What calls for Art?

(After Heidegger)W

 

Tonietta A. Walters © 2002

 

Last update: 12/13/02 5:43 PM

 

“What is happening to me?” Neo, The Matrix, 1999*  

 

The words fall upon me. Singly and in groups they sink in and I am in the midst of something familiar.  It happens so rarely in philosophy that the marked strangeness within this situation is what alerts me to the moment.  With a little consideration I recognize it for what it is…an aesthetic experience.  Outside of analysis and assuredness of proper naming, my version of the aesthetic experience, what I recognize as such.  I get a glimpse of something that upon awareness almost immediately “withdraws”, as if awareness itself clouds my vision.  Not that this never happens for me in Philosophy.  It is just rare – in the fragments, Aristotle, Kant or…Hegel, though a slightly different thing.  I step into the stream of Hegel’s thought and leave it with only droplets remaining.  Inside the stream, recognizable is the manner in which his thought travels (stream-like) and there exists the awareness that the entire stream has to be traveled in order for me to carry the proper memory.  The stream itself is aware enough of its character to warn me of this, but it is an unnecessary warning.  In the warning I am barred from having an honest experience.  The awareness makes the “thing” withdraw.

 

An encounter with an artwork also warns of the possibility of an aesthetic experience, but art is more capable of sustaining the honesty of the moment than philosophy.  It is, of course, clear to me that artworks are the inherent medium for aesthetic experiences.  Nowadays, even in art, such moments are rare.  It seems that an aspect of art as the medium for an aesthetic experience is the experience of some essential truth.  Philosophy, if it is to be true to its' task should also be a medium for aesthetic experiences.  With Hegel, I expected the immersion that usually brings about an aesthetic experience.  The concentration required to overcome an obstacle.  Perhaps this is my beacon – difficult.  It tells me to prepare myself, as some believe is necessary, to be able to have an aesthetic experience.  “Difficult” prepares me because it means something that will take great effort to understand.  Difficulty is found in difference, a thing that requires concentration to remove the usual and ordinary in order to allow for immersion in the different.  “Difficult” calls to mind not easily understood, something outside of the usual or the ordinary – alien.  Truth it seems is alien to the being of a Western inclination in thinking.  Difficulty, difference, the alien, or simply the other; the beacon that draws me to the thing that “withdraws” and I prepare to once again attempt to find truth outside of its environment.  Outside of its' being I attempt to find truth in the attempt at an expression of truth, which in and of itself can never be truth. 

 

Unlike with Hegel, I had no expectations and made no such preparations upon beginning to read Heidegger.  He was another philosopher I would read with pen in hand to make copious notes in the margin or…not read.  Husserl’s student – I expected no more, and in a learned cynicism, probably expected less.  In my view, the history of refinement and/or reinterpretation of a herculean effort of will, with notable exceptions, usually yielded an insipid thing, palatable only to those whose solution to the question of God or the problem of consciousness was to avoid the question or the problem.  So I was taken “unawares”.  This made it easier to keep to the moments, because in those unaware moments the experience is more honest.  The realization came that I had not broken being to make notes in the margins.  I underlined more because the pen was in hand and it served as an unobtrusive way of keeping my vision focused, than for the usual functional reasons.  His emphases took the correct form for my experience.  There was no need to highlight words on my own.  Some words fell to the center of my being, the previous ones serving so well as directional signals that they seemed to echo my own thoughts.  “Art is then a becoming and happening of truth.” 

 

In art I have found what I believe to be an avenue to truth.  If only at first by finding the thing-object truth in the aesthetic experience – where art births itself in a vessel that is prepared beforehand to be a vessel.  In the aesthetic experience of making art, during the creative process, I realize that I only encounter truth in and of itself when I am faced with my own “being”.  To search for truth, as a thing, does not let it happen.  If in searching for the thing called Truth you are lucky enough to stumble upon what you look for, what you have found is only a portion, an aspect.  The awareness removes you from the now as it happens to the presence of memory; from the perceiving to a recollection of the thing perceived.  You are placed in the now aware perception of the thing called truth; the thing-object called truth as opposed to truth as it happens, truth in and of itself.  The moment you find it, the moment you exclaim, “There it is!” is the moment truth withdraws.  It becomes the truth-object, recognized not cognized, as in “Here it is.” No exclamation.  Recognition of the “thing” truth recollects a There and Then…this is where I found it, instead of Here and Now…here it is happening or becoming.  In the creative process, for me, there can be the experience of the Here and Now that facilitates the experiencing of self.  The becoming…of self in truth.  The happening…of the developing relationship between the essence of being and the essence of truth.  Essence intermingles with and knows Essence.  Anything else is too far removed…

 

But what is the essence of truth?  With his words another echo takes form.  “What is truth, that it can happen as, and even must happen as, art?  How is it that there is art at all?”  Truth in my world is dependent on art, but what is art?  Or to paraphrase Heidegger, “What calls for” art?  Outside of being in and of itself to begin to attempt to pin down art evokes the question, “Why bother?”  It is too difficult.  But there is the beacon that draws me.  I can say that my experience is representative of the human experience, but what gives that statement weight.  How do I transcend the subjectivity of my experience?  Again art gives answer.  It is the medium for the aesthetic experience – where art gives birth to itself in a vessel prepared beforehand to be a vessel.  And this is an experience that in some fashion can be shared.  What prepares a vessel to be a vessel beforehand? What calls for art?  “How is it that there is art at all?”  Why bother?  The infinitesimal point becomes an infinite circle.  Within the creative process, truth allows me to walk around and through it, to traverse the circle, to see more than one aspect at a time, because time changes. Truth allows me to see “more than one side” at a time, because as time changes space opens up in a new way.  The Here and Now become a time and space where, as Husserl states, “the Ego immersed in the world” is transcended, “phenomenologically established as ‘disinterested onlooker’.”  But how is this so?  What is it that has prepared me beforehand for what happens within the aesthetic experience?  Do I first have to uncloak the aesthetic experience?  Determine what happens in that moment of “conception” in order to determine what makes conception possible in myself as the vessel in which it is conceived?  A beginning?  Or a repetition of a cycle? Or Both?  Each new beginning a different way of phrasing the same question in an effort to grasp the elusive answer. 

 

So I again arrive where I began this diatribe – the aesthetic experience.  The moment of self-conception for that which allows for the becoming and happening of the truth – art.  It seems that as Heidegger states, I must traverse the circle.  Albeit, each time in a more direct and pointed way and with a more developed awareness; developed through the work that it takes to repeatedly follow the circle.   What happens within my aesthetic experience – the creative process?  I begin with difficulty as the beacon that draws me to the thing that withdraws.  It causes me to prepare with the concentration necessary for having an aesthetic experience.  Difficulty as alien, difficulty in understanding an alien thing…the other.  But can I really understand that which is completely alien to me?  In order to begin to understand I have to find some common ground, something to which I can relate before beginning the process of understanding.  In portions of the aesthetic experience I glimpse something of the other, the alien.  The mind grasps at understanding.  There must be something familiar there to me – something that is not alien.  Perception comes with the awareness of the perception of something, but something completely alien would be beyond even the capability of my perception.  There is a reason that I catch a glimpse of this thing, even though it may be beyond my understanding.  I would not even be able to see something for which I had no mechanism.  Still there is the difficulty, in understanding because of its otherness.  Recognition or cognition…this requires a commonality or something to which I can hold as analogous to the thing in itself.  By analogy we learn.  Analysis and criticism are secondary steps.  The mind searches for the commonality.  Does the answer come in the relatedness of Essences?  Essence intermingles with and knows Essence.  Does this suffice as the basis of my recognition of the thing that is other?  The ability to recognize…as a commonality between the perceiver and the perceived, occurring in the new relationship between the knower and the known; In the intermingling of essences.

 

“What is truth, that it can happen as, and even must happen as, art? How is it that there is art at all?”  Aesthetic experience is the medium that allows for art to birth itself in a vessel prepared beforehand to be a vessel.  This mechanism that allows me to begin the attempt at understanding is the beforehand preparation of the vessel – the commonality of essences.  But…what is happening…to me?  What is this thing that I touch that seems to already be housed in my being and is simply awakened.  Heidegger asks, “What calls for thinking?”  I rephrase to “What calls for art?”   I begin to wonder if it is not the same question.  Or at the very least, two questions that have the same answer?  It is precisely because this “self-conception” happens within the aesthetic experience that this enigmatic, difficult to understand thing happens.  I am forced to take up the responsibility of my own being and to think in a way outside of the usual and the ordinary to begin to understand the other thing in and of itself.  Although this is not true of the arena of artworks today, where explanation is given to the viewer before a true experience of art or before they get the chance to think for themselves.  The aesthetic experience is a transcending experience.  The essence of my being recognizes and intermingles with the essence of the other, the thing that “withdraws”.  Does it withdraw or do I cause it to withdraw, without meaning to, by attempting to view it with a mechanism incapable of seeing it?  The aesthetic experience specifically occurs in such a way that it does not allow for the usual method of thinking.  I am forced to use what is now called a phenomenological way of thinking.  Within that method, I have to allow the thing to reveal itself, in and of itself.  Allow my already prepared vessel to function as it should.  Otherwise, the thing in and of itself “withdraws”.  I must strip away the aspects of myself that do not facilitate the knowing of the thing in and of itself, the preconceptions.  In removing the preconceptions, I myself am allowed to be.  In this being, the essential preparedness of my vessel is revealed and the new conception can occur.

 

Conception – of a different way of thinking.  Self-conception, for art in its essence is thinking.  A specific method of thinking. What is Art?  Art is thought or more properly thought is essence of art.  In this essence of art, I am faced with my own being in and of itself.  In thus being, I am able to cognize the essence of truth…am able to allow the becoming and happening of truth.  The aesthetic experience conceives a way of thinking.  A different way of thinking for what I would be considered, a Western thinker.  Although I believe it is an old and more natural way of thinking.  A way of thinking that is without or more properly outside of thinking in the traditional sense.  The way of thinking that allows for the phenomenal thing to reveal itself in a developing relationship between the knower and the known. Thinking (or the essence of art) conceived within the aesthetic experience – the experience that allows for the becoming and happening of the thing in and of itself, be it truth or being.  The phenomenological way of thinking.