The real

Yesterday, during a panel discussion at the India Art Fair, I heard someone quoting Plato. She said that Plato said that art is the reflection of the reflection of the real. Whether this is true in this abbreviated form remains to be seen. It is an interesting thought.

What is the real, what is a reflection, what is art? For Plato, there is the world of ideas, the world of shadows, which the ignorant in the Cave and the philosopher who wants to lead him out of it. Plato was not a great friend of art; what can you do with a painted apple when you can eat the real apple? And does the painted image really come close to the pure idea in any way? Art seems to make us think, but that does not necessarily bring us closer to the truth. Art springs from and invites a kind of thinking that is not rational. A way of thinking that focuses on the senses, or intuition, on vision, or reflection, a way of thinking that wants to create something more beautiful. This kind of thinking, aesthetics, the theory of perception, assumes something to be true that arises from one's own thinking.

It is this own thinking that, although stimulated by the perception of the shadow world, largely abstracts from it, meaning it detaches itself from it in order to develop something of its own. That which is then developed, the work of art, becomes reality, but is not real. The real, and I think the quote cited at the beginning alludes to Lacan, is doubly reflected. These two mirrors, which lead to a visual feedback loop, create a space of illusion that becomes a space for experimentation. The real remains as inaccessible to art as it is to pure thought.

What does this tell us? This new variation on the problem of Representation. I think the problem of subject and object, consciousness and matter, is implicitly contained here. While Plato's problems are ‚idealistic,‘ meaning they refer to the world of ideas, a world that is neither subject nor object, neither mind nor matter. Yet, the way our thinking struggles to understand the world without being able to perceive actual reality, points to the problem of dualism being the starting point of philosophical reflection. The goal of thinking, that is, the knowledge of the real, the world of ideas, remains a utopia.

And this is exactly what the Upanishads reverse. The few main Upanishads that I have now studied in detail always start from the real, Brahman, the creator of the universe, and the truth itself is the starting point. It is only through its unfolding in the process of reality that existence is experienced. What we perceive, think and create is an expression of absolute being. The core of the philosophy of the Upanishads is the realization that the Self (Atman) is the same as Brahman (cosmos). So if the real is reflected in reflection, that may be art. It makes sense this way, and only this way.

Why does Western philosophy so often begin by thinking in terms of the lowest common denominator, an axiomatics, an ontology trimmed by Occam's Razor? It is the Enlightenment's thought that pushed the principle of rational reduction to its extreme. It has mutated into the paradigm of scientific progress. And for centuries, if not millennia, this small rational thinking has reached its limits. It is well aware of having a body, and consciousness, and a self or soul, yet it always acts as if this were irrelevant, as it does not fully dissolve into rationality. And so, it took a revolution for phenomenology to take consciousness seriously, and Merleau-Ponty the body, for postmodern aesthetics to rehabilitate the senses, and existentialism to celebrate our failure.

Art is not the reflection of the reflection of the real, but the real is reflected in the reflection and so art is created. And thus even a transhuman, because nature is art, and the cosmos, the stars and the souls. Everything becomes art when it is reflected in reflection. When Brahman experiences the world through Atman and the gods dance and sing, then all the phenomenal qualities that the Western mind so brazenly denies are orchestrated by a choir of gods. Our feeling is real, our consciousness is real, the world is real, art is real. The real is real.