Sublime Truth

EXCERPT

The following is a short philosophical vignette, an excerpt from an ongoing of Aesthetics. Here, I attempt to distinguish aesthetic knowledge, that is, the knowledge of sublime Truth, from conceptual knowledge, or the knowledge of empirical Truth.

…The Artwork, specifically in its infinite aspect, is a non-analytic entity, that is, it cannot be understood by definitional expansions alone. It defies mere predicative elaborations, and therefore also syllogistic treatments in reasoning. Since it is symbolic not logical[1], much like linguistic structures themselves, it is comprised, not of subjects and predicates that explicate, but of representations and forms that signify and are signified. The first, representations, are external and empirical, the second, forms, internal and transcendental. Unlike a fact, to which an apodictic certainty may be attached by virtue of which a datum is considered truth, and likewise, its firm grasping by the mind, knowledge, the artwork’s externality presents no such factuality, no such connection between the object of our outer perception and any internal concept, however mistaken such a concept may be, that is, however falsely it may represent its idea. There is, here, rather a nature that bypasses the concept altogether, and careens straight to the form, but for this reason cannot, interestingly, activate it as directly, as referentially as that; it, rather, stirs it, vibrates with it sympathetically in a process that draws on, not our reason nor understanding, that is, not the powers of logic, but our intuition, and yet is not for this reason any less forceful or authentic. On the contrary, the truth of which we speak in the case of True Art is far more direct on account of this very process. As an aesthetic representation runs its trajectory up the transcendental stream toward its source, it hits its goal with such vivacity, that the truth stirred to life unfolds all the more extensively on account of it, opening up purer spheres of Being than would be accessible by empirical means alone. And yet, since it is signified rather than defined, this Truth all the same appears to us as a vagueness, that is, a Truth that is, at once, boundless yet ineffable, undeniable yet ungraspable. We shall call this truth Sublime, or Aesthetic Truth. The Sublime is the truth of art, or art’s purposiveness, that telos which sets it apart from all other modes of human productive activity and toward which all art moves, whether knowingly or not, and to greater or lesser degrees. Since it functions by meanings not definitions, symbols not facts, ideas not concepts, the Truth of art is not so much understood as intuited, and for this reason may be said to reside, not in the empirical but in the infinite realm of the Self. The truth of art is Higher Truth, simply put, because it is representation borne back immediately to transcendental form without any intermediary, without the intervention of any empirical concept. This last element would qualify it as a mere object in search of its factuality, and would make of the resultant truth a mere objective datum. This we see in science but never in art, for art concerns itself not with objective but subjective truth. And by this we do not mean truth relative to the Subject merely, and therefore lacking any absolute or universal value. By subjective we rather mean: belonging entirely to the Subject, that is, laying closest at hand within us, dwelling in the deepest and most authentic parts of the Self, well beyond the potentially distorting effects of predicative logic and empirical vicissitude. These latter may take a false object to be true and gleefully attach to it a concept genuinely corresponding to the falsehood that is assumed to represent the real object accurately, and then proceed onto a number of fallacious syllogistic derivations based on this malequivalence. In art, since it is the form itself that is stirred up directly by the representation, the only procedural errors that may occur are those which result either from a productive misalignment between representation and idea, one for which the artist is responsible, or from the interpretative misalignment of the beholder between these very same. But in neither case is the error factual. In both, a form is still activated by an exactly correspondent representation; in both, the equivalence is still intact, and the chink lies not in the connection, which cannot be anything but immediate and intuitive, but in the foundational aspect of the connection itself, which is misintended or misinterpreted. In plainer words: a scientific concept can be false or true; an aesthetic idea may never be false, merely misplaced or improper[2].

[1] For the importance of the symbol in Art, see Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art: “In the work of art, something other [than the thingly element] is brought together with the thing that is made. To bring together is, in Greek, is sumballein. The work is a symbol (p. 19).” And then: “Allegory and symbol provide the conceptual frame within whose channel of vision the art work has for a long time been characterised.” (p. 20) In other words, for Heidegger, the symbol is an element, not of a particular kind of art, as it is for Hegel, but for all art.”

[2] This echoes Croce’s idea that art, as intuition, dissolves the distinction between reality and unreality, where conceptual knowledge pits one firmly against the other: “Conceptual knowledge…is always realistic, aiming at establishing reality against unreality... But intuition means, precisely, indistinction of reality and unreality, the image with its value as mere image, the pure ideality of the image…” (Essence of Aesthetic, p. 16). A critique, here, could be: is Croce confusing symbol with image?