened in art and on the planet during this century. The cutting edge of the human spirit and of art, one might say, will lie beyond the sphere art from now on.
*
The above was written for an oral presentation and debate. I have therefore refrained from discussing the seminal essay of Arthur C. Danto: "The End of Art" (published in a collection of essays entitled The Death of Art, ed. by Berel Lang, New York, 1984, and somewhat expanded in Danto's A. W. Mellon Lectures of 1995, published in After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton, 1997, as well as in his "Approaching the End of Art," published in his The State of the Art, New York, 1987, and in "Narratives of the End of Art," published in his Encounters and Reflections: Art in the Historical Present, New York, 1986). Danto bases his case of the end of art (a) on the fact that much of modern and contemporary art depends on, or even is identical with, theory, and (b) on certain principles of Hegel's historicist philosophy.
Modern art's relation to theory Danto describes as follows: "Now if we look at the art of our recent past ...what we see is something which depends more and more upon theory for its existence as art, so that theory is not something external to a world it seeks to understand: hence in understanding its object it has to understand itself. But there is another feature exhibited by these late productions which is that the objects approach zero as their theory approaches infinity, so that virtually all there is at the end is theory, art having finally become vaporized in a dazzle of pure thought about itself, and remaining, as it were, solely as the object of its own theoretical consciousness"(p. 31). Art, in other words, has become its own philosophy.
Art's relation to the philosophy of Hegel Danto describes as follows: "Hegel's thought was that for a period of time the energies of history coincided with the energies of art, but now history and art must go in different directions, and though art may continue to exist in what I have termed a post-historical fashion, its existence carries no historical significance whatever"(p.7). As an historical phenomenon art goes through an inevitable process of change; what is important in art progresses from something essentially sensuous or physical to something cerebral--to theoretical knowledge: "The progress in question is not that of an increasingly refined technology of perceptual equivalence [as adherents of the traditional mimesis doctrine used to think]. Rather, there is a kind of cognitive progress, where it is understood that art progressively approaches that kind of cognition. When the cognition is achieved, there really is no longer any point to or need for art. Art is a transitional stage in the coming of a certain kind of knowledge. The question then is what sort of cognition this can be, and the answer, disappointing as it must sound at first, is the knowledge of what art is"(p. 28).
I agree with almost everything Danto says in his essay, except with the last sentence of the above statement. And the contention of that last sentence is not a minor matter.
It is true, of course, that for Hegel history in general is a process of progressive self-recognition, and that at the end of its history art, too, knows what it is, knows its own nature. But self-knowledge is not the innermost nature of art, and it is misleading to suggest that throughout its development art was primarily driving toward self-recognition. My objection here is not that art has had other targets, targets that were much more pressing and immediate than the desire to know its own nature. I think it does make sense to talk about a central trajectory of art that manifests itself in the long run--apart from the variety of short-term tasks and goals that art has also had on the way. But the major trajectory of art is not one of increasing self-recognition as such, but the exploration and realization of the aesthetic. Self-knowledge, to be sure, was increasingly involved at many points in art's long drive to rid itself progressively of all external purposes as a way of finding itself, but in itself it was not the goal, the telos of the whole process. Rather, the self-knowledge that developed with the increasing concentration of art on itself was the recognition that it was centrally tied to aisthesis, to the specific kind of perception that constitutes both its necessary base and its possible limitation. Much of modern art has indeed become its own philosophy, as Danto has shown, but it is still a philosophy of art, not of knowledge.
Danto has been taken to task by a number of critics--in The Death of Art, as well as in the subsequent The End of Art and Beyond: Essays After Danto, ed. by Arto Haapala et al, Humanities Press, 1997. I do not think that any of the criticisms invalidated Danto's basic contention. Some of the critical observations were intriguing, however, and one challenge in particular must be disturbing to anyone who risks any generalization about works of art. Several writers in the above anthologies implied or said outright that Danto always talks about art in general, while actually thinking about a very limited class of works of art, a class that excludes such areas as non-Western art, very early European art, folk art, certain "post-modern" works, and so forth. Some of these writers concede that Danto's analysis does apply to the development of a certain kind of art, the art that many--with a sneer--call "high" art, but that the vast majority of works have never been troubled by "excessively" self-reflective concern with aesthetics, artistic purity, the nature of art, or art's ultimate destiny. The vast majority of artists have simply gone about their various tasks, ignored grand theory and "master narratives," and thus been immune to such thoughts as the possible "end of art."
That a growing tendency toward aestheticism and self-awareness is clearly visible only in a limited number of works is undeniable. The majority of objects that are called works of art may indeed be concerned with other things than themselves, their nature, or their ultimate purpose as art. To talk about a trajectory of art does imply a pointed selection from a great number of all kinds of works. Is there any justification, then, for making this selection? Are obviously aesthetic works of art somehow more important or noteworthy than, let's say, political or religious art? Is it true that "art is not art in the true sense of the term until it is free"? Can the trajectory of art from ancilla theologiae to "art attitude" claim predominance over any other of the developments that could also be traced in the long and varied history of what we call works of art?
It can. To give special consideration to the aesthetic in the history of art is not arbitrary, but justified by what art is. No matter how varied the forms and purposes of art may be, they are all tied to or mediated by aesthetic means. The sculpture of a goddess is a sculpture, the etching of a war crime is an etching, the gruesome drama of Richard III is a play, etc., and so it is inevitable that eventually artists and viewers alike will think about the nature of the medium in which their ideas, fears, or other concerns appear. They will wonder about the complex relationships that exist between "messages" and artistic means. They will discover that the means as such may have a weight and significance that at first nobody had noticed. They may find that sometimes the means may get in the way of what artists try to say. They may ask themselves whether the means may perhaps be more than just means, and whether messages had perhaps better be delivered in other ways than through art. The growing concern of art with itself and its aesthetic means, in other words, was inevitable, and the distillation of pure lines, textures, and colors from a long evolution of painting, together with the formulation of theories of specifically aesthetic perception, was a logical step for anyone who dealt with art in more than a perfunctory way. Art had to focus on the aesthetic because aesthetics is involved in everything it does. There are other trajectories that can be traced, and not all of art can be reduced to purely "formalist" endeavors, but the aesthetic is central to the arts in a way nothing else is, and thus a "privileged" focus for philosophical reflection.
Deconstruction and "Post-Modernism" have until recently dominated artspeak and academic enterprises like an ideology. Dogmatic Relativism was one of the hallmarks of this intellectual fashion: Everything in the world was a "construct." As in traditional versions of philosophical Idealism, nothing was real--neither historical developments, nor differences between important and unimportant, nor the inherent structure of things. It is not discriminating caution, but this a priori Relativism that prompted many theoreticians to disallow any significant generalization about art, and with it the kind of reflection that Danto initiated with his "The End of Art." Now that the decunstructionist fad is winding down, it is perhaps time to realize that the Relativism that reduces the world to an amorphous mass is just the other side of the coin of Absolutism, the habit of seeing no construction as arbitrary, and of perceiving everywhere just plain reality. A less sweeping methodological approach, in other words, may provide the space for a detailed and productive discussion of what Danto offered with "The End of Art."
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Copyright © 1998 by Jorn K. Bramann
Saturday, June 03, 2006
The suspension of time in painting
May 30, 2005 (Monday) - The Suspension of Time in Painting
Aaron M. Brown, a professor of painting at Emporia State University in Kansas.
When dealing with representational (particularly photo-based) painting, the question is often posed, "why paint, when you have the photograph?" This question assumes that there is no fundamental difference between the painted image and the photographic image, or that the painter has failed to provide one. I used to get this question a lot in grad school. It infuriated me, partly because it felt like a glib sort of attack, and partly because I didn't know how to answer the question. Merely citing the love of the painting process didn't seem adequate, because the viewer doesn't necessarily care about such things. Why do I value a painting as a representational object in the first place?
I'm still not certain of the answer, but I have a theory, which has to do with the suspension of time. The element of time is always present in art, more overtly so in a representational image. Different mediums hold and convey the idea of time in different ways. In film and video, visual events are played out over time, and the viewer reconstructs the events into a meaningful assemblage according to the narrative, and/or other culturally inherited factors. The experience is entirely dependent on exposition, whether the narrative is abstract, rational or absurd. That's why we are usually expected to sit through entire videos, and time may become our enemy.
In photography, time is arrested, or frozen--there is the sense of events occurring before and after the photograph was taken, so that the image seems to exist relative to a linear timeline. Any studio manipulation of the image merely extends the timeline, adding more fact or fiction after the original fact. As an object, the photograph has no physical quality that will break the chain of its own veracity.
A painting, on the other hand, seems to exist in a timeless state, or a state of suspension. Any good painting has this quality, regardless of the historical baggage attached to its creation. A painting is a numinous object. I believe this is part of the reason why we continue to value painting, despite continued attempts to assassinate the medium, or torque it out of existence. But where does this untimely quality come from?
I think the answer may lie in the surface of the painting, and the manner in which a painting is constructed. The "traditional" method of painterly construction is an elaboration of childhood intuition: the act of applying pigment to a surface. The painted image is built layer upon layer; all paintings share this common materiality. The layers of pigment are stratified, literally rising above the picture plane, forming a subtle (to the human eye) topographical map. In essence, therefore, a painting is three-dimensional.
This has the effect of enabling the viewer to read a two dimensional image along the z-axis (the axis of depth, as when viewing a three dimensional object). Think of the well known anaology of a painting as a window; the viewer can see into the surface of a painting. When the viewer's gaze is directed inward, as into a painting, all sense of time is forgotten, and a suspension occurs. When time is suspended, it loses its literal meaning, and takes on numinous value.
By contrast, when I look at a photograph, my inward-bound vision is deflected, due to the absolute flatness of the photographic surface. I can scan a photograph and apprehend the image in time, but I can't travel into it--my gaze skips off like a stone on water. I'm convinced that this is why I value photography, but not the photograph--when I look at a photograph as an object, particularly an art object, I'm instantly bored and alienated. There's no surface to sink my eyes into.
The surface of a painting is therefore all-important, and must be experienced in the flesh, not merely in reproduction. The surface depth of a painting may seem minimal (and hence superficial) to lovers of the "real", but consider the surface of the earth. In truth, the metaphysical expansiveness of a painting is a direct result of its physicality.
Aaron M. Brown, a professor of painting at Emporia State University in Kansas.
When dealing with representational (particularly photo-based) painting, the question is often posed, "why paint, when you have the photograph?" This question assumes that there is no fundamental difference between the painted image and the photographic image, or that the painter has failed to provide one. I used to get this question a lot in grad school. It infuriated me, partly because it felt like a glib sort of attack, and partly because I didn't know how to answer the question. Merely citing the love of the painting process didn't seem adequate, because the viewer doesn't necessarily care about such things. Why do I value a painting as a representational object in the first place?
I'm still not certain of the answer, but I have a theory, which has to do with the suspension of time. The element of time is always present in art, more overtly so in a representational image. Different mediums hold and convey the idea of time in different ways. In film and video, visual events are played out over time, and the viewer reconstructs the events into a meaningful assemblage according to the narrative, and/or other culturally inherited factors. The experience is entirely dependent on exposition, whether the narrative is abstract, rational or absurd. That's why we are usually expected to sit through entire videos, and time may become our enemy.
In photography, time is arrested, or frozen--there is the sense of events occurring before and after the photograph was taken, so that the image seems to exist relative to a linear timeline. Any studio manipulation of the image merely extends the timeline, adding more fact or fiction after the original fact. As an object, the photograph has no physical quality that will break the chain of its own veracity.
A painting, on the other hand, seems to exist in a timeless state, or a state of suspension. Any good painting has this quality, regardless of the historical baggage attached to its creation. A painting is a numinous object. I believe this is part of the reason why we continue to value painting, despite continued attempts to assassinate the medium, or torque it out of existence. But where does this untimely quality come from?
I think the answer may lie in the surface of the painting, and the manner in which a painting is constructed. The "traditional" method of painterly construction is an elaboration of childhood intuition: the act of applying pigment to a surface. The painted image is built layer upon layer; all paintings share this common materiality. The layers of pigment are stratified, literally rising above the picture plane, forming a subtle (to the human eye) topographical map. In essence, therefore, a painting is three-dimensional.
This has the effect of enabling the viewer to read a two dimensional image along the z-axis (the axis of depth, as when viewing a three dimensional object). Think of the well known anaology of a painting as a window; the viewer can see into the surface of a painting. When the viewer's gaze is directed inward, as into a painting, all sense of time is forgotten, and a suspension occurs. When time is suspended, it loses its literal meaning, and takes on numinous value.
By contrast, when I look at a photograph, my inward-bound vision is deflected, due to the absolute flatness of the photographic surface. I can scan a photograph and apprehend the image in time, but I can't travel into it--my gaze skips off like a stone on water. I'm convinced that this is why I value photography, but not the photograph--when I look at a photograph as an object, particularly an art object, I'm instantly bored and alienated. There's no surface to sink my eyes into.
The surface of a painting is therefore all-important, and must be experienced in the flesh, not merely in reproduction. The surface depth of a painting may seem minimal (and hence superficial) to lovers of the "real", but consider the surface of the earth. In truth, the metaphysical expansiveness of a painting is a direct result of its physicality.
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