Art unto Art
EXCERPT
In the following philosophical vignette, I attempt to philosophically distinguish two great modes of human knowing from one another, Art and Science.
…It is perhaps here that Schopenhauer’s immortal words come most vividly to life. If it is true that art “plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of life’s course and holds it, isolated, before it”[1], then it is nowhere truer than in the case of the Self, and in fact, perhaps only truly true in this case. I submit that, of all art’s purposivenesses, this is the most authentic and most central to its essence. The alignment between art and life rings truest as a symbiosis between art and mind. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we create art in order to replicate ourselves aesthetically. And this is done both superficially, by way of finite mimesis – or the imitation, through externalities such as formal structures and stylistic devices, of our life experiences as they are cognisable to us empirically – but also and more importantly, in the deeper sense of an infinite, transcendental mimesis and symbiosis. This means both that the inner structures of the mind will see themselves reflected in the infinite aspect of a created artwork, and in turn, be activated by it upon its reception; and also, more broadly, that the division of the artwork into its finite and infinite aspects will find its ultimate origins in the empirical and transcendental geography of the human Self, and will be unable to operate effectively and genuinely otherwise than as its aesthetic extension and projection.
It is in this transcendental sphere that art works its true magic, and distinguishes itself from that other great mode of human self-knowledge, Science. For Science requires no such metaphysical or infinite completion. It touches not so decisively those nether realms of the Transcendental, and remains an occupation, rightly, of the Empirical – which is not to say that it stands on no transcendental bedrock soever, but rather that it never externally thematises it or particularises it. In the case of Science, the Transcendental remains a mere optic lens; all-encompassing in its reach, yes, but never fused to its externalities in such a way as to impregnate them with any internal meaning, though it inevitably determines them conceptually and paradigmatically. Science understands the world by its external particulars alone, attaching to them no infinite thematic reinforcement. This is, to be sure, where its power lies; it catalogues cosmic phenomena without a single care for any metaphysical value animating them, and since its judgment is in this sense unanchored, it is able to apprehend them clearly and dispassionately. And yet if we were to transfer this same methodology over to Art, we would find ourselves much bereft. We would be left with nothing but empty externalities: in literature, mere jeux de mots; in music, as Augustine put it, mere “number tracing”; in painting, mere geometric abstractions. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have delivered us all these, and we have taken them to constitute great art in spite of their metaphysical shortcomings[2]. We have, it seems, forgotten that what sets Art apart, not only from Science but also from artisanship, craft and, more generally, from practical exploits and mere representations of phenomena, is precisely the depth of its infinitude, its pervasive, symbiotic coupling of the phenomenal with the transcendental. Without this, Art would be an empirical exercise much like Science, but, unlike the latter, it would furnish no worthwhile synthetic information about the nature of physical reality, since its infinite substructure, of which it would all the same be unable to dispossess itself, would serve as an insuperable impediment to this. So, I will be so bold as to suggest: leave Science unto Science, and Art unto Art. These two magisteria, though not entirely philosophically non-overlapping, are in practical terms precisely so. The one, Science is an empirical mode of self-knowledge in which the Transcendental is incidental, and whose primary objective is the discovery of the truth of finite particularities. The other, Art is a transcendental mode of Self-knowledge in which the Empirical is secondary, and whose primary objective is the uncovering of the truth of our infinite depths.
[1] The World as Will and Representation, Book 3, ¢30
[2] See also Hume, Of the Standard of Taste: “Many of the beauties of poetry and even of eloquence are founded on falsehood and fiction, on hyperboles, metaphors, and an abuse or perversion of expressions from their natural meaning. To check the sallies of the imagination, and to reduce every expression to geometrical truth and exactness, would be the most contrary to the laws of criticism; because it would produce a work, which, by universal experience has been found the most insipid and disagreeable”. (Loc. 2100-2103)
