There was once a time when a Studium Generale was part of the academic world. I did that for a few semesters. The idea of systematic scholarship always seemed somewhat contradictory to me.
In my philosophy studies, after the intermediate examination in Heidelberg, I then became more systematic, but I was still a ‘colorful character’ in the seminar. I always found counterexamples or strange observations that contradicted the theories. That enlivened the seminar discussions. I was argumentative, did not give up quickly. But in the long run I had little to set against the force of systematic thinking in the tradition of German Idealism, and so I took refuge in aesthetic theory.
Aesthetic Theory
Everything that can be perceived is potentially a subject of aesthetic theory. The more colorful, the better. Yet here too, the systematic and analytical way of thinking caught up with me. We read modern thinkers, no postmodern ones. Art history had remarkably little to contribute to the discussions. And so I surrendered to the idea of the avant-garde. A new thought quickly became an old one and was replaced by an even more radical one.
The tragic thing about this movement, which is often (mis)understood as progress, is analytical reduction. Mystical thinking becomes mythical, then enlightened and finally critical thinking. The subject of art is reduced from the cosmos to the religious/ideological, then to the scientific and finally to the critical, at times cynical. Semiotic reduction was followed by a compositional reduction, then a reduction to the act of perception, a further reduction to the idea (Concept). This process of analysis, dissection and resynthesis was accelerated by media theory. Running alongside it were the developments of printing technology, photography, film, video, computers, AI…
The separating force of science (Scienza) reduces the act of creativity to finding new elements. The ‘ism’ of art history: Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Symbolism, Dadaism, etc… isolate forces of creation and radicalize them until they have found an expression.
Of course this brief outline is a trivializing, radical abbreviation. Art also grew richer through taking in phenomena from the social sciences, psychology and the natural sciences. Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches led artists into laboratories, into politics, onto the street, into activism. Individual forces such as ‘the spiritual in art’, kinetics, synesthesia, geometry, emotion, kitsch—all this and much more was concentrated, distilled, mixed.
Images of Thought
The different movements in art always seemed to me to represent different ways of thinking. I really thought that! I thought the primordial ground lay in thinking. I did share the great Western philosophers’ intuition that philosophical systems are precisely that: systems that provide different interpretations of a reality that itself cannot be explained. That is, the idea that within thinking only a representation of the world can be created, while the world itself is inaccessible.
For that reason, I was always suspicious of the assumption that art was an act of creation, that is, creative. How could a subject be a creator if it was understood rationally? That sounds naive, but it is actually only honest. The West speaks of ‘creative’ artists within a materialist and capitalist conception of the world in which the holy, the sacred, the Divine have no significant place. The subject is thus stylized as a creator, granted a creation that is denied to the Divine. This contradiction seemed to me resolvable only on one side. I chose the rational; that seemed more coherent to me within Western culture.
Within this thinking, art then takes on the role of a depiction, or perhaps even of a laboratory where new experiences can be had. In postmodern discourses, the power of art—to reach the world beyond thinking through the sublime—is radically expanded. In deconstruction, poststructuralism, the rhizome, the world beyond systematic patterns of thought opens up. The systems are, as it were, transcended (even if their principal representatives would probably strongly object here). In the brutal distortions, the search beyond signs, the free linking of the incompatible, something new emerges. Here, for the first time, I felt at home. To this day I find comfort and inspiration in Deleuze’s writings.
But only now am I beginning really to see. For this entire movement of thinking within the rational does not lead very far. The limits of the rational are soon reached. After that come the warning signs: Careful, that is not scientific, or cannot be justified.
How can thinking and the world be brought into alignment? This question shows the arrogance of this tradition of thought. Facing the world is a small thinking mind that wants to grasp the entire cosmos with all its fascinations. And all this only out of itself. Actually this is so stupid that I wonder why I did not see it much earlier. And why did the so-called ‘great thinkers’ who knew this not say it more prominently, instead of hiding it in little posthumous notes (see Kant and Hume, for example)?
The way out of this dilemma consists in understanding our being more broadly than by merely reducing it to rational thinking. We must allow ourselves to understand ourselves as matter and life, as consciousness and rational mind, as intuitive and spiritual. Only if we allow the complex inner images that intertwine these and further levels can we understand ourselves as part of a reality that includes us. The images that then arise there are substantially different. They call for an entirely different language.
Today I found the following quotation in Aurobindo:
“A certain difficulty arises for our mind in reconciling these different faces or fronts of the One Self and Spirit, because we are obliged to use abstract conceptions and defining words and ideas for something that is not abstract, something that is spiritually living and intensely real. Our abstractions get fixed into differentiating concepts with sharp lines between them: but the Reality is not of that nature; its aspects are many but shade off into each other. Its truth could only be rendered by ideas and images metaphysical and yet living and concrete, — images which might be taken by the pure Reason as figures and symbols but are more than that and mean more to the intuitive vision and feeling, for they are realities of a dynamic spiritual experience.” (The Life Devine p.372)
There seems to me to be a hint here of another understanding of art. I will pursue it.
