Repetitive Constellations (Art and Culture)
“si avant dans les générations futures que
brillent les œuvres des hommes, encore faut-il qu’il y ait des hommes. Si
certaines espèces animales résistent plus longtemps au froid envahisseur, quand
il n’y a plus d’hommes, et à supposer que la gloire de Bergotte ait duré
jusque-là, brusquement elle s’éteindra à tout jamais. Ce ne sont pas les derniers
animaux qui le liront”.
“And the man said: ‘This is now [זֹ֣את הַפַּ֗עַם/zot
happa’am: ‘this once more’, ‘this again’] bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she
shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’
Genesis 2, 23
The production of repetitive constellations indeed
dramatically resembles the kin production discussed above. Meaningful
multiplication takes place on either side. Viable and fecund, ‘ensouled’ progeny
is occasioned both by parents (offspring) and artists (symbolic artefacts). Nonetheless,
there is a story about Leibniz which, if true, would testify to the contrary.
Reportedly, toward the end of his life the philosopher plunked down on the
ground in front of his bookcase, burst out in tears exclaiming that, having
written so many books, he would rather have had a child. Leibniz may have found
some consolation by studying, in the same period, the old theological doctrine
of the apokatastasis pantoon (‘the resurrection of all people’, or, as
Leibniz himself translated the Greek: ‘the restitution of all things’,
sic). The Latin words inclinata resurget (‘the line that declines will rise
again’) written on his coffin could even indicate that ultimately despair did
not overpower him.[2] For,
if the belief in a future resurrection of the dead holds true, human artefacts
might share in this promise. Just as humans, they can equally show fecundity
and disseminate.
However, the weeping Leibniz could warn us that
there is a nonnegligible difference between offspring and artefacts, between procreation
and artistic-symbolic creativity. As already the Proust quotation on top of
this section illustrates, other than the procreation of life, artefact creation
remains dependent on animated ‘receptacles’ for their multiplication. These ‘receptacles’
may be living artists, whose inner imagination is stirred by artworks of their
predecessors; but they could also be moral agents, who act on the sublime
examples of moral trendsetters. I think it is utterly confusing when Plato subordinates
childbirth to virtuous agency: “Remember”, he makes Socrates quote Diotima, “how
in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind (ὁρῶντι ᾧ ὁρατὸν
τὸ καλόν: ‘as he sees the beautiful through that which makes it visible’), he
will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities – for he
has hold not of an image but of a reality (οὐκ εἴδωλα ἀρετῆς… ἀλλὰ ἀληθῆ) –, and bringing forth and nourishing
true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.” (Symp.
212a) However valuable cultural artefacts may be, they lack the potency – in
Driesch’ terms – to spontaneously “augment” the “diversity of
distribution of a given system” and cannot by themselves “transform a
system of equally distributed potentialities into a system of actualities
which are unequally distributed”. Culture, however divine or immortal
the paradigm it follows, can only multiply itself when aided by human agents. Even
if we assume that Homer’s Iliad or Thomas à Kempis’ imitatio Christi
are “not images of beauty, but realities (ἀληθῆ)”, the fecundity of both is
conditioned by living human beings whose soul is capable of reflecting,
and responding to, these ‘realities’. Being indeed reminiscent to
embryonic nidation, beauty and truth need psychic processing and
digestion, lest the ‘realities’ they represent and give rise to become extinct.[3]
If a certain repetitiveness of human creations
is indicative of soul, a repetitiveness which structurally differs from the
family resemblance brought about by procreation, what exactly is repeated? If
it makes sense at all here to speak of a repeated ‘entity’ – which is highly
doubtful –, this ‘entity’ will be both trans-empirical (beyond the senses) and
trans-dialectical (beyond rule-governed, retrievable thought patterns). This can
be explained as follows. On the one hand, the various expressions of art and
culture, even though soul-based, do not empirically resemble each other;
what is more, they do not even resemble themselves (there exists an infinite number
of for example paintings). On the other hand, the repetitive process cannot be
intellectually isolated and dialectically mastered. As Cassirer puts it in his Philosophie
der symbolischen Formen (Philosophy of Symbolic Forms): concerning
the “multiplicity of the spirit’s manifestations”, philosophy of culture
should demonstrate “the unity of the spirit”. The “diversity of the products
of the human spirit does not impair the unity of its productive process”.[4]
But again, what is the nature of the repeated
if it cannot reasonably be identified with something empirical or intellectual?
How to assess a semblance which can neither be experienced as a uniform entity
through the regular senses nor conceived as such by thinking? How to imagine a
supra-sensuous unity, which likewise challenges rational thought?
A promising step towards what I am trying to
articulate was set by intuitionism, a theory in metaethics. In order to define
the ‘morally good’, thinkers such as G.E. Moore or Henry Sidgwick[5]
distinguished ‘non-natural properties’ in human actions or virtues; these
non-natural properties, they argued, can neither be empirically described nor
dialectically mastered but only intuitively grasped. Although such properties,
along with the alleged ‘faculty’ capable of detecting them, were soon rejected
by rationalist moral philosophers for being too vague to be of any use in moral
practice[6],
I am nonetheless fascinated by the intuitionist approach. At the heart of
rationalist analytical philosophy, intuitionism represents a rare example of an
attempt to differentiate between states of consciousness.
Yet, since I have started to put into question an
all too rigid barrier between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’, I propose to
interpret the ‘unity’-repeated-by-human-culture, or -by-cultural-artefacts, in fully
different terms. What is repeated is neither an entity nor a unity, let alone a
uniform object. The repetition rather regards ‘patterns’ or even
‘synchronicities’; so much so, that patterns and synchronicities are not only
repeated but also themselves repeating. Repetition and the repeated merge, and
synchronicity always extends without having a clearly identifying origin.
“Eindeutigkeit”, Musil writes,
“ist das Gesetz des wachen Denkens und Handelns […].” However, he immediately
adds, “Das Gleichnis dagegen ist die Verbindung der Vorstellungen, die im Traum
herrscht, es ist die gleitende Logik der Seele, der die Verwandtschaft der
Dinge in den Ahnungen der Kunst und Religion entspricht”. (Musil, 1997, p. 593) The oneiric logic of the soul, blurring any clear-cut distinctions
between repetition and repeated, governs artefactual and symbolic creativity.
This concretely means that there is neither an identifiable progenitor nor a primordial
artwork. Even the ‘founders’ of world religions and global worldviews found themselves
amidst age-old traditions which they perpetuated by enhancing them.[7]
In this respect, it is interesting to note that Adam had fallen asleep when Eve
was created out of his rib: “And the LORD God caused a deep sleep [תַּרְדֵּמָ֛ה, tardēma] to fall [וַיַּפֵּל֩, wayyappēl] upon the
man, and he slept [וַיִּישָׁ֑ן, wayyishān]”. It was
perhaps the „Verbindung der Vorstellungen, die im Traum herrscht“, „die
gleitende Logik der Seele“ which, upon his awakening, made him exclaim: זֹ֣את הַפַּ֗עַם/zot
happa’am: ‘this once more’, ‘this again’!
Being both repeated and repeating, the patterns
or synchronicities are revealed at the level of (1) artefact producers (geniuses)
and (2) the ‘ensouled’ artefacts themselves. I would go as far as surmising
that the repeated-repeating pattern of the soul’s outer manifestation is
analogous to the inner ligament which Patañjali seems to
have in mind when discussing ‘concentration’ (“the fixing of the mind in one
place [deśa])”, or even meditation (“the
one-pointedness of the mind [pratyaya] on one image [eka-tānatā]”).
My suggestion would be that the inner link or ligament inherent to human
culture is not so much to be logically deduced or empirically perceived, as it
is to be ‘apperceived’: in a way which is comparable to yogic meditation. Whether
one is listening to Brahms symphonies, admiring novels written by Thomas Wolfe,
Marcel Proust, or Robert Musil, or relishing poetry by Richard Berengarten. Looking
back on his youth, D.H. Lawrence once wrote: “That’s why I could never ‘draw’
at school. One was supposed to draw what one stared at. The
only thing one can look into, stare into, and see only vision, is the vision
itself: the visionary image.”[8] This vision or visionary image, I
argue, is a synchronistic constellation or pattern which links ‘subject’ and
‘object’.
(This is a pre-publication from Rico Sneller, Into It: Perspectives on Synchronicity, Inspiration, and the Soul. Cambridge Publishers 2020)
[1] Marcel Proust (1989, 1923). La
prisonnière. Paris: Gallimard, p. 173.
[2] Maria Rosa Antognazza (2009). Leibniz.
An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
541-543.
[3] Even Benjamin’s remarkable insistence
on the inner maturation process of artworks (“Denn kein Gedicht gilt dem Leser,
kein Bild dem Beschauer, keine Symphonie der Hörerschaft.”) cannot ignore this
verity. Walter
Benjamin (1991). Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers. In Gesammelte Schriften
IV.1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, p. 9.
[4] “gegenüber der Vielheit der Äußerungen
des Geistes die Einheit seines Wesens zu erweisen”, and “die
Mannigfaltigkeit seiner Produkte der Einheit seines Produzierens
keinen Eintrag tut”. Ernst Cassirer (1956/1923). Philosophie der
symbolischen Formen I. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, p.
51f. (Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms I, trans. R. Manheim,
1988/1955, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, p. 114).
[5] G.E. Moore (1988/1902). Principia
Ethica, New York: Prometheus Books, Henry Sidgwick (1962/1874). The
Methods of Ethics. London: MacMillan.
[6] Cf. A. MacIntyre (1998/1966). A
Short History of Ethics. London: Routledge, ch.18.
[7] Cf Karl Jaspers (1964). Die maßgebenden Menschen: Sokrates,
Buddha, Konfuzius, Jesus,
München: Piper & Co Verlag.
[8] D.H. Lawrence, Making
Pictures. In B. Ghiselin (1985, 1952). The
Creative Process. Reflections on Invention in the Arts and Sciences.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p. 65.
Reacties
Een reactie posten