The Thing and Art: Two Essays on the Ontotopy of the Work of Art. (On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, & Moral Imagination in the Baltics)

The Thing and Art Two Essays on the Ontotopy of the Work of Art

On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics 16

Editor Leonidas Donskis, Professor of Political Science and Philosophy, and Director of the Political Science and Diplomacy School at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Editorial and Advisory Board Timo Airaksinen, University of Helsinki, Finland Egidijus Aleksandravicius, Lithuanian Emigration Institute; Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Stefano Bianchini, University of Bologna, Forlì Campus, Italy Endre Bojtar, Central European University; Budapest, Hungary Kristian Gerner, University of Uppsala, Sweden John Hiden, University of Glasgow, UK Mikko Lagerspetz, Estonian Institute of Humanities, Estonia Andreas Lawaty, Nordost-Institut; Lüneburg, Germany Olli Loukola, University of Helsinki, Finland Hannu Niemi, University of Helsinki, Finland Alvydas Nikzentaitis, Lithuanian History Institute, Lithuania Yves Plasseraud, Paris, France Rein Raud, University of Helsinki, Finland, and Estonian Institute of Humanities, Estonia Alfred Erich Senn, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, and Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania David Smith, University of Glasgow, UK Saulius Suziedelis, Millersville University, USA Joachim Tauber, Nordost-Institut; Lüneburg, Germany Tomas Venclova, Yale University, USA

The Thing and Art Two Essays on the Ontotopy of the Work of Art

Arvydas Šliogeris Translated from Lithuanian by Robertas Beinartas Introduced by Leonidas Donskis

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2564-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents

Introduction by Leonidas Donskis ............................................................ vii I The Thing and Relation in R M Rilke’s Poetry........................................ 1 II P Cézanne and the End of Classical Western Painting ......................... 71 Notes ....................................................................................................... 153 List of Works Cited................................................................................. 155

Introduction Arvydas Šliogeris’s book, The Thing and Art, is a masterpiece of Lithuanian philosophy. It is a piece of rare lucidity, beauty, elegance, theoretical breadth, and philosophical depth. Focused on poetry and painting, it offers a thoughtstimulating, penetrating, and provocative interpretation of Rainer Maria Rilke and Paul Cézanne. This book, beautifully written, rich in scope and ideas, and eye-opening in profound insights and subtle points concerning the ontology or, in Šliogeris’s parlance, the ontotopy of the work of art, now reaches out to a wider readership and offers here an interpretive framework for the greatest works of classical and modern art. Exaggerated anthropocentrism of our times, and, consequently, a fierce denial of the substance of the thing, which eventually leads to the denial of reality as it is, both target that greatest of miracles which the geniuses of Western European art, from Leonardo da Vinci, Hans Holbein the Younger, Anthony van Dyck, Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, and Rembrandt to Chaïm Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani, have tried to comprehend: the fragile and vulnerable human face and the individuality of the soul. Once we deprive reality of its substance denying the thing as a unit of being, we cannot escape the rejection of metaphysical individualism as a philosophical principle and ontological perspective. In doing so, we unavoidably deny the unique validity of the human individual. The loss of reality/the thing leads to the loss of the human being as well. Hence, our naïve assumption that we are the very centre of the universe and that there is no being beyond us. The eminent Lithuanian philosopher tackles some of predicaments of modern consciousness and social existence in a fashion reminiscent of John Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (though in his overall idiom, highly metaphorical and poetic style, and stunning elegance of theoretical formulations, Šliogeris stands much closer to the great French philosophers of the twentieth century).

Concealed Identities, Untold Stories, and Frozen History

The open-ended existence of the thing, lucidly and convincingly interpreted by Arvydas Šliogeris and Martin Heidegger (recall his profound remarks, in Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, on Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece A Pair of Shoes as revealing much more authenticity of being-in-the-world as would any other work of art representing new things and artifacts), stands close to the metaphysics and aesthetics of the ruins, as shown by Robert Ginsberg in his The Aesthetics of Ruins. Both the thing in the metaphysical sense, that is,

viii

Foreword

the thing as an ontological phenomenon and a primary unit of being, and the ruins reveal the nonfinished and nonfinite essence of the world. Of the nonfinished in artworks, Ginsberg writes, We must distinguish unfinished works of art from the nonfinished in artworks. In Michelangelo and Paul Cézanne, the nonfinito (Ital.) is the inclusion within the work of a contributory inconclusiveness. The uncut stone, white canvas, or abandoned subplot in an artwork provokes heightened awareness of the artistic process. The presence of the unworked material amid what has been worked-over makes us participate in the making of the work. A gain, not a loss. The work’s unity incorporates the undone in this sophisticated kind of artistic doing. The nonfinito shares with the ruin enjoyment in the discovery of material, contiguity of the formed and the unformed, and springing forth of form.1 Yet a deliberately unfinished work of art also has its metaphysics and aesthetics, as does an unfinished and open-ended thought. Ginsberg, like Šliogeris, contributes to creating a new kind of scholarship, the scholarship of twenty-first century—not theoretically or ideologically “rationalizing” and dividing the human world and social reality, not dogmatically rigid and unreflective, not soulless and totally insensitive about its social effects or political and moral implications, but reflective, ironic, critical, attentive to every detail of human existence, and, most important, perfectly aware of the vulnerability and fragility of the human world. The open-ended existence, the invitation of the past graciously extended to the present and to the future, vegetation, and peace between nature and culture are exactly what the ruins are all about. Ginsberg makes it clear that the ruins could be regarded as a universal idiom of human existence. Philosophy, literature, fine arts, nature, TV, cinema are all related to the ruins. Not a single aspect of human existence escapes the ruins. Our life can be ruined, yet it can be made up of the ruins of excerpts, quotes, fragments of knowledge, and the like. This is the ambivalence of life in fragments, which Zygmunt Bauman, most probably, would take as just another term for life in ruins. What becomes obvious here is that the ruins are a powerful means of moralization—suffice it to mention the vanitatum vanitas kind of still-life paintings in Flanders and in the Netherlands of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which a skull beside food, a glass of wine, and flowers reminded us of human temporality and mortality. Reproaching and severely criticizing humanity for their vanity and wickedness, the painters of the Golden Age of Dutch art acted as secular preachers and social critics. The skull, the most powerful idiom and reminder of the ruins of the human body, allowed them to dismiss such human weaknesses as the

Foreword

ix

inclination to luxury and self-deception. Much the same applies to the memento mori paintings where the flower, the sand-clock, and the skull are most telling details of human fragility, vulnerability, and brief presence in this world. The initials and inscriptions of great artists and scholars left in their canvases and books appear as an extension and a symbolic equivalent of the skull. They remain quite ambivalent as they cast a shadow of doubt about whether this or that great master left an inscription or initials. An identityconcealment-and-revelation game, a sophisticated variety of hide-and-seek, this phenomenon comes into existence together with the emergence of individualism. Italian, Flemish, Dutch, and German Renaissance masters start signing their canvases, thus signifying the arrival of the Era of the Individual; yet they play identity games that become part of the picturesque carnival of the language and artistic expression. Instead of signing their given and family names, they drop a hint or leave a mark as if to say that the identification of the master is an inescapable part of the interpretation of the work of art itself. An identity concealment leaving part of the clue to that identity is a metaphor of the modern identity game that calls for affirmation of existence: I exist insofar as you identify me as a person; say my name, and bow to me as a Unique Individual on the Face of the Earth. I begin existing as an individual only when you identify me and my artwork, which is my silent autobiography. The deeply symbolic and allegoric nature of Renaissance and Baroque art invites and incites a viewer, an eyewitness of being, to experience a joy of revelation, deciphering hidden meanings and allusions. Like an allusion or allegory, our identity is just a mask covering the face of being. Like a search for an original and unique means of expression or an authentic artistic language, which always remains an effort, our moral choices bring us closer or, on the contrary, distance us from others. Grasp of life and understanding of the other is a continuous path to our own moral substance. If we put it aside, our self becomes merely a mask, a game, and a joke for the sake of amusement of merry ladies and gentlemen. Als ich kan (as well as I can) is a recurring motto by, and a clue to identification of, the author that appears on paintings by Jan van Eyck. The portrait of the Arnolfini couple, a powerful proof of the miracle of the face of the individual, contains this motto, which allows us to identify Van Eyck’s existential and aesthetic traces there. We hasten to read two letters, RF (Rembrandt fecit, the Latin abbreviation for “Rembrandt executed this work of art”) just to make sure that we stand before Rembrandt himself, and not his pupils Ferdinand Bol, Aert de Gelder, or Carel Fabritius. Of Rembrandt’s De Nachtwacht (The Night Watch) Oswald Spengler, in Der Untergang des Abendlandes, wrote as frozen history. Therefore, a great work of art, in addition to its ability to remind us of the mystery of being and the individuality of every human face, body, object of reality, thing, or any other trace of being, allows us a point of entry into history.

x

Foreword

That art can reveal not only concealed identities and frozen history, but also untold stories we learn from Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X (1518– 1519). We know that Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio, 1483–1520) executed this magnificent work just a year before his death. More than that, one of the two Cardinals standing behind the Pope, both relatives and cardinal-nephews of Leo X, Luigi de’ Rossi (ca. 1471/74–1519) died shortly after this work saw the light of the day. Another Cardinal, a member of the Medici family just like the Pope himself, Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534), later succeeds Leo X as Pope Clement VII. Scholars suggest that that the scene represents Leo X and his cousin Giulio de’ Medici listening to the sentence of 4 July 1517 that condemned the Sienese Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci (ca. 1490–1517) to death for plotting to kill the Pope. The accusation of Petrucci for his conspiracy and high treason, as well as his execution, appears to have been not a big consolation before the fate of their all, though. Pope Leo X, born Giovanni de’ Medici (1475–1521), passed away two years after Raphael immortalized him in a group portrait with two Cardinals. Last but not least, in spite of the Pope’s power and prestige, it was the beginning of the time of trouble for the Papacy and the Church, as Martin Luther dealt a blow to their standing and international reputation. In addition, Clement VII broke with Henry VIII and England because of his unsanctioned and illegitimate divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Just like Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and, in a way, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez’s masterpiece The Surrender of Breda (El Cuadro de las Lanzas, 1634–1635) were an anticipation of the decline of Spain, Raphael’s Portrait of Pope Leo X comes as a warning ad reminder that human majesty and misery go hand in hand, and that our passions, fights for power, and striving for domination will end soon in the circle of human life. We have much of frozen history and quite a few untold stories here: conspiracies, plots, and secrets all melt into one along with the mysteries of being and individuality that unveil part of the face of destiny.

The Mask on the Face of Destiny

Isaac Bashevis Singer once noted that literature is not a science; nor is it a religion or a source of morality. Good literature, as he pointed out, is always about God, faith, disbelief, doubt, dignity and misery, sacrifice and treachery, passion, love, fraud, and, finally, the unpredictability and mystery of life. The events can always teach us something crucial, since they contain much more wisdom than our conscious choices. Therefore, literature cannot offer us a comprehensive and explanatory picture of the world around us. Instead, says Singer, it teaches us that causality is nothing more than the mask on the face of destiny.

Foreword

xi

When it comes to our ambition to explain the elusive dramas that occur within the forms of art or in the sphere of aesthetic representation of reality, we are bound to choose between the banalities of causal explanation in the world of human choices, and nebulous narratives about the destiny of the works of art. Whatever the case, Arvydas Šliogeris’s penetrating and deeply original book comes to us as a silent history of the emergence and dissolution of some forms of art. The ontotopy of the work of art reveals a mode of existence of the thing, be it the God, a god, human face, or Paul Cézanne’s great pine.

Leonidas Donskis

References 1

Robert Ginsberg, The Aesthetics of Ruins (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi: 2004), p. 296.

I THE THING AND RELATION IN R M RILKE’S POETRY

1 In front of us is a work of art: a sculpture, a painting, a building, a fugue, a poem. It exists in itself and for itself as a reality, independent of either the creator or the consumer; it lives its life next to other works of art, similar or different. It exists as a thing that contains certain meanings and senses, which are like bridges that link the work of art with what we call context, with the totality called the world. The creation has separated itself from its creator, and, as it usually happens, the latter has become indifferent to his creation, because at the moment another creation is exercising him, the one that is still in the process of emerging, the dim contours of which attract him just like the blurred mountain ridges of a new continent on the horizon attract an explorer. But the moment the creation has ceased to live for the creator it begins to live for another person, for the one that it has been created – for an anonymous consumer of the work of art. The work of art is in front of the consumer as an accomplished reality, resting in itself. A question arises: what is to be done with this work of art? The answer might seem to be very simple, and we have basically answered the question: to consume. Yet what does it mean – to consume the work of art? It is clear that we have to consume it in somewhat special manner, not like, say, a beefsteak or a suit. The work of art is a thing, yet it differs in some way from a beefsteak, or a suit, or a roadside stone, or any other thing that is not a work of art. The relation between man and a work of art differs from the relation between man and a non-work of art. The specificity of this relation usually is expressed by the word “aesthetical”. So the relation between man and a work of art is aesthetical. Thus we describe the subjective aspect of man’s relation with the work of art. When we say “aesthetical”, we first of all have in mind the person’s feelings and emotions experienced in the presence of the work of art. Aesthetical feelings and emotions can greatly vary, depending on who emotes them and what work of art is being emoted. It can be admiration, silent meditation, joy, spiritual enthusiasm, sadness, compassion. Aristotle called the subjective relation with the work of art catharsis, Kant pleasure without interest, other philosophers had other definitions to name the most elementary and universal feeling that comes over man in the aesthetical relation with the work of art. The objective aspect of man’s relation with the work of art usually is called beauty. Namely beauty is that trait of the thing

Arvydas Šliogeris

2

that makes it an object of aesthetical emotion, i.e. a work of art. A special discipline, presently greatly developed and immensely popular, called aesthetics deals with the specificity of the aesthetical relation of man and the work of art. To tell the truth, when we speak about “an aesthetics”, we lie a little. Actually, there are many aesthetics, i.e. there are many explanations of man’s relation with the work of art. It is hard to tell whether it is good or bad, but one thing is clear: the aesthetical explanation of the aesthetical relation does not yield any tangible universally significant results. Some people, for instance aestheticians themselves, are dissatisfied with that, and artists, because of the ephemeralness of the results of aesthetics, frequently squint at aesthetics with contempt, especially at such aesthetics that no longer contains a waft of art itself, only abstract definitions, distinctions, conjunctions, in short, logical cobwebs. Often such a negative attitude springs up inadvertently: aesthetics is expected to give more than it can; it is expected to produce objectively significant results and even technical recommendations, but it cannot offer all that, because its object is only the relation between man and the work of art; even beauty is only an emanation of this relation. The aesthetical relation is identified with feelings and emotions, and to produce some universally significant results thinking about feelings and emotions, analysing the subjective relation between man and the work of art, is perhaps not possible in principle, because – let us say it simply – that which is subjective cannot be objective. Therefore, let us not scold aesthetics too much, let us not expect of it too much and then it will be clear that aesthetics is quite a good thing, although probably it does not generally have any contact with the work of art itself as a thing resting in itself. Besides, there are many treatises on aesthetics written so pleasingly that they by themselves, irrespective of their relation with their object, the work of art, give aesthetical contentment to the reader. There is an easy explanation why a great many of aestheticians take no interest whatsoever in works of art themselves; their aesthetical want is fully satisfied with studies of treatises on aesthetics.

2 Now let us forget aesthetics for a while and especially that the relation between man and the work of art is aesthetical or is called aesthetical. Let us once more begin from the same point, from a simple statement: the work of art is a thing, existing objectively and, as an independent reality, standing in front of man and liable for arousing aesthetical feelings. But who said that a work of art ought to arouse “beautiful” human feelings? If the work of art itself could speak, it would probably tell me this: at least I did not tell this, at least I think that I am not liable for arousing, exiting, and stimulating anything; I am, and this much is enough for me; maybe someone needs me, maybe indeed I arouse catharsis, but all this does not depend on me and I do

The Thing and Art

3

not give a damn; I am a thing, I simply am. Unfortunately, the work of art is incapable of speaking, it stays silent, therefore others speak for it. And those others are aestheticians. They try to reason the work of art with that it ought to be such and such, that it must do this and that, that it must excite, evoke emotions, serve man, tell different interesting stories, etc. And the work of art is silent, for first of all it is a thing and that is it; first of all it is, and probably this is the greatest miracle. To be more exact: the greatest miracle is that we see that it is, that it compels us to recognize its independent, persistent, egoistically obstinate, closed-in-itself, beyond-human, and so radically transcendent being. First, we notice that the work of art is a thing that has being-in-itself. And only afterwards we start with our stories about catharsis, emotions, and the like. So, having made a circle, we get back to the starting point: there are a thing of art and a person who is standing in its presence. And now let us imagine that this person is not an aesthetician and does not know what to do with it. If a beefsteak were in front of him, he would eat it, if a TV set, he would switch it on and watch a sports show. This time neither one nor the other: just a thing. Therefore, let us ask: is a different, not aesthetical, approach possible towards the thing of art as well as towards the vis-à-vis of man and the thing of art? Let us say without much scratching of the head: yes, it is. Let us call this approach philosophical. Yet immediately a more attentive reader would say that the aesthetical approach to the work of art is also philosophical, after all, aesthetics, as everyone knows, is a subject of philosophy, after all, say, Hegel, one of the greatest philosophers of the West, has written an aesthetics, unsurpassed up to date, after all, Kant… In a word, irresistible arguments. Nevertheless, may the attentive reader allow the author of this essay to say this: philosophical approach to the thing of art and to man’s relation with the thing of art differs from the aesthetical one; what is more, these approaches are contrary, negating each other. What is the difference? It can be described in two words, but if it is done here, at the beginning of the essay, this description will rather negate itself, for it will tell nothing. If it is shown immediately, like with a gun banging the absolute truth, it would be the same as though an author of a detective story disclosed the villain on the first page. What kind of detective story would that be, then? And a philosophical essay somewhat reminds a detective story: even though the truth is known to the author from the start, it is exposed to the reader, however, only on the last page. And most important is not that it is eventually exposed. Like in a detective novel most important is the plot, so in a philosophical essay most important is the plot of thought, the movement of thought. Hegel was right saying that the result (in this case, truth or what is pretending to be truth) is a corpse with the tendency lagging behind, i.e. having left behind what is most important: the roads and byroads of thought, hard work of mind, the draft of thinking, which is that true realm of living thought and the plot of thinking. That is why we shall not say yet what is the difference between philosophical and aesthetical approaches to the work of

Arvydas Šliogeris

4

art and, risking to turn out to be total bores, we shall once again trace our steps back to the initial situation: a person is standing in front of the work of art and does not know what to do with it. However, we have made a small step forward. Now we know that this person is a philosopher.

3 Let us make another step and assume that the work of art in front of which the philosopher is standing (or sitting) is a poem or an entire constellation of poems, created as if by a small god of poetry, by one man. That man is an Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, we may say, our contemporary. We thus facilitate the hard initial situation: instead of an enigmatic opposition of man and a thing of art, we have a dialogue between a philosopher and a poem, between a philosopher and a poet, or, in a bit more abstract way, between philosophy and poetry. Is such a dialogue possible? Stories, which we have heard time and again, confirm the possibility of such a dialogue. Indeed, we have a good many philosophers who are in no way inferior to the best poets of all times by the beauty of the movement of thought and its expression. Suffice it to remember divine Plato in whose philosophy poetry amounts to the sweetness in fresh honeycombs. And then Plotinus, Augustine, Bruno, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Camus, among many others. There are also many poets in whose poems wisdom and penetrating thought amounts to clean snow on alpine tops. To name a few: the prince of poets Homer, Aeschylus, Faulkner, Proust, Goethe, as well as the mentioned Rilke. In short, the dialogue between philosophy and poetry set from the moment when mother of all sciences and arts Minerva, being always accompanied by an owl, the bird of wisdom, stepped into the world out of the head of Jove, after having broken through the ferroconcrete cranium. So we have heard a lot of nice stories about the kinship or even identity of philosophy and poetry, although we have heard stories of a different kind, for example, that philosophy is a science or has to become one, therefore it must shun and be ashamed of any kind of kindred relationships with poetry. All kind of stories have been told, that is why at this point we have to say that stories, no matter how nice or how multiple they are, themselves neither negate nor affirm the matter itself, in this case the possibility or even the necessity of the dialogue between philosophy and poetry. The fact that the so-called poetic philosophy or philosophical poetry exists does not prove anything either, at least until we know for sure what philosophy is and what poetry is and whether the dialogue between them is possible not only in the stories told, but essentially, thus independently of all the stories. No one doubts that Rilke was a poet philosopher. That he was one of the greatest thinkers of our epoch, irrespective of his poetry, we may ascertain if we read just a few of his letters; that he was a great poet, we may

The Thing and Art

5

even say – a hero of the poetic word, is obvious, at least to those who look at his poetry with a pure eye and not through the glasses of some story or an idée fixe or do not compare it to some poetic monument, e.g. Goethe, opposing the latter not to another monument, but to a simple person in a costume of the beginning of the 20th century, lost in the jungle of megalopolises and mass society. Yes, Rilke never was or became either an emperor of poetry or a monument. But he managed (or could not help managing) to tie poetry with philosophy. We all know this very well. Less known and very rarely asked is how he did this and why he even could not help doing this. A preliminary answer might be this: he could do this, because he sunk into the very depth of poetry (and philosophy), because the dialogue between poetry and philosophy is possible in principle, and Rilke was not just a scribbler of poems, but lived in the realm of the very principle of poetry, consequently, lived on a razor edge – where poetry and philosophy converge.

4 Now we take another step. Seeing a man-philosopher who stands in front of a thing-poem, we ask quite definitely: what or where is the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy, where is this razor edge on which the person, merging together an artistic image and a mental abstraction, balances? Where should we look for it? In poetry? Is it not risky? Shall we then not turn poetry into an illustration of abstract philosophical principles, cheap symbolism, infantile demonstration of “formulae of being”, seeking for pseudo-philosophical depths where they are absent; shall we not forget that the realm of poetry is an individual, succulent, sensibly concrete image, and philosophy moves in the realm of washy logical abstractions and metaphysical universalities? Will at this point the words of wisdom be of help, having been uttered by a philosopher who delicately felt that poetry and philosophy cannot be mechanically jumbled into one, for in the first place they speak different languages, translatable with difficulty into each other. These are islands, separated by hundreds of miles of water and touching each other maybe only under water, in the hardly discernible depth, like the roots of two oaks, growing far from each other, touch. Let us listen to Hegel: “By this we do not intend to say that the artist must perceive the real rudiment of things, which comprises the universal basis of religion, of philosophy, as well as of art, in a shape of philosophical thoughts. He is in no need of philosophy, and if he thinks philosophically, he performs work just contrary to the nature of art as regards the form of knowing” (1, 293).1 In general, the artist has to avoid philosophy, because if he indulges in it too much, he might start creating centaurs and round squares. More exactly, a philosophical poem is either impossible or not serious. Such a poem might contain neither genuine

6

Arvydas Šliogeris

poetry nor genuine philosophy. And let us not be afraid of such authorities as Lucretius and Goethe, who have written philosophical poems, which unfortunately contain much less poetry than the fans of the Roman or of the Olympian would wish them to contain, and there is not much of philosophy, either. Then, maybe the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy is in philosophy? Maybe precisely philosophy has the disposition of the arsenal of the means of expression, using which we easily bridge our way to the continent of poetry, while at the same time remaining on the land of philosophy? After all, a pure philosophical abstraction chokes the delicate flower of poetry, but a poetic metaphor in a philosophical text, when it is apt and in the right place, is not a mere adornment of the text to enliven the monotony of abstraction; an apt metaphor frequently discloses the essence of the philosopher’s thinking and seeing better than the most polished category. A metaphor, as a concept, might be a reliable instrument of a thinker. Yet does this mean that poetic encrustations and poetic philosophizing is the guarantee of genuine philosophy? Those who do not like philosophy’s orientation towards science think so: philosophy cannot and must not be science and think scientifically, ergo it is metaphysical poetry. Each thinker is a poet, expressing himself in a language of abstractions, which differs from the “true” poetic language not qualitatively, but just quantitatively, in a degree of abstractness. Yet, is such an attitude towards philosophy not its profanation? Perceiving philosophy’s nature in this way, one starts to demand of it such things that, say, Plato or Kant never dreamt about, e.g. “authenticity” perceived subjectivistically, even psychologically. Purportedly, true is only such philosophy that expresses the authentic psychological or existential experience of an individual. It is only a means of the self-expression of an individual and only of an individual; and the more authentically he can express his emotions the truer his philosophy is. And the criteria of the philosophy’s “authenticity” are, for instance, the loveliness, expressiveness, interest of the text and other intimate things. In other words, philosophy is regarded as literature (maybe not the true one, second-rate), and literary criteria are applied to it. Finally, such conclusions are reached: 1. Good philosophy is the one I like; 2. There might be many good philosophies and all of them are equally good, yet I do not like all of them equally, and I do not know why; 3. Philosophy, like flowers and beefsteaks, is a matter of taste; 4. There are as many philosophies as there are people. These are (unfortunately) the conclusions that the so-called poetic conception of philosophy leads us to. The philosopher, however, will never resign himself to such an interpretation of the nature of philosophy, because, even without repeating again the truth, maybe obtrusive for someone, that philosophy is science and nothing else except science, we should not forget the elementary aim of philosophical reflections, which is as old as philosophy itself. This aim is truth. And truth, as we know, is not a matter of taste. It is universal. A philosopher, modestly rejecting the pretence of being authentic, original, and

The Thing and Art

7

interesting, never and in no way can reject the pretence of reaching for truth, which would be not only an idée fixe of his, but also the truth of all. When he does not strive for truth, but, say, will like to be original, then he will not be a philosopher, but at best a mannerist of abstractions. Therefore, a true philosopher is and can be neither unique nor original, because there is and can be neither unique nor original truth. A philosopher thinks over and speaks about that which all others know and believe in – truth, but everyone knows it and believes in it implicite as in an obscure intuition, whereas a philosopher brings that intuition forth into the broad daylight of rational, objective seeing, and only then does it become truth explicite. All others not necessarily have to know this truth as it is known by a philosopher. What is more, after having emerged, the truth might look like heresy or sacrilege, like oddity or an extravagant challenge, like fantasy or a joke. In former times for truth philosophers were being poisoned with cowbane, fried on bonfires, they were being mocked at, looked down at, like some freaks who might be tolerated for the time being, but might be looked at seriously only by other equally eccentric birds or beardless youngsters, besotted with the idealism of youth. What an irony of history and fate, though: initially having seemed so weird, so impertinent, the truth spoken by a philosopher in the course of time used to become a banality, to freeze in the shape of monuments, dogmas, norms of compulsorily inculcated behaviour and thinking, in short, used to become homely and trivial. What a revealing, worth of a researcher, almost direct link between Stoics’ pyr technikon and a nuclear bomb! However, we have digressed. Let us repeat once more: philosophy strives for universal truth and any poetry cannot assist it in this hard work. The poetry of philosophy, therefore, probably guarantees its enigmatic (known only to magicians and gurus) “authenticity”, but by no means its veracity. That is why we cannot look for the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy in philosophy, for it is not in there as it was not in poetry. What is to be done? That which is obvious and has so many stories, does not want to disclose itself a bit clearer. Just facts, inklings, guesses, and nothing certain so far. Only the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy might enlighten us.

5 So maybe we are still moving in the sphere of the principal error while searching for the principle. Let us think. We expected to find the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy either in poetry or in philosophy, treating them as some ready-made things, crystallized in the shape of certain sediment. What is this sediment? Since the medium of poetry and philosophy is language, it is obvious that this is semantic sediment – spanless masses of language, congealed during millennia. To put it simpler, we expected to

8

Arvydas Šliogeris

decipher the principle of the contact of poetry and philosophy from philosophical or poetical texts, and have come to a fiasco. So, if we are researching philosophical or poetical texts, interpreting them together or separately, comparing them, matching or opposing them, we shall in no way read the principle of their contact out of them themselves, we shall not find that place where a poetical vision, due to some mysterious reasons, of a sudden emits from itself a powerful philosophical intuition, and a set of several abstractions suddenly sparkles in a bright poetical light. That place extends in some hardly tangible Between, which is neither poetry nor philosophy, nor is it the combination of the two, yet it somehow ranges over both realms and even flows into the fabric of a text. In order to find the principle we have to go beyond the texts of poetry and philosophy. Beyond, yet where? Our answer will not be unexpected, for we already have it: we must go to the mentioned opposition of man and a thing of art, which is indicated by poetry as well as by philosophy, if only they are not relapses into ventriloquism or intoxication with immanent “music” of the word, the music that has lost any, at least slightly real touch with the sensible world of things and people. We have mentioned that a poem or even a philosophical text can also be called sensible things that stand in front of man. In this case, in front of a philosopher. Yet these things are special in that they indicate more primary things, first of all an elementary relation of man with that which is usually called thingly reality or the world of things. What is this world of things, or simply the world, in which man lives and from which he cannot escape anywhere and ever, even while sleeping? In the most abstract sense, the world is a certain marginal concept, which comprises everything that exists in one way or another. In this respect, the world can be reflected as an indefinite entirety of possible events and things, an entirety that has neither beginning nor end, neither centre nor periphery. Kant called the concept of the world transcendental idea, which, next to other similar ideas, is no other than the totality of conditions of all that is conditional, therefore itself is unconditional. Although we call the world finite, yet such a description is a bit metaphorical and imprecise. Our world is finite only in the background of the infinity of all possible worlds, i.e. in the context of a wider idea of all that is (of a universe). Whereas from the point of view of man – a concrete, bodily and sensibly conditioned, therefore limited, being – the world is infinite, and the finiteness of man in space and time is his fate. Of course, not only man, but also other entities are finite, however, only man comprehends his finiteness in the background of the world’s infinity, therefore, only he can be called a finite being sensu stricto. What does it mean – the finiteness of man? First of all that he is mortal, finite in time. But more important to us is that he is finite in space as well. Man is always in a finite space, the limits of which more or less coincide with the limits of his sensible perception. The being of man always unfolds on this side of the sensibly limited horizon, to overstep which he is never able. He only can

The Thing and Art

9

think away this horizon and get to the other side only while thinking, i.e. ideally, because bodily he is always on this side. And what does it mean to be on this side of the horizon, i.e. to be spatially finite? What do we see when we look at the horizon? The answer is very simple: we see sensible things. Consequently, the horizon of ours, of humans as finite beings, is thingly. Thus man, as a being thrown into a finite horizon, always and everywhere is thingly and is sensibly conditioned. Naturally, on this side of the horizon, in the field of his sensory vision, man always deals with things, sees them, hears, touches, in short, perceives them sensibly. Sensory correlation – and it is an inevitable fate of man as a horizontally finite being – is a thingly correlation of man. Every look is a look at things, every step is a step towards things, and every movement of hand or mind is always substantially correlated and substantially conditioned. Man cannot escape things, no matter how hard he tried to achieve that. Things have being, things are, and eventually only things, in an ontotopically strict sense, are that which really is. True, it has been said that man can think away things by thinking away the thingly horizon, and while thinking he can get into the space of lingual entities. He performs this as a philosopher who thinks logical constructs, as a dreamer who designs sensibly conditioned images, who creates fantasies, myths, poetical constellations, in short, who thinks up possible worlds. Yet what are those possible worlds if they only are not dissolved in the nonthingness of pure mathematical relations? Possible worlds are also things by their origin as well as by their mode of perception, which was called subsistence by medieval philosophers. Real things exist, ideal or metaphysical things (i.e. words) subsist, but in both cases man is tied to sensibly predicated reality. Therefore even thinking away the horizon of real things, man remains tied to them. The contact of man and thing is a primordial ontotopical given, the ontotopical constant of man as a finite being. Everything that happens to man in this world, everything that he himself executes, that he does or does not, thinks or does not think, directly or indirectly is a dialogue with things. And namely things are the only real Transcendence – beyond-human being in the shape of thingly phenomena of being. Someone might say that except things there are events in the world, that things are not absolutely steady, that they are unstable, changing, emerging and disappearing. That is true, that is also a statement of an elementary fact. Yet let us ask: are events possible without things, and what is the true participant of an event if not a thing? There is no event in general, event-by-itself and in-itself. Every event is an event among things and with things, and everything that happens, happens in the thickness of things. Finally, even man – although we, controlled by humanistic sentiments and anthropocentric egoism of the species, very reluctantly utter these words – is a thing in the first place, though an exceptional and extraordinary thing. But in a certain respect every, even non-human, thing is extraordinary, therefore from this viewpoint man does not have absolute priority with regard to other

Arvydas Šliogeris

10

things. This is why the man–thing contact is a primordial, absolute ontotopical given. Everything that we call the human world begins from this contact. Exactly in this contact originate all human interests, all relations, all most diverse and countless creations of human hands and spirit, all actions and inactions, all passions and impassions; in other words, that which we call human being emerges from this contact. Human being is thingly, – such is an elementary, but fundamental ontotopical truth.

6 Since we are analysing the touch between philosophy and poetry, let us state another simple thing: philosophy as well as poetry or a work of art in general originate in that elementary man–thing contact and while originating reifies itself, becomes a thing, and sets another centre of the man–thing contact. Philosophy does not originate from philosophy, poetry from poetry, a work of art from a work of art. These are also elementary truths, but we put stress on this, because of the historical situation of ours. We live in an epoch of hyperculture when more and more of wise people quite earnestly speak about and believe in that the rudiment of all, the proto-element of the being of the world and of man is language, that language is the home of being, that man never and in no way can get to things themselves, for the unbreakable wall of language is between him and the thing, that if we think, we think not about things, but about words, that all human existential problems are only language problems, and that finally all that is, is language and its modifications. Language becomes a fetish and magical reality. A hypercultural epoch makes a fetish of language similarly to pre-cultural epochs that used to make fetishes of things. Only being in the snare of language fetishism might one think that philosophy originates from philosophy, poetry from poetry, a word from a word, a text from a text, a language from a language. However, this is a very strong belief at present. It is being believed that language produces language in the mode of generatio equivoca. This is how our epoch has realized an old dream of humankind: it has invented a perpetuum mobile, the driving force of which is the tongue. Well, here we can have one reservation: poor philosophy (and it is not philosophy at all) really originates from philosophy as reinterpreting and commenting on somebody else’s texts; poor poetry (and it is not poetry at all) originates from other poetry also as reinterpreting somebody else’s texts. Whereas true philosophy and true poetry originate from the thingly protoelement, from the primordial touch of man with things, the touch in which man lives as naturally as a fish in water without noticing it and usually without wondering at it, as a fish is not surprised that it swims in water without drowning. So, maybe the search of the principle of the contact of philosophy and poetry will take us where everything originates, – to the

The Thing and Art

11

primordial and elementary touch of man with the thing. Yet in this place the reader might say: now I see that the author is wrong and speaks not seriously, for he states that in the elementary touch of man with the thing everything originates, i.e. all and various creations of man, and, referring to the touch itself, he wants to explain poetry and philosophy, those entirely peculiar and extraordinary things. How can one explain with the utmost generality that which is extraordinary, individual, and peculiar? This is an elementary logical error. We have to admit that the reader is right about the logic and at one stroke has nailed the author to the cross of logical contradictions. Indeed, when we say that from the elementary touch of man with the thing everything originates, then this touch becomes a night in which all cats are black, it becomes a black hole out of which, according to astrophysicists, galaxies, anti-galaxies, and other devildom erupt. Therefore, we have to break the elementariness of the primordial contact, to resolve it so that we manage somehow to get out of the black hole into the daylight and to see stricter contours of the matter discussed. Let us try to concretize the notion of the contact of the primordial man and the thing. Let it be noticed here that it has been done by the philosophers of the past, and first of all by the inventors of philosophy, the Greeks.

7 It is well known that the Greeks considered wonder the beginning of philosophy and of any knowledge, and the beginning of wisdom and of knowledge for the peoples of the East was the fear of God. Wonder and fear are two different appellations for the touch, or relation, of the primordial man with the thing. They show not only how the primordial contact itself was conceived, but also – and this is more important to us now – where the human look was being directed, towards what ontotopical region the contemplation not only of a philosopher, but also of a common man was pointed. Fear, as a primordial ontotopical feeling, by its nature averts man from direct, sensibly opening presence, from the things of the sensible world and directs his look towards the supersensible language region as the socalled “signified”, towards that which is beyond the visible world, towards the supersensible given that takes the shape of an invisible god, Geist, Big Bang, or the entirety of gods, Big Bangs, devils, quarks, etc., or is not articulated at all. The direction of fear is supersensibleness. And namely fear has borne that invisible, supersensible realm. The man of fear does not trust in what is next to him, in what he sees, the sight therefore is substituted by faith in what is invisible. But namely invisibility is more real to him than a directly seen object of sensible perception. And on the contrary, wonder originates in the direct touch of man with sensibly opening things, and it bounds man to things. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle says that men started to

12

Arvydas Šliogeris

wonder exactly at that what was nearest to them, what was being encountered in everyday experience. So of all the senses sight was cherished most by the Greeks as it, according to Aristotle, more than the other senses helps know things, because it reveals most of their distinctions, i.e. individualizes them most. The Greeks conceived the primordial contact of man and the thing not as turning from things themselves, but as openness to things, as confidence in the being of things and in the natural order that harmonizes the entire sensible world of things, which they called the cosmos. Nevertheless, however simple and elementary the human touch with the cosmos of sensible things might be, the Greek philosophers, starting with Heracleitus and Parmenides, began to notice essential differences in it. All people in all situations eventually have to deal with things, yet not always and not everywhere things are being looked at in the same way, and this depends on the person as well as on the particular situation of the human touch with the thing. The Greek philosophers distinguished and opposed two modes of the contact between man and the thing: doxa and epistƝmƝ. The doxical touch with things is the most natural and simplest, it does not require any special human endeavour. A practically oriented man, submerged in everyday situations, gets into this kind of contact with things. The doxical look is the mode of everyday passive or active experience. In the Greek philosophers’ view, the doxical contemplation of things does not open the being of things themselves, the man of doxical everydayness is submerged in illusions, he is guided by an approximate knowledge of the essence of things only, which can be called merely opinion, but by no means truth. Indeed, doxical contemplation, in which practical interest takes the upper hand, is always oriented not towards things themselves, but towards how one or another thing can be useful or useless to man. At first glance, it might seem that the everyday, practically oriented contemplation of things is the most concrete. This is exactly how people of the practical orientation think; this is how every man, walking along the roads and byroads of everydayness, thinks. Indeed, in each everyday situation man deals with the most concrete things, towards which he advances and away from which he goes, takes them in the hand, puts them away, walks around them, bumps into them or changes the course, remakes, rebuilds, uses them for his own purposes. And if we asked a person in this everyday situation, what this or that thing is, he would answer: that thing is a house, this is a table, that over there is a tree, and this over here is a car. Let us listen attentively to that: he never says that that thing is “this” tree, and that over there is “this” table, and even if he adds the word “this”, it is not that he would want to describe the uniqueness or individuality of “this particular” thing, but because in this way he expresses the explicitness of a certain situation or of his relation with some thing, the explicitness that orients man to make some action. For instance, when it is said that “this tree has to be cut down”, not “this” tree itself as an individual thing is meant, not the tree for the sake of the tree itself is being contemplated, not its individual

The Thing and Art

13

being. The contrary is the case, in such a situation a thing is being deindividualized, it is merely a reference to a certain general, constantly repeating situation and to a certain, constantly repeating action. In the sphere of everyday contemplation, man deals not with individual things, but with schemes of things or abstractions. To be more exact, he sees not “this” individual thing, not the individuality of “this” thing, but a thing in general, a thing as a sample of a certain kind, which interests him inasmuch as that thing in general determines his practically oriented behaviour. We may even say like this: everyday contemplation leads man directly into contact not with “this” thing, but with the thing’s concept. Exactly the concept is what is given directly, what has not to be abstracted. The concept of a thing is closer to man than the individual being of the thing. In trivial experience, in the view of everyday contemplation, first of all not individual things reveal themselves, but things-anonyms, things-schemes: a tree in general, a house in general, a human in general, a spoon in general, a stone in general, and so forth. Every thing first of all shows up as a function, as that which can be brought into play, which can be used for something. Therefore, everyday experience and everyday contemplation in general is anonymous as it is filled with anonymous things in general. It does not individualize things, on the contrary, it de-individualizes them, seeing in them merely universal characteristics, i.e. seeing in every thing first not its individual being, but its “concept”. Trivial contemplation never sees the thing itself; it sees relations between things and possibilities to hominize things, to adapt them to satisfy human needs, possibilities of their usefulness or uselessness. Trivial contemplation is concerned not with what the thing itself is as “this”, but how the thing can be used, what its characteristics are that are typical not only of “this” thing, but of all things akin to this one. It is the content of the thing’s concept that concentrates the characteristics of the thing, i.e. the possibilities of its homininization, its use, consequently, the possibilities of de-reification of the thing. But to see only the characteristics of a thing, only the possibilities of its use, only the relations of the thing with other things or its relation with man, to see the entirety of the thing’s possible functions and functional links is to see not the thing “itself”, but its abstraction. That is why the closer look at trivial, everyday contemplation and at its objects – thingsschemes, things-abstractions – reveals that this kind of contemplation is not as concrete as it might seem to the subject of this contemplation. Just the other way about, everyday contemplation is abstract, it uses schemes, relations, functions, and functional senses. A practically oriented man sees the thingly milieu in a very abstract way, through the glasses of interest and benefit. Of course, such a prescinding gaze at things is not any exception or abnormality. This is just a natural look at the world, and it is determined by the fundamental facticity and thingness of man’s being: the primordial human touch with things is always practical and is determined by the imperatives of his existential self-preservation. The thing comes to man’s view first of all as

14

Arvydas Šliogeris

an instrument, tool, appliance, as a possible object for consumption. In this primordial situation, man is not interested at all in the thing itself as “this” individual that has being-in-itself and for-itself. In the practical touch with the thing, man, irrespective of whether he wants it or not, is compelled to negate the being of the thing “itself”, to detach himself from the presence of the thing as “this”, and to open himself to the realm of instrumental possibilities, i.e. to that which is called the meanings and senses of the thing. In the practical contact with the thing, man puts various senses into it, and that is why things become “full of sense”. The thing that gets into the scope of everyday contemplation is all grown over by the thick layer of human senses, therefore even the thing’s being itself is frequently being identified with a human sense or with the aggregate of such senses. The being of a thing is that by what it is senseful to man, – this is the absolutely natural position of everyday contemplation and of everyday experience. Since the thing’s being is identified with its human sense, it is forgotten that the thing first of all exists as being-in-itself and for-itself, as a closed, self-contained beyondhuman reality, i.e. the thing’s transcendency is forgotten and also the fact that the thing’s being can never be completely dissolved in relations, functions, human meanings and senses, that the being of the thing-in-itself, as beyondhuman being, is senseless and has nothing in common with either man or his needs, either his interests or his expectations. True, things sometimes themselves remind man about their beyond-humanness by not giving in to limitless manipulations, by breaking, smashing, crumbling to pieces, in a word, by resisting human endeavours to compel them to become absolutely obedient and absolutely consumer-goodish, but such a performance of the things’ self-sustaining being in most cases is treated as an exception and is promptly given to oblivion. In this respect, doxical contemplation supposes the oblivion of the being of things, it does not see the being of the thing itself, its individuality and standing-in-itself. That is why the Greek philosophers have asserted that a trivial subject is submerged in illusions, that his fate is only doxa, appearance, subjective opinion, that he cannot arrive at truth, i.e. see things objectively, see their being and standing-in-themselves. It is not by chance that Plato, in his famous cave allegory, compared the subject of everyday contemplation to a prisoner, closed in a cave into which some light penetrates and along the walls of which shadows are passing – pallid reflections of genuine things. In the cave, these prisoners are chained in such away that they cannot turn their heads and see the things themselves that are outside the cave, they cannot see real being, they see only instrumental shadows, though they think these are genuine things and real being. Plato, as other Greek philosophers, is sure that the region of everyday contemplation is the kingdom of shadows, illusion, untruth. Of course, to assess everyday contemplation so negatively only a philosopher spiritualist is capable, and the subject of everydayness himself is quite content with this kind of contemplation, as it helps him orient himself in the thickness of things,

The Thing and Art

15

perform practically useful actions, satisfy his bodily needs, and retain fundamental existential conditions. Also, we may not forget that even the most spiritualistically minded philosopher is not any angel, a bodiless being, hovering in the ether of pure ideas; a philosopher is also a thingly and bodily being, therefore, regardless of his wants, he has to land down into the everyday “hell” at least for a couple of hours and to go by the same imperatives, i.e. by practical interests, by which a subject of the everyday look does. The philosophical look at things does not spring up somewhere near, and irrespective of, the everyday look, but is merely its modification. Despicable attitude of a spiritualist philosopher towards the everyday look is grounded by nothing, because, being consistent, he would have to be equally disdainful towards himself – after all, he cannot break free out of the cobweb of doxical existence at least for a moment, either. Yet the Greek philosophers were right in another respect: while looking into the primordial contact of man with things they noticed that in the sphere of the everyday gaze there could not emerge a pure, practically neutral, disinterested vision of the being of things themselves, i.e. theoretical contact with things. Consequently, let us add, in the ontotopical region of the everyday gaze there cannot emerge man’s artistic contact with the thing, either. In the scope of the practical look, the thing never can show up as a work of art, for the work of art is precisely such a thing that is being viewed by a disinterested eye and the ontotopical centre of which is not a function or a possibility to apply it instrumentally, but its being as of an individualized, standing-in-itself entity. So, when in search of the principle of the touch of philosophy with poetry, we shall not find it in that primordial contact of man with the thing, which was called by the Greeks the region of doxa, i.e. in the realm of the everyday look and of the practical gaze.

8 Therefore, let us go further and make another step, which was also made by the Greek philosophers who were looking for a different type of the touch of man and the thing. This step transfers us into the ontotopical region of epistƝmƝ or theoretical contemplation. Namely in the sphere of epistƝmƝ man overcomes the illusions of everyday experience and anonymity, and a qualitatively new and peculiar attitude towards things ousts the seeing of things-schemes, functional senses, instrumental relations, and abstractions. It has been called theory by the Greeks. What is theory and theoretical contemplation? The word “theory” has a long history of a couple of millennia. It passes through the knowledge of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times and still is leading an active life today. For a long time theory was identified with philosophy, and after mathematical–experimental natural science has come into being the concept of theory is used to define the

16

Arvydas Šliogeris

specifics of scientific knowledge. Like in the history of Western knowledge there have been incessant talks about philosophical theory, we likewise, without giving much thought, keep talking about scientific theory. Usually it is said that theory is the most explicated form of cognition, and the theoretical relation with the entire entityhood is opposed to the practical one. It is true, the mathematical–experimental natural science of the present times has greatly adjusted the conception of theory: modern science has linked it with practical applicability, i.e. with the technicalization of scientific knowledge, therefore theory itself has become immanently practical. The long and complicated history of the conception of theory has made this conception very indefinite, polysemous, washy. That is why it has to be revised in every concrete historical and gnoseological situation. Discussing the problems of this essay, we have to specify the conceptions of theory and theoretical contemplation, too. What direction do we take in defining these conceptions? Firstly, let us not forget that theory is man’s certain elementary, primordial touch with the thing, and theoretical contemplation is man’s specific attitude towards the thing and towards the entirety of things. Secondly, we shall try to highlight the primordial sense of theoretical contemplation, i.e. the sense the Greek philosophers attached to it. The word “theory” itself is of Greek origin. Getting ahead a bit, we shall say that only the Greeks, as distinct from Eastern peoples or even from their successors – medieval philosophers, theologians, and modern scientists, – managed to ground coherently theoretically the meeting with things. The word theǀria etymologically is related to the word theos, God. Those people who were sent to religious festivals and who had sacral authorization were being called theǀros by the Greeks. The Greeks associated the primordial, prephilosophical sense of the word “theory” with sacredness, with godhead, and with a divine look at the world. Describing metaphysics as the most consistent expression of the theoretical gaze at the entire entityhood, Aristotle calls it a divine science, i.e. a kind of science that from a certain viewpoint excels human powers and that can be possessed only by the gods. A theorist is a person who has developed his divine, supernatural powers, a person who is capable of seeing things as they could be seen only by a higher being, a god. A theorist is a mortal with God’s eyes. In the eyes of the Greeks, poets (Homer), prophets (Oracle), and philosophers (divine Plato) used to come closest to such a divine state. Of what kind is this divine contemplation of things? Let us begin with an elementary opposition: theoretical contemplation is the contrary to the everyday, practical gaze at things. The latter is reigned by the principles of benefit and interest, the former is disinterested, it does not strive for any practical gain, for any pragmatic, technically oriented knowledge. It detaches itself from the needs of natural human existence and even contradicts simple human nature. In this respect theoretical contemplation is unnatural, it eliminates naturalistic human intentions. Where does this unnaturalness come from? Practical

The Thing and Art

17

contemplation eventually orientates itself towards man, it expresses his selfpreserving instinct, thus every thing opens itself to it merely as a means and an object of consumption. Practical contemplation discloses not the being of a thing, but merely the perspectives of its instrumental de-reification. Whereas theoretical contemplation is oriented towards the thing itself, its goal is to take such a look at the thing that the being of the thing, its standingin-itself might open itself. We might say that practical contemplation is oriented towards the subject, therefore itself is subjective, whereas theoretical contemplation is oriented towards the object, therefore itself is objective. Another important trait of theoretical contemplation is that it individualizes man’s relation with the thing, and in that it also differs from practical contemplation, which de-individualizes things by looking through them and constituting anonymous schemes of pragmatically deformed thingness. Theoretical contemplation is a radical opposition of two defined, finite thingly individuals or the standing of them in front of each other. A human individual, as a subject of theoretical contemplation, is standing in front of a beyond-human individual, as an object of theoretical contemplation. This standing-in-front, this counter-position of an individual thing as the object and an individual human as the subject is the most essential element of theoretical contemplation. We have to emphasize the following trait of the theoretical counter-position of man and the thing: it individualizes not only the thing, but also man. Theoretical contemplation does not suppose man as an individual, but constitutes him for the first time. Man starts to perceive himself as an individual not anywhere near or before the theoretical counterposition, but for the first time acquires his ontotopical intuition of individual uniqueness in the theoretical counter-position to the thingly individual. Double individualization, of man and of the thing, takes place. The thing is being singled out from the milieu, torn out of the magic sphere of flux, change, and decline, withdrawn from the anonymous context, which fills up that what we call the field of sensory experience. The thing seems to be taken out of the abstractness, schematism of the doxical region, out of thingness in general, it is opposed to its own characteristics and is seen as ontotopically independent entity that has being-in-itself and for-itself. In the realm of the doxical gaze, the thing is perceived as the aggregate of relations, as the concentrate of instrumental meanings and senses, whereas theoretical contemplation husks the thing out of the integument of relations, does not identify it with relations, but at the same time does not dissolve its being in the fluid of human meanings and senses. In the scope of theoretical contemplation the thing shows up as an entity, transcendent in respect of all relations and contexts, of all human senses imposed on it. It arises in the eyes of a theorist as a beyond-human in-dividuum, irreplaceable with anything else, whatever it might be. At the same time, the individualization of man, as the subject of theoretical contemplation, takes place. Man, as the subject of theoretical contemplation, first separates himself from the anonymous

Arvydas Šliogeris

18

naturalistic society and constitutes himself as an autonomous individuality. On the other hand, since theoretical contemplation is a radical counterposition of man and the thing, man, as an individual, separates himself from the wild convergence with nature and becomes a supernatural entity. To be more exact, he starts perceiving himself as a non-natural and overnatural being. Theoretical contemplation is the conditio sine qua non of the selfconsciousness of man as an individual and as the subject of the individually correlated touch with a beyond-human individual. That is exactly why namely the Greeks, for the first time in the history of the world, overcame man’s convergence with nature and his dissolution in anonymous socialness. In the societies of the Ancient East, such processes did not exist, that is why man over there did not develop the capability of theoretical contemplation, did not constitute the theoretical counter-position of man and the thing, and remained magically merged with nature and dissolved in despotic socialness.

9 In the maximally intense counter-position of man and the thing, in the tightness of the individualized subject and the individualized object, in the horizon of theoretical contemplation, the being of the thing itself – to use Kant’s term, the thing-in-itself – opens. The thing shows up as a phenomenon of being that has ontotopically independent and closed-in-itself beyondhuman being. Thus, an act of the thing’s “in-forming” itself takes place: the thing is being perceived as an entity that has a monolithic, indestructible in certain boundaries, individual form. Exactly this form is being constituted by theoretical contemplation. The individual form of a thing is regarded as a direct indicator and representative of the thing’s being-in-itself. An individually in-formed thing shows up as a phenomenon of being. For the first time, theoretical contemplation discloses and stabilizes not only the being of a separate thing, but also being in general. If the concept of being has any real sense at all, this sense is namely that being coincides with the thing, manifests through the thing, and can be only thingly. The thingly correlation of being allows us to separate strictly the regions of being and non-being, of being and quasi-being. Being as thingly being, as a phenomenon of being and an aggregate of such phenomena opens itself in the background of non-being and quasi-being and at the same time highlights and thematizes that background. Man, opening himself to the being of the thing as a phenomenon of being, also opens himself to the possibility of non-being or of pseudo-thingly quasi-being (of pure language, of ideal constructs, of relation). What and of what kind is this being of the thing that opens itself to theoretical contemplation? In this place, we are compelled to formulate a bit unusual thought: the individually constituted being of the thing by itself (for this being opens to theoretical contemplation namely as by-itself) is senseless.

The Thing and Art

19

The subject of theoretical contemplation, while opening himself to the thing itself and to its being, performs a peculiar reduction by the first movement: since in the case of trivial, everyday contemplation the being of the thing is wrapped up in a thick shell of human instrumental senses, projected towards that thing, this shell, while one pushes one’s way to the being itself, has to be hulled, broken, and reduced to the nucleus of the being itself. The theoretical gaze at the thing brings back to the primordial contact of man and the thing, and in this kind of contact the thing, as a phenomenon of being and a monolith of beyond-human being, is senseless. Consequently, being is senseless not accidentally, but essentially, ontotopically. Traditional philosophy has expressed such an ontotopical state of the senselessness of the being of beyond-human things by the notion of substance. The thing, as a phenomenon of being, i.e. as an object of theoretical contemplation, is substantial, it is itself substance or is made up of substances. And what is substance? It is primordial, absolutely monolithic, opaque, materially predicated reality, out of which all diversity of the things of the sensible world originates. It explains everything, all sensible entityhood, but cannot be explained itself; it can be only stated. Human mind can work through up to substance, yet it cannot penetrate inside it, because simply there is nowhere to penetrate to: substance, as a monolith of being, has no crevices or hollows of non-being. In other words, it has no internal structure, it is not made up of anything, itself it is elementary. This is an element par excellence. Human mind can only state its being. Being is the sole sense of substance, any other human senses do not stick to it and cannot be projected towards it. Therefore, substance cannot be a means, function, instrument to something. It cannot be used practically, and it opens its senseless being-in-itself only to disinterested theoretical contemplation. Being is its sole predicate. Substance is an atom of being. The thing also opens itself to theoretical contemplation as mono-lithic, a-tomic, therefore senseless being-in-itself. True, it is not quite right to say that the being of the thing is utterly senseless. A thing has a minimum of sense – insofar as it is “this” thing that has an individual, characteristic form by which we recognize the thing. The sense of being coincides with the sense of the recognition of the thing’s form. Of course, the being of the thing is senseless in the perspective of an only-human gaze and only because we cannot put in it any purely human senses and begin telling stories about what is beyond-human, stories that merely rotate “around” the thing like the planets around the sun, yet do not touch the nucleus of the thing’s being. And the more of being the thing itself has, the more it is senseless with regard to pure humanness. The more of being the more of senselessness. But not vice versa: senselessness by itself has nothing in common either with being or non-being. The senseless being of the thing or the minimum of the thing’s sense, manifesting through the individual form of the thing, is what can be called the thing’s beauty. The thing’s being and the thing’s beauty are identical matters. Ontotopically, beauty is as senseless as the thing’s being.

Arvydas Šliogeris

20

Let us emphasize: beauty is not the symbol of the thing’s being, not the allegory of its being, not the “emoting” of the thing’s being, – beauty is being itself, which opens to theoretical contemplation. The more of being the thing has, the thinner is the husk of pragmatic, functional, instrumental, or any other human senses that covers the thing’s being, the more of beauty it emanates. The more penetrating theoretical contemplation is, the closer it leads to the nucleus of the being itself, to the elementary form of the thing, the more of beauty there is and the more each thing comes closer to an ontotopical situation of the work of art. Since the beauty of the thing is directly proportional to the intenseness of its being, aesthetical explanations and stories, speaking of the secrets of art, do not lead us closer to the essence of beauty. Beauty has no essence; it has only being and coincides with the being of the thing. Thus, beauty is an unreadable riddle for an aestheticizing explanation. Ontotopically, beauty is a secret, and besides, it is an essential secret for the same reason as an essential secret for man is the being of the thing in the theoretical counter-position. And being, as it has been said, is that which is beyond-human and which cannot be transferred into immanently human measures. Being is absolute transcendence. The same absolute transcendence, though being near at hand, though opening sensibly, obviously to theoretical contemplation is beauty. That is why the thing’s being as beauty is an essential secret, which cannot turn into a non-secret.

10 Discerning the pure being of the thing from the chaos of human meanings and senses, given to the thing, theoretical contemplation in a certain respect builds and creates the thing as a phenomenon of being. This building and creation should not be understood trivially, i.e. that the thing is created and built from some elements (the thing itself, as a phenomenon of being, is elementary), from constituent parts (the being of the thing does not have parts, it is not made up of anything), from material (the being of the thing is itself a substantial “material”). Theoretical creation of the thing should be understood as a movement that singles out the thing’s being and stabilizes it, in a word, as a substantializing movement. Theoretical contemplation provides things with being by allowing them to be what they are as individualized, in-formed phenomena of being, and thus presents them with a “small” eternity. Theoretical contemplation emerges out of the confidence in a thing, out of the closeness to its being, it emerges out of love for a thing, for the beyond-human being of a thing itself, and also out of respect for the thingly arrangement of the entityhood. Theoretical contemplation is not blind, it sees not only the being of things, but also that which annihilates this being. It is aware of the constant change, decline, death, becoming, it is aware of the ever-gaping jaws of the Scylla of relativity

The Thing and Art

21

and of the claws of the Charybdis of time. Yet the subject of theoretical contemplation sees the thing as though there were neither death nor decline, as though the thing were eternal and stable like a crystal of eternity itself. To preserve the thing’s being at least in those limits that are given to man, at least in a small strip of the mortal’s being, at least here and now for a short blink to believe that eternity is possible in the shape of the thing’s being, that the stability and monolithicness of the thing’s being is possible – such is the purpose of theoretical contemplation. Theoretical contemplation is tragic, as it knows what is inevitable, and nevertheless, all the same sees things as if there were no inevitability, as if all that is were a miracle of pure being, untouched by the shadow of death. That is why the subject of theoretical contemplation, whoever it might be – an artist, a philosopher, or a politician, is a sort of Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His struggle for the preservation of a phenomenon of being is indeed tragic: it is a struggle without any hope of winning it once and for all. And all the same this person is fighting, is tilting at the windmills of transiency. This is his fate, and he comprehends it as naturally as he naturally comprehends the need to come into the horizon of theoretical contemplation and to see the being of a beyond-human thing.

11 A tricky question arises here. We have asserted that the main trait of theoretical contemplation is openness to the individuality of the thing’s being, which shows sensibly. Meanwhile, it is common to think that the true realm of theory is generality and supersensible abstraction in the shape of logical and lingual constructs, i.e. the individual being of a thing that opens itself non-sensibly. Already the founders of theoretical contemplation, the Greeks, opposed theory to the individuality of sensible things, therefore they translocated real, theoretically seen being into the beyond, into supersensible reality. Was the specificity of theoretical contemplation lost in that way? By no means. Here are a couple of vivid examples. The first one is Plato’s idealism. In search of true being, Plato leaves the sensible world and turns away from the things of this world. But does this mean that he also turns away from the thing’s being? Nothing of the kind. Plato seeks for the highest being, i.e. for unchanging, eternal, absolute, and timeless being – being without any impurity of non-being. He thus discovers the kingdom of eidai – of eternal prototypes of being and absolute phenomena of being. And what is an eidos? Is it a pure concept, a logical abstraction, or maybe a symbol of generality? It is just the other way about. The eidos is a metaphysical thing, with all the varnish of non-being and non-substantiality having been scraped off. The eidos is an individual par excellence, it is the thing’s being, purified to the absolute. The eidos retains the most important trait of the thing’s being – an individual, substantially interpreted form. Plato purifies theoretical

22

Arvydas Šliogeris

contemplation and strictly separates it from doxical contemplation and from its de-reifying potencies. That is why Plato had ground to think that the eidos represents the highest being, being par excellence. Eidai are paradigmatic things, atoms of being, and paradigmatic phenomena of being, and therefore all those mentioned traits of the thing that opens itself to theoretical contemplation apply to describe them. The second example is Democritus’ atomology. Let us ask again: did Democritus, while constructing his cosmos of absolute things, atoms, leave the field of theoretical contemplation and direct his gaze towards pure universality and logical abstractions? Nothing of the sort. Democritus, like Plato, searching for the highest being, perceived it in an individualized, substantialized, thingly way. The atom is also a metaphysical thing, monolithic, undividable, and, most importantly, it has an individual form. The atom is a thing the being of which manifests in the purest shape, without any additives of non-being and relativeness. The atom, like Plato’s eidos, is eternal, unchanging, not appearing or disappearing. It is also an absolute phenomenon of being. In Democritus’ philosophy, theoretical contemplation unfurls even in a purer shape than in Platonism. Plato’s eidai, after all, are things, predicated only ideally, pure forms, which are absolutely stable, but as though without “meat”, without a sensibly massive nucleus. Those forms hover, linger, vibrate, they are a bit ephemeral. Whereas the atoms of Democritus are material, they have weight and mass, they are substantially solid and massive. In this case, the being of things evidently opens itself as the being of beyond-human things themselves, of things-in-themselves. The elementary touch of man and the thing, emerging in the realm of theoretical contemplation, in Democritus’ universe is expressed perfectly, therefore theoretical contemplation itself has all its intrinsic traits and does not contain that equivocality which remains in Plato’s idealistic conception of true being. However, Plato, Democritus, Aristotle, as well as other Greek philosophers, although having retained fidelity to the fundamental imperatives of theoretical contemplation, were making one fateful movement, which later ended up in distorting the essence of theoretical contemplation and in its degradation. They searched for the being of things not on this side of thingly human horizon, not in the field of the mortal’s thingly correlation, limited sensibly, but in pure supersensibleness, seized only by mind. The orientation of theoretical contemplation being changed in this way, sensibly individual and substantially predicated phenomena of being could turn into logical generalities, utterly detach themselves from the primordial contact of man and the thing, and drift out of the genuine scope of theoretical contemplation, away from the things standing on this side of the thingly horizon and opening sensibly. The sensible thing became merely the ideal thing. The thing as the ideal was opposed to the real thing, spiritual immanence to the sensible transcendence of the things on this side of the horizon. Neither Plato nor Democritus did see that the sensible thing by itself, as an individual and as a phenomenon of

The Thing and Art

23

being, already here in this world, on this side of the sensibly correlated and substantially predicated human horizon, was the ideal; that the thing’s being was not a natural fact and not the immanence of human meanings and senses, projected towards the thing; that the thing, as a beyond-human, substantial atom of being, was absolute transcendence. In course of time, on the long and hard road of philosophical thought, the thing’s being was torn from the thing itself and transferred to the sphere of supersensibleness. The drama of being left real things, the tragedy of being was translocated to logical or religious ideality. The things of this world were left to licentious instrumental aggression, were placed at the disposal of time and change. Theoretical contemplation did not vanish, yet it changed its ontotopical address and gradually was identified with cognition.

12 What is the relation between theoretical contemplation and cognition? For a long time, an equals sign was placed in between theoretical contemplation and cognition: after all, theory is the highest form of cognition. Cognition usually was perceived as theoretical cognition, and theory as an instrument and form of cognition. Up to a certain time, such an identification of theoretical contemplation and cognition was simply inevitable, since cognition unfolded as theoretical contemplation, understood in a Greek way. To cognize meant to open oneself to the sphere of supersensible entities that grounded all reality. Cognition, to be more exact, the highest cognition was seen as construction and monitoring of metaphysical things. That is why it was identified with philosophy (or theology), and the latter was regarded as the most authentic manifestation of theoretical contemplation. However, the concept of cognition, which had originated as far back as the pre-philosophical epochs, was started to be applied to the various modes of man’s contact with the world of things and it became very indefinite. In general, almost every relation of man with a beyond-human reality and the relation of man with man could have been called cognition. First, an indefinite direct touch of man with the world, experience, was started to be called cognition. This is practical experience, grounded by practical skills and wits. Let us say, a person making a table cognizes, for if you want to make such a thing, you need certain knowledge and skills. Cognition is everyday experience, providing man with certain, pragmatically significant knowledge. An infant puts his finger to a flame and experiences pain, – this is a kind of cognition, too. Thus, man’s every step into the world and towards things is already cognition. That about which the Bible says, “and Adam knew Eve”, was called cognition, too. So, all social and biological human relations were called thus. Religion, art, black magic, mysticism, even narcotic dizziness – all this was called cognition sometime

Arvydas Šliogeris

24

and somewhere. Perceiving cognition so indefinitely, we may say that every relation of man and the world is cognition, and eventually in this world man has nothing else to do but to cognize, for even the most elementary biological functions, such as sleep or eating, can be regarded as cognition of a kind. In this case, we should admit that an animal is also a knowing being and qualitatively does not differ in any way from man, who cognizes always and everywhere. Naturally, such an amorphous conception of cognition cannot satisfy us. Striving to highlight differences between theoretical contemplation and cognition, we must noticeably narrow and specify the content of the concept of cognition. Revising the concept of cognition, we may choose this variant: cognition is theoretical cognition, its instrument is discursive intellect, which leans on sensible experience and uses logical forms of thinking. Yet this kind of cognition’s description cannot satisfy us, since it does not define somewhat more distinct boundaries between cognition and theoretical contemplation. For more than two millennia theoretical cognition was identified with philosophy or subjects akin to it, and no one ever scratched one’s head, whether philosophy was the same thing what the Greeks called theoretical contemplation or whether those were two different things. If different, then in what? By the way, to husk the specificity of theoretical contemplation out of philosophy was not easy also because philosophy, although it was considered the highest form of cognition, remained the symbol of all amorphous cognition. Philosophy pretended to take into its scope everything: thingly, human and divine, practical and theoretical matters. Therefore, a stricter self-reflection of philosophy, as a peculiar form of cognition, or more, its reflection of its differences from theoretical contemplation was impossible. Only modern times finally have highlighted the real, precise, and unambiguous sense of the concept of cognition, only modern science, as the highest and most authentic form of cognition, not only has strictly separated the realm of true cognition from the phantoms of cognition or from the realm of ghostly cognition, but also – and this is most important to us in this essay – finally has allowed to define clearly the contours of theoretical contemplation and to restore the primordial, Greek sense of theoretical contemplation.

13 Now, when the monopoly of cognition quite justly has been appropriated by science, we know that cognition not only does not have any points of touch (except maybe only the imperative of objectivity) with theoretical contemplation, but in most respects is contrary to theoretical contemplation. Our cognition – I want to emphasize again that I have in mind an authentic form of cognition, modern science, mathematical–experimental natural science – is much nearer to doxical contemplation, i.e. to an everyday,

The Thing and Art

25

practical human attitude towards things. Scientific cognition is not a variant of epistƝmƝ, perceived in a Greek way, but namely of doxa. This at a glance doubtful statement is evidently confirmed by a practical orientation of science, which is lying immanently in the experimental nature of science and directly passing into technical crystals and technological functionalism of such cognition. All doxical knowledge in all times and everywhere (not only in Greece, but in the East as well) also has been practical. Precisely practical application, benefit, interest is the guarantor of the self-esteem of today’s scientific cognition and the only criterion of its truth. In this respect, scientific cognition is a monumental compliment to nature, and not only a compliment, but also an invaluable gift to naturalistic human needs. Whereas theoretical contemplation, as it has been said, is unnatural, for it is utterly unpractical. That is why it is the antipode of the pragmatism of doxical (and scientific) knowledge. But not only that. The most important trait of theoretical contemplation is that it synthesizes the thing, accumulates it into an individual monolith of being, observes the thing as “this” substantial individual and an atom of being. This is done by tearing the thing out of all relations and pragmatic contexts. Such an operation positions it as an atom of eternity in front of man. The aim of theoretical contemplation is to accumulate, to synthesize. Its subject retracts the thing from all relations and sees it as a reality, transcendent to man himself as well as to other worldly forces that annihilate the being of the thing. Theoretical fixating of the thing’s transcendence is the fixating of its transcendence in regard to all relations. The thing is seen as a monolith of being (although really it is not), as an individual (although actually it is dividuum), as substance (although actually it is a complex of relations), as an unchanging timeless form (although it is in time and is constantly changing). Theoretical contemplation strives to preserve the thing’s being without being diffident about constructing even the universum of supersensible absolute substances. Of course, from the doxical point of view, such a theoretical image of the thing’s being, theoretical preservation of the thing in the shape of an atom of eternity is appearance, yet it by no means imply that this appearance is an illusion, that it does not have any real ontotopical sense, or more, that it is unnecessary to man. Meanwhile cognition – we know it very well at present – takes a radically opposite direction. Its first step is to transcend the individual being of the thing, to deatomize the thing, to schematize the thing, to replace the thing itself with its concept, functional scheme, to resolve the thing in advance into functional relations, to put it simply – to annihilate the thing, to destroy its being. Cognition is those millstones that mill the thing’s being into the flour of relations and functions. On the other hand, cognition makes the thing immanent, full of sense, dresses it with the thick layer of human senses that hide in themselves the senseless being of the thing-in-itself. Thus, from the thing cognition takes away transcendency, standing-in-itself and beyondhumanness. To give sense to the thing is to split its monolithic being into the

26

Arvydas Šliogeris

blocks of functional senses. The preliminary condition to cognize a thing is its destruction, de-substantialization, de-reification. This is done by dissolving the thing in endless relations, in the overall relationship of appearances – in relations with man and in relations with other things. In the perspective of cognition, the thing appears not as itself, not as “this” phenomenon of being, but as an ephemeral aggregate of relations, as the centre of the crossing of functional tensions and energetic lines, by the way, a totally accidental centre as “this”. Strictly speaking, on the screen of cognition, we see not things themselves, but relations and functions. The cognitive picture of the thing may be compared to an X-ray picture: instead of a face – a scull, instead of a chest – a zebra of ribs. To look at a thing through the glasses of cognition does not mean to see the thing namely as “this”, an individual, an in-formed monolith of being, resting in itself and for itself. Actually, it means to look through the thing, near it, around it – only to touch those points, where it contacts with other things, i.e. the centres of the tension of relations. Therefore, cognition discloses not the thing’s being, but namely those “empty” spaces, which allow to blow being up with the dynamite of relation and sense, to penetrate into the “bowels” of the thing, to find vulnerable places, cracks, and hollows, which will enable to de-reify the thing and destabilize it functionally. Thus, not the thing’s being is cognized, but what is, sensu stricto, the antipode of its being, we cognize the potencies of its non-being, we cognize not what the thing is, but what it is not as it itself, as “this” thing, as in-dividuum. Being consistent, we declare the sensibly obvious being of the thing to be a mere-appearance, and we call that which blows up its obvious being its essence, depth, and truth. In his Critique of Pure Reason, the book that can be called the Bible of cognition, Kant has shown that things are knowable only as much as they allow annihilating themselves, as much as they are compelled to renounce their being, individuality, substantiality, standing-in-themselves, and transcendent beyond-humanness. While cognizing, man penetrates into the thing’s hollows, into its ontotopical cracks and drives wedges of cognition into them – relations and senses. The artificially forced crack of relation is expanding, there appear more of such cracks, because while cognizing, ever-new relations and senses are being discovered, new cracks are being found, until finally the thing crumbles into functional meanings, characteristics, phenomenological profiles. It becomes transparent and see-through, like some fairy-tale house with glass walls. The “structure” of the thing opens, i.e. its bowels, which are called the essence of the thing. A peculiar logic: sticking to it, let us say, we should call the large intestine or the skeleton the essence of man. As the knowability of the thing we should identify those vulnerable places of it that make it a non-thing, that make it hollow, vulnerable from the inside, having some “inside” that is standing in front of the outside. Nature itself has put into things disability to resist the aggression of relation, and it is the guarantee of the knowability of things. Cognition

The Thing and Art

27

does not open things themselves; the thing, as long as it is a thing and as much as it is a thing as “this” individual phenomenon of being, as long as and as much as it has being, remains on the other side of the horizon of cognition. Penetrating “inside” the thing, resolving it into meanings and relations, man cannot find what he has been looking for – the thing itself and the thing’s being. The realm of cognition is relations, and we cognize not things themselves, but their relations, whereas the thing’s being is never dissolved to the end in the realm of relations: being is transcendent to relation, therefore unknowable. The realm of cognition is the formula (as relations can be expressed only by a formula), the realm of being is the form. In search of being, we must stand in front of sensibly substantial landscape of forms. Thus, it is senseless to speak about formulae of being, as being has only forms, and formulae denote the antipode of being – the quasi-being of relation.

14 If the thing itself, as a phenomenon of being, is unknowable, if in the presence of the thing’s individual being, of its minimally senseful form, and of beyond-human transcendency the discursive intellect is helpless, then whom do all those aspects of reality, which unfold in the primordial touch of man with the thing, open themselves to? Now we have a clear and unambiguous answer: they open themselves to the subject of theoretical contemplation. The being of the thing opens itself if not before cognition, then at least independently of it. Theoretical contemplation is a primordial, elementary, but not cognitive relation with the thing. Now we have found that place where not only philosophy and poetry, but in general the principle of the touch of philosophy and poetry ought to be looked for, – theoretical contemplation. Man can look at the thing as an artist or as a philosopher only when he enters (stands himself in) the field of theoretical contemplation and becomes its subject. A philosopher thinks over the being of the thing itself, purifies it, and singles it out of all relations without trying to penetrate its “inside”, for it would mean to de-reify the thing, to take away its being, to dissolve it in relations, in human senses, it would mean to breach the demarcation line that separates theoretical contemplation from scientific cognition. In that case, the knower, say, a scientist, would have the right to sneer at pseudo-scientific pretences of philosophy, because philosophy does not and cannot have those two elephants on which the entire stupendous edifice of scientific cognition stands – mathematics and experiment. Therefore the philosopher, as the subject of theoretical contemplation, remaining loyal to the fundamental principle of any scholarliness and every theory – the objectivity – and not pretending to penetrate into the realm of relations, tries to reflect the being of the thing by opening himself to its

28

Arvydas Šliogeris

individuality, substantiality, beyond-humanness, and transcendence. Thus the realm of philosophy is being, transcendent to relations and relationship, to functional senses and sensefulness. Thus how the artist, in our case the poet, looks at things, too. He tries to see the being of things themselves, its individuality, one-timeness, its rigid thingly form, which contrastingly separates itself from the anonymity of the milieu; he tries to record with words (or other means) the being of the thing as “this”, to be more exact, to purify this being, to scrape off all the varnish of anonymous senses and contexts, to see and to show it idealized. The thing’s being is not a brutal fact either to a philosopher or a poet, because a fact is the quasi-being of an anonymous background and anonymous things-schemes. The thing’s being is the ideal to the one as well as to the other: to the one in the shape of truth, to the other of beauty. Let us emphasize that the ideal, separated out by theoretical contemplation, is not some “beyond”, perceivable merely by mind, merely an ideal metaphysical thing, merely a concept, abstraction, or a logical entity. This ideal is evidently thingly, we may say, sensibly direct and sensibly in-formed. After all, the thing’s being is always correlated sensibly and no other being is attainable to the mortal. Both the philosopher and the poet, as the subjects of theoretical contemplation, open the individual being of the thing itself as the sensibly obvious and sensibly in-formed ideal. On the horizon of philosophical contemplation, that ideal is called truth; on the horizon of poetical contemplation, it is called beauty. The being and beauty of the thing is the same in this respect that being first of all manifests through beauty and beauty through being. It is not so that being correlates with beauty as essence with appearance, it is not so that being is a non-thingly transcendent x, which opens itself through an immanently thingly y, which is called beauty. In the mode of beauty, the being of the thing is maximally separated from all relations and relativity, from the anonymity of human meanings and senses, it is torn out of an anonymous quasi-being of being in general, and the beyond-humanness of being, as an individualized phenomenon of being, is brought to the fore. The senselessness of being opens through beauty as an elementary, yet absolute sense of the thing: “this particular is”. Beauty minimizes and simplifies the chaos and complexity of doxical anonymity. In the phenomenon of beauty, all the “depth” of being (or rather pseudo-depth, because being does not have depth) passes into the surface and becomes what it is – a thingly surface. Beauty, as well as being, are superficial, for namely the surface is an ontotopical region of being and beauty. Being, in the shape of beauty having become the surface, in the horizon of theoretical contemplation is seen all. There is no principal difference for the subject of theoretical contemplation between a simple thing of nature and a work of art, or a thing of art. Theoretical contemplation can see beauty in a simple thing, i.e. it can constitute that thing as a work of art (and vice versa: doxical contemplation can look even at the work of art as at a “value”, i.e. only as at a commodity, a concentrate of pragmatic senses), and

The Thing and Art

29

in a work of art the subject of theoretical contemplation sees namely the individual being of the thing, the thing itself as “this”, so, he constitutes a work of art as a thing and as a phenomenon of being. Let us summarize: the place of the principle of the touch of philosophy and poetry is theoretical contemplation. Thus we answer one of the questions, posed at the beginning of the essay. But this question is not the only one, therefore we cannot stop yet. Let us proceed.

15 On the path of the inquiring thought we encounter one more problem. Let us ask: what is theoretical contemplation from the point of view of the subject? Up to now we have thought over the objective profile of theoretical contemplation, taking a look at the thing’s being that opens itself to the subject. Yet, this is not enough. We do not know yet how it is possible to take the position of the subject of theoretical contemplation, what the traits of the activity of theoretical contemplation as the subject are. Theoretical contemplation supposes a radical, reflectively fixated, i.e. deliberate counterposition of man and the thing, of the subject and object of theoretical contemplation. In general, it is possible to open oneself to a thing’s being only at close range, only when a thing is standing on this side of the mortal’s sensible contemplation or on this side of the substantially limited horizon. The being of the thing has to be correlated sensibly. Things that are in general on the other side of the thingly human horizon cannot open to him as phenomena of being. Probably, only to a hypothetically higher being all things have real being, sensible and supersensible, those that are on this side of the horizon as well as those on the other side of the horizon, for this kind of being is not limited by any horizon, it is horizonless. The entity and the thing, in regard to their being, are identical to the hypothetically higher being, although we, beings limited in space and time, cannot know about it. To man, the entity and the thing, in regard to their being, are ontotopically different realities. The mode of being of the entity is quasi-being, therefore, only the thing that is on this side of the horizon, limited sensibly and substantially, can open itself to theoretical contemplation as a phenomenon of being. Every thing is an entity, but not every entity is a thing. Only things can show up in the shape of a phenomenon of being. In this respect, the thing qua the thing, the thing qua a phenomenon of being is a close thing. But “closeness” is an ambiguous notion. If we use terms precisely, we must say at once that even the being of the thing on this side of the horizon is very far from man. So, what is “close” to man in things directly, in the eye span of everyday experience and the doxical gaze? Close to man are not the things themselves as phenomena of being, but their instrumental senses, their applicability, their

30

Arvydas Šliogeris

functions, their instrumentality, or readiness-to-hand as Heidegger says. We get allied with things, we may say we even coalesce with them while using them, manipulating them, remaking them, putting into or taking away from them instrumental, i.e. purely human, senses. In such a situation, we do not notice things themselves; any gaping at the thing “itself” in the situation of instrumental usage paralyzes a practical action, hinders from using smoothly the functions of things, de-functionalizes them. In the practical contact with the thing, any just-gazing at the being of the thing is an impermissible luxury. So, in an everyday situation, not things themselves, but their functions and applicable meanings are close to us. In such closeness, the function and meaning entirely drowns out the being of the thing itself as “this” individual. The thing and man meets each other in the sphere of the function and relation, in the non-thingly Between, and both are de-individualized in this Between, for the functional contact is anonymous like the function itself and the functional sense. In the functional Between, the being of man, as an individual, as well as of the thing, as “this” monolithic individual, disappears. Naturally, at the same time the ontotopical tension between man and the thing, as beyond-human being, disappears. The non-thingly Between is such a sphere, the sole mode of which can be only quasi-being; it does not have independent being. We cannot say that the functional Between overcomes the counter-position of man and the thing, the subject–object tension, as it is primary with regard to this opposition, just as a practical contact with things everywhere and always is primary with regard to theoretical relation. Apparently that is why we may say only with reservation that in the situation of the functional Between, the thing, as “this”, as a phenomenon of being, is close to man. On the contrary, in this situation, the being of the thing is “very far away” not topologically, but ontotopically. That is why the first step that brings closer to man not the function of the thing, but its being is to distance a real thing. So that a thing qua thing may indeed be close to man, in this case close to the subject of theoretical contemplation, first it has to be distanced. The thing gets close ontotopically only from afar, only after it has been put into a distant focus of theoretical contemplation. What does it mean to distance a thing? It means to tear it out of the anonymous instrumental closeness, to single it out of the realm of applicability and functional meanings. Such a distancing positions a thing into a situation of ontotopical self-dependency and standing-in-front-of-the-subject. The thing can show up as itself, as “this” thing, as a phenomenon of being, having being-in-itself and for-itself, only through the ontotopical counter-position, only at a theoretical distance. The theoretical distancing of the thing’s being cleans off all functional meanings and senses, given to it by man, and purifies the senseless being-in-itself of the thing. The theoretical distancing of the thing’s being evidently shows its specificity. With regard to man, the thing’s being in general is something that is very far away, that is probably farthest from his immanent naturalism. Such farawayness from man of the thing’s being is

The Thing and Art

31

expressed very simply: the thing’s being is possible only as beyond-human and senseless being. Functional senses of a thing are closest to man; sense, however, does not coincide with being, the being of a thing is the antipode of sense. The thing’s being negates a human sense similarly as a human sense negates the thing’s being. To distance the thing to the situation of being-initself, which is being built theoretically, is to take any sense from it, to peel off all layers of functional human sensefulness. Things exist and probably have right to exist (who or what could deprive them of such a right? Maybe only a power which has nothing in common with rights) independently of whether we put in them any senses or not and independently of what senses we put in them. The being of the thing is senseless, but it does not mean that the thing is altogether absent; very much the other way, only then is it present in the most intense ontotopical and ecological sense. If we do not put some human mask on the thing, it does not mean that it has no countenance of its own; if we do not impose any human role on the thing, it does not mean that it gets lost and does not know what to do. No, it does not get lost, or it gets lost more seldom than a human who has not got any social role does. It simply is and knows how to be much better and more intensely than a human. That is why we can say: things are close to us first of all because they, as phenomena of being, are very far away from us. They are far to such an extent that in no way and never can we draw as close to them as we get close to their functionality. When the thing, as a phenomenon of being, is closed and monolithic, when it by itself does not have the so-called depth (we dream it up ourselves), when it does not have any emptiness into which the probe of knowledge could penetrate, then – for a blink and for eternity – it is far away from us and shows up only in the counter-position of the “I” and “this particular thing” of theoretical contemplation. However, exactly that farawayness of things, exactly that distance to overstep which we never can without destroying the thing itself, is the condition of the irreplaceable drawing closer of the being of man and the thing to each other. The thing, standing in front of us in the counter-position of theoretical contemplation, reveals to us that we are not alone ontotopically and that besides the chaos of human meanings and senses there exists beyond-human being, the partner of an ontotopical (and ecological) dialogue. Is it not the place wherein the true sense of the ecological turning-point lies? Ecological closeness of the thing and its transcendency, as a chance to overcome anthropomorphic solipsism, is possible only through theoretical objective farawayness. Besides, things, as phenomena of being, are real not only by themselves; they provide realness and ontotopical weight to man himself. What is man without the being of things? A chimera, a mirage, smoke, the so-called “spirit”? Without the being of things, without the direct practical or theoretical contact with things themselves everything becomes quasi-being, i.e. hovering in the ephemeral realm of absolute relations and anonymous senses. Everything becomes merely language, merely a symbol, everything becomes bureaucratic reality.

Arvydas Šliogeris

32

One may easily flee from the opposition of man and the thing, which highly encumbers human existence, flee from the tension that arises in the practical or theoretical presence of the being of things, as K Jaspers has put it, escape from the prison of the subject–object opposition. A lot of means have been devised to surmount this opposition. One and the main of them, which did not even have to be invented, is interspersing oneself in an everyday anonymity, merging with the senses of doxical functionalism. Our every natural step, every natural glance is nothing else but relativizing the thing’s being, transferring the thing’s being to the equivalent of relation, to some anthropomorphic sense. Orienting ourselves each moment only to the signs and functions of anonymous thingness, dissolving all things in the fluid of instrumental vectors, we constantly surmount the tension of the being of man and the thing, we get back to anthropomorphic immanence, to the peaceful island of functions and meanings, to a convenient station of a consumer, and we get suspended in the comforting and dizzying doxical realm of the nonthingly Between. We thus enter a state of ontotopical weightlessness and the continent of lightness, which is populated not by the creator, but by the consumer. But it is very hard to break free from the realm of the functional Between, it is still much harder to open oneself to the being of the thing, but this difficulty is precisely the porch to real being. To relocate oneself to the situation of theoretical contemplation is very hard, because all natural human powers resist that.

16 What are then the main components of the subject of theoretical contemplation that constitute his openness to the being of the thing? We know now that theoretical contemplation is not cognition, which destroys the being of the thing and surmounts the subject–object opposition. The instrument of cognition is intellect, functioning inductively or deductively, or to put it in a wider scale, the human mind and thinking, rational powers. If theoretical contemplation is the antipode of cognition, then maybe it is irrational, maybe it grounds itself on irrational powers of man: feelings, emotions, affects, instincts, somatic reactions? Maybe it is dizziness, maybe, according to one sage of the Orient, it is a vision of the world through a senseless look of a newborn calf, maybe it is a mystical intuition or a magic merging with the “secret of being”, maybe it is life, glorified by Zen Buddhists, “philosophers of life”, existentialists, psychoanalysts, phenomenologists, and aesthetes? We shall answer clearly and simply: theoretical contemplation is the contrary to all mentioned here. First, we shall emphasize that theoretical contemplation overcomes man’s solipsistic insularity and puts him in front of the world of things. Whereas all the just-

The Thing and Art

33

mentioned modes of man’s contact with the world do not lead him into the world, do not open to him beyond-human being, but on the contrary, drown him in the existential vibrations of his own, close him as if in a prison of chaotic inwardness, which, as Leibnitz’s monad, is without windows. Not the theoretical or practical opposition of man and the thing, not the subject– object tension is a prison, as existentialists think, but on the contrary – the prison is the getting over this opposition, closing oneself in the encasement of vital and existential vibrations. To get over this tension is to flee from the world, from objective, beyond-human being. Any mysticism, any magic, any intoxication is the most expressive document of the fear of the world of things. And the fact that our epoch is in such adoration of irrational emotions, feelings, giddiness, “merging with being” bespeaks the weakness of the man of this epoch, his inability to stand in the tension field of the theoretical counter-position. The quest of magic and pseudo-religions most evidently confirms metaphysical feminization of the epoch that celebrates aggression and masculinity. What we can first say about theoretical contemplation is that it is not any feeling, any emotion, any ventriloquism or ventri-vision, any mystical intuition or flaccid melting in amorphous flow of human meanings, sensory impressions, vital stimuli, pathological states. Theoretical contemplation is a relation with the thingly world, a relation that sees the being-in-itself and for-itself of a beyond-human thing. To see means to see the individual and clearly resolved form of the thing that is standing-in-front. Theoretical contemplation surmounts the amorphousness of an everyday look and builds the cosmos of thingly forms, seen distinctly and contrastingly. It creates the order of forms not as a system, but as an organic whole that is being diversified by things themselves. Since the conditio sine qua non of theoretical contemplation is the counter-position of man and the thing, any merging, giddiness, or melting in emotions, in the waves of vital or existential vibrations is out of the question. Bringing this element of theoretical contemplation to the fore, we shall say that theoretical contemplation is plastic and not musical. The most authentic sensory realm of quaggy existential inwardness that flees away from the world of things, is music, which swallows every plastic vision of the world, turns man into Proteus who constantly changes his shape in the descending waves of anonymous senses. Such Proteus-like change and play is the self-deidentification, self-de-formation and de-reification of an individual. Whereas theoretical contemplation concentrates into an individual atom not only the thing, but also the subject of the contemplation, a human individual. The human himself creates a plastically in-formed monolith from his amorphous inwardness and chaotic vital existence. He becomes himself and cannot identify himself with anybody else. The main principle of theoretical contemplation is contrary to the Oriental Tat tvam asi, which eventually means You are I. The imperative of theoretical contemplation: You are not I; I must never and nowhere merge with what is beyond me or inside me as

Arvydas Šliogeris

34

some strangerness, which has happened to come goodness knows where from. The subject of theoretical contemplation, while seeing the individual being of a thing, similarly clearly and contrastingly sees his own, as of an “atom of soul and body”, plastically constituted being. Consequently, the second element of theoretical contemplation is reasonable seeing. The span of vision is being managed by cool, objectively oriented reason, which defines plastically the being of the thing. The same reason constitutes also the object of theoretical contemplation. This reason might be called plastically and substantially oriented intellect. However, we know that intellect is an instrument of cognition, i.e. of man’s merging with the thing. In the sphere of theoretical contemplation, intellect functions a bit differently. It does not cognize things, but becomes acquainted with them. Not cognition, but recognition of and acquaintance with the thing are the most important traits of the intellect that functions in the realm of theoretical contemplation. In this respect, theoretical contemplation, from start to end, from top to bottom, is rational in the classical Greek sense of the word. Now we see both basic elements of theoretical contemplation: these are the five senses, first of all sight as the most theoretical sense, plus theoretical reason, regulating the process of sensory perception, tearing this perception out of an everyday sensory dispersal, and orienting towards the seeing of the individualized being of the thing as a phenomenon of being. Theoretical contemplation is as cold as spring water, as clean as alpine snow; it does not contain any feeling, any emotion, any giddiness, any other irrational human powers. Only a being, rationally regulating sensory openness to things, man, can establish a situation of theoretical contemplation. Theoretical contemplation elevates man above his naturalistic powers and maximally unfolds his specifically human powers. In the sphere of theoretical contemplation, man manages to open himself to beyond-human being and to sensible thingly transcendence, i.e. to see other-being. An animal differentiates all things into eatable and uneatable, whereas man can divide all reality also into what has selfdependent, beyond-human being and what has not. Man can recognize the right to be for that what he himself is not. Man, as a subject of theoretical contemplation, can break through the shell of anthropomorphic solipsism and take part in a dialogue with beyond-human being like with an equal ontotopical partner.

17 In the realm of theoretical contemplation, the five senses, oriented towards the thing, and theoretical reason link man with the transcendent being of things, with that which is seen as in-formed, individualized, and substantially self-dependent. Whereas feelings, emotions, vital vibrations, mystical intuition link man with quasi-being, with non-thingness, with the

The Thing and Art

35

invisible, with all the anonymity of the world, with that which the Orientals called Tao, Nirvana, or something else. That was the real being for them, and the real being for the subject of theoretical contemplation is that which the Orientals called the veil of maya – the being of sensibly individualized things. And no other being is attainable to the mortal, if he does not regard the hunt for illusions in illusory ways as his life’s imperative, if he tries to see the world clearly and simply and does not flee from it into the nirvana of some giddiness. Theoretical contemplation, as the synthesis of sensible seeing and reason, which concentrates this seeing into a nucleus of an individualized thing, or, to use Kant’s term, as the spontaneity of intellect, which glues together fragments of sensory perception into a monolith of a phenomenon of being, is the actual ontotopical field of being, the being of the thing as well as of man. Transcending this field by emotions, mystical intuition, magic giddiness, surmounting the monumental counter-position of the being of the theoretical subject and the thing, we concurrently transcend into the twilight of quasi-being, we de-individualize, and take being away from, the things as well as ourselves. The marginal notion of such a deindividualization, or a regulative principle, is non-being. We may distinguish two potencies of finite consciousness: the theoretical potency, the potency of being, and the potency of non-being, which might be relatively called the magic potency. These two potencies of consciousness can be separated and opposed. If we imagine infinite consciousness, these two potencies coalesce into one, being merges together with non-being, and a state of the metaphysical Between emerges, which, from the viewpoint of finite consciousness, amounts to non-being and darkness. Yet equally we may say that this Between is pure light, absolute lucidity, in which finite reason would not be able to distinguish the opposites of being and non-being, in which all signs and boundaries, separating the thing from the non-thing, being from non-being, would disappear. When we use such notions as “thing”, “being”, “phenomenon of being” we mean their direct, we might say, banal sense and we avoid any allegory, symbolism, ambiguity, subtext. In our situation, the simplicity and homology becomes a categorical imperative. Man of the today’s world is sinking more and more rapidly into the state of the “second magic”. Lost in the labyrinth of endless, constantly avalanching on him from all sides, anonymous meanings and senses, unceasingly inundated by a flow of chaotic information, unable to control this flow and being washed like a sliver, unable to penetrate through the thick hull of anonymous meanings to the simplicity of the being of things and man, to stand into an elementary relation with the direct, thingly world, he is inclined to seek high and low for symbols, allegories, magic tokens, mystical monograms, semantic ritualism, the mimicry of the word and the thing. If we call this infinite mass of anonymous senses language, we will be able to say that the excess of language and its almost demonic power has partitioned man off the simplicity

Arvydas Šliogeris

36

of things and being. Precisely the excess of language and of anonymous senses has become the source of the “secondary magic”. Theoretical contemplation is the antipode of the magical vision (or, strictly speaking, blindness) of the world, the antithesis of the sublime or everyday mysticism. While retaining the fundamental clear, individually articulated thinking, theoretical contemplation concurrently needs as long the distance between the “I” and “this particular thing” as possible, it negates every magic merge with beyond-human being, every magic “eating” of the thing, every aesthetical or vital giddiness, disappearance of clear contours, twilight, mist, squinting, an inward look, emotion, melting the being of the thing in contexts, in irrational senses, in the logical nuances of a phenomenon, sophisticated indulgence in microscopic deformations of the “background”, in a word, it negates every irrational subjectivistic deformation that reduces the being of the thing itself in one way or another to its anthropomorphic substitute. The subject of theoretical contemplation constantly returns to things themselves; in the eye span of theoretical contemplation, in the tension of the ontotopical counterposition of the “I” and “this particular thing”, a naked thing arises as “this” and as a phenomenon of being, and not as a semantic substitute of thingness. The subject of theoretical contemplation sees things as clearly and simply as our teachers, the Greeks, used to see them. Theoretically, there is no need to stack some things into warehouses, called museums, and to experience them as works of art, and to consider all others, “non-museum pieces”, which accompany man in the short path of his life, only the symbols of instrumental consumption, because the difference between a simple thing and a work of art is not a matter of principle. This difference is only quantitative and indicates different degrees of the intensity of the thing’s being.

18 Now, after a long road of thought, we can answer the question, posed at the beginning of the essay: is a non-aesthetical attitude towards the work of art as the thing possible? It is possible and possible namely as theoretical contemplation. Aesthetics, instead of reflecting the specificity of the work of art as a phenomenon of being, shifted its attention to the analysis of man’s relation with the work of art; therefore, an aesthetical look at the work of art was frequently oriented not towards the being of the work of art, but towards man and all his de-reifying powers. Thus, the space of the work of art was started to be looked at as if looking through the thingness of the work of art and trying to discern only the infinite mass of human meanings and senses, projected towards the work of art. Various feelings, emotions, stories, and scientific myths got into the focus of an aesthetical gaze. Aestheticism is narcissistic indulgence in immanently human ingredients of the work of art,

The Thing and Art

37

and only in them. In the view of an aesthetical gaze, the relation with the thing of art obstructed and pushed to the periphery the being of the thing itself. Thus, the work of art was interpreted only historically, mythologically, literarily, magically, mystically, phenomenologically, symbolically, allegorically, etc. Aesthetics started to tell only human stories about that the specificity of which could not be confined to pure humanness, there was much of looking round the work of art, and the work of art itself was forgotten, which, as the thing, is never identical to any relations, for it is transcendent with regard to all relations and, in a certain sense, is the thingly absolute, minimally senseful as moonlight. A conclusion was reached logically that the creator was more important than the creation, that of most importance was the psychology of the artist and those irrational powers that gave birth to such an oddity, the place of which could be only in special asylums, museums, like of a mentally ill person only in a mental institution. Eventually, art was relocated to the sphere of the irrational, and aesthetics had to engage in research only of what was irrational in the work of art and in creation in general. But let us once again listen to Hegel who says: “But we should expel all dark forces from the realm of art, for there is nothing obscure in art, everything in it is clear and lucid” (1, 251). By eliminating irrational relations with the work of art (insofar as it can be done), theoretical contemplation restores to the work of art that simplicity and clearness which was lost in the epoch of the orgies of aestheticism. Its waymark – as the ideal and regulative principle – is classical art and classical attitude towards the work of art, which has originated namely in the realm of theoretical contemplation. Of course, it does not mean that, having such a waymark, we should and must at one scoop start creating classical works of art. It does not mean that the ideal of theoretical contemplation and of classical art may at once, here and now, be made a fact. There is no need in that. The ideal retains its might as long as it is the ideal: any endeavours to realize it directly would mean to compromise it and turn into a caricature. However, philosophy, and this means also a philosophical attitude towards the work of art, is always oriented not towards facts, but towards man’s possibilities, maybe realized only partly and lost, but not buried for good. Philosophy always speaks about the ideal, maybe realized only partly, yet never realizable to the end, thus alive and shining on the prospective horizon, like a lonely star is shining on the dark evening sky – a herald of hope and of a sunrise. The byroads of both the philosopher and the poet lead towards it.

19 Having found the principle of the contact of philosophy and poetry and the ontotopical shelter of this principle, we may move on to the main object

38

Arvydas Šliogeris

of this essay, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, and try to hull out its philosophical content if such a content in general is present in his poetry. Let us assume that it is present, that Rilke is a poet philosopher, and that in his poetry there is as much of philosophical content as there is of poetry in Plato’s philosophical dialogues. Yet such an assumption forces us to stop for a while and to eliminate one more difficulty, which arises from the aesthetical conception of art, which is dominating nowadays and which is prevailing in the interpretations of Rilke’s poetry. From the middle of the 19th century, one, at a glance very “innocent”, word with ever greater obstinacy pushed its way into the view of poetical interpretations, the word, which has now become almost a synonym of poetry and has firmly seated in the monarch’s throne in the kingdom of poetry. This word is lyricism. Poetry, as it is now frequently assumed and said, is a lyrical relation of man with the world. Lyricism can be various: it is being talked about lyrical emotions, expressed by a poet, about a lyrical subject, about lyrical dialectics, and even about philosophical lyrics. Like many other too widespread words, the word “lyricism” now means everything and nothing, it is used in need and needlessly, it is used inertly, without much thought, not trying to comprehend more clearly its primordial sense, which also has originated in the elementary contact of man with the thingly world. Since we are interested in the principle of the touch of philosophy and poetry and its place, and such a principle is theoretical contemplation, we shall examine the notion of lyricism only in one aspect by posing a question: what is the relation between a lyrical and a theoretical look at the world, does the lyrical look fit in the frame of theoretical contemplation? If yes, then a lyric poet is also a poet philosopher. And if not? First, let us ask, what the lyrical relation of man with the world and its things is. The realm of the lyrical look at the world is the feeling and the emotion. The dominant of the feeling is the main trait of the lyrical look. Another trait results from it: the lyrical look at the world is subjective, it is oriented towards a lyrical subject and can yield only a subjectively distorted vision of the world. The third trait of the lyrical look is that it develops in the realm of the lyrical subject’s subjective relation with the world. The lyric poet is not interested in things themselves, their objective shape, and their being-in-themselves; he is not interested in beyond-human being-by-itself. The most important and the sole personage on the stage of the lyrical look is the subject-lyrist himself, narcissistically fixing his gaze on the so-called inner world, on his existential vibrations, on the twilight of pure inwardness, and on the vibes of his feelings, in short, on himself and only on himself. Everything that is not he himself, all the mass of things is a mere stimulus to him, merely “evokes mood”, makes him rejoice and laugh, or grieve and distress, in a word, sing his soul’s joy, dismay, or pain in such a way as if this soul were the centre of the world and the rest just a periphery. The situation of a consistent lyrist reminds of H C Andersen’s tale about the ugly duckling. So, during his wanderings, the hero of this fairy tale gets to a cosy cottage

The Thing and Art

39

where an old woman and a cat live. These two not only live in regard that the old woman eats and sleeps, and the cat eats and purrs, but they also sometimes philosophize. And their philosophy is this: the world has two sides, one side is the good one – this is the old woman and the cat, the second – the rest – is the bad one and is unworthy of their attention. This is also how a lyrist sees the world: beautiful, good, and right is that which takes place in the kingdom of his beautiful, good, and right feelings, the rest is nothing to make a song about and exists just for the fun of it, only to stimulate occasionally the lyrist’s sensitive soul. It is a subjectivistic, or, we may even say, sentimentalized solipsistic position. Pure feeling, when it predominates absolutely, blinds the singing lyrist. He becomes a capercaillie, which, while singing, is blind and deaf and therefore is easy meat to a hunter (brutal objectivism). The world and things seem to disappear; waves of feeling, the music of words, and vibrations of the soul remain. Things themselves do not have their place in the scope of the lyrical look, there is only one actor on the stage of the lyrist, and that actor is the lyrist himself. The aim of the lyrist is to express himself, namely himself. The principle of universality is ousted by the imperative of originality. Such poetry is created as if with the eyes closed. This is the poetry of the eyeless. That is why it is very easy to write a lyrical poem. Fairly good lyrical poems are written even by secondary-school girls. After all, such poems are without any objective content; to write them one does not need either experience or hard and long-lasting encounter with the world, one does not need even bookish erudition. And if a lyric poet is incapable of overcoming such a pure, at first glance, expression of his feelings and emotions, if he does not become objective and does not open himself to the world as to the thingly space of human universality, he is doomed to remain infantile for good. After all, pure lyricism is nothing but infantilism. The most important thing to us is that pure lyrical poetry remains in the realm of a subjective relation, it shuts itself in the shell of subjectivity and is incapable of opening itself to the objectivity of the being of things, of going out to the space of universality and generality. Consequently, the lyrical look has nothing in common with theoretical contemplation and is closely related with the prose of life, everydayness, the ontotopical region of doxical relations – with all that is, however, so passionately despised by lyrists themselves. The lyrical relation is just a sublimation and modification of the pragmatic relation with things. That is why, at first glance, a paradoxical conclusion offers itself: a philosophical interpretation of lyrical poetry is impossible, in the span of the lyrical gaze poetry cannot touch with philosophy, for in the lyrical relation of man with the world there is neither objectivity nor the being of things themselves, there are no traces of theoretical contemplation of entities here, therefore there is no philosophy, either. Philosophical poetry is possible, whereas philosophical lyrics are a contradictio in adjecto. The realm of lyricism is the feeling and the emotion, in a word, a subjective relation. The realm of theoretical contemplation and

40

Arvydas Šliogeris

philosophy is a cold, rational, objective look at things, is the being of things themselves. To see things themselves is to reduce the subjective relation with them so that this relation seems to disappear, that it is obstructed and ousted by the being of a visible thing: a philosopher or a poet has to become a pure eye of the world. To get to the sphere of theoretical contemplation a poet has to make a movement, which at first glance looks rather unexpected: he must surmount lyrical hovering in his own existential vibrations; concurrently, he must surmount his own subjectivity and subjectively oriented, i.e. lyrical, look at the world. Thus he becomes objective and gets into the true space of the poetical touch with the world, into the space of theoretical contemplation. But is this possible to do at all, and if possible, then how? Does not the poet, overcoming his subjectivity and lyricalness, leave the poetic cavern and become a pure philosopher? Is such poetry possible, in which feelings would not manifest to a greater or lesser extent? is poetry without any additives of lyricism possible? can a poet be entirely objective? This question is very difficult, but, although without finding a clear and final answer to it, we shall perhaps specify the concepts of theoretical contemplation and philosophical poetry. Let us assume that the poet (or perhaps not only the poet, but also the philosopher) cannot be utterly objective. In general, absolute objectiveness is probably the privilege (or maybe a drawback) not of man, but, for instance, of a camera. The lyrical touch with the world, at least as an admixture or a peripheral background, is an inevitable condition of poetry and of the poetical touch with things. But in this place, in the play of the proportions of subjectivity and objectivity, the rule of “more–less” comes into action. The first extreme is pure lyricism, in which all the space of poetical vision is overshadowed by the feelings of a singing woodgrouse, his subjectivity, his relation with “something”, because he does not know, does not see, and is disinclined to see that “something”. The lyrical relation and the hovering in such a relation becomes everything, and the thing itself that has aroused lyrical vibrations seems to disappear or at least does not get into the field of the contemplation of the singing woodgrouse. Such poetry where merely “authentic”, i.e. purely subjective feelings remain, in which there are merely “self-expression” and singing one’s own subjective emotions, does not much differ from a bird’s song, for it is similarly naive, blind, and impotent. Without any doubt, it can be neither philosophical nor thinking, it cannot have any universality or objectivity. At best, it is mannerism or pursuit for originality. Obviously, such poetry has nothing in common with theoretical contemplation and thus in general cannot be called poetry. The contrary case: the poet tries to be objective, to avoid naive subjectivity, to eliminate the emotional relation with the thing, and to become the pure eye of the world that sees things themselves and expresses them in a poetic language. Poetry, having flowed from such contemplation that is oriented towards universality and objectivity, would be maximally philosophical. But will that still be poetry? Probably not. In the poet’s theoretical contemplation of the being of

The Thing and Art

41

things, there must remain also a lyrical relation with the thing, yet such that it would not block the thing itself, i.e. an objectively oriented feeling must remain, which would not be only subjective, only the non-objective vibration of the soul of the lyrical subject, like an itch or a toothache. If the feeling and lyrical openness to the being of the thing remain in poetry, this feeling must be general, universal, objective. Kant called this feeling sensus communis and considered it the foundation not only of poetry, but also in general of any artistic relation with the world. The place of this feeling is Between subjectivity and objectivity, it is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. If you will, this is a theoretical feeling, which appears and stays only in the field of theoretical contemplation. Only the poetry that originates from such an objective theoretical feeling, which is oriented towards the being of things themselves, can be true poetry. At the same time, it would be philosophical poetry. We may say that there is more of subjectivity in poetry, but this subjectivity is objective, and there is more of objectivity in philosophy, in which nevertheless traces of the thinker’s subjectivity remain. This is why the objectivity of philosophy differs from the objectivity of science: the first is individualized and free, the second anonymous and compulsory. But philosophy and poetry meet in the field of tension of the “I” and “this particular thing”, in the realm of theoretical contemplation of the being of things. Only a poet whose feelings are not just his own feelings, whose feeling is universal can write a true poem. That is sensus communis. In this respect, great poetry is not lyrical and subjective. Only when the singing capercaillie opens his eyes and sees the beyond-human being of things, only when his relation with that being is reduced to the seeing of the being of the thing itself, only when his look becomes open, lucid, seeing, discerning contrasts, forms, individualized images of the world, in short, when he sees the being of things themselves, only then does he become a true poet and probably a true philosopher. Now we can specify the notion of theoretical contemplation. As it has been said, theoretical contemplation is the synthesis of sensory perception and individually oriented thinking reason. We may add that theoretical contemplation is thinking-seeing experience, which unfolds in the realm of universal feeling, is oriented towards the things on this side of the horizon, and differentiates the being of things themselves from doxical anonymity and from the sphere of pragmatic relations and senses. It is not the synthesis of abstract thinking and abstract sensibleness, but it is also not hovering in the realm of anonymous meanings and senses. It is seeing reason and reasonable seeing. In the focus of such reasonable seeing, there stands the being of the thing as a phenomenon of being, independently of whether it is a “simple” natural thing or a work of art. Did Rilke understand the specificity of the world’s poetic vision precisely like this? Does Rilke’s poetic subject, opening himself to the world, try to surmount the lyricism of a woodgrouse, to put a bridle on pure feeling, and, stepping out of the shell of subjective emotion towards the being of

42

Arvydas Šliogeris

things themselves, to sing what is universal, general, and objective? These questions throw us into the turbulent medium of Rilke’s poetry and thinking. It is so easy to get lost in there, to get drowned in the crochet of refined metaphors, and to be lulled by an extraordinary beauty of his poetry. Siren songs are waylaying us in every step of Rilke’s poetic word. Yet we have no right to stop up our ears. Like Odysseus, we must not only listen to, but also see with our open eyes that which the poet is singing about, we must not yield to the charms of Rilke’s sirens. Only then shall we probably be able to penetrate up to the metaphysical centre of the poet’s songs. Let us try to do that by answering the just-asked questions and by going into Rilke’s poetical, belletristic, and epistolary texts. We, Rilke’s fans, all know well how Rilke as a poet started and how he later evaluated the creations of his youth up to The Book of Hours. The evaluation is more than sceptical: Rilke was apt in general to write off his early lyrics. It seems he would have lived with greater ease and respected himself as a poet if the world had not seen the first two collections of his poems. This thought might be grounded by various citations from Rilke’s letters. These are the poet’s words to one of the researchers of his poetry, who paid too much attention to the poet’s “fountainhead”, i.e. to the poems of his youth: “These unfortunately extant attempts are indeed not related with anything, they are in no way, by no means the beginning of my work; just the other way about, it is an absolutely personal ending of my childhood and my youth” (8, 235). With contempt Rilke calls the creations of that period “jene Scheinprodukt meiner Jugend” (the pseudo-production of my youth) and the like. In a word, no compromises, no concessions, no “maybe”, “not yet”, “if”. Someone has said that we are most intolerant namely to the mistakes of our own youth. These words may be ascribed to Rilke more than to anyone else. Yet what is the cause of such contempt to one‘s own beginnings? Let us read the collections of young Rilke’s poems. They are not so impotent as they seem to the creator himself. They are even beautiful, truly poetical, and some are even masterly. Being capable of writing such poems, one may even expect to become a classic of some literary province. Nevertheless, Rilke rejects them unconditionally and as the true beginning of his creation regards the period of his life that is marked by the first truly Rilkean creation – the poetical-philosophical cycle The Book of Hours. With it, the true road of Rilke the poet and Rilke the thinker begins. A frequent question is why the early poems of Rilke were so disliked by the author himself. The answers are various and usually psychological. But psychology has nothing to do with it. Rilke was a highly reflecting poet, and not a single line of a mature poem of his has appeared as there appears a blind song, awakened by the spring winds. His every step in poetry and not in poetry was not only “emoted”, but also thought over, and thought over not just passingly, sometimes, when dreams or creative impotence rush in: Rilke’s huge epistolary legacy is first of all a conscious, I would say, methodical philosophical reflection on his own poetical road, on the nature of

The Thing and Art

43

poetry and art, as well as on the aims of creation. It is not by chance that Rilke is considered a great thinker of our time. It is obvious that he not only felt, but also clearly understood the impotencies of the creation of his own youth. And the main of them is lyricalness, a subjective, too personal inquiry into his own feelings, lack of objectivity, of a clear, sensibly oriented, rationally lucid look at the world. The further the better Rilke comprehends one, it seems very simple, truth: a genuine artist, so also a genuine poet, is not a genius, who imagines himself to be a sun, around which all that is rotates, who radiates light, and who spits out masterpieces in the state of a somnambulist; Rilke understood that the source and the centre of light was not the pure inwardness of the genius, but things themselves, and that creation is not a somnambulist’s ventriloquism, but first, craft, second, craft, and third, craft. Therefore, a poet has to regard himself as a craftsman, making good, i.e. firm and steady, things. And if those things turn out to be also beautiful, then the master will be able to be utterly content, for he is an artisan of the highest rank. “Aesthetical theory that dared to imagine that it had understood what beauty was, perplexed You and invited artists who thought that their task was to create beauty. It still has to be repeated that beauty cannot be ‘done’. No one and never has made beauty. Favourable conditions might only be established for that what occasionally deigns to live among us: an altar and fruit, and a flame. The rest is not in our power. And the thing, leaving the hands of man, suspended between God and man, an untamed daemon, like Socrates’ Eros, the thing itself is not beautiful, it all is just yearning for beauty,” says Rilke (2, 138). The artist is not a creator of beauty and not a source of beauty; what he can do most is to let things, things themselves show their beauty, subdued and veiled by anonymous senses and relations of the everyday world. The beauty of the thing is none other than the being of the thing, elevated into the light of a certain vision. What sort of vision is this? This is an objective, theoretical, clear vision of the thing itself. This is how the thing is being seen by a craftsman, who makes a necessary and good thing himself. The source of genuine poetry is not feelings, not the singing of a self-contented genius woodgrouse, not the pour of emotions. In his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke gives a classical description of the fountainhead of poetry, which should be chiselled on the board, hung on the wall and read daily by any poet, particularly by a young genius: “But, oh, you accomplish so little by poems if you write them in your younger days. You should wait, you should accumulate sense and sweetness all your life, your long life, and then, at the very end, you maybe could write some ten good lines. After all, poems are not feelings, as people tend to think, we have got plenty of feelings in our youth; poems are experience” (7, 17). A true poem originates not from feelings, it appears from experience. Further on, in describing experience, Rilke names a lot of things: a person has to see a lot of cities, people, and things, to know animals and flowers, to remember travels, seas, mornings, love nights, and a lot more. An impression might form that a

44

Arvydas Šliogeris

greater extensiveness is needed for the experience from which a genuine poetry originates. But in that case, the best poets would be tourists. We need to specify Rilke’s conception of experience so that a poet’s experience is not identified with that of a tourist. Without a doubt, a poet must see a lot, yet it is not what he sees, but how he sees that counts. One wise man has said that you can know the world without leaving your yard, as there is everything, all infinity and the entire universe in the boundaries of a person’s sensibly thingly experience. Rilke also has in mind not the extensiveness of experience, but its intenseness. To look into things “till the eyes bleed”, to forget oneself, one’s feelings, emotions – and indeed, having seen the being of one thing, the being of the things of the entire world will disclose itself, for it is the same or at least similar everywhere. But to contemplate and forget oneself, to become the pure eye of the world – that is the hardest. One has to overcome even the relation itself with the thing, to overcome in such a way that the relation would melt in the thing, itself would become the thing, because every relation always and inevitably has too much of subjectivity and hinders the vision of the being of the thing itself. Writing about Cézanne’s painting, Rilke says this: “Each time you ever-clearly see that it was necessary to renounce even love; it is only natural that the artist loves each of those things that he creates; but if that is emphasized, the thing becomes inferior: we start reasoning about it instead of simply telling about it. The artist loses his impartiality, and that what is the best, love, remains outside the creation and finds no place in it, stagnantly drowsing somewhere near: and that is how the painting of mood appears (which is no better than thematic painting). The artist paints: I love this thing, instead of painting: here it is” (2, 228). So, even such, it seems, a universal, praised by all and exalted by poets, feeling as love has to be surmounted, not to mention others. Then things of art will be created, which will radiate the purest light – the light of their own being; then the being of things themselves, as phenomena of being, will open, and together with it beauty will show up as well. Rilke acknowledged the sole indicator of the work of art of the highest hallmark – the being of the thing. “The thing–model appears to be, and the thing, created by art, is,” says he (2, 206). Therefore, also poetry for mature Rilke is not singing one’s own subjective emotions and hankerings, it is not a complaint, supplication, or lament, it is not a lyrical groan or rejoicing in the presence of the world or with one’s back turned on it. As he says in the third poem of the first part of the Sonnets to Orpheus: Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr, nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes; Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes. (6, 296) The song you learn is not the desire of, and not the pleading for, what you will eventually reach; The song is being. Easy only for God.2

The Thing and Art

45

Poetry discloses the being of things and stands it in the light of the theoretical counter-position. Rilke knows how difficult it is for a mortal to do so, who is deep in the realm of his interests, needs, finite goals, and pragmatic instrumentalism. Therefore, only for God is it easy to see the being of things themselves, and the human heart constantly stands at the crossing between relation, as the human meaning, oriented towards the subject with his finite egoistic interests, and pure being. Therefore, the song, opening being as the object of theoretical contemplation, gives nothing tangibly valuable to man, nothing what might stabilize his position in the world of passions and interests. Therefore: In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch. Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind. (6, 296) The true song is that sigh. The sigh for nothing. A godly whiff. Wind. With regard to finite human interests, the song is nothing, a whiff of morning freshness. But with regard to the being of the thing, the song is the great road towards being, and the mortal is on it. If he manages at least for a moment to escape the byroads of everydayness and to stand on the bridge to being, laid by the song, then he opens himself to another dimension of the entityhood, he opens his eyes and sees what is beyond him, he surmounts his anthropomorphic solipsism, and starts a dialogue with other-being. He surmounts the great human loneliness, for the first time in general he is confronted with what is, with true reality, accordingly becomes real for himself, himself becomes a phenomenon of being and not merely a function at the factory of everyday instrumental games. The cited lines disclose one more thing – mature Rilke’s attitude towards infantile poetical lyricism. This is his most important thought: the naive lyrical relation with the world ontotopically does not differ at all from the everyday, pragmatic relation. Indeed, the everyday man continually lives in the situation of an unsatisfied need, which Heidegger very aptly has called Care (das Sorge). Everydayness is an ontotopical state of passion, need, wish, lack, anxiety, fear, constant want to obtain this or that, to reach this or that, to get there and there. We might say that it is a situation of constant asking and supplication. People earlier used to ask and supplicate to God, now they ask and supplicate to fate, future, lucky coincidence, government, science, and other anonymous powers. Everyday life is the state not of reason or calm vision of the world, but namely of a lacking passion, asking feeling, supplicating emotion, and complaint about loss. In short, one lives in the realm of a feeling, which is a witness of human finite possibilities. But it is the same realm where the lyric capercaillie lives, and he asks basically for the same what the everyday man asks for, and he also complains about, weeps for, moans over the same finite things, about, for, and over which an everyday struggle for existence takes

46

Arvydas Šliogeris

place and inexorable passions seethe. A human among humans is indeed a ball of feelings and passions if he, at least for a blink, cannot detach himself from purely human matters and, at least for a blink, experience the calmness of theoretical contemplation. An infantile lyrist is also such a ball of feelings. He does not even try to escape from the situation of the everyday man and from his pragmatic passions, and “skilfully” sings the same what some salesgirl “unskilfully” shouts. He is deep in the same illusions, in the same cravings as a waiter is, but on top of these illusions he puts one more – that he is different than “others”, that his feelings are “deeper”, “purer”, and “gentler”: after all, he is a genius, and those others are mere everyday prosaists. Yet in reality he does not differ at all from an everyday pragmatist, only the latter asks simply, and the genius, though asking for the same, asks finely, elegantly, by poems demonstrating his pragmatism, decorated with the lace of feelings. But since he asks for the same as a waiter, the lyrist is utterly unnecessary for that waiter or for any other everyday man; as also unnecessary is such an asking, wailing poetry, singing sublimated pragmatism. Ich will nicht diese halbgefüllten Masken, lieber die Puppe. Die ist voll. (6, 264; Duino Elegies, IV) I hate these half-empty masks. Better a puppet. It is full. These are the words that Rilke utters to singing pragmatists. To overcome infantile lyricism for Rilke meant to overcome the region of doxical pragmaticism and to open himself to the pure being of the thing on the horizon of theoretical contemplation. At the beginning of the seventh elegy of the Duino Elegies he formulates the main principle of his poetry and poetical philosophy: Werbung nicht mehr, nicht Werbung, entwachsene Stimme, sei deines Schreies Natur; … (6, 274) No more pleading, no pleading; grown out of the voice Let your scream’s nature be; … The poet has no right to and must not ask, he is simply ontotopically forbidden to plead for finite matters, of course as a poet, not as a human. The sole duty of his is to see, protect, and glorify the being of a phenomenon of being. That is why Rilke so contemptuously regarded his early poetry, which still was “Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes” and which did not break from the feeling, governed and dictated by everyday interests. That is why in one of his letters he says that owing to Rodin’s huge influence, which has helped him to overcome lyrical superficiality and cheap a peu pres, he has found the road to the space of true poetry, where not the feeling dominates

The Thing and Art

47

any longer, not lyricism, but openness to the being of a phenomenon of being. Now we can say that Rilke is not a lyric poet, that his mature poetry is not lyrical in a usual sense; Rilke is namely a poet philosopher. Poetry and philosophy merge in his creation in the space of theoretical contemplation, and if some admixture of a lyrical feeling gets into that space, this feeling has nothing in common with subjectivistic feelings, sung by a lyric woodgrouse; it is an objective theoretical passion, which opens the beyond-human being of the things of the world, a feeling, which has been called sensus communis by Kant. That is why a philosophical interpretation of Rilke’s poetry is possible without any reservations. That is why we can ask a question: what did Rilke the poet see, entering the horizon of theoretical contemplation; what philosophical vision fixed his attention; what aroused his wonder; but at the same time, what awakened his suffering?

20 We already have a preliminary answer: first of all Rilke saw things, their independent individualized being-in-itself and for-itself. The thing is the main hero of Rilke’s poetry and philosophy. Not man, but the thing, and man insofar as he is a thing. This does not mean that Rilke diminished man: “By comparing people to things, he (the artist. – A Š) exalts them (people. – A Š), for he is a friend, mentor, and poet of things” (2, 70). More: “Man has shrunk, he is no longer the centre of the world; man has grown, for he is regarded with the same eyes as nature; he means not more than a tree, but he means very much, for a tree means very much” (2, 58). The fact that Rilke compared man to a thing not necessarily has to be linked with the so-called crisis of anthropocentrism, which has been talked about a lot during the last hundred years, although rarely with reason. Maybe some astronomer, ladling galaxies and metagalaxies with the eyepieces of powerful telescopes, like a beekeeper swarms of bees, felt himself like having theoretical support to oust man and instead of him to cast a Herculean portion of interstellar matter. Maybe another scientist, in love with a chimpanzee and having compared its behaviour with that carousel of vanity, on which human life rotates, also gave the palm of preference to the cute monkey, silently musing that even though the chimp is not as clever as the human, it is also clear that it is not as dumb as its younger brother. It at least does not treasure up, does not pursuit vain glory and does not enthusiastically produce nuclear bombs. Several readers of popular scientific magazines, having become aware of scientific discoveries, also decided that it was done with anthropocentrism. And a couple of singing capercaillies got another pretext to be solemnly sad and sing human meagreness in the presence of the great universe. Yet all this was merely an intellectual self-titillation, which did not yield any important theoretical or

48

Arvydas Šliogeris

practical conclusion. In fact, man has always considered himself a centre of the universe, and nowadays he considers himself such more than ever. At every step we come across such abnormalities of anthropocentric nightblindness that they make one's hair stand on end. Andersen’s old woman and cat philosophy is not so easily got rid of, besides, it is not clear whether it has to be done altogether. Comparing man to the thing, Rilke did not have a single thought about any anthropocentric crisis. Simply, as he had repeatedly admitted himself, things were always closer to him than people. And it is only natural, for Rilke was an artist, and an artist, according to him, was a friend of things. There were other circumstances too that made not only Rilke, but also other artists (e.g. Cézanne) turn to things, but we shall not touch them now. Be as it might, but having woken up from a lyrical slumber, Rilke saw things. Not a thing in general, not a concentrate of anonymous instrumental senses, not schemes of thingness, not obstacles that had to be walked around, not lumps of matter that had to be eaten, but individual, resting-in-itself things. Besides, Rilke saw things directly and simply, without any human masks, not symbols, not actors, not clowns of human functions, not puppets, but what lay in-itself and for-itself and lived their independent lives. He saw simple and always inimitable things: a flower, statue, well, fountain, tree, mirror, ball, column, in a word, many different things. He thus entered the scope of theoretical contemplation and stayed there until the end of his life. But as every subject of theoretical contemplation, Rilke saw something else, about what we have only hinted, more exactly, have been silent. He saw how impermanent, how fragile, weak, and perishable things were, how unstable and short-lived the being of things was, how tragically short the life and beauty of things were. Yet, this is no discovery, nothing new and original, – the reader of these lines will say. We all know very well that things disintegrate and that they are not eternal; that their being is unstable and that they, like people, die. Is it worthwhile mentioning that such a great poet saw such simple matters? Yes, it is, because all great poets and philosophers always and everywhere find and show the simplest matters. That what is in front of his eyes and the simplest is the hardest to see for man. The world’s nature is very simple, yet how difficult is to get closer to that simplicity. The whole human life is nothing else than getting closer to the understanding of the simplest things. Sometimes it is called wisdom. Besides, let us not say that it is easy to see the decline, fragility, and death of things. We have already seen how difficult it is to see things themselves, to look into their individual being. It is no easier to see the furies that destroy the being of things. Everyday consciousness sees neither the being of things nor the frailty and decline of this being. It opens itself neither to pure being nor to that which is the antipode of being, to non-being. Its usual state is hovering Between being and non-being, in the giddiness of quasi-being. Only theoretical contemplation awakens man from the snooze of quasi-being and stands him into the tension field of the great antinomies of being/non-being.

The Thing and Art

49

Now we can express clearer what we have only hinted earlier: by opening the beyond-human being of things, theoretical contemplation concurrently opens another rudiment of the entityhood, which we shall call the antipode of being for the meantime and the direct document of which is the fragility of the being of things, the volatility and declining of things. From time immemorial the realm of this anti-existential rudiment has been called time.

21 So, Rilke, as the man of theory, saw the being of things, but at the same time he also saw that hardly nameable realm, which annihilated and swallowed things, submerging them into the abyss of non-being. However, he saw the picture of the antinomies of being and non-being not so as to experience the peace of great knowledge, to put up with it as some Oriental sage, and to say to himself and to others once and for all: this is how it is, should be, and will be, and nothing can be done about it. Let it be! No, Rilke perceived the eternal antinomy of being/non-being as tragedy, as what is, but should not be. He opposed this brutal fact of reality with grand negation, as if saying: I know that it cannot be otherwise, but I cannot, and do not want to, put up with it. He opposed the ideal to the fact, the ideal of being to the fact of non-being, eternity to temporality, immortality to death. Therefore, his entire poetry is one monumental question: how to preserve the being of things? And again, and despite anything, all the same, nevertheless: how to preserve the being of things? Just for posing this question Rilke might be considered a great thinker, because this simplest question is the most important question of the entire Western culture and first of all of Western metaphysics. By posing it, Rilke entered the great tradition of Western metaphysics and firmly tied the threads of his thinking to the axis of this tradition. In this respect, we may call Rilke a classic, by using this word without any sentiments, without any literary or textbook allusions. Simply, the question – how to preserve the being of things? – is traditional, therefore, classical. Rilke saved things in various ways, sometimes even naively and comically. At one time, he tried to write poems-things, which had to last longer than simple things. Such endeavours produced his weakest collections of poems: The Book of Images and New Poems, in which, excluding several truly good poems, the rest looks like a chain of experiments. And if those poems were not saved by Rilke’s mastery, we probably could say that creating poems-things, like a sculptor (and at that time Rilke constantly had the creator of great things, Rodin, before his eyes) moulds a true, material thing, Rilke experienced a fiasco. Next to poems-things there appeared the apotheosis of the thing of art. Only art creates immortal things, – this is what Rilke thought long and obstinately. However, at the same time, his true

Arvydas Šliogeris

50

poetry (the question, how to save things) was moving in a direction that was not seen clearly by Rilke himself. Like an underwater current, it carried the poet to the deepest of his intuitions. Those intuitions were and remained questions. And exactly in the question, in the genuine question, their tragedy and their truth were lurking. Our task is to describe, at least schematically, the path of this tragic question, winding through the mountain ranges of Rilke’s poetry. How to save the being of things? This question first unfolds with all its might in The Book of Hours. Let us turn over its pages.

22 Having posed the tragic question, Rilke, like every true thinker, makes up his mind once more (hundreds or thousands of thinkers and poets have already walked that path, which leads to the Golgotha of tragic knowledge) to try to begin from the very beginning – himself to walk the entire road from start to end. In The Book of Hours, he commences with the great symbol of Western metaphysics, with the guardian and shelter of the highest being; he starts with God. Why with God and why could precisely God be the guardian of the being of things, the shepherd and friend of things? And what kind of God could play the role of the watcher over the being of things? It is not the God of Christianity. That one was a purely human, personified God, and it was first of all concerned with human, all-too-human matters. True, it had created everything – the sky and the earth, stars and stones, birds and flowers. But most important was that he had created man and given him all the world of things to govern. That God’s look at the world was too discriminative. On top of the pyramid of being, it had placed man and given him the key from the deepest secrets of being. And Rilke was concerned not only about man, but also about the being of non-human things, which was not less existing than man. Therefore, the poet turned to the God of philosophers, not of believers. This one, though retaining the attributes of a person, was more democratic: it was concerned with the being of things, not only of man, it was concerned with being in general, for it, after all, had created everything, not only man, but also what is beyond-human. Thus, philosophers understood the true nature of God better: taking away its orientation only towards man, they considered God the highest being in general, thus, the guardian of all things, of everything that had being. This is why philosophers needed theodicies so much: they had to justify also that evident matter that God allowed to be also those things that bore evil. So, how, with the help of God’s might, did philosophers expect to preserve the being of things? The world of things, reality, perceived through senses, was an ontotopical region of constant becoming and declining. For the first time in the history of philosophy, the picture of becoming being, painted by Heracleitus, not only stated the

The Thing and Art

51

mirthless and undeniable fact, but also became an incentive of philosophers’ revolt against the factuality of becoming. By the endeavours of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and their successors, the counterbalance to the Heracleitian conception of flowing and declining being was constructed. Traditional metaphysics solved, or hoped to have solved, the problem of the preservation of the being of things in this way: it turned things perceived sensibly into things perceived spiritually and translocated those metaphysical things beyond time, to supersensible transcendence. Things became supersensible substances, absolutely stable entities. They became atoms of being, and in this kind of being there were no cracks left, no pulp, into which the glutton Cronus could strike his teeth. Metaphysical things eventually were accumulated into a paradigmatic thing, into absolute substance; taking part in this absolute being, other things also got the gift of eternity; they became accumulations of undying being. The highest being, or the paradigmatic thing, was that God of philosophers, which was opposed to transiency and becoming and thereby to indefiniteness, chaos, and disorder. To believe in God meant to believe in the stability of thingly being. The thing, taking part in godly being, is the thing without the additives of non-thingness, the thing, torn out of the realm of becoming and relativity. The thing as a phenomenon of being is the principles of the individual form and substantiality, accumulated into one point. If the thing disappears as sensory appearance in this world, it still remains for ever in that other world as an archetype of divine intellect, as a substantial form. Could Rilke be satisfied with such a way of preserving the being of the thing? Even in this place, without yet knowing his conclusions, we may guess that the answer was “No”. He was a poet, not a metaphysician, and wanted to save the being of the things of this world, but not of metaphysical things (the being of which, by the way, was not needed to be saved, it was granted a priori). Therefore, he could not be satisfied with the prototype of the transcendent God of traditional metaphysics as the paradigmatic thing. And that is what we see, while turning the pages of The Book of Hours: Rilke’s God does not resemble the God of traditional metaphysics or of Christianity; it even becomes the antipode of the traditional God. The most important attribute of the God of The Book of Hours is das Dunkelheit – darkness. The traditional God is the abode of light and the brightest light itself that illuminates everything that is, and Rilke’s God is different: we could not say that it lives in darkness, it itself is darkness: Du bist der dunkle Unbevusste von Ewigkeit zu Ewigkeit. (6, 91, Book I) You are dark incomprehensibleness from eternity to eternity. Du Dunkelheit … (6, 76)

Arvydas Šliogeris

52 You darkness …

Du bist so dunkel, meine kleine Helle an deinem Saum hat keinen Sinn. (6, 85) You are so dark that my little lucidity On your edge has no sense. … Gott aber dunkelt tief (6, 99) … but God darkens in deepness. But if God is an unbounded sphere of darkness, can we then say that God is “he”, “this”, can we then address it as it was addressed by the medieval theologians and thinkers, address it as a person, as an individual, or an individualized thing? True, Rilke uses the address word Du, yet only metaphorically, only because the language itself compels to individualize that what is spoken about. Even when trying to talk about that what is untold, man is compelled to individualize, because the language itself individualizes and reifies. And that what Rilke calls God cannot be told. Rilke’s God is not only not individual, but is the opposite of individuality, is the negation not only of individual being, but also of the principle itself of individuation. Such a god is no paradigmatic thing, no highest being in the shape of individual substance. It is not a thing, a person, substance, nor is it in general any concrete individual. Another attribute of Rilke’s God, supplementing the first one, is indefiniteness. God is the origin of indefiniteness, consequently, also of thinglessness, formlessness, and anti-substantiality. Such a god does not allow to be turned into an individual thing, into an in-formed substantial phenomenon of being (contrary to the prototype of the traditional God). Those who want to individualize and reify such an indefinite, anonymous realm – and those are first of all artists – are doomed to failure beforehand, accordingly, are doomed to hate God even while loving it. Such is to Rilke the great Michelangelo:

… und dass er Alles wie ein Ding umfasse, – nur Gott bleibt über seinem Willen weit: da liebt er ihn mit seinem hohen Hasse für diese Unerreichbarkeit. (6, 87) … and that he embraces all as one thing, and only God is unattainable to his will: he loves him with grand hatred, because of this unattainableness.

The Thing and Art

53

So, God is the enemy of the artist, of the creator of individualized things, the negator of the being of the work of art as a phenomenon of being. In order to create a thing of art the artist has at least to forget God or to counter-position tangibly substantial being, which opens itself only in the brightest light, to its anonymity, darkness, and indefiniteness. God symbolizes indefiniteness and darkness, and the thing of art is the source of definiteness and light. The work of art originates not out of God, but against God’s will, as the “nevertheless”, as the “notwithstanding”, as stubborn substantial being, as a counter-position that negates any melting in the anonymity of indefiniteness. It is not by chance that Rilke compares his God not with thingly, but with musical reality; it is not by chance that the relation, in which man, instead of touching with, merges with God, is the feeling, i.e. a de-objectifying realm: Meine Gefühle, welche Flügel fanden, umkreisen weiss dein Angesicht. (6, 81) My feelings, having found wings, fly around your pale face. The feeling is God’s equivalent in man, because namely the feeling drives man into the state of indefiniteness. As soon as man tries to see God as a thing, i.e. to see clearly, distinctively, to see like the subject of theoretical contemplation sees a thing, he loses God: Wenn ich dich male, Gott, du merkst es kaum. (6, 80) When I paint you, God, you barely see it. After all, when painting God, man reifies it, gives it form, concurrently gives it tangible being. Rilke’s God does not need that: it is not that what has form and what lives in things and as things. It is a thingless being. Now we quite clearly see what kind of God is the God of The Book of Hours, and we do not have to argue the point that such kind of God cannot be the guardian of the being of things, because it is the antipode of such being. Such God represents the realm of thinglessness, it is the Great Anonym, devouring and negating the being of things, but in its turn being negated by that being. Things must escape the realm of the Great Anonym, and only then can they become things, only then in general appears that which we call being. God, as the Great Anonym, is the rudiment and principle not of being, but on the contrary of non-being or, at best, of quasi-being. And if Rilke was looking for the guardian of the being of things and for the principle of being, and if he expected to find that principle in the Great Anonym, he had to be deeply disappointed. That what he found was an utter opposite to that what he was looking for. Rilke did not need that kind of God. And he made up his mind to turn away from it, because only by turning away from non-being he could turn to being, which for a mortal shows as the being of things. Rilke’s road was leading him away from God. We do not find God any more either in the

Arvydas Šliogeris

54

Duino Elegies or in the Sonnets to Orpheus. Does this mean that by turning away from God, in the image of which elements of traditional concept of God are still seen, Rilke entirely forgot that what he had found, wandering the paths of The Book of Hours and looking for the principle of pure being and for the possibility to reify it? Of course, not. He could no longer forget that being, embodied in a thing, and first of all in a thing of art, was not the sole and absolute rudiment of the entityhood, that next to the first, or more exactly, around the first rudiment – being, there extended the second one – the Great Anonym, the rudiment of indefiniteness and non-being, and that this second rudiment was no less powerful, or maybe even more powerful, than the first one. Yet, was it more real, more truthful, or such in which the sources of truth, good, and beauty might be searched for? As a poet and thinker, as a subject of theoretical contemplation, Rilke was standing on the crossroads, from which three roads were forking: one of them was leading towards the being of things, another was winding through the continent of non-being, and the third one… The third suggested a compromise and led along some medial line. Walking along the third road, man would be always merely on the road to something: on the road to being and on the road to nonbeing, he would be able to open himself to neither pure being nor pure nonbeing, neither the thing nor thinglessness, neither the form nor formlessness, neither the named individual nor the anonymity of an indefinite rudiment. Which way could Rilke take? As a man of theory, he chose the perspectives, offered by theoretical contemplation. Without much hesitation, he had to reject the compromise third road, which is being walked by the subject of everyday contemplation, who is hovering in the state of the ontotopical Between and sees neither pure being in the shape of a material phenomenon of being nor the Great Anonym, the source of non-being. The realm of the subject of everyday contemplation is quasi-being; that what he sees is the mixture of being and non-being; he sees things, which are merely half-things, he sees relations, which are merely half-relations, for they are always conceived just as relations between things, not showing in the shape of pure thinglessness.

23 Rilke took the road that led to the being of things. He chose the principle of being. We already know this. But we do not know something else. We spoke much that theoretical contemplation opens to man the principle of being and the being of the thing. Now we can supplement this statement. Opening the being of individual things, theoretical contemplation concurrently opens also the antipode of being – the realm of the Great Anonym. This is inevitable. Only he who knows what day is may know what

The Thing and Art

55

night is. Only he who knows that there is pure being may know that there is pure non-being as well. Everyday contemplation, hovering between being and non-being, between the thing and relation, between the name and the anonym, between seeing thinking and blind feeling, does not see the oppositions of being and non-being, cannot see the limit that divides thingly being from its antipode. Certainly, this limit is intuited, but not comprehended clearly and not thought over as ontotopical reality, in which man lives everywhere and always, here and now. Everything that in general is, with what man is in contact while encountering the world, is indefinitely called being or life. Everything that is beyond life, before it, or after it, is called non-being, or simpler – death. Non-being is identified with death. Thus being is separated from non-being by a certain distance: while a human lives, there is only being and there is no non-being, which only comes with death. A distance of time, from birth to death, is wedged between being and nonbeing. Therefore, to the subject of everyday contemplation, non-being is always somewhere very far away, it has no realness, it “will be” sometime, but here and now it is absent, and only being-life “is present”. The subject of theoretical contemplation sees the world differently. While seeing pure being in the shape of individualized things, he also sees non-being, which like a mantle covers each thing. That is why we have said that the thing’s being is not merely a trivial fact, merely a simple given. Being is the ideal, theoretical contemplation must at each blink as if tear that mantle of non-being off the thing, rend the thing’s being from the realm of non-being, put man to the situation of the tragic tension, and show two rudiments of the entityhood, which negate each other, show them contrastingly, in pure shape. So, in a certain respect, the rudiment of non-being becomes an object of theoretical contemplation as well, but it “becomes an object” in a different way than the rudiment of being, which always stands in front as a thingly phenomenon of being. Those two monumental rudiments of the entityhood were already comprehended by the first Greek thinkers, and Parmenides, opposing pure being to pure non-being, was the first to think them over clearly and to give them names. During millennia of hard work of theoretical thought, those two rudiments constantly were emerging next to each other and in front of each other, they were reflected over and named very differently, frequently imprecisely and indefinitely, yet they were always emerging on the horizon of theoretical contemplation. We have to think them over now as well. This means we have to name them. For our thinking to be as precise as possible, we must name them as simply as possible. The first rudiment can be named easily, because it allows to be named according to its nature. To name is to individualize, or to express in words individualized being, which is always thingly. So, we already know the name of the first rudiment of the entityhood, which opens objectively and substantially: it is being in the shape of the thing. The second rudiment of the entityhood is much harder to name, and to be entirely precise, it cannot be named at all. After all, the non-thing

56

Arvydas Šliogeris

does not have any name, after all, non-being is inexpressible, inarticulable, even unimaginable. And nevertheless, for thousands of years man obstinately has been searching for a name for the second rudiment as well. There have been many of those names: Anaximander’s apeiron, Thales’ water, Oriental Tao and Nirvana, the “roots”, “darkness”, Zen Buddhist “om”, etc. Let us not be entangled in the net of boring induction. Compared with the thinkers of the past we are in a better position when we try to give a name to the second rudiment. Quite recently, a couple of hundreds of years ago, this so hardly nameable element finally was if not named, then at least tamed. It was done by modern science, by mathematical–experimental natural science, which, if compared with earlier expressions of man’s relation with the world, invented a unique expression of the relation with the Great Anonym – the formula or, more precisely, the equation. All traditional religion, traditional art, traditional philosophy eventually dealt with the form. Even man’s relation with the non-thingly, formless rudiment was being formalized, reified, and substantialized. Only modern science, by breaking forms into formulae and equations, destroying the kingdom of substantial forms, and in general ousting the ontotopical situation of the form, has found the most authentic expression for the second rudiment of the entityhood. As it has been said, it is the formula or the equation. What does the formula express? The answer might be this: it expresses pure relation. The simplest name of the second rudiment of the entityhood, of the Great Anonym, or to put it more exactly, its pseudo-name is Pure Relation. We have spoken much about relations between things, relations between man and the thing, we speak about relations between people, about relations between, between, and between… In general, we cannot do without that elementary, but at the same time universal word, for everything that is, to a certain extent, is in relation with something and cannot exist beyond relation, near relation, and so on. In this respect, the entire world is an infinite variety of relations, and each thing is like a fish, entangled in the net of relations and not being able to escape. The entire world and each thing separately is an entirety of relations, therefore is relational, not absolute, not substantial – like an apple, being eaten by the worm of non-being. Everywhere and always man has to deal with relations of things, thus relation itself as though does not exist for him, because it is overshadowed by things. Relation does not have its own being, it may be called only quasi-being. Whereas speaking about relation as the second rudiment of the entityhood, we call it pure relation not by chance, because this rudiment is not merely the entirety of relations between things. Rather on the contrary, the entities of the world, as an entirety, are the entirety of pure relations. So, pure relation, as the rudiment of the entityhood, is an analogue of non-being. We cannot say that there “is no” realm of pure relation at all. That which is not at all, cannot be even spoken about. Meanwhile, we speak about pure relation, yet we speak encountering great difficulties and paradoxes. We speak about that which has no being as though it were; we

The Thing and Art

57

nevertheless cannot say that what is analogous to non-being is altogether absent. What is the cause of these difficulties? Well, it is because we talk about pure relation in natural language, and language is always linked to things and relations between things; accordingly, it is correlated substantially and objectively. Therefore, relations between things can be expressed also in natural language, because in that case relation is expressed by things themselves. For example, a dog is running, a son loves his mother. Whereas it is impossible to express pure relation in natural language, because this relation is not reified in any way and cannot be opposed to the “I” as “this particular thing”. Pure relation is not a relation “between some things”; nevertheless, it is relation as pure Between, as the relation between relations. Man’s relation with the realm of pure relation is also paradoxical. The realm of pure relation is very far from us, because, and first of all because, it is too close to us. We are wallowing in it like fish in water, we breath it in like air, which we do not notice, we are infused into it like a drop into an ocean. We cannot reify this realm, individualize it, make it into a tangible reality, an object, and place it on the field of the subject–object tension. We are always in it and never behind or in front of it. It is seen by the eyes neither of the body nor of the “soul”; to put it precisely, it is even not thought as an entity or an entirety of entities, perceivable by reason. It probably can be intuited, “emoted” as magicians, shamans, mystics, Zen Buddhists, and parapsychologists believe, it probably can be merged with, tuned in, listened into as irrationalists think, but all this is hard to comprehend for us, simple mortals, who trust only in our own eyes and in our simple, earthly reason. When one says that the realm of pure relation is “emoted” or intuited, we have an immediate question: what is being emoted here, what is intuited here? Because that which is not any entity, or more, not any thing, is at the same time not something that could be more than the feeling or emotion itself, what could be other in regard to the emotion, what could be beyond the feeling or emotion. Since man can be only inside the realm of pure relation and never beyond it, no special endeavours, methods, narcotics, or mysticism are needed for him to get into pure relation. Nonetheless, crowds of people through the entire human history have tried hard to submerge into the realm of pure relation, to flee from day into night, to shake off, it seems, an unbearable burden of the counter-position of the “I” and “this particular thing”. Pure relation cannot become a sensibly individualized thing, thus cannot be distanced, and so remains at an unreachable-to-man distance, which is unreachable, because it is not far enough from man. As we see, we can talk about pure relation only in paradoxes and while speaking, we say nothing about it, because to say something at all we can only about some thing, about some substantially individualized entity, object, and pure relation is no entity. What is more, we have said that man is always in the realm of pure relation and never behind or in front of it. But this statement is also ambiguous and paradoxical. Strictly speaking, neither man nor the thing

58

Arvydas Šliogeris

coincides with the sphere of pure relation, dissolves in it, like this fish, mentioned several times, does not dissolve in water. The thing, though constituted of relations, does not coincide with their entirety. The being of no thing can be dissolved in relations without a remainder. If this would be done, together with the vanished thing its being would vanish too. As long as the thing is and has being, it is always super-relational, thus absolute. Being is always more than merely an aggregate of relations; it is transcendent to relation and to an aggregate of relations. Even having described all relations that the thing is “made up” of (this is impossible in principle), we would not exhaust the being of the thing and would not even get close to it. Rather the contrary is the case, we would distance ourselves from it. Exactly in this respect each thing is a substantial individual, and exactly in this respect we may consider the thing the shelter of being and the first rudiment of the entire entityhood. The same may be said about man. Even though he is always submerged in the realm of pure relation as any non-human thing, yet he does not drown and dissolve in it. Truly speaking, he does not dissolve in the realm of pure relation as long as he is an individual substantial entity, consciously comprehending and securing his substantial individuality and identity, i.e. as long as he does not fall asleep, intoxicate himself, or die. Death is the truest dissolution in the realm of pure relation. But as long as man lives qua man, i.e. stands in the rationally lucid counter-position of the “I” and “this particular thing” and sees that which is beyond him as a sensibly predicated object, he is always beyond the realm of pure relation and in front of it. Man cannot merge with it entirely. This inability to merge and dissolve is the biggest misfortune of magicians, mystics, and others who seek for ontotopical giddiness. That is why thousands of ways are being invented how to surmount that threshold, which separates man, as the substantial individual, as the “I” who consciously reflects himself and is standing in the clearness and limpidity of the counter-position of the “I” and “this particular thing”, as a possible or real subject of theoretical or practical opposition, from the sphere of pure relation. But let us leave in peace all magicians, mystics, and Zen Buddhists. Only let us mention that there is one perfect and flawless way to merge with the Great Anonym. It is suicide. Any giddiness is none other than a small suicide, a sacrifice to the mad idol of the Great Anonym, a sacrifice to non-being. Is non-being worth such sacrifices? The thing, as the place and principle of being, and pure relation, as the “place” and principle of non-being, are two monumental rudiments of the entityhood, between which the entire existence of man (and the thing) is hanging. Man is on the swings of the great Between, and to get another ontotopical status in this world is not his lot. But there can exist, and do exist, two radically opposite orientations, negating and neutralizing each other. The first orientation, which is realized in the situation of theoretical contemplation, in the subject–object opposition, is the orientation towards sensibly individualized substantial being, thus towards being in general. The second is

The Thing and Art

59

the orientation towards pure relation, realized in the realm of magic giddiness. It is the orientation towards non-being. We may call the first orientation rationalistic. It has been most consistently realized by Western culture. We may call the second orientation irrationalistic. This one has been most consistently realized by traditional Eastern culture. Theoretical contemplation opens both rudiments of the entire entityhood, yet it itself is the expression and realization of the orientation towards being; it is not neutral in regard to both rudiments. Entering the horizon of theoretical contemplation, man chooses the orientation towards being, so he chooses the principle of being. And vice versa.

24 Now we know, what Rilke found, after he had taken the position of the subject of theoretical contemplation. He found things and pure relation. Now we know against what Rilke had to guard the being of things – against the realm of pure relation. And precisely the conflict between those two rudiments of the entire entityhood, which negate each other, is the philosophical content of his mature poetry, precisely the collision and duel of those two rudiments create tragic atmosphere, which enshrouds the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Let us go through those two collections and see how Rilke manages to solve the tragic conflict of being and pure relation. Both great cycles have two axes around which the entire poetical and metaphysical constellation of late Rilke rotates. Those two axes are the poetical equivalents of two rudiments of the entityhood. First, let us take a closer look at the poetical equivalents of the realm of pure relation, because this realm to late Rilke becomes more important, more ontotopically valid, and sometimes, we may guess, even peculiarly fascinating, and that is very strange and unexpected from a friend of things and from a glorifier of the being of things. To name the realm of pure relation (at the same time to interpret it) Rilke uses several words, depending on the poetical context and semantic field, in which the intuition of pure relation is lurking. The very fact that the realm of pure relation needs several words to be named, that one, precise and unambiguous, word is not enough confirms the above-expressed thought that to name the sphere of pure relation is very hard, for it is nameless in its essence and nature. In the thirteenth poem of the second part of the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke names the sphere of pure relation probably most precisely, by calling it exactly “pure relation” (der reine Bezug): Sei immer tot in Eurydike, – singender steige, preisender steige zurück in den reinen Bezug. (6, 320) Be always dead in Eurydice, – singing and

60

Arvydas Šliogeris glorifying return to pure relation.

More frequently another name for the realm of pure relation is found – openness (das Offene); Mitt allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene (6, 279; Duino Elegies, VIII) With all its eyes the creaturehood sees openness. Rilke himself in one of his letters, having in mind his eighth elegy, where both rudiments of the entityhood are very precisely and strictly opposed to each other and are opposed in such a way that one rudiment (of the thingly counter-position) is linked with human existence and the other with prehuman (animal) existence, makes these comments on the notion of openness: “You should understand the notion of openness that I have tried to unfold in this elegy like this: the consciousness of an animal infuses it into the world, but it (the animal) does not oppose itself to the world each blink (as we do); we stand in front of it owing to a special inclination and intenseness of our consciousness (durch die eigentümliche Wendung und Steigerung, die unser Bewusstsein genommen hat)” (4, 263). Openness is exactly the realm of pure relation, which Rilke calls the world in the above quote by emphasizing that man, as a conscious being (a possible subject of theoretical contemplation), cannot totally merge with the world, dissolve in the ocean of the Great Anonym (“Wellenschlagen des Unbegrenzten”, is said in another place), and the lesser animals, especially most primitive, are merged with this ocean naturally, they do not oppose themselves to that which is beyond them, they therefore do not have any “beyond”, any transcendence: everything that is, is immanent to them. They live in the blessed state of primordial mergence with entirety, they do not know the great tragedy and tension of the counterposition of man and the thing. Whereas the fate of man is different: Dieses heisst Schicksal: gegenüber sein und nichts als das und immer gegenüber (6, 280) We call it fate: to be in front and not otherwise and always in front But it is exactly why man sees not only the being of things, but also its fragility, tragic temporality, decline, and crumbliness. And all his endeavours to preserve being, to adjust it, i.e. to give it an eternal individual form, eventually come to nought. Sooner or later the being of things falls to pieces, and the Great Anonym swallows it, and man can only watch a sad picture of being becoming non-being: Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall,

The Thing and Art

61

Dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus! Uns überfüllts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt. Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst. (6, 281) And we: spectators, always, everywhere, Facing everything and never beyond! This fills us over. We adjust it. It falls to pieces. We adjust it again and fall to pieces ourselves. In this respect, the lower animals are as though happier than a human, because, constantly living in the primordial womb (“den Schooss ist Alles,” the womb is everything), i.e. in the Great Anonym, they do not know what being is, they do not see being, they themselves are not being, but at the same time they do not know constantly threatening fear of non-being as well. They are not, they do not live in the most intense sense of these words; on the other hand, they die not as humans die, they do not stand in the presence of non-being. The threat of death and non-being does not arise to them as a conscious fear – and what a paradox! – exactly because, even while living, even while “being”, they are in non-being, in the realm of the Great Anonym, which is no other than an analogue of death. Therefore, Rilke says: Denn nah am Tod sieht man den Tod nicht mehr und starrt hinaus, vielleicht mit grossem Tierblick. (6, 279) Because close to death, death cannot be seen and one is staring beyond maybe with the wide-open eyes of an animal. One more name of the realm of pure relation, although used rarer, is das Weltinnenraum. A nominal translation of this word, coined by Rilke himself, is “the inner space of the world”. Yet, if translation is an interpretation, such a translation is utterly misleading. The inner space of the world? An immediate vision of a huge tank inside an enormous ball comes to mind, something like Parmenides’ Sphaira, only hollow, and you are standing inside that spherical space and see it as though it were a dome of a starry sky or some bowl with which a nameless God has covered you. But in fact, it is the other way round. Das Weltinnenraum is a realm of absolute thinglessness with no guide marks, no divided manifestations, no multiplicity, no forms, no individualized diversity. This is the realm of pure relation, as some field of tensions and intersections of pure forces, imageless medium, from which individualized things emerge miraculously, similarly as from the darkness and indefiniteness of earth there appear a tree, a flower, a perfect line of a hill, in a word, thingly images, which, after they have walked the road of being for the destined period of time, again return to the Great Anonym, merge with the realm of pure relation. Things are always only on the road: on the road to being and on the road to non-being. A poet or a philosopher,

62

Arvydas Šliogeris

having averted his gaze from decline and change, on the horizon of theoretical contemplation sees the being of things in pure shape as eternity, though unstable, though small, though always drowning in the waves of time. Rilke, like no other of his contemporaries and not many of his predecessors, saw not only the being of things, but also its fragility: like nobody else he contemplated that realm, overcoming which the being of things rises to the light of day, but which never releases things from the fetters of non-being and sooner or later annihilates individualized forms of things and sucks everything that tangibly is back into the mire of pure relation. Hardly shall we find in poetry of all times the words that express more painfully the fragility and transience of being: Ein Mal jedes, nur ein Mal. Ein Mal und nicht mehr. Und wir auch ein Mal. Nie wieder. (6, 282; Duino Elegies, IX) Once everything, only once. Once and nevermore. And we too, once. Never again. So, can things be torn out of the jaws of pure relation? Rilke never doubted that it should be done or at least tried to be done. Not consoling himself with any illusions of pseudo-immortality, openly and clearly admitting the fact of death and of decline, not counting on the other world, Rilke firmly knew one thing: everything that really is, everything that can be called being without any illusions, magic, and mysticism, is here and now, is thingly, and not thingly in general, but thingly concretely, sensibly, in an individualized way, and all this opens to the mortal on this side of the thingly horizon. And although it all is immensely fragile, yet it is the sole and absolute reality to man. That is why Hiersein ist herrlich (Here-being is magnificent), that is why, although everything is only once: Aber dieses ein Mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein Mal: irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar. (6, 282) But to be this once been, though at least once: To have been earthly, seems irrevocable. Therefore, one of the ways to tear the being of things out of the Great Anonym’s jaws is theoretical contemplation, which rises being to the rank of the ideal. But what does it mean not to identify the being of the thing with everyday facts and to consider it the ideal? To a philosopher, it means to think over and speak out the being of the thing, to oppose it contrastingly to quasi-being, non-being, the realm of pure relation, i.e. to omnifarious idols of quasi-being. To a poet, it means to glorify (rühmen) that what is, to sing things, to express the simplicity and closeness to man of their being, their ontotopical independence and necessity, to remind the everyday human of what he is apt to forget: things are not mere functions and means, “this”

The Thing and Art

63

world of things is not a mere gigantic beefsteak, given to man to be promptly swallowed. Man’s mission on this earth is not merely this: to tear off a possibly bigger piece of this beefsteak for oneself. Things “are”; consequently, they are equal partners of man in the ontotopical dialogue. Man cannot do without things not only as an ontotopical being; he cannot do without them as an overnatural being, which is in constant search for otherbeing, beyond-human being as substantial and tangibly self-contained reality. Therefore, Rilke says: Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus, Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, – höchstens: Säule, Turm... aber zu sagen, verstehs, oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals innig meinten zu sein. (6, 283) Maybe we are here to utter: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window, – at most: column, tower… but to utter, do understand, oh, to utter so, like things themselves never inwardly think of being. By uttering things, by glorifying the being of the simplest things, a poet shows them to mortals and does not allow to forget the being of things for those who are too deep in instrumental games and are apt to substitute the being of things with their functions, only-human meanings and senses, to fragment it into “constituent parts”, to substitute the being of the thing with phantoms of cognition and to dissolve in the realm of pure relation a still “living”, still present thing, to kill things before their true death. The being of the thing must be saved and glorified not some time in the deepest past, not in the mists of the future, not in some unseen lands, beyond all possible horizons, not in metaphysical spaces, not in mystical visions, not in speculative dreams, but here and now, in the presence of the thing, standing in the counter-position of theoretical contemplation: Hier ist des Säglichen Zeit, hier seine Heimat. Sprich und bekenn. (6, 283) Here is the time of the sayable. Here is its homeland. Speak about it and advocate. Is that not enough? Does Rilke’s heroic stance not satisfy us, does his stubborn “all the same”, “nevertheless”, his quixotic tilting at windmills of non-being still lack of something, can the being of the thing be saved in some other way, more carefully, wiser, without ache, tragedy, and despair? Is such a tragic and quixotic stance, if not most comfortable, then at least most honest and without illusions? We would probably answer like this: that is

Arvydas Šliogeris

64

fully enough, the being of the thing, opposed as the ideal to the realm of pure relation, is the sole way, appropriate to the mortal, to save things insofar as the arrangement of the entityhood allows. There is no way further. There is only not resigning oneself to the facts, there is the “all the same”, negating that which is inevitable, there is a totally unwise “no” to the logic of the world of facts. There is a naked thing, and only in the shadow of its being might we find a short rest and peace. That is enough.

25 Yet, it was not Rilke’s lot to withstand the pressure and tension of such simple truths. He makes another step towards the being of the thing, and into the space of his great poetical cycles the famous Angel, which has made so much trouble to the commentators of Rilke’s poetry, flutters in. What is this angel of the elegies and sonnets, this mysterious, almost mystic, figure, and besides, arising too concrete historic associations with Christianity and with the world of supersensible beings? We shall state at once that the angel guards and preserves the being of things, similarly to the poet or philosopher in the space of theoretical contemplation. But the poet does it in this, visible world and performs it only in a way as such a task could be performed by the mortal – quixotically. And the angel, whatever it might be like, is a being superior to man. Rilke does not tell us whether this angel is mortal or immortal, but it is clear even without his comments that the competence of the angel in guarding the being of things is greater than that of man. The ontotopical status of the angel is strange: it is not a creator of the being of the thing as a phenomenon of being, not the subject of theoretical contemplation, because the being of the thing to him is not the ideal that must be fought for, pursued, laboured for, even though quixotically; the being of the thing to the angel is a quietened fact and an elementary presence. But what kind of presence? It is only an ideal presence, an invisible thing, the non-sensible equivalent of the being of a sensible thing. “The angel of the elegies,” says Rilke in his famous letter to Witold Hulewich, “is an outcome in which our replacement of the visible with the invisible is an accomplished fact. To the angel of the elegies all erstwhile castles and towers exist, because they are already invisible for a long time, whereas the still standing towers and bridges of our being are no longer visible, although they still remain thingly (to us). The angel of the elegies is the being that ensures that the invisible is the reality of the highest rank” (8, 270). But if so, then Rilke’s angel deals not with real thingly being, but only with its ideal, therefore, illusory substitute, thus with quasi-being. Consequently, the angel itself is not substantially individual and has no real being. True, the angel does not create being, yet it guards it, it is a guardian angel, it guards being from the furies of pure

The Thing and Art

65

relation. But it is incapable of protecting the real being of the thing, i.e. its being in this world, because it is blind, it does not see “the still standing towers and bridges of our being”, it therefore is not a subject of theoretical contemplation and cannot become one. Hence, one way out is left for it: to protect being as a pure form, detached from a sensibly individualized thing, as a Platonic archetype, lingering in the “other” world, in ideal supersensibleness. The angel guards not real, but paradigmatic things, ideal prototypes of the real being of the thing. The angel transfers the prototypes of things to the timeless space, and such ideal things become like small lumps of being, like Democritus’ atoms, floating in the emptiness of pure relation. Such things, ideal atoms of being, are eternal, stable, and unchanging, like small gods. Rilke creates a polytheistic universe. Yet his polytheism differs from that, say, of the Greeks in that the Greeks pre-eminently concentrated the being of a phenomenon of being in human shapes, and Rilke’s angel gives a divine status also to thingly shapes. The space of the ideal absolute belongs to the human as well as to the thing; being lives not only in man, but also in things, and there it lives no less intensely than in man. Rilke’s angel is more democratic than the Christian God: the latter looks after the spirits of humans only, and the former cares about the spirits of things. Unfortunately, the angel is concerned not about the being of real things, as the poet himself would want, but only about the shadows of that being, the spirits of things. Let us say: Rilke, having made up his mind to preserve the being of real, visible, things on this side of the horizon, ends up with a pseudo-solution, which does not differ in any way from the variant of the being’s rescue in traditional metaphysics. By refusing the quixotic and probably most honest decision, Rilke finds nothing better than his predecessors, the knights of the continent of the supersensible, found and follows hard after them as if saying: the being of things can be saved only by transforming it into a pure ideal form, by turning things invisible. The only absolute form of the thing is invisibility, and we, humans (at least poets and philosophers), are the bees, gathering honey of the visible into the beehives of the invisible. And the angel is the most vigorous bee, most intensely turning the visible being of the thing into an ideal invisible substitute. How is this work done, in which, according to Rilke, the first violin is played by a poet, and the angel merely stabilizes that which has already been done by man? This is Rilke’s answer: “Elegies show how we perform this work of ceaselessly transforming this beloved, visible, and tangible world into our nature’s invisible vibrations and thrills, which complement vibratory spheres of the universe with vibrations of new frequencies” (8, 268). But if this is so, then the preserving of the being of things looks very strange, if not absurd. Does the transforming of the being of things into “our nature’s invisible vibrations” not mean to dissolve it in the realm of pure relation, to get detached from the substantial individuality of this being, and to fling it into the waves of anonymous human meanings and senses, that is to say to submerge it into the Great

Arvydas Šliogeris

66

Anonym? Does that not mean to refuse the uncompromising position of the subject of theoretical contemplation when a sensibly individualized thing stands in front of a human, the substantial thing stands in front of the substantial “I”? Unfortunately, we have to give an affirmative answer to these questions. Rilke slides from theoretical preservation of the being of things to the apotheosis of pure relation, insensibly acknowledging the priority of nonbeing over being and evidently contradicting his own thought, expressed in the seventh elegy that “Hiersein ist herrlich!”, and his own imperative, formulated in the ninth elegy: the being of things must be guarded, here and now, only here and now and nowhere else, because there is no being in any invisibilities, in the spaces of the vibrations of the soul and the universe, there “is” merely quasi-being and the abyss of pure relation in there. Having started with the glorifying of the being and the thing, Rilke ends with the apotheosis of non-being and joins a flock of magicians, mystics, idolaters of pure relation, and adversaries of theoretical contemplation. Let us ask once again: is a quixotic or even Sisyphean solution, of which Rilke was afraid, not more honest?

26 Let us ask, but not judge and blame the poet: first because he is not a thinker, but a thinker poet, because contradictions and inconsistencies are the most natural medium of his soul. Besides, to us, the admirers of Rilke, not those final answers that he tried to propose are most important. Most important is the tragedy of the grand question, which has been so vigorously and truthfully expressed by the very life as well as by the poetry of his. This truthfulness recompenses everything: his inconsistency, his mistaken paths, pits in the road of poetry, manifestations of decadence (especially in prose), as well as all other imperfections that Rilke did not manage to avoid, for they cannot be avoided by any mortal. Besides, Rilke, like no one else in Western culture before or after him, has compelled us to put doubt in the absolutism of the anthropomorphic solipsism, and that is probably his greatest merit; Rilke has made us look into things more attentively and see that next to man there are beyond-human things with their being and their right to be, that a flower, tree, well, tower also are, and the “is” of individual, though senseless, being is the miracle, which we eventually call beauty. This in no way means that the poet, like some sissy aesthetician, urged to “admire” the beauty of things, as a noncommittal gift of gods or nature. Rilke disclosed the tragedy of beauty, he showed that beauty was hard and that it was a duty and task to man, but not merely a source of pleasure or an object of feeble consumption. Beauty to Rilke was inseparable from the being of the thing; and the being of the thing, as it has been repeatedly said, is not a banal everyday fact, but the

The Thing and Art

67

ideal, obligation, imperative, the hugest weight that the mortal puts on his shoulders and steps towards his Golgotha. Beauty is being, and being is a lonely rock, washed by the waves of non-being. The duty of man is to be a guard of this rock. One more thing, not to be forgotten. Rilke’s getting close to the being of things that ultimately led him to mistaken paths is the fate of the whole epoch, not only his. The epoch in which the poet lived and thought created an entirely unique ontotopical situation of the being of the thing and finally found itself in a labyrinth. The epoch of Rilke was ever-quicker sliding to the abyss of thinglessness, was ever-deeper plunging into the darkness of pure relation, into the invisible, into the magic of non-thingly pseudo-reality. Again, Rilke saw that tendency more sharp-sightedly than many of his contemporaries and understood its danger to human existence: Mehr als je fallen die Dinge dahin, die erlebbaren, denn, was sie verdrängend ersetzt, ist ein Tun ohne Bild. (6, 283) More than ever vanish things there, the experienced ones, because what ousts replacing them is an action with no image. These are the words in the ninth “Duino” elegy, which is the hymn to things and at the same time anxiety about their fate. The being of things is being ousted more and more intensely by the “action with no image”, things “vanish more than ever”, they seem to fall to pieces and it is impossible to gather them again, to put them back into an individual form, to restore the concreteness and substantiality of the thing. Things as though explode from within, and it is impossible to believe in their oneness, in their identity as individuals. What remains is chaotic fragments of thingness; either a formless thing, i.e. a senseless thing, or a thingless sense remains, and there is no way of putting those two matters into one whole, in which the being of the thing might be restored. Rilke expressed such misgivings in various letters. We shall quote an excerpt of his letter to Marilyn: “… so in times of the war I used to feel exactly that, exactly such disintegration of an object (after all, it ultimately depends on the belief in to what extent we perceive such an object, as well as to what extent we want to express ourselves through it: a disintegrated person feels best expressed through pieces and fragments) …” (8, 233). Let us not be misled by the seemingly specific date, “in times of the war”. Rilke perceived the ontotopical disintegration of the thing, the ontotopical degradation of the sensible world, the ousting of all fateful matters of human being into the invisible, and the lack of the sensible, therefore also of the thingly, equivalent of the constants of the most essential human existence, as a fatal turning-point in the history of Western civilization, as a fate, which cannot be hidden from. We can only close our eyes and try not to see what is happening with things and with man.

68

Arvydas Šliogeris

However, Rilke did not want to close his eyes, he wanted to see clearly and simply, he wanted to know what was happening with things, why the “experienced things” were vanishing, where the being of the thing was disappearing. He was not the only one to see those matters and not only he tried to resist them. The same road was taken and the same questions were asked by another artist thinker, Rilke’s alter ego, the French painter Paul Cézanne. Let us look at his paintings and try to answer a question that caused anxiety also to Rilke: what has happened to the being of the thing?

The Thing and Art

Paul Cézanne. The Great Pine. Oil on canvas, 33 ½ x 36 ¼; in Museu de Arte, Sao Paulo, Brazil.

69

II P CÉZANNE AND THE END OF CLASSICAL WESTERN PAINTING

1 There is a picture on the wall in front of us. Let us take a closer look at it. We shall not see anything special in it. There is an edge of a wood depicted in it. A strip of grass is in orange and tawny colours, continuous tops of trees and bushes block the horizon, above the bushes there is a space of the sky, which is pierced by the crown of a large tree. This large tree is the main figure, the visual and compositional centre, and at the same time the only individualized accent of the picture. It seems, the picture has been done only for the love of this tree. The large tree, like a monumental individual, is predominating in the entire plane of the picture. We cannot say that the picture is nice, or attractive, or intriguing. Its facture is emphatically rough, separate colour dabs at first glance seem to be dashed quite accidentally; no intention to please the viewer with a good taste can be seen, no endeavour to file the surface of the canvas, make it nice and pleasant to look at. On the other hand, there are no attempts to dazzle the viewer, to shock, to demonstrate originality or some impertinent, extravagant curiosity, to attract with an unexpected point of view, with a strange match of colours, with a peculiarly stylized drawing or any other slap in the face. We shall find nothing of the kind in this picture. It is neutral, not trying to demonstrate itself insistently, it is emphatically objective and in a way anonymous. The painter seems to be deliberately hiding himself, without revealing his mastery, feelings, thoughts, sympathies, as well as antipathies. To show all the mentioned matters, first the plot of the picture does not suit. To be more exact, there is no plot here. The painter is not telling any stories, is not depicting any action; he is not relating anything altogether. It would be difficult to convey the content of the picture in words, because there is no content here; only an elementary visual statement of the being of a large tree. The picture is almost senseless, meaningless, and speechless. Standing in front of it, you become speechless yourself; you look and cannot tell anything, even if you would. The zero level of sense – perhaps this is the most exact description of its contents. What is more, the picture does not arouse any feelings, it does not strive to become a catalyst of stronger emotions. It itself is cold and neutral; therefore, the soul of the beholder remains as if untouched, cold and calm. I would call that trait of the picture the zero level of expression. If, after all, it is expressive, then not more than

72

Arvydas Šliogeris

the motif in it – the corner of a wood with a large tree growing in it. Of course, a more sensitive viewer, searching every nook and cranny for secret senses, meanings, symbols, and allegories, seeing in all things, especially in works of art, accumulations of feelings and emotions, can read a lot even out of such an anonymous and simple plot. However, indeed it would be not a read-out, but a projection of one’s own subtle soul, rich inward world, or vague existential vibrations towards that where there are no such things. Our picture is neither symbolic nor literary. And if a viewer were ignorant of the author, he would indeed remain indifferent and unmoved, he would not go through any elation or catharsis, or anything else that even does not have a clear name. He would remain cold and objective, just like the picture is. The plastic counterpart of such objectivity is a strict and elementary composition. There is nothing irrelevant here. The trunk of the great tree is the vertical axis of the picture. The tops of the undergrowth, touching the bottom of the crown of the great tree, as though draw the horizontal axis of the picture, almost perpendicular to the trunk. The composition makes a cross, and the great tree is standing in the crossing of the vertical and the horizontal axes. The colours of the picture as well as the composition highlight the being of the great tree, let us say, its individuality and its standing-in-itself. The trunk of the tree is in cold, bluish grimy colours and makes a contrast to a warm yellowish and green colours of the undergrowth in the background; the crown of the tree seems to be incised into a cold, ice-blue sky. Even a non-specialist will see that the composition is considered to the details, is precise, geometrically strict, and because of that is so elementary and unobtrusive; in a word, even a non-specialist will see that the picture is painted by a great artist and, which is of most importance, is painted not just for the fun of it, not incidentally. The painter knew what he was doing and externalized his knowledge almost perfectly. There are no insignificant, empty places in the picture, its every dot is saturated with being, every brushstroke is so intense and integrated into the whole that it seems that if the direction of the brushstroke or the local colour were changed, the entirety would disintegrate. In general, there is no emptiness in the picture, no depth, air, or perspective. It does not invite to come inside and take a walk in nature’s lap, to stroke the trunk, or to settle ourselves for a cosy picnic. If a fragment of “nature” is depicted, then this nature is severe, alien to man, uncomfortable, has no intimacy and closeness. It is not hominized. The picture does not involve, but repels the beholder; it is somewhat convex to the side of the beholder, for the great tree lacks space in the frame and on the plane of the canvas, it climbs out, threatening to fall over the unsuspecting viewer, who is admiring this “innocent” nature. At the bottom, the foreground is somewhat cut off, it falls through into some depth, therefore the crown of the great tree not only dashes into the foreground, but also keeps on moving forward towards the viewer and as though hangs over his head. The trunk in cold colours and the continuous verdure of the undergrowth constitute the background and create

The Thing and Art

73

some illusion of the depth. But this illusion is immediately ruined by the massiveness of the forms and colours, their certain insularity and opaqueness. You can feel the stagnation and statics of inorganic matter, even though live nature has been painted. There is no external movement, no atmosphere; the sky resembles a block of ice or a lump of bluish clay, it is also concentrated and massive like the verdure of the wood. As if everything were moulded out of lava and petrified for good into crystals, which, due to whims of nature unknown to us, have acquired shapes of organic creatures. But the statics of the picture is misleading. After a closer look, you see that the internal dynamism is everywhere. It gives an impression as though the great tree were being shaken by the inner shivers, as though its crown were being twitched by spasms. The bushes, especially on the right, resemble tongues of green fire. It seems as if inside of this green continuous soft mass an invisible activity took place, as if condensed energy were bubbling, which is about to erupt outside and demolish all thingly forms, seen on the surface. While you look at those green tongues of fire, an unexpected association comes to mind from somewhere: Van Gogh’s cypresses, like the pillows of dark fire rising into the vibrating space. But the space of Van Gogh’s Cypresses is open and total dynamics, and the inner dynamism of this picture is constrained by the fetters of external statics, is tamed and confined in moderation and boundaries; therefore, at first glance, stability and calmness prevail. That is why we have said that the picture is inexpressive. If we tried to express in brief its contents, we may say that the picture only shows, as if saying: there stands a tree. Or: this is a tree. And more simply: this tree is. Minimum of sense and maximum of being – that would be the lingual equivalent of the picture. We may add that the picture is called The Great Pine. It was created by a French artist Paul Cézanne.

2 Now we know how the picture looks like, what is in it, what its name is, and who has painted it. But we know nothing yet about those who are looking at it. Who are they? Let us assume that there are three viewers: an art historian, Miss Salesgirl, and a philosopher. The first knows much about the picture and its author, much more than we have told here. The second knows nothing about the picture and its author. And the third knows the picture and the author, but not much, “a little something” in Winnie-the-Pooh’s words. The first viewer, the art historian, no doubt, is feeling most comfortable in front of the picture, because he knows most and he can tell a lot to the other two, who, of course, will listen most respectfully to his stories. The art historian will tell them a sad story, almost a legend, about the life of a misunderstood genius, about a young man, giddy with the passion for painting, about his persistent, silent struggle with the father banker, who

74

Arvydas Šliogeris

dreamt of seeing his son like himself, who wanted his son to inherit his father’s good name, bank, capital, to become an honourable citizen of Aix, but not a dauber, destined to live and die in poverty; the historian will tell about the Paris bohemia of the 19th century, about strange artists, who used to tease the public with their impertinent paintings and who even named themselves somewhat frivolously – the Impressionists; about their passionate discussions at the Café Guerbois, about an oddball painter, who popped in there sometimes, wearing a frayed, bright-coloured, paint-smeared shirt, an ireful, rancorous, loutish eccentric, who was not much welcome even by his brothers in arms, an outcast among outcasts; about equally harsh and loutish works of this painter (even this word, painter, – how unbecoming it is to him); about a furious herd of philistines, ready to smash the café windows and tear to shreds the picture of this oddball, exhibited in there and, according to one witty critic, painted with a drunken broom; about a lonely old man, secluded from the world and silently, unnoticed finishing his days in a provincial town, every morning, bent under the weight of the easel, treading heavily sur la motif to his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire; about street brats, throwing stones and rotten apples at the old man; about his kinks and peevish character, about his everyday hard labour, about fits of rage and helplessness, about unfinished, cut, torn, trampled-to-mud pictures (for he again had failed to realize the design); about his dream to die with a brush in his hand – the only dream of this man that came true; about lots of interesting biographical, historical, social, and technical facts; about… A good art historian can relate about anything, you name it! However, will all these stories bring the other two viewers even a bit closer to The Great Pine, will the picture be more eloquent, will the door open to the speechless realm of its forms, and will the other two understand that in front of them is indeed a great work of art, to be precise, will they see its uniqueness and beauty? Let us doubt that, because all told stories do not touch in any way the direct being of this work of art and of the great pine, depicted in it. Stories are one thing, and this work of art, so persistently affirming its being and more persistently hiding its sense, is a different kettle of fish. The second beholder, Miss Salesgirl, does not know anything about either the picture or the author and consequently cannot tell anything. Therefore, she will modestly keep silent with a polite smile on her face; or if she dares to speak, in case she has her opinion about anything, as it is common in our literate times, she will tell us something like this: there is nothing interesting in this picture, I cannot see anything to admire. And indeed, she will be absolutely right. There is really nothing interesting and intriguing in it: no fair-haired belle staring at a black-haired young man and expressively stretching her hand towards him, no moonlit night, no swans in a mysterious pond, no fancy-dressed ladies and gentlemen dancing tango, in a word, nothing that could titillate Miss Salesgirl’s curiosity or interest, nothing that would make her exclaim: “Oh, how beautiful!” Unless the art historian would tell her that the picture is worth half a million dollars. He had

The Thing and Art

75

better not say that, as Miss Salesgirl will be struck speechless and opinionless. So in the end, Miss Salesgirl will turn away from the picture and forget it that very moment, just as forgotten is any other thing of no use and interest: a roadside stone, torn shoes, a stray dog. And let us repeat once more: Miss Salesgirl will be absolutely right. Indeed, of what value is such a vapid picture? It is not worth even a bag of potatoes. A worthless thing, that is all, next to many other worthless things. To Miss Salesgirl our picture is only a thing and nothing more. Therefore, she turns away from it. And what about the third viewer whom we have called a philosopher? His situation in the presence of the picture seems to be the trickiest. He cannot tell many interesting stories like the art historian, because, as we have mentioned, he knows very little about the picture and its author, only “a little something”. Besides, he is not inclined to tell any stories, as he does not understand what the connection is between them and the evident being of the picture. It seems to him that all the stories are revolving somewhere around the work of art and even create a diversion from its direct presence, distract, cast a kind of blanket on it, through which it is almost impossible to see the picture itself. Its contours become smeared, the great pine loses its persistent individuality and turns into a ghost, symbol, sign, hieroglyph; it loses that which to a philosopher seems most important – its thingness. Thus, strange as it might seem, the philosopher’s stand is closer to that of Miss Salesgirl. First, the picture to him is a thing and nothing else. But unlike Miss Salesgirl the philosopher turns to the picture, and he turns towards it for the same reason that Miss Salesgirl has turned away from it: because the picture is a thing, because it simply is. First, it is in the same way as other things are: a roadside stone, a bag of potatoes, or a stray dog. But for this reason alone it is important to the philosopher. Through it, the elementary being of an elementary thing speaks, and that is much. Yet through it, something else speaks, which is not so elementary anymore as the being of a stone. The philosopher knows only a bit more than Miss Salesgirl, still not less than she. He knows that this picture is a work of art, therefore, it is an exceptional thing, though he also knows that all things, in a certain sense, are exceptional: after all, there are no two things in the world entirely identical, nonexceptional, not individual. Nevertheless, let us say that The Great Pine is an exceptional thing to the philosopher, at least because it seems to be a twofold thing. First, The Great Pine is a thing in a direct sense: the frame, the canvas covered with paint – all that is thingly. Let us call it the first layer of thingness. There is the second layer next to the first: another thing is depicted in the picture – a large pine, a tree that shows its thingness, its right to be even independently of the painter, of the picture, and independently of whether someone is looking at it or not. This twofold thingness of the picture as a work of art, exceptional only in this respect, attracts the philosopher’s attention and grips him so that he forgets all those stories, told by the art historian, all feelings and emotions, all the sighs and catharses of

76

Arvydas Šliogeris

aestheticians. After all, to understand the picture for the philosopher means not to look around it, not to look through it, not to regard it as some kind of binoculars that show all those interesting stories, told by the art historian, but to look at the picture itself and at what is seen directly in it – at the great pine. But how can that be done? The picture is here and now, and to look at it is not difficult at all. Meanwhile the great pine is not here and now; it is most probably not in this world altogether, as Cézanne painted it at the end of the 19th century. What is to be done, how is it possible to enter the horizon of a twofold vision, which corresponds to the twofold thingness of the picture? It is not hard for a philosopher to do so. Moreover, such endeavours to enter the horizon of the twofold vision transfer the philosopher to the space he lives in, to the realm of thought. In order to understand the picture as a place of twofold thingness the philosopher has to carry out a mind experiment, the structure of which is neither as simple nor as complicated as the one that the look of the art historian at the picture is based on. The art historian is interested only in the human side of a work of art, which can be called the historical context. He looks at a work of art as a thing as though created out of nothing; besides, he contemplates the creator. He is interested in the process of creation and its historical circumstances, as though it were the sole and self-standing reality. He looks at Cézanne, painting a picture, and at the picture painted. Of course, a philosopher cannot ignore the process of creation and its historical context as well. But he is not content with that. The philosopher contemplates not only Cézanne at work, not only the picture painted, but also what Cézanne is painting. He tries to see not only the picture, which is called The Great Pine, but also the object painted, the great pine. The philosopher carries out this mind experiment: he as if stands next to Cézanne, looks at the same great pine, which is being painted by Cézanne, and asks himself: what is this old man painting and why in general is he painting this unlovely tree precisely in this way and not in any other? This is the philosopher’s twofold vision: he must see not only the picture, not only the painter, but also the thing painted. But, whether he likes it or not, the absolute and irreplaceable presence, with which the mind experiment begins, at the time being is not the living tree, but only its painted image. The Great Pine as a picture obviously differs from the pine as a thing of nature. The painted pine is a thing created by man. And what does that mean: to create a thing, though similar to the thing of nature, but not natural anymore? This means to hominize it, to bring it close to man in some way, to saturate it with human reality, with human content; consequently, to put a human sense in it. Of course, as it was said in the first essay, eventually man deals only with senseful things. Opening himself to the senseless being of the thing itself, he puts at least a minimal sense in the thing. In this respect, even beyondhuman, not yet hominized natural things “mean” something to man, they are full of sense to him. What then is the difference between non-hominized natural things and hominized things, between the real and painted pine? Most

The Thing and Art

77

probably they differ in those additional senses and meanings that man puts into a natural thing, while hominizing it, the senses and meanings that the thing by itself did not have in the first place. A hominized thing has more sense than a non-hominized one; it is more senseful than a natural one. The pine painted by Cézanne is more senseful, it “means” more than that living pine having been painted. But to say about a work of art this much that it has more sense than a natural thing is to say nothing about it yet. Because of most importance is not that senses and meanings, complementing the primordial, natural sense, were put into a thing, but what senses and meanings were put into it, what the work of art means. But again, it is obvious that the work of art “means” not in general, but only in contact with the person whom it means something. The sense of a work of art depends on who is looking at it. We have already seen that the same picture “means” very different things to an art historian, a philosopher, and Miss Salesgirl. Each can read a different sense in the same picture. To one, the picture opens many senses and meanings, to another, less, to the third, it is almost senseless. That which is full of a very significant sense and is important to the art historian, does not seem senseful and important to the philosopher, and does not have any sense to Miss Salesgirl. And on the contrary, the art historian will not see any sense where the philosopher is inclined to see the most important sense. We must try to define more precisely in what the picture is full of sense namely to a philosopher, forgetting for a while other possible layers of sense and batches of meanings.

3 That is why now we have to ask a question: what is the relation between painting and philosophy, can we interpret a painting philosophically? A similar question was posed in the first essay. However, now it is trickier. In the first essay, we tried to grasp the places where poetry and philosophy came in touch and saw that it was not easy to do so. And the kinship between poetry and philosophy is stronger than between philosophy and painting. Although poetry employs visions and metaphors, and philosophy abstractions, which frequently have no sensible equivalent, but they both spread in the same realm, the realm of language and the word. Sensible reality does not take part in poetry directly, a poetical word only refers to it and itself is not sensible at all and ultimately differs from a philosophical notion only by the degree of abstractness. Whereas painting is the most sensory of all arts; and not only because we can see the work of painting (because, in a way, we also can see poetry and even music, which can arouse visions, seen by the “eyes of the soul”), but also because a painting is sensibly individualized, a thing that exists in itself and for itself. Besides, it depicts sensible things. The language of both poetry and

78

Arvydas Šliogeris

philosophy spreads in time, and a painting and that which is depicted in it exist in space and in general are motionless. The dynamism of language, thrusting itself into a picture, meets there the statics of sensible thingness, i.e. the realm, alien to its nature. What is more, each word is an expression of pure meaning or sense, be it functional in a philosophical or poetical context; whereas sensibly individual things, depicted in the picture, by themselves are not pure meanings, they only refer to some meaning or sense, which does not take part directly in the picture and which is transcendent to the sensible shape of the picture. Cézanne’s Great Pine as a thing, as an accumulation of colours and forms covering the plane of the picture, by itself does not have any sense. This truth has been proved to us by the example of Miss Salesgirl. The art historian and the philosopher did not turn away from the picture only because they “thought up” certain senses, they turned the senseless being-initself of a sensibly individualized thing into a lingual equivalent, at the same time as though transferring it into the realm of pure meanings, but that realm by itself does not have any common measure with sensible reality. That is why the question on the relation of a work of painting and philosophy is a tricky one, for the philosopher can never be sure that the philosophical interpretation of a picture, unfolding in the realm of language, i.e. of pure supersensible meanings and senses, is indeed equivalent to the implicit sense, more precisely, to the being of the sensible individual, depicted in the picture. Thus, it is easy to agree with the opinion that there exists, and has right to exist, philosophical poetry and probably even poetical philosophy, but in great doubts will be the one who is out for philosophical painting. And most unconvincing is this combination: pictorial philosophy. Maybe one can paint with words of a natural language, maybe a good many of poets do so, but to try to paint in categories is probably the same as to try to paint on water. As we see, the question of the relation between painting and philosophy is indeed tricky, and a philosophical interpretation of a picture is far more complicated than, say, a philosophical analysis of a poetical work. Where can we find a way out? It is obvious that nowhere else but in the content of the picture. Although the picture by itself, as a thing of the sensible world, is senseless and speechless, yet at the same time it is a reference to what is not a picture any longer. We have said that it is a reference to certain meanings and senses. Those senses can be infinitely various and cannot be all surveyed in principle. But all actual or potential senses can be divided into several masses, relatively closed in, or at least defined by, rough contours, and then the question can be asked: which mass of senses is most acceptable for the philosopher’s competence; in which nest of senses can he feel most at home? Let us call conditionally the first mass of senses technical. This mass lies on the surface of the picture as the most direct layer of senses and meanings. In the scope of the technical mass of senses, on the horizon of an interpretation appear such senses of a picture as the composition, design, colours, match of the design and colours, values, facture of the picture, harmony between its

The Thing and Art

79

separate parts, direction and intensity of the brushstroke, positioning of the grounds of the picture, spatial structure, consonance of the figures and the grounds, and other suchlike things. It goes without saying that while technical senses are interpreted the philosopher is out of work. This mass is not in his competence. In this case, the philosopher feels helpless and speechless; he has nothing to say, because in this field he can speak only as an amateur. Technical senses are the competence of a professional – of the painter himself or of an art critic. Let us call the second mass of senses, again conditionally, historical. These are the senses that link the picture to the cultural and social context. In this case, into the horizon of an interpretation fall concrete biographical and social circumstances of the picture’s origination, the place the picture holds in the history and tradition of painting as well as among the painter’s other works, its links to dominant tendencies of style in a certain historical epoch, dependency to some school, to some “ism”, the picture’s manner and style, the traces of the influence of other authors, its connections with the concrete social and political situation, public ideas embodied in it, and other suchlike things. When interpreting historical senses, the philosopher feels a bit more comfortable, yet he still cannot beat the specialist of this kind of interpretation – the art historian. Let us call the third layer of the mass of senses literary. These are subjective, or psychological, senses, expressing the artist’s individual relation with the object being painted or with the entirety of possible objects to be depicted. To those we may attribute the artist’s feelings and emotions, aroused by the creation process, his sympathies and antipathies, his joy or sorrow, grief or the peace of contemplation, his passions, inclinations, pessimistic or optimistic view of the world, love or hatred, malice or respect, glorification or disdain of the world – in a word, all the gamut of vague feelings and emotions, which, however, have left their traces in the picture. These senses and meanings “affect” also the viewer, arouse feelings, not so intense, however, as those of the painter’s himself, but still vivid and strong enough. It is this mass of psychological senses that links the picture with the public at large, it is exactly this layer that first interests the viewers, gives them aesthetical delight and frequently is considered almost the most important indicator of a picture’s quality, authenticity, ability to affect, in a word, of its aesthetical potential. True art excites, it does not leave you indifferent – these words indicate that a work of art intensely radiates psychological, and has a solid mass of literary, senses. These senses are again not so alien to the philosopher, for the philosopher cannot entirely set free from his individually human subjectivity, he “emotes” a work of art, too, he goes through certain feelings, is excited or stays indifferent; in a word, he reacts to the influence of the work as a psychological subject. Yet, he reacts precisely not as a philosopher, not as a subject of theoretical contemplation. The psychological, or literary, touch with the work of art is pre-theoretical, consequently, not philosophical. Therefore, the mass of literary senses is not the true realm of a

80

Arvydas Šliogeris

philosopher, either. The masters here are art critics, aestheticians, people of letters, and others, on the whole fond of art and not fancying their lives without it. To the philosopher the psychological senses are alien first because we deal with subjective senses, which have no true universality, and therefore are indefinite, unverifiable, hardly objectivizable or conveyable. As it has been said, feelings and emotions have nothing to do with theoretical contemplation, therefore, with the philosophical interpretation of a work of art. Philosophy looks for thingness; in a picture, it looks for a thingly content and thingly senses. These thingly senses happen to constitute the fourth mass of senses and meanings, which we shall call theoretical. What are these senses? Let us describe them as this: these are nominal or elementary senses of a picture, i.e. those senses that usually elude the attention of an art critic, of an art historian, of an aesthetician, as well as of an ordinary consumer of the work of art who emotes the picture and gets aesthetical satisfaction. The mass of theoretical senses coincides with the entirety of the substantially individualized forms of a picture. Each substantially individualized form, seen on the picture plane, is full of sense, but this sense is elementary, and precisely because of that it is universal. If, say, a picture is showing a house, then naturally all viewers will understand it as a house and not as a turkey. If a picture is showing a tree (like Cézanne’s Great Pine), nobody will ever doubt that this is a tree and not a lying woman. These truths are so elementary that it might seem ridiculous, or maybe even indecent, to mention them. The logic of thinking over theoretical senses leads us to banalities and tautologies, like these: the grass is green, the sun is shining, the lake is in waves, the bucket is standing; shoes, a bag of potatoes, a mushroom, etc. Nevertheless, there is at least one man who regards those banalities and tautologies as neither banal nor tautological, nor do they seem so matter-ofcourse as to some refined aesthetician or to any other sophisticated person. This man is the painter himself. With the passion, almost incomprehensible to a stranger, “till the eyes bleed”, he looks at those simplest, most banal things, makes them his “own saints” (Van Gogh’s words), and with no less passion transfers them to the space of a picture. And how laboriously, painfully, obstinately, humbly, and faithfully one must work so as to accomplish that banal and elementary task: to double the tautology, once more to state the elementary being of an elementary thing on the picture plane, to repeat the elementary form of an elementary thing, to make the elementary sense of the simplest thing speak out of the picture. And who would dare to ask the painter painting an undistinguished chair, table, or doddery old man: why are you painting such a banality, don’t you have nobler, more interesting, and greater subjects? The artist would answer nothing, because to explain anything to a know-nothing is the same as to lecture on Kant’s transcendentalism to a wooden club; or would say something like this: there are no banalities and tautologies for a painter, the battle of Waterloo is not more significant to him than a broom in the corner;

The Thing and Art

81

besides, all noble and great subjects are also composed of the most elementary forms, of sensibly individualized things. It is not clear whether the aesthetician would agree with the painter, but the philosopher definitely would. The elementary being of a thing and the elementary sense of the form of a thing perhaps is a banality to Miss Salesgirl, but it is an absolute goal and an absolute sense to the painter. Maybe, while painting a broom or a loaf of bread, the painter intends to express something else as well, maybe those elementary things are only symbols to him, yet it is obvious that they can have this symbolic sense only because first they simply are painted, that they have the elementary sense, which coincides with their form and being. In order that a thing should mean something, first it simply has to be. Ontotopically, being always comes first and before meaning. And this primordial being of a thing is never a tautology or banality to a painter. If he is of a different opinion, then he is not a painter, but at best a painting man of letters. Besides, to paint an elementary thing so that its being in the space of the picture is not less intense than its being in the world is not as easy as skilful-in-drawing girls or art specialists think. The painters themselves should be asked about that: Vermeer, painting a pitcher, Van Gogh, painting worn-out shoes, and Cézanne, at work with the great pine. At least Cézanne would say that to pain the great pine is extremely hard, so hard that he has never managed to do so, that he is in doubt whether in general anyone ever would be able to paint it as it should be done, i.e. so that you could utter: indeed, this pine in the picture is more real than the real one, it has more being. A copy more real than the original? Yes, that is it, this is what a true artist always and everywhere has been trying to achieve. Otherwise, it is not clear what painting is for altogether. To multiply the visible? Since the mass of theoretical senses is the fundamental one, since meanings and senses are matter-of-course and elementary, since to draw an elementary form of a thing is being taught at school in first grades for several ages now, rarely is it being thought about those senses, like a driver rarely thinks about the wheels of the car. These are obvious matters that may be disregarded. Are they really so evident and banal that they are no good to be thought over philosophically? First, let us say that there is nothing matter-of-course, nothing banal, nothing to turn away indifferently from to a philosophical gaze at the world. Already the Greeks knew that these are the simplest things that arouse the greatest wonder. Besides, we can also remember that all what is simple and trivial today, yesterday was new, strange, and extraordinary, and that the form of an individual thing, as the main principle of plastic arts, is not a timeless matter, existing from times immemorial. This principle not always has determined plastic formation of material, not everywhere an individualized thing, as an element of the theoretical mass of senses, has been the constant and ontotopical nucleus of plastic art. We shall confine ourselves with such examples as Arab ornamental arts, Eastern hieroglyphic painting, or the abstract art of our times. So, the philosopher, directing his look towards the

Arvydas Šliogeris

82

mass of theoretical senses, which supports the entire plastic structure of the picture, the entire superstructure of other senses, and the entire ontotopical content of the picture, is not in danger of bogging down in triviality. Besides, and this is of most importance, by thinking over elementary thingly senses of the picture, the philosopher enters the true philosophical realm, universality, because only thus directing his look can he carry out the mentioned mind experiment, only thus can he see at the same time both Cézanne’s picture and the thing that Cézanne is painting. Thus the work of art, seen on the horizon of theoretical senses as an ensemble of universal values, pushes the philosopher towards things themselves and casts him out to the thingly world. That is why we have to begin our philosophical interpretation of a painting with the analysis of theoretical senses. So, for a while let us forget all other “superstructural” senses and concentrate our attention to the forms of individualized thingness that are unfolding harmoniously on the plane of a picture. Let us call the senses that mark the elementary form and individual being of a thing classical, and by this let us link the glide of our thought with the name of this essay: The End of Classical Western Painting. Let us regard for a while this movement of thought, which still needs explanation and argumentation, as a statement or assumption that the ontotopical landmark and plastic foundation of Western classical painting are namely these elementary senses or the cosmos of substantially individualized forms. Is this so, indeed; is such an assumption not too risky and high-handed? For the meantime we cannot answer this question at length and soundly. We shall say this much that this assumption is very important for the subsequent course of thought. Therefore, our next task is to develop and to ground it. This is not easy and simple. With a view to grounding the assumption, we need a lengthy excursus to the history of Western culture and plastic arts and first to the territory of the so-called classical art.

4 Now we ask: what is classical painting, what are its fundamental ontotopical and artistic principles? This question is not fully correct for it is insufficiently elementary. It supposes a preceding question: what does the conception “classical” mean, what is the classical? Only having tried to find the answer to this indeed primordial question, might we hope to answer the first one as well. So now we are going to think over the conception of the classical. But is it worth doing? Because we have to get to the trivialities again. Everyone knows and easily understands what the classical is. To every literate person the word “classical” is as obvious and does not arouse any doubts and problems as the words “thing”, “art”, “history”, “tradition”, “motion”, “world”, and many others. We use this word everywhere and anywhere, always and anytime, and we use it without much thinking, for

The Thing and Art

83

indeed, if we start thinking about our every uttered word, we shall be incapable of speaking. Usually, we are satisfied with an approximate sense of a spoken word and its nominal content. What is evident and universally common seldom grips us, more seldom awakens our thinking abilities. But let us repeat: there is nothing absolutely evident, nothing trivial in this world to a philosopher, and the simplest matters, known well to everyone, are of his greatest concern. We might remember Hegel who used to say that if something is known to us, it does not mean that it has been cognized. Knowing and cognition differ not only nominally and quantitatively; they differ essentially, their contents unfold in utterly different planes. Knowing, which is enough in an everyday communication, is always approximate, the sense of the words and notions used is washy, anonymous, not articulated, therefore abstract and scanty. While speaking just “about this or that” and without much thinking, we submerge also the notion of the classical into the realm of such indefiniteness, abstractness, and anonymity. Indeed, where this notion is not used! what senses it is not endued with! We speak about “classical art”, “classical Greece”, “classical perfection”, and “classical simplicity”, we say, “Žemaitơ, the classic of Lithuanian literature”, we have “living classics”, we constantly mention “classical German philosophy”, we talk about “high-classic style” as though the classical might be lower or higher, better or worse, as though we could grade it, increase or decrease, have it or not, sell or buy. The notion of the classical, as many other notions that are not casual though, but used casually, means everything, yet exactly because of that it becomes indefinite and unclear. Itself being evident, it has become complicated. The tradition of millennia has made it thus, the tradition that not only preserves, but also annihilates, not only opens, but also covers, not only brings closer, but also makes distant. By preserving something, tradition makes it anonymous, chokes up its primordial sense, always simple and clear. To get to that primordial sense, to take off the mask of complexity, and to restore simplicity – that is the goal of the mind’s work. Thinking is the road to simplicity, but a thinker is always only on the road to it, because the simplest things hardly are attainable altogether to the limited mind of a thinking human. But we must strive for them, although no one knows what for. So, the classical. Let us try to put forth the usual senses of the notion of the classical, presumed only vaguely. First, the notion of the classical expresses human reality; one way or another, it is associated with that which we can call the human world. Classical are the works of human hands and soul, hominized entities. We never use this notion to describe beyond-human reality, we never say “classical nature”, “a classical stone”, “a classical mole”. True, sometimes it is spoken about a classical landscape, yet even in this case not the natural elements themselves are meant, but certain cultural and historical associations. In the broadest sense, the notion of the classical is oriented towards that ontotopical region which, very indefinitely again, is called culture. Classical reality is created by man. This is the first sense of the

84

Arvydas Šliogeris

notion of the classical. Let us go on. The notion of the classical orients us not towards the fact, but towards a certain obligation. In this respect, “classical” is a normative notion, indicating a high rank of a creation of man’s hands and spirit, achieved seldom and painfully. It is this normative sense of the classical we highlight when we speak about classical art or classical philosophy and have in mind the most splendid, perfect, universally acknowledged, ageless, “eternal” human creations. Such is the Parthenon, such is Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, such is the Don Quixote, such is the Critique of Pure Reason, and such is probably Cézanne’s Great Pine. By crowning a human creation with the halo of the classical, we seem to lift it above time and history. Time and history is the realm of perpetual change, of perpetual ageing and renewing, of death and birth, and a classical human work is timeless and historiless. Consequently, there is something stable and immutable lying within a classical work, something that is independent of temporality and decline. But changeless and imperishable is only what is ideal, supersensible, because all endless shapes of the sensible world have beginning and end, they appear and disappear, they are submerged in the Heracleitian flux. In this respect, a classical work is an embodied ideal and namely because of that it has a normative character. The norm, lying in a classical work, is ideal. This is a tautological statement: in general, the norm can be only ideal, as distinct from the fact, which can also exist in the shape of a sensible entity, though not necessarily only in it. One more sense of the classical, as if overruling the normative one, is historical. Frequently we use the notion of the classical when we have in mind a certain historical period, a certain step in the ladder of human development. If we speak about Western culture, such a classical step is ancient Greece. We shall narrow the historical sense of the classical stage by linking it to a segment of the cultural and political development of ancient Greece, for instance, to Athens of Pericles times. The classical halo, which ancient Greece has been wearing from time immemorial, at present has become dim. More and more voices are heard urging to take the classical monopoly away from ancient Greece. More and more often it is spoken about Eastern classical culture, about American Indian or African classical art. A kind of decentralization of the history’s classical nucleus is happening, directly connected with the so-called Eurocentric crisis. Together with this process, the normative potential of the notion of the classical is weakening. For a European of the 19th century classical Greece was still not only a historical era, but also an absolute ideal of the being of man, and a contemporary of ours idealizes Greece less and less, and usually sees it as an ordinary fact of the world history, as one of many “cultural organisms”, emerging to the surface of the historical flow and sinking in it again, not distinct in any merits in comparison with other cultural organisms. Such is, for example, the attitude of Spengler and his epigones. It is not consistent in one aspect: if history is levelled, if it is being looked at only as a whole of equivalent facts, unfolding in time, then the term

The Thing and Art

85

of “classical” either loses its sense entirely or becomes a mere conventional label, i.e. a concept of classification. Consistent historicism should in general reject the notion of the classical (and it is sometimes done, by the way), for its normative layer cannot be utterly ignored. Because if this layer is removed and reduced to an accidental historical fact, it would be senseless to speak about not only classical era, but also classical art, a classical work, classical perfection, and thus all hierarchical criteria of an evaluation of human creation would be lost. Another sense of the notion of the classical is stylistic. We describe a certain style of the hominization of entities by this notion, the style that is externalized first of all in works of art, philosophy, religion, but also in a communal life (because we can speak also about a classical political organization, e.g. classical democracy and the like). The sense of the classical as a certain style comprises the normative as well as the historical aspects. The style of the hominization of entities or of hominized entities, generally called classical, most consistently revealed itself in Western culture, i.e. in the civilizations of Antiquity and Western Europe. Such are the main senses of the notion of the classical, most clearly articulated, conventionally intuited and sanctioned by the tradition. Of course, next to these, various other conceptions can thrive, original and having subjective nuances, but we can ignore them, because all nuances, all refined extremes are merely a matter of taste, and taste, as you know, not always appears to be good. Besides, originality is not the kind of virtue that philosophy would show consideration for; philosophy strives for truth. And although the road to truth is always unique, truth itself cannot be unique as it makes pretensions to universality.

5 Now let us ask: can several conventional senses of the notion of the classical have a common denominator, do they have one common peripheral background, which, though cannot be seen in the foreground, binds as if with some invisible threads all scattered senses into one thing? Does the notion of the classical have one sense, implicitly lying in all conventional senses? Can we hull this general sense out of other senses, sanctioned by tradition? Certainly, if such a sense exists, it has to be traditional, too, i.e. it has to be read out of traditional manifestations and senses of the classical. Since tradition links the notion of the classical to Western culture, we shall try, without attempting of being original, to shell this one sense of the classical out of the tradition of Western culture, the more as the object of our essay is Western painting. As it has been said, we link the notion of the classical to human reality, to the human world, and to human artefacts; therefore, we speak about classical literature, classical philosophy, and classical art. The classical unfolds through various works that have originated in different fields of human activity. The concept of artefact analytically supposes a very

86

Arvydas Šliogeris

simple thought: an artefact is a reality, not given from everlasting, not existing in a ready-made shape, only to be found by a human; an artefact must be created. And what does it mean – to create an artefact? It means to hominize the “material”, found in nature, to rearrange it, to give it a certain form; in other words, man has to come in touch with beyond-human reality, we may say, with natural things. An artefact is a secondary reality, for it originates from a pre-existent reality. This primordial reality is neither nature by itself nor man by himself, because these “by themselves” are abstractions; man never can exist somewhere outside nature, separate himself from it, and lock himself up in some ontotopical ivory tower. The primordial reality, in respect of abstract nature-in-itself, in respect of an abstract human-in-himself, as well as – and this is most important to us now – in respect of an artefact, is man’s touch with nature. Namely in respect of this touch, the artefact is the secondary reality, because it originates in the realm of this touch and is a thingly crystallization of this touch. Every artefact is a crystal of man’s preconceived look at natural things or of a relation with beyond-human entities. This look is a priori, and the artefact a posteriori. What artefact a human will create, how he will hominize natural “material” depends on how he will contemplate not yet hominized things of nature, what he will see in them, on what horizon those non-human things will open themselves to him. The specificity of an artefact is determined by the specificity of the primordial human touch with things of nature. But if this is so, then a classical artefact, independently of the field of activity it originates in, presupposes towards itself a pre-existent classical touch with things of nature, a classical look at beyond-human reality. In respect of different artefacts, this fundamental contact is invariant. Classical works of art, classical philosophical systems, as well as a classical religion (if we can speak about such) grow out of the same primordial classical touch with beyond-human reality. Precisely this primordial classical touch with things of nature is the nest of all various humanly-thingly crystals of the classical. So, we can reasonably speak about a classical contact of man with the world, from which, and only from which, as though out of some roots, classical things (and having in mind the entire entityhood – classical entities) grow. What is that classical touch with the world, towards what entities is the classical human look oriented? Indeed, there is not, and cannot be, any abstract, deductively thought out answer to this question. We can read the specificity of the classical look only out of a classical artefact, which is, after all, an expression and a document of that look. The classical touch with entities relates with a classical artefact as the essence with the phenomenon. We can get to the essence only by examining the phenomenon. But we have lots and lots of various classical phenomena. Which one of them can we regard as exemplary, i.e. revealing most adequately the roots of the classical, or at least most appropriate to get to the springhead of the classical? Such phenomenon should be the simplest, besides, it should have to be in the

The Thing and Art

87

beginning of classical tradition as its rudiment, itself not having become tradition yet, but laying foundation for it, naive, direct, still without a thick hull of additional senses, put into it by the future history. Western culture has such an initial classical artefact, with which everything starts and which expresses in the simplest shapes the primordial classical touch of Western man with beyond-human reality. These are Homer’s poems and first of all the Odyssey. Exactly from the Odyssey we can try to read out the elementary sense and structure of the classical contact with the world.

6 How can we do this? Only by hulling out the meta-physical nucleus of the Odyssey. But there is no metaphysics in this epic yet, it originated by a long way later and at first glance has nothing to do with the naive reality of the epic. The epic tells very simple stories about very simple people and about simple relations between them. Everything is elementary in the epic, everything, it seems, can be seen clearly on the surface, everything is “physical”, everything is sensible and evident. That is indeed so. However, no one could deny another very simple thing: the epic expresses a very definite contact of man, existing beyond the epic, with the world. That world, beyond the epic itself, beyond the content being told and its nominal sense, is exactly our meta-physical reality. Where in the epic itself could we find a bridge, leading us beyond it, where can that meta-physical nucleus be concentrated? It is obvious that it should be concentrated in the picture of the main hero, Odysseus, and in his relations with the entire entityhood. So, what is Odysseus’ most important trait? It can come out only when we know, what Odysseus’ main goal is, what his biggest wish is. The essence of man, as of a mortal and limited being, is best shown not by what he has as something integral, as an elementary fact, but by what he has not, what he strives for, consequently, by what he can lose. Constant lack, constant standing in front of the unknown and of possibility is man’s fate and therefore the ontotopical centre of his existence, too. So, what does Odysseus strive for, where are his main endeavours directed to? The answer might be like this: Odysseus, as an individual, strives to preserve his identity, so, his substantial being. On his way to his homeland, various dangers impend over his identity. Odysseus’ way home ontotopically is nothing else than a means to preserve his substantial identity. By the way, we must emphasize that Odysseus’ endeavours to preserve his identity as an individual are not related (or at least not always related) to the fear of death. It is obvious that the greatest threat to the substantial identity of an individual is death. But Odysseus’ fear of losing his substantial identity is related not to death. Odysseus, as a true hero of an epic, is a noble and courageous man. Consequently, he is not afraid of dying. After all, he was not frightened to descend twice to the kingdom of Hades, to

88

Arvydas Šliogeris

the abode of the dead, so he outbraved death. Like a true Greek, Odysseus knows that death is inevitable, that to die is man’s destiny, and even gods cannot resist destiny, not to mention humans. “Mortal” and “man” to a Greek are synonyms. Strange as it might be, but Odysseus is most afraid of immortality. The queen of the Ogygian Isle (the synonym of paradise), goddess Calypso, offers Odysseus immortality, on condition that he would forget the land of his fathers and remain with her eternally to indulge in various blessings and pleasantries. Yet Odysseus chooses the fatherland and thereby also death. It means he wants to remain himself, to preserve his “soul”, his substantial nucleus, his own self, although encased in a mortal body, although temporary, although temporal. All the long and hard way back to his homeland is a test to Odysseus’ will to preserve his substantial identity. The Lotus-eaters offer him magic fruit, having tasted which a human frees himself from torments and becomes eternally happy. But to free oneself from pain exactly means to lose one’s individual identity, because pain is the fate of an individual, we may say, even a synonym of individuality. Basically the same, i.e. eternal happiness, is offered to Odysseus and his friends, besides Calypso, by the hostess of the Aeaean Island, the goddess Circe. Her magic potion turns a human into a pig, that is to say, sets him free from all torments of human existence, torments that are destined by human individuality. To become an animal is to become eternally happy and in a way immortal, consequently, to set free from the fear of death. After all, sensu stricto, mortal is only he who knows that he is mortal, and this is known only by man, a conscious and overnatural being. With the help of the Olympian gods, Odysseus resists Circe’s spells and retains his identity. How does he do that, despite all the mentioned stories of seduction? He does that opposing himself as an individual to nature’s existence, in Hegel’s words, to the animal paradise, or in our terms that we have explicated in the first essay, to the realm of pure relation. Calypso’s offer of immortality, the fruit of the Lotus-eaters, the potion of Circe, as well as the siren songs – all these are no other than different ways of losing one’s individuality and substantial identity, of merging with primordial nature, of dissolving in the realm of pure relation. Thus the first trait of the classical contact with the world comes out: the opposition of man, as a substantial individual, to the realm of pure relation, his separation from the magic merging, like an animal, with nature, his constant resistance to the Great Anonym, which perpetually threatens his identity and negates the very principle of individuation. We have to emphasize that identity and substantial individuality to Odysseus are namely a principle; this is the ideal he strives and fights for, knowing well that there are forces in the world constantly ruining that identity. Nature and pure relation are a fact; Proteus, perpetually changing his appearance, is a fact; siren songs and the potion of Circe (most probably it was vodka) are a fact; Odysseus’ friends-pigs are a fact; a man-eater Cyclops is a fact; and the Lestrygonians are a fact, too; the principle is Odysseus himself, opposing his

The Thing and Art

89

own self, his will to remain himself, to retain the monolith of his soul, the uniqueness and irreplaceability of his own “self” to all the powers that deindividualize, anonymize, and destroy the substantial identity. In short: the fundamental principle of the classical touch with the world is namely the substantial individual, and a condition of an individual’s self-preservation is the opposing oneself to the realm of pure relation, separation from the primordial animal merging with nature. However, so far, we only are stating the principle of the classical touch with the world, yet this is not enough. Let us walk on the path of questioning thinking: how and by what means can Odysseus preserve his identity, what does he lean on in resisting the attraction of the realm of pure relation? His friends are of no help to him, they constantly and very easily give in to nature’s temptations, and they need Odysseus’ help themselves. True, in critical situations, and first in those when his substantial identity is threatened, Odysseus gets help from the Olympians. However, for some reason only Odysseus basks in their grace, only he is the gods’ pet. The Greeks, knowing their gods well and being on close terms with them, knew that gods helped only those who were worth of their support. The favoured probably would be able by themselves, without the gods’ intervention, to overcome those obstacles that they overcome with the help from the Olympians, because almost always the gods do nothing what man himself can do on his own, if only he is noble, courageous, and wise, if only he is vir bonus as the Romans used to say. Odysseus is such. He is saved everywhere by his own qualities – the power of his body and mind, stamina, wit, eloquence, patience, and cleverness. Yet these are the qualities that distinguish Odysseus from his friends only thus much as some pirate chief differs from a common pirate. Odysseus of many counsels (wiles, devices) – this is how the king of Ithaca is called in the epic and how he is known in Greek mythology. But more and essentially Odysseus is distinguished from his associates by another trait – love for, and memory of, his homeland. Man sinks lowest, loses his last human traces, and turns into a beast when he forgets his homeland. The greatest danger, lurking in the fruit of the Lotus-eaters, in the songs of the sirens, in the potion of Circe, and in the caresses of Calypso, is the oblivion of the native land. Odysseus’ all friends perished during the journey, none saw his homeland – none, except Odysseus, for he was the only one truly not to forget his land, he preserved the memory of his land in the most fateful and most perilous situations. Only he who never forgets his homeland – wherever he is, whatever he undergoes – truly has it. And exactly the memory of one’s homeland is the most reliable guarantee of man’s substantial identity. Only Odysseus, constantly returning to the memory about his native land, was not turned into a pig and did not sink into the primordial merge with the naturalistic realm of pure relation, only he, having chosen pain, misery, and concern, refused the pleasantries of the animal paradise. That is why we can assert that one of the most important elements of man’s classical touch with the world is namely the memory of

90

Arvydas Šliogeris

one’s homeland, attachment to one’s homeland, or love for one’s homeland, rationally clarified. But what can such a vague, and nowadays hopelessly sentimentalized and poeticized word “homeland”, having lost its real sense, explain? What is homeland, where is it? What can we, living in megalopolises, in stone-cube anthills, lost in ferroconcrete jungle and cobwebs of total communications; we, eternal tourists, wanderers, nomads, living everywhere and nowhere, constantly hurrying from one edge of the world to another, constantly driven by the anxiety to break through beyond the horizon, constantly on the move, never here and now; we, attached to a certain place only by body and only for a blink, but by soul kiting in a wide world, which is distant and mysterious, and deceitfully comes closer, but again only for a blink, for it moves away instantly, flickering and waving, changing like the veil of maya, changing its skin like a snake, putting on ever-new masks, being treacherous and intimidating, yet alluring by its strange presence between being and non-being, between clearness and darkness, between having and having not; we, hunters for news and sensations, children of Proteus, having inherited his fantastic ability to be everything and nothing; what can we, homeless and placeless, still know about homeland? Indeed, perhaps it is not easy for us, the dwellers of orbis terrarum, to tell what the word “homeland” means, but what it meant to Odysseus, a Greek, a man of the classical, is not so hard to tell. Homeland to Odysseus is Ithaca, an island where near and dear people live – Penelope, Telemachus, old Laertes, his faithful servants and fellow-countrymen. But people by themselves are not homeland yet. First of all, homeland is a piece of land, where not only exceptional people, but also exceptional things live. The notion of homeland to a classical Greek was not a mere sentimentalized abstraction; it was a reference to a sensibly evident, viewable place. Homeland to a Greek was a city-state, a walled polis and its surroundings that can also be viewed by an eye from some higher place, a hill or the roof of a temple. The entire homeland was here, at side, around, it was connected not only with the soul of a dweller, but also with his body, it showed itself sensibly and was seen directly by the eyes of the soul as well as of the body. The first trait of homeland was its sensible evidentness. But sensible evidentness by itself does not mean anything yet; not everything what is sensibly evident is already homeland. A polis to a slave also was sensibly evident, but it was not his homeland. Wherever man, as a spatially limited being, is, he is always linked to the space of sensible evidentness, he is always on this side of the sensibly limited horizon. Homeland is the entirety of sensibly evident entities, and besides that, it is something else what distinguishes those entities from the entirety of all possible sensibly evident entities, which is called the world; it is the entirety of distinct sensibly evident entities. What makes the entities that limit the locality of the native land distinct from other entities? It is their sacredness. To an ancient Greek, his homeland is the entirety of sacred things, limited by the sensible horizon:

The Thing and Art

91

temples, gods’ altars, statues, a home fireplace, agoras, public buildings, a native homestead, appliances (Odysseus’ bow), people and animals (Odysseus’ dog). Ontically, a homeland, as the entirety of sacred things, does not differ at all from the empirical world in general, and the sacred things themselves empirically do not differ from any indefinite empirical thing, which is not sacred, because it is outside the boundaries of the homeland. But what is the real sense of sacredness? This word seems mystical, therefore a philosopher does not have a right to explain something with reference to it, because the word itself needs a rational explanation. The realm of asking thinking is reason and rationality, and nothing is more alien to him than mysticism and ventriloquism. Sacredness can also be perceived very simply and not mystically at all. Sacred things first are stable, unchanging things, retaining their individual look and being. The empirical world, stretching beyond the boundaries of the native land to an indefinite distance, is constantly changing and varying, it does not have clear contours, there are no islands of peace and stability, it is in general formless, it lacks statics and stationary immobility. Whereas the things and people of the homeland are that which is most stable and unchanging; the homeland is the island of peace and stability in the ocean of constant change, appearance, and decline. To a Greek, his homeland is an island not only in the direct sense (like to Odysseus), but also in the indirect sense, as it is isolated from the external world, like the cosmos of permanent things from the entirety of impermanent things. What makes sacred things permanent? Ontically, they do not differ from other empirical things, they are not eternal, either, they appear and disappear, they are born and die, for some time they are, but having turned the full circle of their existence, they crumble and vanish into non-being. It is obvious that such stability is presented by man. Striving for stability, he surrounds himself with such things which, having received from him the gift of permanence and inviolability, return it back to man. In this respect, the permanence of sacred things is their immunity; they are not objects of mere usage. A sacred thing is a thing that has received a right from man to be in itself and for itself, that is not a mere appliance or instrument, and the being of which is purpose by itself and not only a means. How does such a cosmos of untouchable things emerge? The simplest answer might be this: these things are created. Temples, altars, hearths, agoras, statues, columns, wells are built; various appliances are made. But such an answer is not precise. After all, the homeland, as the entirety of sacred things, comprises also inartificial things: a holy grove, a river, stones, hills, plots of land, in a word, natural things. Therefore, in need to specify and rationalize the notion of sacredness we shall use another term: homeland, as the entirety of sacred things, comprises familiar things. To station the things of the homeland is to become acquainted with them. In this respect, homeland is the entirety of familiar things and people. We have to explain this term. We shall say straight away that becoming acquainted with a thing is the opposite extreme

92

Arvydas Šliogeris

of cognizing it. Cognition and acquaintance are antinomic matters, negating each other. What does it mean to become acquainted with a thing? To make it clearer, let us assume that we become acquainted with a person. An unfamiliar person is a person-in-general, a person-anonym, a personabstraction; he has no clear contours, he is a source of many a possible sense and surprise, an accumulation of pure possibilities; he is like a night, out of which anything can emerge, he is an unexpected entity. A stranger is the one who can be this or that, so, of every and any sort. It is a formless mass without a definite outline. To become acquainted is to tear the person from the anonymity of pure possibilities, to minimize his sense, to state the adequacy between his outside and his inside, between a sensible phenomenon and a supersensible essence, between the surface and the depth, between what is visible and what is invisible. To become acquainted is to simplify the person’s representation, to establish for the first time altogether his image, in a way to solidify it, to make it permanent, stable, to reify it, to delimit it so that it is no longer unexpected, but behaves and speaks the way we expect him to behave and speak beforehand. In short, to become acquainted with a person means to see him as an author and an individual. And thus comes out the difference between cognition and acquaintance. Acquaintance individualizes and cognition de-individualizes, acquaintance concentrates and elementarizes and cognition disperses and resolves, acquaintance overcomes anonymity and cognition anonymizes again, acquaintance brings one nearer and cognition again moves one away to the realm of indefinite senses and possibilities. Let us assume that I want to cognize a person as a psychologist. What do I do? First, I de-individualize the person, resolve him into anonymous traits, characteristic not only of this person, but of other persons as well, I begin interpreting him in the background of anonymous universality. The individual loses his elementariness and becomes a complex of anonymous characteristics and relations. Cognizing an individual psychologically, I ascribe him to a certain anonymous psychological type, to a certain group of temperament, I find in him common, abstract, varietal, classificatory, typal characteristics, I de-identify a concrete person as “this particular” unique substantial individual. To a psychologizing look, an individual is not anymore this particular, consequently, it is not an individual anymore, it is a mere varietal specimen, classificatory stereotype. The millstones of cognition grind the person’s individuality into the flour of reactions, characteristics, traits, stereotypes of behaviour and thinking. The individual disintegrates into fragments, he as if vaporizes, loses his thingly concreteness and melts in the fluid of relations. Cognition turns even a familiar person into an unfamiliar one. Cognizing an individual person, we do not get closer to him, we hopelessly more and more distance ourselves away from him. Anyone who has read Marcel Proust’s phenomenological epic will easily understand what we have in mind. An individual turns into an anonym even though directly he is close to us. This de-individualizing,

The Thing and Art

93

disrupting the acquaintance with the individual, anonymizing nature of cognition will show up even better if the binoculars of cognition are turned not towards the psychology of a person, but, say, towards his anatomy, biochemistry, physiology and so on ad infinitum. That is why we say that cognition is the contrary to acquaintance: acquaintance ends where cognition starts, and the arrows of cognition can be stopped only by the shield of acquaintance. Everything that has been said about a human applies to any non-human thing as well. To become acquainted with a thing is quite different from cognizing it. Acquaintance is the individualization of a thing, the authorial separation of it from the anonymous background, from the realm of thingness-in-general, it is the counter-positioning of the thing to every context. So, to build the homeland, as the cosmos of sacred things, is the same as to become acquainted with these things and to individualize them in two ways: to give them an individual form and to stand them in their permanent, unchanging place, designed solely for them. The space of the homeland is the ensemble of such individualized places and each of the places is filled with individualized things. This is how one more trait of the classical contact with entities shows up: man, as a substantial individual, protecting his identity, stands in the presence of familiar people and familiar things. Familiar things are the things admitted to the space of man’s world, therefore we can call them humanized things. The term of “humanization” shows one more profile of the sacredness of things, but it needs explaining as well. When saying that familiar things are humanized things, we have in mind not only those things that were called technei onta by the Greeks, i.e. artificial things, those like a table, sword, chair, house, bed, or cloak. Acquaintance, as the humanization of a thing, should not be identified with the hominization of a natural thing, with its remodelling, with the creation of a non-natural reality. We ascribe to the entirety of humanized things also those things that were called physei onta by the Greeks, i.e. natural things. After all, homeland, as the cosmos of familiar things, comprises not only artificial, but also natural things. The cosmos, as the analogue of his homeland, was to a Greek a universal order and harmony, involving all individualized things that unclosed themselves within the horizon of acquaintance. In this respect, there is no ontotopical difference between the Parthenon and a star, between an amphora and the oak of Dido, between a spoon and Scamander. All of them are included in the orbit of the things, identified by the acts of acquaintance, in-formed, in-placed, and individualized, all of them are elements of the homeland and the cosmos. One more profile of a sacred thing, resting in a locality of the homeland, is its substantiality. Acquaintance and humanization coincides with the thing’s substantialization. Sacred things are substantial things, in Aristotle’s terms, individual substances. It means these things are closed, monolithic, opaque, they do not have any cracks and hollows, they are not dividable or solvable in any relations. Remembering the terms, used in the first essay, we can say that

94

Arvydas Šliogeris

a substantial thing is a thing that has a minimal sense, which coincides with its direct and sensibly seen form, and with its obvious being. Substantiality is identical to elementariness. The things of the homeland are elementary. Their essence cannot be explained by anything else that is not they themselves; substantial being is ultimate, not interchangeable with anything else, because it is non-complicated and non-complex, structureless reality. The sole attribute of a substantial thing is its elementary being, its individual form, and the same form is its sole sense, seen evidently and opening itself namely in the course of acquainting humanization. A substantial thing “means”, but its meaning is elementary and again coincides with its obvious being. The sense of a tree, table, amphora, or temple is obvious, for it uncloses itself in the horizon of acquaintance. A table “means” only that it is a table and nothing else, a jug “means” only that it is a jug. The term of “substantiality” explains the already-mentioned statement: minimum of sense, maximum of being; it explains the identity between a thing and its sense, or between the being of a thing and its minimal sense, transiting to the senselessness of being. The being of substantial things in itself is senseless, substantial things, however, are senseful, but senseful minimally. Certainly, when speaking about the minimal sense of substantial things, we have in mind not the qualitative, but the quantitative aspect of sense, not the intensiveness of sense, but its extensiveness. These minimally senseful (from the point of view of extensiveness) things – instrumentalized only unambiguously or not instrumentalized at all, – on a sudden become a container of the highest and most important sense to a person of the classical: the aura of sacredness used to fixate exactly this important sense (from the point of view of intensiveness). By guarding and defending his homeland, a Greek guarded and defended the being of those by themselves senseless sacred things, their individuality and substantiality. Therefore, to a Greek, an inseparable attribute of the highest being is precisely the substantiality of this being, its indivisibility, opaqueness, and monolithicness. The highest being is an informed substantial monolith. Giving arguments to this statement, we shall remind a thought of Parmenides, the progenitor of Western classical philosophy: the highest being, which has the rank of divinity and so has the halo of sacredness, is Sphaira – a monolithic, immobile ball, without any hollows and crevices into which a sting of non-being could penetrate. Therefore, Parmenides asserted that there is only being and there is no nonbeing. Being is an absolute substance. A bit differently, but equally expressively the same thought was developed by another great Greek thinker, Democritus. To him, the highest being and the primary principle of the entire entityhood is a multitude of atoms, undividable substantial things that have an individual form. The conceptions of being of these Greek thinkers differ only in that Parmenides acknowledged only one atom, one substance, and Democritus many of such substances. Monosubstantial and polysubstantial conceptions of the entityhood differ not essentially, but only quantitatively:

The Thing and Art

95

in both cases, the highest being is a substantial individual. These two great thinkers in the language of philosophy told that which was evident to the heroes of Homer as well as to every Greek who had not lost touch with his homeland, i.e. with the cosmos of sacred, familiar, humanized things, with substantial individuals, existing in the shape of a person or a thing. And now the ontotopical nucleus of the classical touch with the world reveals to us fully: it is the principle of substantial individuality. The classical touch with the world is a contact of a human, who preserves his identity as a substantial individual, with things as substantial individuals; and to preserve their identity, as much as the arrangement of the entityhood lets doing, is man’s biggest ontotopical obligation. We must emphasize that namely the mutual union of man and the thing in the realm of substantial individuality discloses the deepest layer of the classical touch with the world. A classical hero can preserve his identity only if he stands in front of the identity of the being of a thing, if he opposes his substantiality and individuality to the substantiality and individuality of a beyond-human thing. This is how the memory of, and love for, his homeland was important to Odysseus, who tried to preserve his identity. Only being in his homeland or not forgetting it, could a Greek retain his “soul” as a substantial atom, because he could find support for his substantiality only in the homeland, in its substantial things. Familiar people and familiar things were Odysseus’ sole medicine against the Lotus-eaters’ fruit, Circe’s magic, siren songs, and Cyclops’ jaws. Only familiar things and familiar people, only the locality of substantial individuals defended a Greek from the Great Anonym and from the perils of pure nature, gave him peace, shelter, and protection, helped him retain his overnaturalness and the ontotopical condition of his, the emigrant’s from the animal paradise, i.e. from primordial nature. Only they stabilized the tension and counter-position of man and nature, of human and thingly individuals. Man’s separation from nature, his emigration to his homeland as the cosmos of substantial individuals is the birth hour of the classical touch with all entities.

7 Now we can understand better what man’s separation from nature is, which marks the moment of the dawn of the classical and thereby also the beginning of human existence and of human history. First, we should specify the statement: man separates himself from nature. What does he separate himself from, what is this “nature”? Sensu stricto, man separates himself not from nature as a beyond-human ontotopical region, existing in itself and for itself; he separates himself from the primordial magic merging with nature. In the horizon of a magic (i.e. pre-human) look at the world, nature does not unclose itself as nature yet, i.e. as beyond-human reality and as thingly reality. To a magic look, nature is not yet a thing, or an entirety of things,

96

Arvydas Šliogeris

because each thing supposes an individual “I”, so also the counter-position of the “I” and the Thing, of man and a thing. Risking of being slightly inaccurate, let us say like this: to the magic look of a pre-human, who is not separated himself from nature yet, nature, or more precisely the reality that we call nature, is egotopical, i.e. saturated with human characteristics and maximally anthropomorphized. Primordial nature is the entirety of magic anthropomorphic senses and meanings, a humanly egocentric substitute for the thingly reality, a substitute, which adumbrates the reality itself and shows up in the shapes of various good and evil spirits, demons, divinities, and other “subjects” of sense. Magic senses are anonymous, they are not linked to an individual subject, person, or thing, because in a magic image anything can be anything, anything can become anything, every entity has in itself dozens of anonymous senses, therefore itself is also anonymous: everything is one, and nothing is in-formed, defined, substantial, and substantially individualized. Magic senses are a reference neither to an individual person nor to an individual thing, they are even not a reference to the individual relation of man and the thing. In the realm of magic senses, there is no author or authorial contact with the thing. So, what do these senses convey? They convey a relation in general or pure relation, which in its nature is instrumental and defines anonymously the self-preservation instinct. To the magical look, nature is the entirety not of things, but of pure relations, a huge repository of magic senses and of entities that personify them. To merge with nature is to hover in the mirages of pure relations and magic senses. But pure relation is not any thing, and the magic sense is not linked with a thingly or human individual. Consequently, to separate oneself from nature is not to leave the realm of definite things or entities, the beyond-human reality of thingly substances: to separate oneself from nature is to separate oneself from the realm of pure relation, to emigrate from the universe of magic senses. How does it come about? They say that man opposes himself to nature. But nature so far is merely a universe of pure relations and magic senses, it does not have yet the shape of a thing, it does not exist yet as a substantial monolith, it is still lucid and empty. To put it paradoxically: the realm of pure relation is anonymously diversified emptiness. And to oppose oneself to emptiness, to oppose oneself to the non-thingly realm of pure relation and magic sense would mean to oppose oneself to that which has no being, which is not, which is impossible in principle. By separating himself from the realm of pure relation, for the first time man establishes that which he on the whole can oppose himself to, i.e. beyond-human being, nature as the entirety of tangibly individualized substances or substantial individuals. In this respect, “nature”, as thingly reality, is constituted by man himself. Therefore, we may state that in the classical situation there is no ontotopical difference between technei onta and physei onta: every individual thingness, natural as well as artificial, is moulded by man. “Nature”, as the entirety of things, as thingly substantial reality, and as a diversified ensemble of substantial individuals, is

The Thing and Art

97

man’s “creation”, just as “culture” is. So, using the terms precisely, we should state that man not “separates himself from nature”, but isolates himself from the realm of pure relation. How does he do that? He builds a wall of familiar, humanized things between himself and the realm of pure relation. Homeland is that substantially articulated locality on this side of the wall, and beyond it, the realm of pure relation extends: to the Greeks, it is the kingdom of titans, demons and spirits, sirens and Lotus-eaters, Lestrygonians and Cyclopes – the ontotopical region of barbarian existence. The counterposition in general becomes possible only in such a situation, only when one stands in front of the wall of substantial individuals. You cannot counterposition yourself to what does not exist, to what does not have a shape of substantial being, to the Great Anonym. You can counter-position yourself only to what is: to being, individualized substantially, to the wall of substantial individuals. This wall to a Greek was a synonym of being itself. Being unclosed itself to him only as the entirety of substantial things, of phenomena of being. Everything that was not thingly, not individual, not confined in a form – pure relation and pure senses – amounted to non-being to a Greek. Being, as the being of familiar things, i.e. of phenomena of being, is precisely that wall that man erects between himself and non-being and himself becomes a gardener of being. And becoming the gardener of being, man becomes an overnatural being, i.e. no longer a relational anonym, defined only biologically, no longer a flash on the glimmering surface of the veil of maya, but an absolute reality – a phenomenon of being and a substantial individual. Let us emphasize again that man’s entrance into the classical situation, his becoming a substantial individual, i.e. a true human, is possible only because a beyond-human, though humanized thing also becomes a substantial individual. The counter-position of man and the thing at the same time is the absolute union of a substantially individualized human and a substantially individualized thing. Western philosophers expressed that union like this: there is no subject without object and no object without subject. Such a counter-position and union is exactly the classical touch of man with the world. We already know that its metaphysical nucleus is the substantial individual or tangibly individualized substance. Deviating a bit from the path of our thought, we shall say that in the East the substantial individual has not isolated itself from the realm of pure relation. The easterner’s touch with the world has stayed magic, anonymous, and controlled by collective images, naive anthropomorphism, mysticism, and phantasmagorias. Therefore, neither theoretical contemplation, nor the “I”/Thing counter-position has appeared in the East; nor has philosophy emerged in the precise Greek–European sense of the word, i.e. as an independent manifestation of theoretical contemplation, based on rational thinking and entirely detached from the magic, religious, and common-sense pragmatics. From the viewpoint of a Greek, the easterner’s touch with the

Arvydas Šliogeris

98

world has remained barbarian, and the Eastern culture is non-classical not sometimes, but in principle, ontotopically.

8 Now let us get back to those familiar things in the classical situation and ask such a question: what is the relation between a “simple” classical thing and a classical work of art; how can an everyday familiar thing be transferred to the realm of art? Can we transform “inartistic” things into works of art in the classical situation; is the distance between the thing and its artistic equivalent long? These questions compel us to get back, at least for a while, to the analysis of a familiar thing. It has been said that a familiar thing, as a substantial individual, has no inner structure, it is simple, elementary, it is not made up of more elementary parts, it is monolithic, without hollows or cracks, it is a solid phenomenon of being without inlays of non-being. So there is no contradiction in a familiar thing between its essence and its appearance, between the depth and the surface, between how the thing “looks” and what it is “actually”. More precisely, there is no discrepancy between the thing’s “semblance” and its depth, between that which is visible and that which is invisible. If we call the surface of a thing, its outside the form, and its invisible depth, or its essence the content, then we may say like this: the form of a familiar thing utterly corresponds to its content. Why is it so? That which we call the thing’s content, its essence, its invisible side, or the supersensible depth, is nothing else but the thing’s human sense, i.e. the sense projected by man towards the being of the thing. The sense of a familiar thing is elementary, since the thing itself, as a substantial individual, is elementary. That sense, filling the depth of the thing and coinciding with its content, reveals itself in its entirety, without any remainder, on the surface of the familiar thing, thus coinciding with its semblance and appearance. While seeing the semblance of a familiar thing, at the same time, without any extra effort, we see also its elementary and individualized sense. The sense coincides with the outward form of the thing. We understand the thing by seeing it. Having cast a look at the thing, we immediately and directly understand it. The comprehension of the thing’s content is connected with the thing’s sensible and plastic subsistence. To understand the thing we do not need to think analytically, or to cognize, or to thematize its structural parts, or to hull out its phenomenological profiles; in short, we do not need to project towards the thing any extra supersensible, magic, or cognitive senses. The sense of a familiar thing is as elementary as the thing itself, it is as limited and “small” as limited and “small” is the thing itself, an in-formed monolith of being. The form of the thing is unambiguously full of sense, and the sense of the thing is unambiguously in-formed. There is nothing in the thing that would not have a form, its depth is not amorphous; on the contrary, the depth

The Thing and Art

99

has its inner form, and that inner form is none other than the duplicate of the semblance or of the outer form. The entire thing is on the surface, its semblance is not an empty appearance in which some mysterious, inarticulate depth or the “true essence” is lurking; the entire depth is on the surface, it coincides entirely with the semblance, the correspondence between the depth and the semblance is not relative, but absolute, not accidental, but integral. The thing “means” only what it is, its sense coincides with its being. The semblance of the thing is not a reference to something what would not coincide with the thing itself, with its form and semblance. Familiar things are not any symbols; they are namely nonsymbolic things. Since the supersensible content of such a nonsymbolic thing coincides entirely with its sensible form, the content itself can exist and be comprehended only sensibly and plastically. The sense of a familiar thing also exists only sensibly and plastically, only in an individualized form. This situation can be called ontomorphism: the semblance and the form are substantial, and the substantial depth is in-formed. A classical thing is a thing without senses that are transcendent to its semblance and form. Yet, to a specialist of ancient culture, this statement can seem of much doubt, if not worse. Indeed, if a classical thing does not have any depth, transcendent to its semblance, if its outer form entirely coincides with its inner content and its sense with its sensibly evident being, then why do Greek philosophers perform the movement of transcendency, why do Greek philosophers construct the ontotopical region of transcendent entities, from where and why do the supersensible Parmenidian Sphaira and the otherworldly Platonian kingdom of eidai appear, why do the Olympian gods, invisible to the bodily eyes, appear; in short, why does the monumental ontotopical region of the pure transcendent take form, the region that is externalized not less than the visible sensible cosmos? It is not difficult to answer this question. It has been said that the Greeks built a wall of familiar things to rail themselves off the menacing realm of pure relation, off the demons of nature and evil spirits, off the furies of change, time, and decline, which annihilate the being of the thing and man; in a word, off the powers that send death. But this does not mean that the Greeks were in oblivion about the death demons and the ghost of the Great Anonym. The Greeks, like no other nation, looked at death without any glasses, without any illusions, directly and with open eyes. They saw distinctly the fragility of man and the fragility of familiar things, torn out of the jaws of Cronus for a short blink and placed in the space of the homeland. They knew well that the substantial individuality of the thing and man is an ideal and not a fact, that it is a norm and not presence, that the substantial being is that which is to be striven for, which requires constant tension and titanic endeavour and not that which is presented as a gift from an unknown god. The protection of the substantial individuality is the greatest hardship and constant struggle and not wimpish lightness and passive indulgence in the harmony of the cosmos. The Greeks never were

100

Arvydas Šliogeris

aestheticians. Their homeland to them is not a museum, but an arena of the struggle for being. The preservation of being is a gigantomachy, so vividly impressed in the Olympian religion and so strikingly depicted in the battles of the Olympians with the Titans, i.e. with the demons, personifying the powers of the Great Anonym. This is why next to the first wall of familiar things, the Greeks built the second one, the wall of supersensible substantial individuals, which separated the homeland space more reliably from the realm of pure relation and from its demons. The first wall was not strong enough, because sensible things are fragile and friable, because they are not capable of withstanding the aggression of the demons of pure relation. The second wall was laid of immortal, eternal, stable, and indefectible things, of ideal substantial individuals. Thus appeared the space of the pure transcendent, like some proof armour covering the homeland, the cosmos of sensible individuals. What was this space of the pure transcendent? Was it an analogue of the realm of pure relation, or was it a formless, thingless, anonymous realm, an amorphous ocean of magic senses, or was it maybe emptiness? Is the realm of the classical transcendent similar at least a bit to the Eastern supersensible realm, to Nirvana or Tao, to non-being, in a word, to the Great Anonym? Oriental transcendence was the analogue of the realm of pure relation. What is more, the Eastern transcendent legalized, consecrated, and idealized that realm. To the East, the highest reality is namely Non-Being, the Great Anonym, and the ultimate purpose of man, his most monumental ideal is to merge with Non-Being, to melt in the ocean of pure relation, to shake off one’s own individuality at any cost. In the East, every individuality, of man or of a thing, is considered an illusion, pure appearance, or even a kind of immorality, a source of anguish or curse. Looking for ways how to free oneself from misery, Buddha Gautama recommended only one – to shake off one’s individuality in some way, to submerge the individual being of man or a thing into the realm of Non-Being. Non-Being, as the ultimate purpose of an individual, is the most fundamental principle of Eastern culture, the epicentre of the entire so-called Eastern wisdom. The transcendence of the Greeks, as the space of the ideal and the absolute ontotopical landmark, was utterly different. It was contrary to the transcendence of the East. The epicentre of Greek wisdom is being in the shape of the substantial individual. The principle of being coincides with the principle of thingly individuation. The pure transcendent is not a copy of the realm of pure relation, not an analogue of the Great Anonym, but on the contrary, the antipode of the non-thingly realm. The transcendent of the Greeks was thingly and individualized; that was the kingdom of substantial entities as substantial forms. We can call such an ontotopical attitude panmorphism. The entire space, sensible as well as supersensible, of the classical is filled with the forms of familiar things, with the being of substantial individuals. Even mathematical relations, which seem to be an utterly thingless realm, are reified, they are identified with the harmony of the

The Thing and Art

101

heavenly spheres and the movement of heavenly bodies. Pure relation is thus transformed into its opposite, the thing, non-being is thus transformed into being, non-substantial reality into substantial. Thus appears the very principle of trans-formation. The classical Beyond, as a thingly transcendent, is neither amorphous nor pseudo-morphous; it is namely ontomorphous and also polymorphous, which is characteristic first of all of the Greeks. Consequently, the sensible On-This-Side and the supersensible Beyond, the visible and invisible cosmoses, are identical to the Greeks. The supersensible ontotopical area was a duplicate of the sensible cosmos, of the landscape of familiar things. The area of the pure transcendent is an image of the homeland. So, the area of the Greek pure transcendent is articulated plastically and substantially, it is individualized like this world. Therefore, metaphysical things and metaphysical people (gods) are as close and familiar as the things and people, fellow-countrymen, of the sensible cosmos; therefore, the Greek gods are so like mortals with all their passions, weaknesses, and imperfections; therefore, they are bodily, sculptural, and easily interchangeable with the sensible equivalent. And most importantly, metaphysical things are as elementary, unambiguous, and with a minimal sense as sensible things. They are without the symbolic depth, either, which would not correspond to their semblance and surface. There is utter harmony between their form and content, semblance and sense, the visible and the invisible. Each Greek god “means” only what he “is”, its meaning is utterly conveyed by its being, its entire depth is on the surface and inseparable from its semblance. This is why none of the Olympians is a mere symbol, a reference to something what it itself is not. The transcendent, constructed by the philosophers, was ontomorphic as well and did not differ structurally from the Olympian kingdom. The Platonic eidos is namely the semblance of a sensible thing or a visible form, turned into a substantial entity. Each eidos has its direct sensible equivalent, each metaphysical form has its sensible analogue, i.e. the form of a sensible thing. The bounds of the sense of an eidos utterly coincide with the bounds of the sense of a sensible thing. The eidos is namely the form (semblance) of a familiar sensible thing, projected, by a movement of eidetic transcending, towards the Beyond and acquiring the status of an eternal thing, eternal individual, or eternal form. The sensible equivalent of the eidos of “treeness” is a sensibly evident tree, the equivalent of “tableness” a sensibly evident table, and there is not more sense in “treeness” or “tableness” than it is in a living tree or in this particular sensibly evident table, at which philosophizing young men are sipping light wine. The eidai are as individualized, elementary, and substantial as the Olympian gods or familiar sensible things. They differ from the latter only in one trait – they are more substantial. They are substantial individuals par excellence. That is why, they are maximally elementary, maximally familiar, and maximally plastic; that is why, their form utterly corresponds to their content, their surface to their depth, their sense to their thingly expression. They are

Arvydas Šliogeris

102

absolutely of a single meaning and a single sense. Their sense is fully blended with their being. All classical, i.e. familiar, things, sensible as well as supersensible, are plastic individuals. Their sense is also plastic, because it is directly transferred to the sensible, plastically individualized equivalent. Such things are not only an ideal object for artistic depiction; they by themselves, still being simple trivial things, are works of art already. That is why the Greeks did not banish works of art to museums, did not allot them a separate ontotopical area, did not fence them within a stall of aesthetics, and did not separate artistic creation from crafts. An artist was an artisan, and an artisan was an artist: both created familiar things, and the creation of those things, as an authorial union with the thing, was acquaintance; both had to have the same skills, the same knowledge, the same experience, called by the Greeks by one word technƝ. The artist and the artisan were technites – creators of substantial things. Even a philosopher theoretician was in his own way a technites, for he also created substantial, true, supersensible things. In this respect, technƝ, practical contemplation, coincides with logos, theoretical contemplation. Logos is not some supplement to technƝ; logos is the same technƝ, only oriented towards the supersensible ontotopical region. Sculptors, the masters of Kerameikos, painters, architects, and craftspeople built the first wall of sensibly evident and familiar things, which separated the territory of the homeland from the realm of pure relation; poets and philosophers built the second wall of supersensible substantial individuals, of familiar metaphysical things, which had to withstand an attack of the furies of pure relation in case the first wall would crumble. Man was surrounded from all sides by the wall of being without any cracks and hollows of non-being. Being is, non-being is not – this is how that pansubstantial attitude was expressed by Parmenides of Elea. Once it was being said: nature does not like emptiness. Actually, man is afraid of emptiness, for emptiness is a synonym of non-being. And most important is not that emptiness arouses fear; most important is that a classical man does not acknowledge the ontotopical priority of emptiness. Everything is filled with being, and namely with tangibly substantial being. Even the space of pure relation is reified and substantialized, relativity is transformed to its opposite, absoluteness, and anonymous senses are covered by the hull of thingness, are tamed and elementarized. Classical soil matures the nut of being.

9 The classical touch with the world, the ontotopical nucleus of which is the principle of a thingly link with the substantial individual, appeared in ancient Greece, so we may state that the Greeks are a classical nation par excellence. Let us not ask any more questions about what the particular historical development of the principle of the classical was in the civilization

The Thing and Art

103

of Antiquity, when and where this principle reached its apogee, what its most elaborate and perfect manifestations were. This is a task for cultural historians. Let us say only thus much that the principle of the classical was universal: it covered all spheres of human existence and creation and in one way or another destined all modes of the human touch with the world. This principle is the roots out of which grew the entire tree of ancient culture. But we would err in thinking that the principle of the classical is a mere historical phenomenon, which blossomed together with classical Greece and withered with the start of the sunset of ancient civilization. Of course, the crisis of ancient culture was also in a way the crisis of the principle of the classical, but after the collapse of that culture the principle did not disappear. It was taken over and preserved by the culture of Western Europe. This continuity, as a historical phenomenon, is of no interest to us, either. It is a wide, separate topic, having been ventilated thousands of times. We shall suffice in mentioning only several obvious facts of the history of culture. The emergence of the so-called culture of the Middle Ages is a new historical cycle. The initial substrate of this culture is barbarian from the viewpoint of the man of Antiquity. The culture of the Middle Ages grew up out of barbarian, pre-classical soil, i.e. out of the primordial merging with pure nature. It would be naive to think that there is no pit between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, that the continuity was even and direct. The culture of the Middle Ages is not a mechanical prolongation of ancient culture. Yet it is also obvious that the culture of the Middle Ages was not primordial, that it is a legal heir of ancient civilization; so, the principle of the classical was preserved and, having gradually overcome the rudiments of barbarianism, became the fundamental cultural principle of Western Europe. If it is meaningful to speak about Western culture as a peculiar and relatively secluded cultural organism, it is only because it grew up on the base, bricked by ancient Greeks, i.e. on the principle of substantial individuality. In this respect, the idea of the classical, or to put it more exactly, the classical touch of man with the world is overhistorical and timeless. The classical is the unchangeable, elementary ontotopical nucleus of Western Europe. It can be overloaded with historical trash, can be dislodged to periphery, can be even forgotten and not seen anymore on the surface of historical becoming, it can become unconscious, out of reflection, but it always remains at least as an underwater current, as a peripheral background, as a seed, fallen to the soil in late autumn, snowed in and frosted up during winter, yet not withered away, and in spring coming to life and awakening only to blossom anew. The principle of the classical was first of all preserved by the Middle Ages philosophy and theology. It was concentrated into paradigmatic substance, into the absolute metaphysical thing and absolute substantial individual: such was the representation of the transcendent God, such was the monosubstantial religion, such was the poly-substantial philosophy of the Middle Ages, in which the substantialistic attitude prevailed, too. The ontotopical

Arvydas Šliogeris

104

region of tangibly individualized substances, of metaphysical things was preserved. Certainly, these metaphysical things of the Middle Ages in their semblance, form, ontotopical and existential sense differed from those of the Greeks, but the most important matter was taken over: these things preserved their semblance, form, substantiality, and elementariness. Most importantly, there remained the identity of semblance and sense, of form and content, of depth and surface. The epoch of the Renaissance did not need to rediscover the principle of the classical, it had only to validate it, to universalize, and to give back sensible evidentness to it, i.e. to give it a shape of a work of art, as of a sensibly individualized thing, the shape, in which it had originated in Greece. In the epoch of the Renaissance, the principle of the classical was restored only as the principle of plastic construction of things. And only in this respect may we regard the Italian Renaissance, as well as all modern times, as the revival of antiquity; and the metaphysical forms of the principle of the classical generally never vanished; the Middle Ages guarded them sometimes in a more pure shape than Antiquity or modern times. Consequently, classical painting of modern times restores not the principle of the classical itself (sensibly individualized), but only one mode of its manifestation, although the plastic art of modern times is not a mere paraphrase of the plastic art of Antiquity. Yet what the specifics are, by which the stages of the development of classical plastic arts differ, is again not the business of ours, but of historians of art. We shall content ourselves with a simple statement: in the painting of modern times, the principle of the classical remains as the fundamental constant, as the mass of elementary theoretical meanings, about which we have spoken in the beginning of this essay. Therefore, we shall proceed to classical painting itself and shall try to uncover its ontotopical parameters.

10 Let us sum up briefly what we have thought over: since classical things were familiar, thus of minimal sense, their semblance expressed their entire elementary sense, and their sensible form their entire supersensible content; since the entire human sense and the entire content of those things were directly interchangeable with the sensible equivalent, they not only were akin to the work of art, but also could be easily transferred to the space of the work of art sensu stricto and acquire the status of a work of art. The kinship between simple, trivial classical things, revealing themselves to the doxical look as utensils, and their dubbing in the work of art was conveyed by the theory of mimesis. Art is mimesis, the mimicking of nature, – such attitude, having originated in Greece, later, as a dominant, went through entire Western culture, up to the modern period. The preliminary condition of the mimetic kinship between a simple thing and a work of art is an authorial

The Thing and Art

105

touch of man as a substantial individual with the thing as a substantial individual. The shaping of a simple utensil as well as of a work of art is the reification of the creative powers of a concrete individual (author). This thing is created by this human, namely he is the author of this thing, and into this thing he puts this sense, also elementary, easily surveyed like the form of the authorially created thing. A thing of art differs from a simple thing only by that it has still less sense than its real prototype; to be precise, it loses those possible senses that are in a simple thing as a utensil, which functions in a sphere of practical relations and doxical look. We shall try to explicate this thought by a specific example. Let us assume that a picture shows a tree. The real tree, opening itself to a practical look, is drawn into the orbit of instrumental manipulations and in general can have many senses, the variation of which depends on who and in what practical situation is looking at it. The tree for a practical look “is” that what can be made of it. And we can make many things of it: a bed, table, ship mast, fence, spoon, bowl, arrow, etc. All what can be made of this tree is exactly the mass of the instrumental senses of this tree. Meanwhile this tree, after having been depicted in a painting, seems to lose all instrumental senses. Only one sense remains, which opens itself to theoretical contemplation, – it is the “treeness” of this tree, its individualized being, its unique form. The being of a thing in a work of art blankets the thing’s instrumentality, therefore the elementary sense of this being, coinciding with the form, blankets all possible instrumental senses, or technically speaking, reduces them to an elementary sense of the being of the thing, which, in regard to the set of the instrumental senses, comes close to senselessness, although, as it has been said now several times, it does not disappear completely. Only being-by-itself could be senseless, but since being exists only in the shape of a thingly individual, it always exists as an elementary sense of this thing. Another example: a picture shows a human being in action. Let us say that it is a girl reading a letter (a picture by Vermeer). What is the difference between this girl in the picture and the living girl? The answer is very simple. The living girl not only reads letters, but also does a lot of other things: eats, sleeps, tambours, reads romances, communicates with other people; in a word, she lives. Each of her look, gesture, step, action is full of sense, life involves her in various situations and in the fields of different senses. Naturally, it is impossible to transfer all conceivable senses of her life into a work of art; besides, there is simply no need to do that. The painter distinguishes only one, elementary sense and transfers it into the work of art. And only through this elementary sense does the being of the girl unclose itself, only such an elementary sense can be plastically individualized and substituted with a sensible equivalent. Of course, in the picture, a human can be shown in various situations and actions, involved in various relationships with things and people, but in each case the depicted situation, action, or relation must have an elementary, defined, and unambiguously evident sense, since only such a sense can be

106

Arvydas Šliogeris

turned into a sensibly individualized form, only then does the form not contradict to the content, only then does the sense coincide with the thing and merge with the being of the thing as a substantial individual. Therefore, we may call the classical painter’s look at things naive: he believes in what he sees, he trusts in the semblance and surface of things, because he believes that the surface of things is adequate to their depth and that the sensible form of a thing entirely conveys the supersensible content of it, and thereby the essence of it , too. He does not try to look for, and does not expect of finding, anything that would differ in principle from the surface of the thing. The principle of linear perspective has epitomized such a trust of an artist in the surface of things. A classical picture is always open, it draws a viewer in, as if by inviting to come inside the space of the picture where simple, familiar, reliable, and close things or people are placed. The space of the picture seems to extend the real space of the viewer, like the space of a theatre stage extends the space of the hall. The entire picture space is easily surveyed, every thing in it has its easily identified place, therefore itself is also easily identified. The relations between things are also stable and static. All things “mean” only what they are sensibly, directly, and evidently. Certainly, it does not mean that there were no symbolic, allegoric, or even mystical elements in classical painting. Everybody knows well that classical painting in many of its instances was historical. Painters used mythological, historical, literary plots. Such historicism flourished most in the painting of Italian renaissance. But its apogee and most exact expression classical painting reached where it was least symbolic, where the sensory view was not a mere reference to what it was not itself, where the being of an individual thing was not a transmitter of meanings and senses, which were transcendent to sensibly individualized being, where the sensible form entirely merged with the supersensible content and was not merely an empty vessel, which had to be filled with invisible meanings and senses by the beholder, and at last where the sensible view was not a projection or mirror of anonymous meanings and therefore “meant” not more than it was possible to see directly, with the naked eye. The classical and symbolism are matters negating each other. The more symbolism is in the picture, the more the visible sensory view impels the viewer to look for additional senses that cast into the shade the nominal sense of “this particular is” of an individualized thing and that swallow and melt its evident being, its sensibly in-formed standing-in-itself, the more we depart from the classical look at the world, from the plastic expression and elementariness of that look. It has already been said that the sense of a substantial individual is elementary, and that which is elementary cannot be symbolic, as it does not have a two-ply bottom and a background. The elementary sense of a substantial individual inhibits the direct being and sensible form of that individual from transcending, whereas every symbol maximizes such transcending. If a thing reveals itself to us only as a symbol, we do not see its direct, sensibly individualized being any longer and do not

The Thing and Art

107

see its initial sense either, which corresponds to the direct being of this thing. When looking at a work of art as at a symbol, we annihilate it ontotopically, because in place of the direct being of the thing we put our relation with that thing, i.e. senses that are transcendent (symbolic) to the being of the thing. But we cannot call Western classical painting realistic, either. Mimesis is not mimicking of an accidental thingly individual and not depiction of a sensible worldly fact. The thing’s individuality should not be confused with its character, i.e. with those traits that are characteristic to this thing. Accidental characteristics of “this” thing are not substantial: the character of the thing and the semblance, characteristic only to it, bring out and complement its substantial individuality, yet they cannot be the substitute for that individuality. After all, a substantial individual is not an empirical fact, after all, the individuality of a thing as a phenomenon of being first is determined not by empirically accidental characteristics, but by those basic elements that constitute its sensible semblance, its eidos in the Platonic, and its form in the Aristotelian, sense. An artist, stationing a work of art as a substantial individual, distinguishes and stabilizes its form, which most adequately expresses its essence and being. In this respect, it has been said that the substantial individual is an ideal, but a sensibly correlated ideal and not some supersensible, abstract metaphysical entity. Therefore, Western classical painting was idealistic, though it does not mean that it was metaphysical, that is to say that a classical artist depicted pure ideas or some transcendental things, perceived only by intellect. The object of artistic depiction was an idealized thing. What do we mean by this? After all, every image of a thing is already the idealization of the thing; even when simply looking at a thing we idealize it, i.e. we simplify and schematize. We should not identify artistic idealization with such schematization, although, of course, we cannot do without it, either. In the horizon of a classical look, the things painted are idealized doubly: by applying the principle of selection and by using a certain painting technique. The idealizing nature of classical painting impelled to select the things depicted. Not every trivial thing could become an object of artistic representation, not every thing served in fixing and stabilizing the substantiality of an individual, only that which of itself already was beautiful, perfect, i.e. close to the ideal of the substantial individual. That is why the object par excellence of classical painting was man, since namely the individuality of man is most substantial and can be most easily transferred to a sensible equivalent. Of all familiar things, man knows himself best. To get acquainted first of all means to get acquainted with a human. The belief in the paradigmatic substantiality of a human was inseparable from the traditional belief in the substantial nature of the soul. Already in Antiquity, a thought, eventually consolidated by Christianity, was gradually taking shape: the soul of a human is simple, indivisible, unchanging, and therefore immortal. The identity of man as a substantial individual was seen as the identity of man as the subject of an a-tomic soul. That is why almost all space of classical

108

Arvydas Šliogeris

painting was occupied by the human and human matters, which ousted nonhuman things as a secondary reality. The latter were mostly appearing only as a background or a stage on which a human existential drama took place. True though that other genres of pictorial art, still life and landscape, were relatively independent. But a landscape could not be any, it had to comply with certain ideal norms: it had to be beautiful, harmonious, pictorial, in short, idealized, brought close to man, hominized, and tamed. We shall almost not find a landscape without a human, at least as a peripheral element of it, in classical painting. Classical still life usually also shows idealized, close-to-man things, which seem as if asking to be picked, as if dedicating themselves to man, as if being ashamed of their beyond-humanness and hiding their obstinate standing-in-themselves. When idealizing things, a classical painter makes them prettier and thus maximizes their substantial individuality. The beauty of things, identical to their being, is supplemented by prettiness, which ought to emphasize the being of a thing, to draw attention to it as to an unusual, infrequent, exceptional matter. Certainly, such a selective idealization was not the same in different schools of classical painting and in different periods of its historical development. Say, the masters of Italian Renaissance did not know yet the secret that disclosed itself to the Dutch painters of the 17th century: that each thing is beautiful by itself, that a familiar thing, as a phenomenon of being, already by itself is the place and source of beauty, which is identical to its individualized being, there is no need whatsoever therefore to look for extraordinary, matching more the ideal, pretty things, pretty people, great events, there is no need for crutches of mythology, history, or literature; not only gods, demigods, mythological figures or heroes have substantial individuality. Common people and simple things can be the object of painting as well if only their sense is elementary enough, if only it is transferred entirely to the sensible form of the thing. Accordingly, in Dutch painting, if compared to Italian, there is less prettiness, but more real beauty; accordingly, Dutch painting more precisely, freely, and universally expressed the main principle of the classical – substantial individuality. Yet, this does not mean that the Dutch entirely rejected idealizing, without which classical painting generally could not do. They softened the first element of the principle of idealizing, the selection of the objects of painting, but retained the arsenal of technical means, characteristic to entire classical painting. The most important technical trait of classical painting is the primacy of drawing over colour. By a perfect drawing, strict contour, elaborate system of values, gradation of light and shades, in a word, modelling, a classical painter most adequately spotlights the individuality of the thing depicted, distinguishes it out of an anonymous background, separates it from other things, and wraps it up in the diapers of substantial individuality and insularity. On the plane of the picture, the thing gets volume, the third dimension, depth, and a sculptural shape. And all this is very essential, since the thing, painted by a classical painter, is not a hint on a

The Thing and Art

109

certain being of the thing, not a pictorial substitute for the thing itself, not even the “visual” of the thing, but namely the thing itself, the real thing, more real than its prototype, the thing, having more being than the original. Plato was wrong when he accused artists for having to deal with the most illusory appearance, with the shadow of a shadow. The classical painter never thought so: to him, the painted thing is not an ontotopically secondary, or at least second-rate, reality. When creating a thing of art, he expects to enhance the intensity of the being of a simple thing. To him, to draw a thing first means to single out its elementary sense and being from the anonymous mass of senses and thus to stabilize that being. The primacy of drawing over colour is exactly the technical analogue of substantial individuality and thereby the idealization of the thing as well. That is why we have said that classical painting by its nature was not realistic. And when the orientation towards a realistic depiction of actuality starts to manifest itself or predominate, we may say that the ontotopical foundation of that painting starts to crumble and erosion begins, leading towards entirely new results, which are inorganic to the classical and which reveal a touch with the world, utterly unknown to classical painting. But we shall not speak about this yet. Finally, striving to spotlight the ontotopical parameters of Western classical painting still more, let us compare it with the Eastern one, first with Japanese and Chinese painting. The main protagonist of a work of Western classical painting is the thing as a substantial individual and phenomenon of being, the picture plane is saturated with substantially articulated and individualized being, and the background only brings out the persistent standing-in-itself of the substantial individual, whereas the ontotopical landmark and main character of an Eastern picture is emptiness, non-thingly reality, to put it simply, non-being. The brush in the hand of an Eastern painter, when touching the thingly surface, seems to rupture a hole into the non-thingly depth, into the realm of pure relation, and the painter (and the viewer along with him) plunges into the waves of the Great Anonym. Thingly forms here do not have any independent meaning, they merely bring out the background-emptiness, being in this case is merely a reference to non-being, form to formlessness, an individual to anonymity, and a familiar thing is merely a symbol of the Great Anonym, therefore it is not familiar ontotopically. Every dab is a mystical act, a magical overcoming of the counter-position of the “I” and the Thing, a leap into the realm of magical meanings, consequently, a leap into non-being. Meanwhile, a brushstroke to a Western painter is, although an intuitive, nevertheless a rational act, which is not a bit mystical or magical. Contrary to the Eastern painter, the westerner, while drawing a thing, tears it out of the realm of anonymous meanings, overcomes any magic, and stands the thing in the field of the “I”/Thing tension. Without any attempt to modernize Eastern painting (although, as it is known, Eastern painting greatly influenced the founders of postclassical, modern Western painting, and it is standing at the cradle of modern painting), we may call it impressionistic. An Eastern painter

110

Arvydas Šliogeris

paints very quickly: with a sniper brushstroke he as if fixates the momentary view of the plot painted, as if stops the moment, preserving its entire dynamism, incompletion, indefiniteness, and openness to further change. There are no things in an Eastern painting, there are only vibrations of thingly shadows; things are disappearing or appearing, emerging out of emptiness only to merge back in it again, thus they have neither individuality nor defined form. It is not by chance that a paradigmatic plot of an Eastern painting is a vanishing bamboo. During the painting of such an impressionistic visual of a vanishing thing, of such a blink of disappearance, there cannot be any corrections or refinements, for the moment does not repeat itself, it vanishes in non-being. So, to capture the configuration of a moment, one needs to paint in a flash. The same impressionistic touch with the world is evidently shown by Japanese haikus and tankas. They stop a fleeting and vanishing moment, too, and namely out of disappearance, out of momentary impressions, out of the vibrations of vision and feeling they extract the entire slightly melancholy (since everything is temporary) aesthetical charm of the world. Aestheticism is the most radical opposite of a substantial look at the world. We may call the entire art of the East, including painting, processional and aestheticistic: it is the fixation not of being, but of becoming. On the other hand, Eastern painting is decorative and phenomenological. It is not the thing itself, not its resting-in-itself and substantially stable being that is painted, but its view, the sense of which is merely decorative; consequently, the goal is not beauty, but prettiness. In classical Western painting, prettiness is an additional element, which highlights the form of a thing, i.e. highlights its being and beauty, the beauty that relates to the being of the thing itself; and the decorativeness, so the prettiness, of a thing in Eastern painting is the end in itself. Forthright hedonism and instrumentalism are always inseparable elements of aestheticism. For instance, Hokusai paints one hundred views of Mount Fuji. We shall emphasize: he paints not Fujisan itself, but namely a view of Fuji, he paints profiles of Fuji, to use the language of phenomenologists. Not only a hundred, but also a thousand views-profiles of Fuji can be painted, yet which view of those hundreds or thousands will be the representative of the being of Fuji itself? The answer is obvious: not any of them, because to the painter as well as to the viewer Mount Fuji is a means of aesthetical pleasure, it does not exist as an absolute reality and as a substantial individual. Mount Fuji opens itself only as a momentary concentrate of infinite profiles and of perspectives of human vision, in the terms of phenomenologists, as a noeme, i.e. not as a substantial integrity, but as a batch of anonymous senses. Ultimately, Fuji is just a hieroglyph, a symbol of the realm of pure relation. It is merely a decoration, appearance without essence, a form without an adequate content; consequently, if even a form, then a non-substantial one. And here we have another, Western, painter, painting tens and hundreds of times the same mountain. It is Paul Cézanne, standing in front of the Sainte-

The Thing and Art

111

Victoire massif. Is Cézanne, just like Hokusai, painting only a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire? Oh, how good it would be, if only a view had to be drawn! After all, it is so easy to do that, it is so easy to transfer to the canvas ephemeral profiles of a mountain, it is so easy to paint nicely, decoratively, virtuosically. Yes, it is quite easy; therefore, this easiness breeds works that Cézanne himself contemptuously called painting of castrates. But what should be done for the painted mountain to be more real and have more being than its real prototype? what should be done for the mountain to become eternal? how to paint the sole, yet absolute form of the mountain, which would express the elementary being of the mountain itself? How to convey the sole, yet absolute sense of the mountain itself as this individual? how to identify this sense with the sensibly evident being of the mountain? Cézanne’s task is much more difficult than that of Hokusai, even though they both paint the same thing. Hokusai paints a view of the mountain, and Cézanne, with fanatic persistence, tries to transfer to the picture plane the being of the mountain itself, its monumental standing-in-itself, its individuality and substantial weight. Again and again he tears and tramples to mud to his mind unsuccessful works, starts anew, but vainly again, and thus to the very end. The painted mountain is not a mere decoration to Cézanne, he makes no attempt to paint nicely for the painting to be pleasant to the eye, attractive, prettified, refined. Meanwhile to Hokusai, these are decorative elements, a view pleasant to the eye, virtuosic drawing, and polished facture that count. A picture is drawn only as a decoration. So, the hedonistic principle dominates in Eastern painting, and this painting is eventually only an applied one. A picture is always merely a means, but not a purpose in itself, merely an aesthetical value. It is not to be prayed to, as, for instance, to the characters of the Michelangelian murals, it is to be savoured, it is merely utilized as an aesthetical utensil next to other more or less aesthetical utensils. In the present-day words, an Eastern painting is just an element of an interior, a colourful dab on a folding screen, fan, or wall. We have mentioned that the classical in the West rises from sacred things. We may add that Western painting was sacred as well, and remained sacred even when it was secularized, when it was separated from church, mythology, and religion, like, for instance, Dutch painting. Sacredness is not necessarily related to some mysticism or religion, it can be secular as well. It has been said that sacred things are familiar things, which have roots in the homeland soil; therefore, even the most simple and trivial things can have, and do have, a sacred meaning. Our fathers used to regard bread and land on which they lived and died as sacred. Exactly in this respect sacred was Western classical painting, too. Sacredness is a synonym of the being of a substantial individual. Consequently, Western classical painting is neither applied nor aestheticistic nor hedonistic, or at least it is not only such. Since a Western painter paints eternal things and not a momentary view of a thing, he cannot paint as quickly and precisely as an Eastern painter. He paints for a long

Arvydas Šliogeris

112

while, persistently, and hard, because to paint to him first of all means to build a cosmos of eternal things, of substantial individuals, to tear a thing out of non-being. We might as well say like this: a Western painter paints the minimally senseful existence of a thing; an Eastern painter draws a minimally existential, anonymous sense of a pseudo-thing or of a pure visual. So, the most adequate symbol and paradigmatic “object” of Eastern painting is the hieroglyph, which in its turn is the symbol of pure, thingless sense. Works of Eastern painting are hieroglyphs, symbolizing the Great Anonym. The painting of the East ontotopically is oriented towards the same direction as its entire culture, towards non-being; the classical painting of the West is oriented towards the same direction as its entire culture, towards being as a thingly phenomenon of being.

11 The classical touch with the world can remain as long as there remain classical things as authorially built familiar, elementary substantial individuals, the outside of which corresponds to their inside, the surface to the depth, and the sense entirely coincides with the sensibly evident being of the thing. What happens when the wall of familiar things, surrounding man, falls down, when the substantial individuality of a thing is started to be considered as mere appearance, when not only sensible, but also supersensible, metaphysical things fall apart? We shall be able to answer the question “What happens?” only after we know how and when the ontotopical destruction of the cosmos of substantial individuals takes place. A preliminary answer is very simple: it happens when cognition gets inside a thing, so when familiar things become cognizable or cognized things. As it has been said, cognition is opposite to acquaintance, thus a cognized thing is the antipode to a familiar thing, and cognition is that force that ruins the cosmos of substantial individuals and changes man’s ontotopical touch with the world, first of all with the thingly environment. To avoid misunderstandings we shall state at once that we shall use the concept of cognition as the term that has been defined in the first essay: it is scientific cognition, based on the experimental mathematical method and immanently emanating a technical reconstruction of the thingly world. So, this is mathematical-experimental natural science, the ontotopical foundation of which was laid by Galileo, Newton, Koepler, and other modern-time thinkers, who substituted the meta-physical orientation of theoretical contemplation with another. That one we may call a meta-technical orientation, having in mind not the specialized subject, technics, but an utterly new and peculiar means of man’s theoretical touch with the world, which gradually ousted the old classical one, theoretical contemplation in the Greek sense. Of course, metatechnical cognition, as an expression of the

The Thing and Art

113

post-classical touch with the world, did not appear at once in pure shape. Its history is long, ambiguous, and heterogeneous; it coincides with the history of mathematical-experimental natural science only in part, because metatechnical cognition eventually became universal and comprised not only scientific cognition in a proper sense, but also other spheres of man’s touch with the world, not excluding either philosophy or art. We shall note that the key structures of metatechnical cognition might be found even in such works of modern man, which appear as manifestations of anti-scientific reflection; after all, it is not by chance that they speak about modern man’s scientific world outlook and have in mind namely universal look at the world, starting with scientific theories and ending with an everyday, doxical look. The metatechnical viewpoint has a long history also in a direct sense. The first stage of its development, called Newtonian world outlook, still has remains of the classical touch with the world; the world is still conceived as the entirety of substantial bodies, moving according to the laws of mechanics. Only in the second half of the 19th century did the metatechnical viewpoint acquire a pure, concrete, and finished shape, cognition finally found its true realm and separated itself from all other possible ways of man’s contact with the world. The history of the metatechnical viewpoint does not interest us. Let us assume that it is well known, as heaps of works of scientific historians and philosophers are dedicated to it. We are interested in ontotopical implications of metatechnical cognition, we have to find out how the thing opens itself in the horizon of cognition and how man’s contact with the thing shifts.

12 What does it mean to cognize a thing? First of all it means to divide it analytically into constituent parts, to penetrate into its “inside”, to find its certain characteristics, to de-substantialize it, to disclose its inner structure; consequently, to resolve the thing’s supposed elementariness and atomicness into structural components, which, although being more elementary than the thing itself, by themselves are in no way elementary. The constituent parts that the thing is “made up” of are no longer things, more substantial than the initial thing as the whole. The thing’s structure, unclosing itself to cognition, in its turn is not an aggregate of further irresolvable elements, the thing’s “inside” is not the entirety of elementary substances, at reaching which cognition calms down and stops. From the viewpoint of cognition, the thing has nothing elementary and nothing substantial; it has no opaque ontotopical barriers, which should not or could not be trespassed, cleared, and resolved by cognition. Cognition is endless namely because it does not acknowledge any ultimate ontotopical instances, which would be untouchable and nontranscendable. Cognition is the process of endless transcending, which

114

Arvydas Šliogeris

smashes the ever-appearing barriers of seeming elementariness and substantiality. Cognition is the process of limitless de-substantialization, thus the process of limitless de-reification. To cognize is first of all to de-reify a thing, to de-substantialize it, to resolve its evident being into… Into what? Not into elements and substances, not into atoms, as Democritus and his successors thought, but into relations. However, strictly speaking, it is not possible to resolve or fragment a thing into relations, as a relation is not any “smaller” thing or a substantial element, it is not even an entity. Relation does not exist “by itself” and does not have any being. Therefore, it would be more precise to say that during cognition a thing, as a substantial individual, is dissolved in the realm of relations, and dissolved in such a way that any substantiality, any individuality and individualized being of the thing evaporate. The true object of cognition and its authentic realm is not a thing, but relation; thus, cognition in this respect is the thing’s destruction, the reduction of its being-in-itself to the quasi-being of relation; cognition is the annihilation of the thing. Cognition does not bring man closer to the individualized being of this thing, it takes him away from it, because in the realm of cognition there is nothing sensibly individual left, nothing sensibly in-formed, delimited, stabilized; in a word, there is nothing thingly left. All ontotopical centres shift to the sphere of the invisible, to find a visible equivalent of which is simply impossible, because a sensibly individualized thing is by no means an equivalent of a supersensible, de-individualizing, and, consequently, annihilating relation. Although relation does not have any ontically evident realness, although it is not reality in a usual sense, yet to the cognizer it is ontotopically more real than the thing itself. Relation becomes so real that, after a thing has been resolved into relations and those have been stabilized and mastered according to the laws of nature, new, “synthetical” technical things can be constructed from them. Cognition is by no means only contemplation, it is also a technical reconstruction of natural things, the outcome of which is a new, never-before-seen-in-man’s-history universe of cognized things, which we shall call man’s new world. After all, the nucleus of this world is namely a new, ontotopically unique thing, the being of which is constructed out of the non-being of pure relations. The new human world is made up of hominized things, which we must distinguish from classical things, which appeared in the realm of humanization. We have said that humanization is an authorial building of the cosmos of familiar things, a series of substantializing and individualizing actions, which tear the being of the thing out of the realm of pure relation. The creation of the world of cognized (yet cognized anonymously, because pure relation is anonymous) and anonymously constructed things, of the universe of synthetical thingness, is called hominization. Humanization is acquaintance with the sensibly evident being of this thing; it is an authorial opposition of two individuals, human and thingly. Hominization is anonymous de-substantialization; it is decomposition of the thing’s being into anonymous senses or the synthesis of

The Thing and Art

115

a thing from the “material” of pure relation. We might just as well say like this: a familiar thing is “thetical”, because it is placed in front authorially, as a phenomenon of being; a cognized thing is syn-thetical, because it uncloses itself only as a complex of anonymous senses. While speaking about the hominization of things, we have in mind not only technically constructed articles, but also the so-called things of nature. Natural things, as nature itself, are none the less intensely sucked in the orbit of new thingness, just like technical things are. In general, man indifferently looks at all things that come into the horizon of his either acquainting or cognizing look. Artificial as well as natural things are equally included into the realm of a desubstantializing relation, they are all equally dissolved in the senses and relations, opened by cognition. In this respect, in the new human world, nature is as synthetical as technically hominized reality is; e.g. an oak is as synthetical as a plastic bucket is. In every situation of the contact of man and a thing, a cognizing look equally looks through the sensible evidentness of the thing and under the thingly appearance always discerns the same “characteristics”, reducing each thing to them, be it a radio set or a flower, a human or a medicine pill, washing powder or a spring, spurting out of the ground. To the cognizing look, the sensible surface of all things and their substantial individuality is merely appearance, sensory illusion, under which the “real essence” of all those things flourish: chemical reactions, biochemical processes, molecular structures, atomic and electronic configurations, centres of energy, biofields; in short, a limitless realm of relations, cognized or not yet, and of anonymous senses. To such a look, a human ontotopically does not differ a mite from a stone, for both of them are made up of the same chemical elements; a living tree ontotopically does not differ from a sheet of paper, for the essence of both is the same – cellulose. To a cognizing look, ontic, i.e. sensibly evident, differences are not essential, because essential is the ontotopical identity of all things, essential is the fact that eventually all things are made up of the same relations, which are specified and consolidated in various fields of specialized cognition. Essential is that all things, at least potentially, can be conveyed by one formula, which exhausts their entire essence. After all, not only infantile poets, but also grave scientists quite seriously were, and still are, on the hunt for the “formula of being”, which must explain everything and to the utmost; after all, it is not just for the fun of it that attempts were and are made to create various theories of “unified field”, which have to reduce the qualitative diversity of the world to a meagre mathematical formalism. Man’s classical touch with the thing is thus ousted, thus crumbles down the wall of familiar, individually substantial, and elementarily meaningful things, the wall that man built in the classical situation between himself and the realm of pure relation. Thus disappears the thing’s being, which is dissolved in the ocean of anonymous relations and anonymous senses. Finally, thus disappears the situation of the classical counter-position: now man does not have anything

116

Arvydas Šliogeris

to oppose, for the entire thingly world becomes lucid, the entire thingly reality becomes transparent; to a cognizing look it opens like a door to the space of absolute lucidity and emptiness. And it is not possible to stand in front of emptiness. Following the wall of sensibly substantial things, the second wall – of metaphysical things, the ontotopical region of pure transcendency – crumbles down as well. It loses substantial solidity and an elementary, apprehensible order; it loses substantial differentiation, simplicity, and harmoniousness. Transcendent reality is no longer the cosmos of metaphysical individuals, it gradually turns into a magic universe where there are merely the undulation of pure relations and vibrations of anonymous senses, merely pure becoming without limits and discrete values. The sphere of pure transcendency is no longer an archipelago of elementarily meaningful metaphysical things; it turns into the Great Anonym again. The thing becomes that hole through which the ocean of pure relation inundates the world of man and swallows the substantial individuality of man as well as of the thing. Pure relation thus seems to rise from the depth to the surface and like a mist covers the cosmos of sensible things. The surface of the thing starts to turn lucid and becomes transparent: it no longer covers the thing into an impenetrable casing of a substantial form, it no longer repels a human. On the contrary, the surface directly opens the depth, but this depth is amorphous, empty, non-thingly, not individualized, therefore, also transparent. True, this depth, as the realm of pure relation, is cognized or potentially cognizable; consequently, it is in a way resolved, for it is made up of senses. But those senses are anonymous, thus they do not have an individual form. Such an ontotopical situation might be called pseudomorphism. What takes place here is, in the terms of traditional philosophy, the disintegration of the subject/object opposition, of the “I”/Thing counterposition, and at the same time the de-identification of the “I” as well as of the Thing. First, the subject de-identifies itself; it as if submerges in a kaleidoscopic, ever-changing and chaotic “world without limits” and returns to itself only as a mosaic of chaotically flickering anonymous senses. The “I” dissolves in the flux of undulating meanings of the world; it thus as if reifies itself. Yet also, a contrary process takes place, which might be called the hominization of the thing. The thing dissolves in the same realm of anonymous senses and is imbibed by the “I” as an unstable mosaic of such senses, as a sequence of anonymously meaningful existential vibrations, a sequence, which has neither beginning nor end nor stable islets of peace and definiteness. The “I” and the thing merge in the realm of anonymous sense, and that sense is neither hoministic nor thingly, it is a sort of neutrum, which eliminates the situation of the classical counter-position. On the surface, things seem to retain their sensory individuality and identity, they seem to remain “the same”. But in reality, the sensory identity of things is a mere decoration. After all, the cognizing man knows that the monolithicness and sensory identity of things are just “appearance”, that the depth and the real

The Thing and Art

117

essence of things is a flickering chaos of anonymous senses. This knowledge – always approximate, implied, hazy – is not neutral existentially: it disintegrates and annihilates the innerness of an individual. Man starts losing more and more the atomicness of his self, consequently, his identity as well. Only functional identity remains (a social or professional role) without which man falls to many fragmental, partial “selves”. Since he cannot find constancy in the world of things, he no longer finds it in himself, either. In this ontotopical situation, the whole horizon of man’s vision is filled with hollow things, made up of fixated moments of emptiness, because sense, if anonymous, is just a concentrate of emptiness. Things become polycentric: each sense of the thing (and there is legion of them, as it has been said) is a centre of a kind, which consolidates the thing, but this centre is neither stable nor substantial, neither in-formed nor the only one. All possible centres are functional, thus relative and disintegrating the being of the thing. This is a paradox of the cognitive relation with the thing: the being of a thing is made up of centres of non-being; the “nucleus” of the being of a thing is non-being. The thing itself is merely a phenomenon of quasi-being. That is why the fundamental belief of the cognizing man is belief in emptiness. Emptiness is searched for everywhere, and everywhere it is found, everywhere it is seen. It is expressed in such words as “everything is relative, nothing is absolute”. To say that everything is relative is to state that the highest ontotopical reality is the void. But belief in the void is contradictio in adjecto. When a person complains that his life is empty and senseless, he states the priority of emptiness over being and the priority of relation over substantiality. There are many voids in his touch with reality in the most elementary, we may say, direct sense. That which he sees evidently and which is ontically (sensorily) being, in fact ontotopically is emptiness, although it has an outer shape of a thing. Then it is being said that the world is senseless; senselessness is identified with emptiness. In fact, the situation is much more complicated: emptiness that the cognizing man, seeing through hollow things, meets with is maximally full of sense, since it is filled with anonymous senses. Each sensefulness is only extensive, it lacks the intensity of the being of a substantial thing. This is how another paradox of the situation of excessive cognition unfolds: the state of senselessness is brought about not by the lack of sense, but by the excess of sense, of anonymous sense. What is senseful, and even hypersenseful, in general, anonymously, what is senseful to everyone is senseless to this particular individual, to a finite being, who is capable of opening himself only to a finite and limited sense, which he himself has put into a concrete thing, consequently, this sense is familiar and not cognized. Merging thus with infinite senses of the Great Anonym, a finite and limited individual finds himself face to face with senselessness, which occurs owing to a cyclopean excess of sense. Sense that cannot be identified amounts to senselessness, just as being that cannot be identified sensorily, individually, and substantially amounts to non-being. And there is nothing

118

Arvydas Šliogeris

more hopeless like endeavours to identify anonymous sense using the instruments of cognition itself, i.e. to try to cognize it: such pseudoidentification only increases the mass of anonymous senses and condenses their mist. Phenomenological, hermeneutical hulling of anonymous senses leads to barren deserts of the Great Anonym. Hegel gave an expressive name to the road that leads to those deserts: die schlechte Unendlichkeit. Anonymous sense is see-through, but invisible. That is why it is the antipode of being. Being always has to be visible, but not see-through, thus substantially individualized and – in the shape of a phenomenon of being – minimally senseful. To the cognizing look, the index of the thing’s true essence, thus of its being as well, is no longer its form (as to the acquainting look), but the formula or more exactly the equation. In the realm of totalized cognition, the formula swallows the form; a mass of formulae, descending upon things, annihilates the cosmos of forms, since the formula, as it has been mentioned in the first essay, is the opposite of the form. The form individualizes, the formula, on the contrary, de-individualizes; the form is simple and irresolvable, the formula is complex and resolving each elementariness; the form is thingly and absolute, the formula is thingless and relative. The form is the expression and indicator of being, the formula of pure relation. The form is senseful unambiguously, authorially, and elementarily, the formula only anonymously. The landmark of the classical look at the world was the form as an element of the cosmos of familiar things, and the landmark of the cognitive look is the formula-equation as a symbol of anonymous senses. Let us briefly summarize the thoughts over the new thingness, taking a closer look at a concrete thing. I have a hominized thing in front of me; let us assume that it is a radio set. We may first state that this thing has not been created by me. It has come to the situation of sensory obviousness and sensory counter-position from the “big world”, from an anonymous realm of “all”. This thing generally has no author, who might have put in it a certain elementary sense, i.e. have built it authorially. So, neither I nor another “I” as an individual and author has put any sense in this thing. Nevertheless, the radio is not a senseless thing, as it performs a certain function; on the other hand, it is not senseless either because I generally know what a gigantic mass of senses has been put into it, I know that this radio indirectly contains the entire history of the world’s scientific knowledge, millions of senses that were created at some time by someone, were expressed by formulae, were stabilized, were mastered epistemologically as well as technologically. This radio, as any other, is a container of an infinite mass of senses, it is maximally senseful, its every minutest detail is saturated with sense. Unfortunately, all those senses are anonymous. I do not know what they are. Even a specialist does not, and cannot, know that, because he is also a finite and limited being and in no way can span all senses of the knowledge of the world that are crystallized in the shape of this radio. True, the specialist

The Thing and Art

119

knows several senses; for that reason, he is called a specialist. But I am not a specialist, and in fact I do not know any of the senses, put into this radio set. That is why the radio, as a thing by itself, to me is senseless: to me, senseless is its “inside”, its depth, and its true essence. Having opened its back side, I see a chaos of wires, metal, plastic, and glass. I cannot see any direct connection between this chaos, i.e. the mass of crystallized anonymous senses, and the direct function of this thing, for which I have acquired it. Such is the first level of the senselessness of a hominized thing, which emerges owing to the excess of anonymous senses and of the anonymity of sense. Yet, the radio as a thing by itself (and not as a function) is senseless also in other respect. It is senseless without a radio station somewhere a thousand kilometres away, without broadcasters, singers, actors, operators, without the entire broadcasting equipment and in general without a vast mass of “external” senses, which floats somewhere in the space of the great world and is unreachable, incomprehensible, inaccessible to me, therefore in fact also senseless. If we retract such a thing from the anonymous mass of external senses, which comes from the other side of the thingly horizon, from the realm of the Great Anonym, it will become the hole of a doughnut, a nought. There is nothing more senseless like a broken radio. So, the sense of such a thing no longer coincides with the thing itself, it is transcendent to the thing. The sense subsists everywhere and nowhere, and the thing is here and now, in this place, in front of me on the table. And the moment the thread, connecting this thing with the sense, transcendent to its being, breaks, the senselessness of the being of “this” thing comes to the foreground. The thing remains, the sense disappears. So, the sensory appearance of this thing, its evident being, its form do not have any direct link with its true sense. Let us imagine that an artist, wishing to paint a thing, is painting a radio. He at once creates an ontotopical situation of a broken, thus false and senseless radio, because he retracts the sensible being of this thing from the mass of anonymous senses. A radio has sense only until, and only where, it works or can work. Meanwhile, a painted radio set does not work and cannot work. A radio is a pure function. By losing its functionality it loses all its senses, and its sensible form, its thingly shape becomes merely the indicator of its senselessness; therefore, this form by itself is senseless, too. An artist, painting a radio, fixates namely such senselessness. So, a hominized thing cannot become an authentic object of artistic depiction: its being by itself and its sensible form are senseless, its depth is empty to a direct viewer, and there is no correspondence between the essence and the semblance. The Greeks of the classical epoch felt the possibility of the existence of such pseudo-things. They created a great proto-image of a pseudo-morphous thing. That was a Trojan horse. Its outside is simple, clear, and elementarily senseful. But its depth incubates the demons of death and destruction. The road of history from the Trojan horse to the atomic bomb is very long, but the ontotopical distance between them amounts to nothing.

Arvydas Šliogeris

120

13 So what is the relation between the depth and the surface of a hominized thing, between its semblance and essence, between the content and the form, between its true sense and sensorily evident being? And how does a painter feel in front of such a thing? The most important ontotopical trait of a hominized thing is the inadequacy between the depth and the surface, between the semblance and the essence, between the content and the form, between the being and the sense. The semblance of a hominized thing is deceptive; it is no longer a direct indicator of the thing’s depth and true essence. Since such a thing is not a substantial monolith, its depth is neither plastic nor thingly anymore; this depth is an accumulation of pure senses, it is without exact boundaries. And the surface of the thing retains sensory individuality, because the form and the semblance of the thing still remain. But the semblance of a hominized thing (its eidos in the Platonic term) seems to suspend in the void, as it loses its support in the substantial depth, which has neither the inner semblance nor the inner in-formed individuality anymore. The bond between the two ontotopical layers of the entityhood – sensible and supersensible, immanent and transcendent – breaks. It has been said that in the classical situation the bond between these two ontotopical regions is direct. The cosmos of metaphysical things repeats the cosmos of sensible things, both are plastically diversified and plastically individualized. A transcendent idea is a copy of a sensible eidos (semblance), the supersensible content acquires form, the sense utterly coincides with the being of the thing and is adequately transferred into the sensible equivalent. In case of a hominized thing, the transcendent reality is no longer the equivalent of the immanent reality. The surface of the thing no longer covers that what it should directly indicate; it “means” not what the thing is actually. A plastic semblance of the thing is merely a mask, which covers the nonplastic mass of anonymous senses. What is indeed real, what is the true essence is neither plastic nor thingly, neither in-formed nor substantial anymore. The depth of a hominized thing is no longer individualized, meanwhile it can express itself only through the individualized surface. The thing with its sensible form becomes a kind of ontotopical ghost, at best a symbol, the sense of which is utterly anonymous. It is not meaningful as “initself”, it is merely a reference to a formless non-thingly reality, to the universe of pure senses. Thus breaks the bond between the sense of a thing and its direct, sensibly individualized being. The sense is infinite and the thing is finite; the sense is “big” and the thing itself is “small”; the thing in fact “means” lots, it contains an immense sense, whereas itself as a sensible individual it remains limited. The sense of the thing detaches from it. The evident being of the thing does not mean anything any longer, the thing loses even that elementary sense that has a link with its sensible form. The sensible form of the thing not only shows nothing, but actually is an obstacle that

The Thing and Art

121

prevents from penetrating towards its true sense; it is a wall of a kind that stands between man and the content of the thing. Indeed, what is the relationship between the “true” sense of a thing, which is disclosed by cognition, between the phenomenological layers of the thing’s content and its outer form? What is the relationship between this particular sensibly evident tree, between its finite form and infinite senses of its cognitive content – chemical, biochemical, atomic, biological, etc., structures? The sensible form is one thing, and the supersensible content, disclosed in the horizon of a cognitive look, is quite a different kettle of fish. There is no direct link between them. Most important is that the span of the sense of a hominized thing no longer corresponds to the span of its sensible being. The span of the thing’s sense is much wider than the thing itself; the sense is infinite and the thing is finite. The thing is no longer able to contain that huge sense that is placed in it by the Great Anonym (in this case by science). This is the situation of the excess of sense. The sensible form of a thing becomes senseless, first of all because by its content the thing is too full of sense. The excessive sense starts to burst the being of the thing from the inside, the content destroys the sensible form of the thing. The entire thingly world becomes equivocal, polysemous. Things lose their ontotopical monosemy, they become unreliable. We constantly meet things the sensible form of which does not “mean” anything either directly or generally, or it “means” altogether not what the thing itself actually “means”. The most diverse forms are given to the same sense and the same content, and the same sensible form might be given to a different content. The form negates the content, the content the form, an ontotopical conflict between the form and the content sets, the content becomes formless and the form contentless (for instance, what is the relationship between the form of an antenna and its content, between the semblance of a grenade and its true sense?). Things become “strange”, “incomprehensible”, “mysterious”, vague, washy, waving, vibrating; in short, surreal, as though someone had engrafted the Protean nature in them. These are unreliable things, which cannot be naively relied upon, since they have the uncertainty of a mask. Things become dangerous and arouse fear (which might be unconscious), since the individual does not know what is really lurking in them. Hominized things need not a plastic depiction, not a direct reliant openness, not an intense look, not admiration, not theoretical contemplation; oh no, most of all they need phenomenological or hermeneutical “understanding”, i.e. the same cognition. Such things may even be beautiful, but their direct, sensibly evident beauty seems to recede into an ontotopical periphery. In the foreground, there is uncertainty, attempts to cognize, to guess the true sense, to overcome the fear of ignorance. Only when, and only after, the hominized thing has already been “understood”, “unmasked” phenomenologically, when it has already been resolved into a set of indefinite and always approximate values, when it has been broken into structural fragments and phenomenological shivers, when it has been

122

Arvydas Šliogeris

partially identified (full identification of a hominized thing is impossible in principle), can man take a risk to open himself to the beauty of the thing. A look at a hominized thing never is, and never can be, direct, naive, reliant, and integral. A filter of cognition or understanding is placed between man and a sensible semblance of a thing (an im-mediate given), splitting the sensible wholeness of the thing into the shatters of sense profiles. Since in the case of a hominized thing sense detaches from the thing itself and loses a substantial form, the form in its turn loses substantial importance and becomes a mere sign or hieroglyph. And most importantly, it becomes such a sign, which signifies God knows what. The form is just an anonymous symbol of the Great Anonym. About such a pseudo-sign or pseudo-symbol we may say just this much: it signifies or symbolizes “something”. A pseudosymbolic form starts to wither away straight off: its existence is no other than its decline, and namely decline (crumbling, bursting) is the sole way of such a form’s existence. The form remains only in the shape of a pseudo-form. That is why we have called the ontotopical situation of a hominized thing pseudo-morphism. The pseudo-form is the source of pure formalism: it is like some nut the shell of which is intact, but the nucleus is rotten, and there is emptiness inside. Directly, the form does not express anything that is not it itself. Transcending an empty form, we no longer hit the nucleus of being, the substantial form, but hang suspended in the void of pure relation. Pure relation by itself is formless, so as “by itself” it even does not exist and is only being thought up additionally as the vibrations of the pure inside, i.e. as an inner pseudo-reality, as a flow of anonymously “senseful” intuitions, symbolic emotions, reflexes, reactions, stimuli, as the shimmering of approximate, washy senses, as a pseudo-mophy of hieroglyphs. So, an immediate relation of a finite individual with a hominized thing is irrational; and that is one more paradox, because this thing is the sediment of the purest (scientific) rationality, a crystal of the cognizing mind. Yet such rationality is anonymous and opens itself to a limited individual only as the irrational depth of the Great Anonym, as a mysterious symbol or hieroglyph of the realm of pure relation, i.e. irrationally. In the situation of a hominized thing, there appears that what we may call the absolute invisible. The invisible may be various. Man frequently meets with such invisibleness, which is only relative and in principle can be visible, which has sensible equivalent and can be shown through a sensible visual. The finite and elementary sense, which is generally invisible, nevertheless can have a sensible semblance. Human suffering by itself is invisible, but it can be reflected in the person’s face, thus it can be expressed sensibly and made visible. Elementary senses are seen at least potentially. Such invisibleness is not yet detached from sensible visibleness. The invisible, bubbling in the depth of a hominized thing, is of another kind, it does not have its visible equivalent, it no longer touches with the world of visible forms. The classical invisible is relative; it is no other than the sensible visible with all its forms and thingly multifariousness

The Thing and Art

123

transferred to the Beyond, invisible to the eyes, but visible to the mind, to imagination, seen theoretically. Whereas the invisible of hominized things is not a transcendent copy of the sensible visible; no, it appears during the destruction of each visibleness. Such invisibleness cannot be depicted and acquire a shape of a plastically diversified work of art. According to Rilke, the absolute invisible appears as an outcome of “ein Tun ohne Bild”.

14 What can an artist do in such an ontotopical situation, how can he feel himself in the presence of the world of hominized things? Let us invoke authorities. Probably most exact in describing man’s touch with hominized things was Kant. First, he clearly separated the sensible ontotopical layer of the entityhood from the supersensible, immanency from transcendency, the form of a hominized thing from its content, an appearance from its true essence. This dividing line is not oversteppable in any way; on one side are absolutely transcendent, inaccessible to man “things-in-themselves”, on the other appearances, constructed by man himself. Nevertheless, Kant’s terms do not suit us. He claims that “things-in-themselves” are unknowable; knowable is only the world of “appearances”. To us, it is important to emphasize that the sense of hominized things does not open itself sensibly, and only in this respect they are “things-in-themselves” and do not have a sensible equivalent namely because they are constructs of mathematical cognition and symbols of the Great Anonym. To us, another thought of Kant is more important: the most authentic and in a way the sole true contact of man with a hominized thing is namely cognition, understood as mathematical–experimental natural science, i.e. cognition as an action, reconstructing the entire world of things, actively rearranging the utter structure of the thing, placing anonymous senses into the thing. More important is what Kant says about art. The main aesthetical thought of this German philosopher is that man’s touch with a work of art is cognition as well; yet, differently from the “true”, scientific cognition, it is cognition without concepts, we may say it is unexpanded, imperfect cognition implicite. An aesthetical touch with a work of art is a porch, the first level of cognition, its embryonic stage. According to Kant, an aesthetical impact of a work of art is such that it arouses a free play of the powers of cognition (imagination and intellect) and thus to the viewer gives pleasure without any interest, i.e. the pleasure the source of which is the viewer’s indifference to the being of the work of art as a thing. A work of art and a contact with its being do not have ontotopical independence, they are only a stimulus to cognize. A work of art is the embryo of a technological thing; in other words, something that is not finished yet (certainly, unfinished not technically, but ontotopically), imperfect, that has not reached its maturity, something that is

124

Arvydas Šliogeris

as “not yet”, “as if”, “sort of”, and the like. Therefore, Kant describes the specifics of an aesthetical touch with the thing in gnoseological terms. It is judgment. Kant specifies the essence of beauty in these words: an appearance, if only it corresponds to the idea, is that which is essentially beautiful. Such a description is utterly precise, we may say, classical. But it is classical because it is applicable only in the case of a classical work of art and of a classical thing. The “appearance” of a classical work of art and of a classical thing indeed corresponds to the “idea”, i.e. to the sense and content. But what happens when the appearance does not correspond to the idea, and does not correspond not because the artist, due to the lack of talent or other circumstances, was not able to implement this correspondence, but because the idea and the appearance, the form and the content, the sense and the visual in general do not have a common measure, when the idea in general detaches itself from the appearance, when it is infinite and the appearance is finite, when the idea, by its nature, is absolutely supersensible and the appearance is sensible. And exactly then do we have the situation of a hominized thing, when this classical Kantian description of beauty is no longer applicable; it does not reflect the ontotopical essence of the situation. So, what can an artist, in our case a painter, do in such an ontotopical situation, what road towards a work of art should he choose? A painter can choose one of two roads. He can devote himself to the realm of pure relation, to submerge into the Great Anonym, to merge with the jelly of amorphous senses and “depict” the pure senses themselves either directly or symbolically, and to leave crumbling and vanishing things for ruin. This situation was best expressed by Picasso who used to say that a painter had to depict not what he saw, but what he thought, and that to a contemporary painter it was recommendable to put out the eyes or at least to paint with the eyes closed. Having chosen this road, the painter eventually has to become a symbolist, surrealist, expressionist, and if he is consistent enough and goes the road through, he must in general renounce thingly forms and create the so-called abstract or non-figurative painting. Almost all founders of the socalled modern painting took this road. But these painters can be asked a legitimate question: is this what they do still painting? Maybe it is some variety of applied mathematics, pictorial mathematics? After all, if a painter tries to express the realm of pure relation and to depict pure senses, then he actually paints that what basically is an object of mathematical natural science: he paints formulae and equations. In this respect, i.e. in its ontotopical content, entire modern painting is indeed applied mathematics, a depiction of formulae and equations in pseudo-morphous shapes. But the formula cannot be adequately transferred to the visual, for, as it has been said, the formula, as an expression of anonymous sense, does not have any sensible equivalent. To painting, this road is suicidal, it leads to a deadlock, at best to cheap decorativeness, the creation of adornments and nice trifles; in a word, to shallow orientalism. A picture that has become a decorative dab

The Thing and Art

125

loses not only the substantial form, but also the substantial content; thereby it loses substantial importance and becomes accidental, optional, and unnecessary. Walking down the second road, a painter at all costs, “despite anything”, “all the same”, under compulsion, taking titanic pains tries to identify the thing with its elementary sense, to minimize the sense of the thing, to retain the thingly individuality, to stop the thing’s disintegration, its melting in the ether of anonymous sense, and not to give in to the spell of the songs of the sirens of pure relation. In this case, a painter first must bring back the lost harmony between the semblance of the thing and its real sense, between the surface and the depth, between that which is evidently and that what this sensibly evident “is” means actually. Thus, he must identify the thing. Yet how can that be done by a painter who stands in the presence of a hominized thing? The identification of such a thing would mean no other than the disclosure of its anonymous senses. Only a cognizer, a “specialist” or a phenomenologist, can do that, and merely approximately at that. But a painter is neither a scientist nor a “specialist”, nor a phenomenologist, nor a hermeneutist, nor a man of letters. A painter cannot cognize a thing, husk its sense profiles phenomenologically or in any other way, because he simply does not have time for that. He ought to get to work at once and to paint the thing. The realm of the painter is the visible, his sphere of action is the surface. Then how could he at the very start identify the being of the thing? There is only one way to do that – by minimizing the sense. The painter must at any cost and maximally minimize the sense of the thing painted, not pay any attention to it, forget it or limit himself with the most elementary sense of the thing, which, as we have said, coincides with the sensible semblance of the thing; he must minimize the region of anonymous sense and move towards the nominal sense of the thing. More specifically, it means to renounce the plot, action, any kind of story, literature, mythology, historicism, allegories, any sort of symbolism; in short, to avoid maximally all references to that what does not coincide with the evident being of the thing, i.e. with the sensible form and semblance of the thing. The sole way left to the painter of creating a true picture is to point to the thing, avoiding any comments, any license, any pretence to demonstrate his “deep thinking”, ideas, authenticity, renouncing any literature and prate. The pointing to the thing or showing the thing on the picture plane has to be maximally speechless, silent, without any rhetoric. Besides, it is necessary to eliminate all traces of a subjective touch with the thing, i.e. one has to be maximally cool-headed, not to show one’s feelings, judgments, emotions, sympathies and antipathies, in a word, one’s personal attitude towards the thing. The picture has to contain no psychology and no pathology. According to Rilke, it means to look at the thing the way a dog looks at its image in a mirror, as if saying: here is another dog sitting. And that is all. Only after the region of sense has been narrowed to the minimum, only after the sense has been elementarized, is it possible to link it with the semblance of the thing and to

126

Arvydas Šliogeris

find a sensible and plastic equivalent for it. Otherwise, the excess of sense bursts the thing up, annihilates its being, because, as we have mentioned, in the situation of hominized thingness the limitless sense constantly shadows the limited being of the thing and constantly destroys the substantiality of a thingly individual and the substantial identity of the thing’s being – that foundation on which, and only on which, a work of the art of painting can be built. The second road leads the painter towards the substantial individual, towards the classical. And exactly that road was taken by a French painter Paul Cézanne. Things of art, created by a great painter, are shrouded in mystery. Infinite possibilities of interpreting are lurking in them, they are never straightforward and monosemous, never disclose themselves as plainly as a mathematical formula or a grammatical rule. Each epoch reads different senses out of a great work of art, but none of them is ultimate and absolute. Accordingly, it is being said that a great work of art is timeless; it is marked by the seal of eternity. But what is this eternity, created by a mortal? It is a capability of the work to resist the aggression of time, to remain a bit longer than it is destined to the creator of the work. Works of art are also temporary, they are also mortal. Yet they are a bit more resistant to the all-eroding rust of decline than he who created them. And maybe their resistance to time can be explained first by that they are much simpler than their creator is. The more elementary the thing is the more durable it is, the harder it is for the millstones of time to grind it to dust. If there is a trait, typical of great things of art of all times, then this trait is namely their simplicity, since only that what is the simplest is the most universal and most eternal. So, the mystery of a great thing of art is an obvious paradox. This mystery is not mysterious, it can all be seen directly, it is all on the surface of a work of art. We are used to saying that a thing of art is mysterious, because it is deep. But to put it more precisely, a thing of art does not have any depth, its entire depth coincides with its surface, all of it is right here, in front of our eyes. And we do not need any scientific or phenomenological glasses to see this evident depth, showing up on the surface, this mystery of a work of art. Consequently, there is nothing dark in the mystery of a work of art, nothing demonic, nothing pathological, nothing irrational, in short, nothing mysterious. Such is the paradoxical mystery of a work of art: it is clear, simple, and rational, although no intellect is capable of turning, at least for a moment, that mystery into a non-mystery, of reading it and making it trivial. Actually, deep in our hearts we do not want such a fantastic intellect to appear, because making the mystery of a thing of art trivial would seem to us a sacrilege. That is why we chant hymns to great beauty, frozen in the crystals of things of art. However, we seldom realize that this secret is not a monopoly only of a thing of art. Casting a pure look at the things that surround us, we suddenly see that they are not less mysterious than a thing of art is. The mystery of a thing of art in no essential way differs from the mystery of any other thing. And the mystery

The Thing and Art

127

of a thing is very simple and obvious, too: a thing is mysterious because it simply is. The being of a thing is a mystery par excellence, because in the presence of being any cognition is impotent. A great creator does not create but only highlights the mystery of the being of a thing, points to it, pays our attention to it, wakes us from slumber and oblivion, opens our eyes to the miracle of being. That is why we first search for a mystery and find it in the thing of art and in its creator. However, a great creator has another mystery, partly independent of the mystery of a thing of art created; it is the mystery of his creative work that reveals itself only to him. They say that the creator cannot explain his own creation, that in the presence of his own creation he is as speechless as other viewers of the work are, except, of course, art critics and men of letters. So, he cannot explain himself, he is a secret to himself. Where is the source of that second mystery? Where does it come from and make a nest in the soul of the creator? Maybe that is a never-oversteppable line between the possibilities of the creator and the reality of a thing of art, between the ideal and its thingly crystallization? After all, to the creator, the work always seems lesser than the ideal prototype of the work, which has cut into his soul. However far the creator would go, he is always merely on the road to an absolute, ideal, and perfect work of art. A real creation is always miles and miles from its ideal prototype. This distance from the prototype to its realization is the mystery of every true creator; and maybe the longer the distance the greater the mystery, which shines its mysterious light also on the created thing of art. Maybe we call this light the depth, implied sense, truth, authenticity; in short, that what makes a great work of art namely great. Paul Cézanne has an essential mystery, too. It shrouds also the things of art created by him. In this respect, he in no way differs from other great artists. But Cézanne has his own, only his, mystery, to read which he did not manage during his entire long life, he remained to himself an unread riddle. He called that mystery la réalisation. How to realise oneself? – this question was tormenting Cézanne at each step of his creative road, and the further the more. We may say that by trying to realize himself maximally Cézanne was not original. Each true artist, realizing himself at least partly, reads his own riddle. Long though the distance from the ideal, hovering in front of the artist’s eyes, to its externalization might be, many great artists are more or less content with what they have created. As they say, they are capable of “expressing themselves” and turning their visions into things of art. In this respect, Cézanne is an exception. To the conviction of Cézanne himself, he failed to do that what had been achieved so easily by others, say, old masters, – to realize himself. The secret of the distance between the ideal prototype and its externalization is lying deep in Cézanne’s soul, as this distance is extremely long. His discontent in himself, not giving him a rest even for a moment, disdainful attitude towards his own creations, constant complaints that the realization has failed again, again and again, heroic endeavours, renewing daily, hourly, at any cost to realize himself, to paint a picture that

128

Arvydas Šliogeris

he would be content with, but again a failure, again complaints and rage, again cut canvases – many of them were scattered along the hills of Provence by mistrals, many were rotted by autumnal rains, many more were trodden down by the enraged painter. And the further the harder. And it is painful to such an extent that the old hand of painting, the master who, it seems, has no secrets left in the palette and on the canvas, the master, already acknowledged by the brightest minds of the epoch, two years before his death is complaining to one young painter: “I am too old, I haven’t managed, and now there is no time left, to realize my goal. I am at the beginning of the road, discovered by me” (3, 211). We can pick tens, if not hundreds, of such complaints, such signs of inner chagrin at the impotence of self-realization, from Cézanne’s letters. They show through namely when Cézanne reaches the time of his maturity, when he indeed feels himself a master and even “the strongest of all living painters”. They show through and no longer disappear. An old man of sixty-five still speaks like a schoolboy, he is still on the road, the end of which cannot be seen, he still has hope that one day, in some hazy future, he will succeed in doing that what he cannot achieve at the moment. The realization fails, the brush falls out of the hand, the picture remains unfinished. Again another canvas and again the Sisyphean stone, again heroic endeavours and again the wheel of Ixion. And there is no doubt that the causes of such discontent are not external: not the indifference of the public and even not their hostility to his works, not the craving for an unreachable glory, not avidity for the respect of the contemporaries, for success or money. Western culture has few artists, so indifferent to the attention of the outer world, like Cézanne. Work was everything to him: the alpha and the omega. Cézanne’s discontent relates to his creative work and only to it. He not only felt, but also knew that he was not succeeding in creating a picture that would be as perfect as the “art in the museums”, as the canvases of old masters, which fascinated him so much and made him suffer more. He knew very well that he had not succeeded in finishing a single picture. Not a single! He knew that much better than his admirers, than his disciples, and even than his foes. He knew that better than we who have put Cézanne among the classics and have proclaimed him one of the greatest Western painters, the father of modern painting, an innovator, the discoverer of new worlds of form and colour, a Columbus of painting, he knew better than those who now pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for his works. We have counted how many works Cézanne left finished, how many half-finished, how many just started. Unfortunately, we cannot count how many pictures – and to our eyes maybe entirely finished – he destroyed: cut with the spatula, tore, burned, gave to the first comer; how many of them have been turned to doormats, how many of them have been eaten by rats and mould. One thing is clear: not less than the extant ones. And how many pictures did Cézanne leave that he would himself have considered finished, i.e. those in which he finally had managed to realize his design? Once again: not a single! So, what did this old loner of

The Thing and Art

129

Aix labour for? Maybe for perfection? Of course. But every true artist strives for perfection, and if, after having created a thing of art, he says with a sigh of relief, “this work is finished”, then, at least for a blink, he believes he has reached perfection, maybe not of the highest degree, but sufficient for a mortal. Such moments seem to have been altogether absent in Cézanne’s life. He was haunted by a phantom of a visible-only-to-him perfection. He strove for such perfection, which to the others, who watched his creative work from aside, seemed incomprehensible. But after all, perfection is one as it is universal. Perfection is the ideal, and the ideal by its nature is universal, because timeless. That what is perfect is perfect everywhere and always and not only here and now. By striving for perfection, Cézanne basically strives for the same what Rembrandt or Vermeer pursued. Why then was it so hard to him to do that what, say, Vermeer had been doing so easily? Exactly this incapability to reach humanly limited, i.e. attainable in principle, perfection is the true mystery of Cézanne. But if only we try to read this riddle psychopathologically, we shall turn his entire titanic work to caricature and shall have to conclude that Cézanne’s work and creations are a misunderstanding, determined by subjective causes. Then a greater misunderstanding will be the fact that Cézanne won public recognition, that now he is without reservation entitled genius and accepted to the pantheon of the all-time saints and martyrs of Western art. Of course, public recognition is not an argument that Cézanne’s entire creation eventually is a loss. A great spirit, striving for the absolute, is always doomed to lose, although, if usual human measures are applied, such a loss is an utter winning. On the other hand, even recognition as such can mean a little, as it can be based on a misunderstanding, too. To recognize is not the same as to understand. Cézanne’s case in this respect is also an example. In the beginning of the 20th century, when Cézanne’s star was on the rise, one wise art critic and painter, Maurice Denis, wrote this: “There is something of a paradox in Cézanne’s recognition, it is hard to explain it, just as it is hard to explain Cézanne’s works as well” (3, 233). And further: “I could never get a clear and specific answer from Cézanne’s admirers why they liked him, and even painters are unable to answer that” (3, 233). I do not think that after a century there have been essential changes, although heaps of books have been written on Cézanne. He still remains a riddle. Without any pretence of reading it, let us try to answer at least one question: why could Cézanne’s work be a riddle to himself and to his admirers?

15 Having walked a long road of an enquiring thought, we may now say this much: if Cézanne experienced a fiasco, if he did not succeed in a perfect realization (although by no means do we think so), then the causes of that are

130

Arvydas Šliogeris

as well not personal; they lie in that peculiar ontotopical situation in which the painter had to live and work. It is the situation of the death of things. Cézanne was destined to paint dying things. It is hard to tell whether he knew that as it could be known to a philosopher, by reason. Yet it is obvious that his hand and brush knew about that. Cézanne knew about the agony of things not as a thinker, but as a painter. All around him, things in agony were standing, lying, moving, falling and rising, crumbling and wriggling. And not Cézanne himself “made up his mind” about dedicating his, as painter’s, life. Things themselves ordered him. And the order was this: it is necessary to fan a spark of life into dying things, it is necessary again to create a cosmos of familiar things, it is necessary for the second time to tear the being of a substantial individual out of the non-being of pure relation. This is the imperative of classical art, and in this respect Cézanne did not differ at all from the old masters. What is more, his orientation to the classical was reflective; he used to repeat that it was necessary to return to the classical, that it was necessary to create such a thing of art that would be as solid and lasting as the “art in the museums”. However, it was not possible to walk the road, paved with the mummies of academism, it was not possible to return to the classical so easily as it was done by Cézanne’s despised “painting of castrates”. The ontotopical situation was unique, it was such with which no other classical painter had encountered. Everything had been firm, stable, unchangeable around the predecessors of Cézanne. If a floating islet of perishableness could have been found, then first in one’s own soul, but it had been so minute, compared with the stability of familiar things, that it could have been easily forgotten: all beauty, all thingliness, all being had been on the outside. Cézanne found himself in a worse situation: he could not find anything stable on the outside, everything was clearing, declining, liquefying, ever-new cracks were opening in so stable, it seemed, things. The things of nature and the world of man became an ephemeral stage decoration. The souls of anonymous senses were hovering above things and devouring the being of things themselves. “All we can see disintegrates and passes away. Nature is always the same, but nothing we see remains unchanged. Our art should arouse the sensation of nature’s stability, distinguish its elements, its changing appearance. Our art must show us nature’s eternity,” thus spoke Cézanne to his young friend Joachim Gasquet (3, 276). Exactly the lack of stable things, the want of thingly substantiality was Cézanne’s initial point of creation and its stimulus. In the realm of art, there had to be created that what was more real and thingly than reality itself. A work of art, as a thing and as a concentrate of the being of a thing, had to have more being than the things of the “first” reality, which had lost that being. Not the “second reality”, but namely the “first” one is ontotopically weightier than the sensible world, – that is what a work of art was to Cézanne. He fled from reality not to find peace in the world of a beautiful illusion, but to find a higher, graver reality. To him, the reality of hominized things is marked with the seal of illusion

The Thing and Art

131

and appearance. By fleeing from that reality towards familiar things, created by art, he actually fled from illusion. Cézanne created or tried to create things of maximal being. When he painted an apple, he knew that if the realization were successful, his apple would be incomparably more stable, more individual, and more substantial than the original. The original rapidly rots, changes colour, loses its perfect form, disappears, or simply is eaten up. Whereas his painted apple is inedible and undevourable, it rests in itself, as solid and indivisible as the atom of Democritus; it is eternal. Cézanne rebelled against every hominization of nature and a thing, against every try to replace the thing itself with its hominized equivalent, to prettify it, to dress it in a suit, to make it comfortable, to turn it into a mere instrument, mere symbol or sign, i.e. instead of the thing itself to plant its anonymous sense. Cézanne instinctively felt that even the so-called nature had become hominized, artificial, submerged into the ether of anonymous human senses, that there was no clear line between what had been hominized and what had not been hominized yet, that an ontotopical difference between nature and culture had smeared, and that even that what seemed as beyond-human and substantial being in fact was merely the formula with the mask of the form. Everything what is, is artificiality affecting naturality. Therefore, Cézanne’s main objective was to get back to things themselves, not to let himself to be deluded by what is not things themselves, but merely their hominized caricature, an operettic surrogate of substantial thingness. The being of a thing was Cézanne’s greater concern than the beauty of it, whereas classical painters showed at least not lesser concern for beauty than for the thing itself, because familiar things by themselves, as elements of the objective world, were crystals of beauty. That is why the theory of mimesis suited the old masters so well. But to Cézanne this theory had to seem inappropriate or even impotent. When things themselves are sufficiently substantial and stable, when their sense entirely coincides with their being and the form with the content, an artistic depiction may be comprehended as the mimesis of such things, as the selection of the most beautiful things and their transfer to a picture plane, i.e. as the idealization of things. And what could Cézanne mimic? The shadows of pseudo-things? the undulation of anonymous senses? the realm of pseudo-morphism? What else could he idealize, what else could he hominize more? After all, a hominized thing is hominized and idealized maximally. He had to transfer to the canvas things themselves and to transfer so that the being of the thing would increase, would become more intense, that the thing would finally acquire a strict form, that its sense would again coincide with its being and not burst the being from the inside. To the question – what is more important, beauty or the thing? – the old masters would have answered that beauty to an artist was not only more important than the thing, but in general was that what was of utmost importance. Whereas Cézanne would have answered that the thing itself was of utmost importance, since even an unattractive thing, if only it had plenty of being,

132

Arvydas Šliogeris

was the place of beauty, for beauty without a thing was impossible altogether. The thing is a phenomenon of beauty just because it simply is. While depicting or creating the being of a thing, we also create beauty. Emile Bernard quite correctly noted: “The concept of beauty was utterly alien to Cézanne; only the concept of truth was familiar to him” (3, 211). To Cézanne, to strive for truth meant to restore the being of a thing, to identify a thing qua a thing. That is why he did not look for beautiful things and did not try to prettify unattractive things. All things were equally important to him, because all of them had the right to be and the right to be shown as substantial individuals. Cézanne thus, as his friend of fate Van Gogh, could paint anything: old shoes and a jacket in tatters, for even in those “unattractive” things there was still plenty of being. And later we also saw that such things indeed have in themselves so much not prettiness, but real beauty, which coincides with their individualized being, retracted from the mass of all anonymous senses. When Cézanne says that everything in nature is created according to the example of the cylinder, the sphere, or the cone, and adds that we have to learn to paint according to those most elementary figures, his words do not contain any “theory”, explicated later by cubists, futurists, and other epigones. Those words of his just mean that he tries to restore the elementariness, stability, and substantial solidity of a thing, because the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone are the simplest and most stable figures, Platonic archetypes, elements of the world, and prototypes of ideal forms. They do not have any indefiniteness, any ambiguity, any crack into which a bark beetle of non-being might burrow. And of utmost importance is that the sense of these forms is most elementary, most easily identifiable, absolutely reifiable without any remnants of additional sense. These are absolute things, the perfect prototypes of the substantial individual. Cézanne therefore never thought he was painting only visuals. He contemptuously called pictures that had any admixture of illusionism, fantasy, symbolism “Chinese pictures” (this was his remark about Gauguin’s pictures). I tend to think that Cézanne painted not pictures but something more. Deep in his heart, perhaps not realizing it himself, incited by a titanic passion to equal God itself or even to exceed it, he wanted to create things themselves. No other artist before him had ever set such objective, no other artist, therefore, had felt so helpless like Cézanne. For instance, to Matisse, Picasso, or other programmatists, painting was “only” painting and nothing else, and a picture a colourful dab on a concrete wall. But exactly that is why it was no longer true painting, just an imitation of it. Acquiring absolute autonomy, it lost any autonomy, because it lost ontotopical weight, selfsupport, thingness, and became a symbol of anonymous senses. Striving to restore the substantial individuality of the thing, Cézanne had to move away from the trodden paths not only of the old masters, but also of his direct predecessors, the Impressionists. The starting point of the Impressionists and of Cézanne is the same: to come maximally near to the sensible world, to

The Thing and Art

133

reality itself. But such an analogy is superficial. The paradox of Impressionist painting is this: trying to come closer to reality itself, they actually distanced themselves from it; seeking maximal objectivity, they fell into the net of solipsistic illusions; pursuing to show things themselves, they showed the remnants of de-reified thingness; aiming at the form, they found themselves in the realm of pseudo-morphism and eventually of amorphism (later works of Monet); reaching out for being, they reached the pseudo-being of pure relation. The Impressionists were led to the loss of contour, of the individuality of a thing, and of the form by a misunderstood imperative of concreteness. To their conviction, only sensible experience, controlled as little as possible by intellect, can disclose the true, authentic, live concreteness of the things of the sensible world. They trusted too much in “naive” sensory experience and did not understand that there was nothing more abstract than an object of “naive” sensory experience. The actual source of the concreteness of a sensible image, i.e. of the thingly individuality of the image, is not the five senses themselves, but the sensorily correlated mind, theoretical contemplation. If a thing is reduced to pure sensibility, it disappears as a thing, because it loses its substantial individuality. The “naive” senses are an analogue not of the being of a thing, but of pure relation. Too intense coming close to things actually takes one away from their being. The Impressionists forgot theoretical distance, the “I”/Thing counter-position and found themselves in the waves of magic flux and incoherent sensory impressions. They submerged into the realm of pure relation, they gave themselves up to the magic of the hominized world and to the attraction of the Great Anonym. No wonder they took great interest in Eastern painting, which also had grown up out of the too great trust in momentary impressions, in “naive” sensory experience, and in a naive “look of a newborn calf” at the entire entityhood. And Cézanne constantly emphasizes that even though a painter must take a scrutinizing gaze at the sensible world “till the eyes bleed”, yet he must not put trust only in the senses. Sensory susceptibility has to be obedient to the power of the constructing mind. To Cézanne, to paint means to “think with the brush in the hand”. Rejecting flatly the position of naive sensibility, so praised by the Impressionists, the painter returns or at least tries to return to the classical horizon of theoretical contemplation, tries to restore the distance, lost in the realm of naive sensibility, between man and the thing, between the “I” and the Thing. Cézanne remembered well what the Impressionists had almost forgotten: the being of the thing, its individuality and substantial form is not what is given to man in a ready-made shape, what has to be watched passively, in what one has merely to indulge. Acquaintance with the thing is not only its sensory perception, but also its theoretical construction; it is the outcome of the thinking and seeing mind. This does not mean that the form and being of a familiar thing is “subjective” in the Kantian sense. On the contrary, it is maximally transcendent, maximally beyond-human, even

Arvydas Šliogeris

134

though humanized. Exactly the “naive” sensory image of the entityhood is immanent. An animal is an absolute solipsist, as the realm of solipsism is not thinking, not the mind, not theoretical contemplation, but namely the “naive” senses. “To become a classical painter through nature” to Cézanne first meant to restore the ontotopical situation of theoretical contemplation, to take a good look at things themselves so that they, standing evidently (sensibly) in front, yet at a theoretical distance, would unclose themselves as substantial individuals and as phenomena of being. In this respect, the French painter did not differ from the old masters, either. But Cézanne’s mission was aggravated by another task, related namely to the excess and pseudomorphism of the sense of hominized things. So as to disclose things themselves as substantial individuals, the painter had to take them maximally away from man, to scrape the thick coating of cognitive meanings and senses, to tear them out of the realm of the excess of hominized meanings and senses, to de-hominize them maximally, to objectivize, to transfer them where the prying eye of a cognizer would not reach them. And that should have been done forcedly, under coercion, at any cost and despite anything, as the things of the hominized world are neither elementary, nor substantial, nor elementarily senseful. “The beloved visible” had to be saved, protected from what is human-all-too-human, from the aggressive desire of the epoch to turn all things to a symbol of the universe of anonymous senses; the masks, put by people, had to be torn off; things themselves had to be shown. In short, once again: things had to be identified. How did Cézanne approach this objective?

16 In order to identify a thing, in order that it should not deceive, that instead a thing a pale symbol or a bloodless phantom of sense should not obtrude itself, you must come maximally closer to the thing literally and figuratively. To come closer does not at all mean to surmount the distance of the theoretical opposition and to merge with the thing: in that case, the thing would become invisible. To come closer is to stand in front of the thing, so that the being of the thing, as a substantial individual, is seen best. You cannot rely only on the representation of the thing, on the memory of it, you cannot depend on imagination, you cannot try to transfer to the canvas an idealized scheme of the thing, you have to paint obvious things that are standing here and now in front of your eyes; so, you have to get back to things themselves literally, to paint only what you see and not what you remember or imagine. Besides, you must paint things in that sole place, which is the place of their being and in which, and only in which, they open their true, elementary sense. Each thing has its place among other things, and, if torn out of it, it loses not only a place, understood topographically, but also its true sense and together with it its being. The thing’s place is not a

The Thing and Art

135

topographical but an ontotopical attribute and one of the conditions of the thing’s substantial individuality. Things, like people, have their home and their locality of being; things have their roots, struck into the sole possible place of their being. After those roots have been cut, the thing hovers suspended in emptiness and becomes a mask that hides phantoms of anonymous senses behind it. Suffice it to paint, say, a piano in a field of rye and the world becomes absurd; the piano, the field as well as, after all, everything that is lose their true sense. So, to stand in the presence of things themselves, which are in their own place, – such was a preliminary condition of the identification of the being of a thing to Cézanne. That is why so important, we may say, principally important, was plein air to him; that is why so fastidious was he in choosing a motif; that is why so monotonously and persistently did he paint the same motif, the same things, which had taken root in the same place of their being, destined to them for good; that is why he tried again and again, hundreds of times, to transfer Mont SainteVictoire to the canvas, he always painted it in the open air, gradually intensifying his acquaintance with it, each time ever-better familiarizing himself with this, and only this, and exactly this particular thing and never painted it indirectly, in the studio, from memory, he never distanced himself from its sensible authenticity and from the direct touch with its being. Of course, not Cézanne invented plein air; we may even think that the Impressionists impelled him to plein air and more specifically Pissarro, but it was to Cézanne that plein air became salvation and Calvary as well as the last hecatomb for the ideal of the classical. Even while working in the atelier, Cézanne remains an outdoor painter, even his still lifes are breathing of the naturalness and beyond-humanness of a true landscape. We might say that his still lifes are small landscapes, just like, on the other hand, his landscapes are large still lifes; both are crystals of the being of individualized things, both are sediments of long and persistent acquaintance with the same things.

17 To identify a thing is first to become acquainted with the thing and to establish an authorial touch with it. Where does the acquaintance between man and the thing, between the painter and the thingly motif painted most easily set? Certainly, only where his initially familiar things are resting from time out of mind, in that sole place-locality, given to a mortal, which is called homeland. A painter, trying to identify things, to retain and immortalize the stability of their being, has to come back constantly to his homeland, and only in his homeland can he attain that what is unattainable at all in any other place: to stand in the situation of the classical touch with the thing. Whatever place such a person travels, however long he wanders in the big world, he always returns to his homeland and finds here an island of classical clarity,

136

Arvydas Šliogeris

stability, and peace, which is separated from the realm of the Great Anonym by the wall of familiar things. Actually, such a person never even leaves his homeland, ontotopically he is always in it and never without it. Cézanne’s homeland is Provence, and everybody knows well how important was to him as a painter his native Aix and its environs, L’Estaque and the entire saint land of olive-trees. Cézanne found himself, his things, and his motifs in Provence and nowhere else. He painted his best pictures in Provence and nowhere else not because the landscape of Provence is extraordinary in some way, the sun of Provence is especially bright, the light here notably detaches from the shadow, the contrasts here are extremely emphasized, and the forms are pure and clear. Well, certainly also because of that, too; after all, Cézanne himself called the land of Provence classical. However, each locality, each landscape is in some way peculiar and individual and is irreplaceable to someone, consequently, classical. But to Cézanne, Provence became the sole irreplaceable locality of self-expression first of all because it was his homeland, the sole place on earth where he could find fewest of anonymous and most of elementary senses, least of contingency and most of necessity, fewest of the phantoms of quasi-being and most of being. Cézanne was not a man of a metropolis and did not like it. “I am not a Parisian,” he used to say to his friends. He was a provincial by nature and by vocation, a man of his homeland, a plant rooted in the soil of Provence. Paris, as any other metropolis, was alien to Cézanne’s classical temperament. After all, namely the metropolis is a social equivalent of the Great Anonym. That is a nonclassical place par excellence. A city is a conglomerate of unfamiliar people and unfamiliar things, a chaos of de-sanctified people and things, a universe of constant shimmering, change, appearance, and disappearance, a collection of unexpected things. In a city, a person is constantly descended upon by anonymous things and anonymous senses, every corner is pregnant with a surprise, everything here is new and therefore mysterious, everything is too full of sense and therefore senseless. A city evidently demonstrates a dialectical trick, described by Hegel, when being becomes nothing and nothing becomes being: a person or a thing appears from round the corner – their being appears out of nothing; and the same person (or is it another?) disappears round another corner, disappears for good, ultimately and irreversibly – his being becomes nothing. It is not possible to identify either people or things in a city, their entire sense is detached from their sensible being, from their form and semblance, for it is anonymous. There are no more stable forms in a city, there are no more things that have their own, and only their own, place, that is why everything is washy, without contours and contrasts, everything is just a mass of anonymously differentiated jelly, a mass of pseudo-morphous shadows, which obstructs the limited view of a mortal and drowns his consciousness in the flux of senseless fragments of thingness, momentous reactions, and incoherent stimuli. A city man retains his consciousness, but loses his self-awareness – the sole guarantee of the

The Thing and Art

137

identity of an individual. Each moment his soul disintegrates into thousands of fragments, his “I” resolves into thousands of instantaneous “I’s”, between which there is no more direct continuity, links, and relationships. Consciousness (sense), detached from self-awareness, becomes its opposite, non-sense. The Great Anonym manifests in this non-sense in the shape of a chaotic (because not reflected over and non-reflectable) stream of consciousness or “subconsciousness”. By the way, the word “shape” is not appropriate here, as the stream of non-sense does not have a shape; it is – again to put it in Rilke’s words – ein Tun ohne Bild. A metropolis is a huge Proteus that has neither its own face nor individuality; it is a tremendous mask and a universe of masks, for each entity in a city is a small Proteus, a small mask, and a mosaic of such masks. Theoretical contemplation and the radical “I”/Thing counter-position vanish in the metropolis. In this respect, the metropolis is an avalanche of pure relation, having set itself free and having inundated the entire view of the mortal; this is the second nature and the realm of the second magic. The metropolis is the homeland of the second orientalism. But actually, the metropolis is not anybody’s homeland and cannot be one. That is why to the classical nature of Cézanne, the metropolis was the land of the Lotus-eaters, the island of sirens, the domain of Circe, and the nest of the Lestrygonians. Like Odysseus, Cézanne lived by the memory of, and by the yearning for, his homeland; he constantly made returns to his Ithaca, to the cosmos of familiar people and things, to Provence, in which it was still possible to make a movement of a classical painter – to identify a thing. This is how a radical contrariety between the ontotopical directions of Cézanne and the Impressionists comes to light. The Impressionists were people of the city and, with few exceptions, painters of the reality of the metropolis even when they lived and worked in the province. They did not have and did not look for a homeland. That is why their painted things eventually disintegrated into shatters and fragments, and, say, in the works of late Monet there remained the shimmering of the veil of maya, the play of formless coloured dabs, though pleasant to the eye, but senseless and without substantial solidity. The Impressionists were creating “aesthetical values”, whereas Cézanne was creating (or at least tried to do so) things themselves and was building the closed-in-itself being of a phenomenon of being. And being by itself is not a value and cannot be such. Although nominally Cézanne was a disciple of the Impressionists and took over certain elements of the technique from them, but his ontotopical direction was contrary to that of the Impressionists. In this respect, Cézanne is the antithesis of the Impressionists.

Arvydas Šliogeris

138

18 Yet, in order to identify the being of a thing, to relate the thing with its sense again, it is not enough to come back to one’s homeland and to engage oneself in outdoor painting; the classical conception and structure of the picture has to be essentially changed. To Cézanne, first of all it meant to simplify the plot of the picture and to minimize its sense. Cézanne’s growth as a painter is the road of minimizing and simplifying the sense of a picture. In the works of his youth, we may find many mythological and literary allusions; there are still many plots, stories, actions in them; they still contain plenty of conscious or unconscious symbolism, many passions, feelings, moods; but later, in the works of the so-called Constructive Period, all this literary rubbish vanishes for good. The content of Cézanne’s mature works equals to nothing or almost nothing. It is a kind of zero level of content and sense. The painting of the French artist cannot be called subject-based, historical, mythological, or genre-oriented. It contains no symbols or allegories, no hints on specific (or non-specific) events, no external dynamism, no action that could be talked about. Almost all his pictures might be called by one word, a noun: “A Pine”, “A Mountain”, “Oranges and Apples”, “A Landscape”, “A Jacket”, “A Human”. Finally, after generalizing and simplifying they all can be called “A Thing”. Cézanne painted things, people, and landscapes, but all that he painted can be called a still life. A still life is the essence of Cézanne’s painting not as a genre of painting, but as a metaphysical nucleus. Such a transfer of all the motifs painted to the still life was again determined by the most important aim – to identify the thing. After all, there are least of sense and most of being, least of change and most of stability namely in the thing that is simplified as in a still life and detached from all external links and relations; the sense of the thing, seen in a still-life manner, is elementary and corresponds most adequately to its semblance and the form expresses best the content. A thing in a still life “means” as much as its evident sensible being and elementary semblance “means”, it has no symbolism and no depth that bursts the surface of the thing; the visible is an absolute equivalent of the invisible. Cézanne therefore liked to paint paper flowers more than living ones: the former are more stable, they do not wither away, they last longer than the latter. Besides, a still life has no plot, it does not tell any stories, it only states and shows: this thing is, and nothing else. It is not by chance that one of the painter’s greatest dreams was “to set off a revolution by a single well-painted carrot”. And to paint a carrot or another thing well means to confine it to a most elementary form, to a crystal of being of a sort. That is how things crystallize in Cézanne’s landscapes: trees, hills, houses, water, and even the sky, acquiring the simplicity, motionlessness, and stability of almost inorganic being. On the other hand, the simplest thing becomes a rightful hero of the picture. There are no more “beautiful” and “ugly”, “big” and “small”, “noble” and “ignoble” things in his pictures.

The Thing and Art

139

Things are no longer divided into those that are “worth” the painter’s brush and attention and those that are not. Moreover, the simpler the thing is the more it asks to be transferred to the canvas, the lesser its being is the louder it pleads to see, to enlarge, to show that being, for even the most insignificant thing is and has right to be, for even in the being of the most elementary thing there is more beauty than in all literary ideas, in all noblest senses, in all anonymous abstractions, in short, in the entire kingdom of symbols, created by man. And Cézanne has proved by his works that it is indeed so. He, like Van Gogh, who used to make the simplest things “his saints”, painted a kettle, an onion, a tile stove, a frayed coat, an armchair, or a clock without the hands, and painted all this not as a background, not as a secondary element of the composition, not as an embellishment or a detail, but as the main figure of the picture, as the absolute teleological centre. Who of the past great painters before Cézanne and Van Gogh had dared to turn into a work of art torn shoes of a peasant, a chair, a pipe, a sooty kettle, and everything else that is usually called rubbish? That rubbish, however, attracted those two hunters of the being of the thing first because it had least of sense and because it is easiest to identify the being of the most elementary and least noticeable things, those companions of our everyday life. Such things do not have yet infinite sense and chaos, which is waving in complex, big, i.e. hominized, things. The simplest things are most easily recognized, they are most thingly, they are that wall against which all attempts to transcend into the universe of anonymous senses strike, they block the way to the aggression of the Great Anonym. Only that what is small can resist the furies of megalomania, which have overtaken the human soul. Greatness and size are qualitatively different, and even negating each other, matters. There was incomparably more of real human greatness in small Greek towns than in the vast Roman empire. The tattered bed of Epaminondas has much more greatness than the treasuries of Persian kings and the immense spaces of their empires. Small things can be greater than the biggest things; one has only to see that greatness, one has only to know how to look at it with the pure eye. Being is equally great always and everywhere; no human measures of grandeur, frequently quite infantile, are applicable to it. But you must unclose it here and now, in the simplest things and in the commonest people. Only then will you be able to show it to others. Cézanne and Van Gogh knew how to do that masterly. Great is what is simple and small, – this is what their “saints”, elementary things, relate. However, it is not enough to simplify the plot of the picture and to throw overboard different symbolic and literary ballast in order to show the being of the thing itself. Furthermore, it is necessary to eliminate from the picture the traces of the subjective attitude towards the thing, to become maximally objective, not to show one’s feelings, moods, wit, sympathies and antipathies, otherwise there is a risk instead of the being of the thing itself to show merely one’s own relation with the thing, i.e. eventually oneself, but not the thing, one’s own existential vibrations,

Arvydas Šliogeris

140

psychology or pathology, but not the thing’s objective standing-in-itself. Cézanne knew about that risk, as he himself had gone through the purgatory of romantic expressionism, himself had undergone all temptations of psychologism and pathologism, himself had overcome them at great pains and finally had created a maximally objective visual of a thing. The zero level of expression is one of the most important traits of his mature pictures. The relation with the thing is utterly melted in the being of the thing itself; relation becomes being. This is how the imperative of classical art in Cézanne’s works for the last time regains body and blood. This is how the classical thing once more is torn out of the realm of relation and is stood in front of the subject as a substantial reality and a phenomenon of being.

19 A Lunacharsky quite precisely noted Cézanne’s creative aims and essence. Here are his words: “Meanwhile, those who followed Cézanne saw in all his quest not what was sound, not his distinctly expressed want to construct a picture from nature’s material and to retain thingness after having ascertained in its existence, and thus to break through Gauguinian flatness. Cézanne was in rage when he heard saying that the picture had to be flat and to demonstrate weightless things. On the contrary, his grand task was to present thingness, because a true painter must highlight the mightiness of things, must actually create a new world, a better one than that we see” (3, 44). One thought is important to us in this quote: by highlighting the mightiness of things, Cézanne had to create a new world, i.e. a new structure of the picture space, a new way of organizing all pictorial material, and though he oriented himself towards the classical, he had to overcome many canons and stereotypes of classical painting. The most important task of the French painter was to show the being of man and of a thing as a substantial individual. So, the main principle of the organizing of the plastic and spatial structure of his pictures is the even construction of the intensity of thingly being. The space of Cézanne’s pictures entirely, from top to bottom, from the first ground to the last, is saturated with being. There are no empty spaces, no places without something. A picture is a continuous plastic mass, each dot of it is a maximally condensed monolith of being, there is equally plenty of being everywhere. There are no cracks in the picture, no illusionism, no thinning; even the places not covered by paint, left in most of the “unfinished” pictures, are not emptiness literally: they radiate the same intensity of being as other “filled” places of the picture. That the spaces of Cézanne’s pictures are replete with being might be shown by comparison. That what we call being we usually perceive extensively and quantitatively. To us, there is plenty of being generally in that which is big, wide, long, massive, which covers a vast space or long time. The intensity of being is

The Thing and Art

141

perceived as something directly proportional to its extensiveness. But such a perception of being is dotted and fragmentary; there are many cracks, pores, hollows, i.e. there is plenty of non-being in being, perceived like that. Another perception of being is possible, which we shall call intensive. To imagine better its essence, let us for a moment remember our childhood, that time when there was equally plenty of being everywhere around; when everything, even hollows, was eloquent, so also replete with being; when an empty space did not exist at all; when each dot of the opening-in-front-of-us world was alive with something, for which we did not have names, but we knew and believed that every dot is very important, that it is; when everything around us and inside us was thick, full, and plenteous. There were things even in those places where “actually” there were none, for we could not see them. Yet we knew that they were, one just had to look better, one had to look at the world, say, through a sliver of blue glass or to know a magic word. We believed that there were also invisible things, and they were no less real and had no less of being than visible things. The visible and the invisible blended into one thing, and that thing had more being than the “pure” visible or the “pure” invisible. Exactly such intensiveness of being that opens itself to a gaze of a child is radiating from Cézanne’s pictures. Probably it was not by chance that many researchers labelled his works as “naive” and “primitive”. I do not think that Cézanne had an infantile soul or managed to retain a “childishly pure and naive” look at the world until his old age; nor do I think that he consciously strove for primitivism, so popular in the painting of our century. Artificial, reflective primitivism, which is no other than a whim of a refined, satiated-with-culture soul, is not productive, barren and sterile. Such primitivism has no necessity and no truth. Refined primitivism, as one of many manifestations of mannerism, leads to a dead end. Cézanne was not a primitivist and did not strive for primitivism for the sake of primitivism. He was indeed a thinker with a brush in his hand and generally knew what he was doing and what he was trying to attain, although we should not treat this knowing as some theory or programme. Cézanne did not have any programmes and did not originate any theories. However, seeking to identify maximally the thing and to intensify its being, he was looking for new means of expression, for a new – compared to traditional Western painting – organizing of the space and structure of a picture. The space of classical painting seemed to Cézanne too ephemeral, too illusionary, too open, and too empty, and the things, placed in it, too modest, shy, and timid, because, after all, indeed in that space, which was open to a human and was pulling him in, were placed not things “themselves”, but their idealized proto-images, their “beautiful” ideas, the ideal substantial equivalent of real things. The space of a traditional picture, constructed according to the principle of linear perspective, reminded too much of a theatre stage, and the things and people of nicely dressed actors. The uncertainty of operettic quasibeing was lingering above those things. Such organization of space in the

142

Arvydas Šliogeris

situation of the death of things no longer could satisfy Cézanne. The space had to be managed in such a way that there would remain as little illusionism as possible, which was unconsciously identified by the painter with the illusoriness of a hominized thing, with the insufficient intensiveness of its being. Therefore, Cézanne rejected traditional perspective and traditional methods of the construction of the depth of a picture. In a traditional picture, things are as if moving away from the viewer, the grounds, like stairs, placed one after another, harmoniously and coherently lead us to the picture’s depth up to the horizon; and in Cézanne’s pictures, the contrary is the case. We may call the perspective of his pictures, though very roughly, reverse and more precisely pulsating or zigzag. As a rule, Cézanne’s pictures do not have a foreground; it falls through somewhere backwards and partitions the viewer from the space of the picture. Thus, the things in the picture seem to be moved away from the viewer; thus, their independency, their insularity and beyond-humanness is shown and their untouchability, their right to be in and for themselves is defended. On the other hand, Cézanne brings farther grounds forth, and they lean on the foreground, come closer to it, and become not less thingly and distinguished substantially. Cézanne fixates this drift of the farther grounds to the front in warm colours and the foreground in colder colours. The painter himself used to say that while standing in the presence of a motif he used to see how the grounds started to crawl one on another and straight lines listed forth. That is why there is no more calm traditional depth in Cézanne’s picture. Everything that is in there, all the things seem to move towards the viewer, the picture seems to swell towards him, the apples of still lifes are climbing out of the picture space, and the impression is that they are about to roll from the picture into the real space of the viewer. Even in landscapes, where the foreground is also cut off, all the things are moving so vigorously towards the viewer and seem to be so close that an illusion appears that the viewer is “standing” in the space of the picture itself and that a part of the picture is behind him. And so the picture swells towards the viewer like some huge colourful bubble. I would call such a structure of a picture space ek-static3: it not draws in but pushes away. This is how the intensiveness of the being of the picture’s things is created, this is how the thing shows its substantiality and individuality. The ek-static convexity of Cézanne’s pictures is especially pronounced in his still lifes, in which things are placed on the picture plane in such a way that their being looks even grimly, as they are unusually close to the viewer and are constantly moving towards him. One is under the impression that a still life is painted at so close a distance when the thing observed cannot be seen altogether, because it is too close and should, according to all laws of optics, become dim and resolve into incoherent colour dabs, and the image of the thing should disappear, disintegrate into elementary sensations. The fruits of Cézanne’s still lifes, however, not only retain their rich thingness, but also even aggressively affirm it, as if saying: do not touch me, but look at me, – I am. The ek-static

The Thing and Art

143

impression is much enhanced by the roughness of Cézanne’s canvases, by their bristly facture, by various deformations and at first glance dissonant colour contrasts. To a good many of the painter’s contemporaries, his pictures seemed so eye-irritating, crude, and repulsive that they provoked only malicious laughter, and ill tongues commented that he in general was illiterate in the ABC of painting or even had an inborn defect of vision. To many contemporaries, the effect of ek-staticalness was just the pathology of personality. Yet, such disgust, growing into hatred, at prancing canvases was not merely an aftermath of not understanding or misunderstanding. Precisely repulsion is one of the most important principles of the construction of Cézanne’s picture space. Those pictures might have looked repulsive first of all because they were such by themselves, and such they were painted by Cézanne himself. They do not admit the viewer too close to their presence, they compel a respectful distance, they forbid any familiarities, do not invite to come in, to be friends, they are alien and unsocial. They seem to have this, written on them: “No admittance!” Such severity of Cézanne’s pictures is not a fortuitous whim, which should be explained psychologically or pathologically; rather, it is a document of Cézanne’s, as a painter’s, tragic destiny. Being attacked from all sides by anonymous senses, which annihilate the being of a thing and destroy its form, the painter, at any price intending to preserve the being of a familiar thing as a substantial individual, is forced to maximally dehumanize it, to move it farther from man, because all anonymous senses, blanketing the being of the thing, come from anonymous humanness, i.e. from the realm of cognition. In order to preserve the substantiality and familiarity of things the painter is compelled consciously to make the same things unfamiliar, untamed, alien, rigorous, and severe, he is compelled to show the primordiality of the being of the things, the nontransference of that being to any humanly senseful equivalent. This is the greatest paradox of Cézanne’s works: he manages to get things closer only by taking them farther away, to acquaint with them only by making them anonymous, to humanize them only by dehumanizing them. The entire ontotopical situation of a hominized thing is clearly seen in this paradox, i.e. the strangeness of anonymous things to a person, of course, not to man in general, but to this particular finite individual. The dehumanization of the picture space is inherent to Cézanne’s entire mature creation. The critics have noted more than once that Cézanne not only forbids the viewer to come into a painted landscape (probably the most vivid example of such a prohibition is the picture called The Road at Chantilly, in which on the path, leading to a grange in the background, stands a barrier), but in general eliminates from the landscape any traces of human existence. Also, differently from the landscapes of the old masters, where a human is always present, sometimes indirectly, but usually directly, as a meaningful and pictorial element of the picture structure, we shall not find people in Cézanne’s landscapes. They are empty, without any traces of human activity, frequently wild, breathing with

144

Arvydas Šliogeris

the severity and mightiness of primordial nature, untouched by man. And when the artist paints a populated landscape, let us say, houses or any other artificial, man-made things, they look as severe and dehumanized as the things of nature. Some little town (e.g. Gardanne) thus becomes a collection of geometrically reduced bodies: houses become crystals, a human abode a kingdom of minerals. Moreover, Cézanne treats a human like a thing and paints him in the same way as a still life or a landscape. People, painted by him, resemble more of statues, as they are also modelled from inorganic matter, they are stiff, massive, petrified. Their faces do not show any traces of feeling or thought, any passions, psychological nuances, mimic, any vitality that would reflect their spiritual life. Cézanne’s people very rarely look straight to the viewer; usually they look down, aside, or straight at some thing; often instead of a face, an area, not covered by paint, or an indistinctive colourful dab is left. Cézanne does not like a human face and especially human eyes. As a painter, he sees no ontotopical difference between a human and, say, an apple, and in general he values an apple, as an object of painting, higher than a human, because a human moves and an apple is motionless, it is much easier therefore to paint the latter. Does it mean that Cézanne was a misanthropist, was his painting inherently antihuman, as Charles Maurice thought, who said these bitter words about Cézanne’s works: “He has no initial all-organizing idea, no humanitarian task, which would link an artist with humankind. Cézanne’s works lack a humanitarian rudiment, which would help people see the reflection of their world in them” (3, 232)? I think these words are wrong, they are uttered by the person who viewed Cézanne’s works superficially, who did not see the depth of them, their true intentions and who did not feel the tragedy of the painter’s situation. Yes, if to look superficially, Cézanne is moving from man and approaching non-human reality, pure, simple, severe beyond-human things. Yes, Cézanne treats a human as a thing. Yes, he reifies a human, but tries not to hominize things. If we look at it in the abstract way, detached from historical and ontotopical situation, this is a step towards antihumanism. Yet, let us remember again what ontotopical situation nurtured Cézanne’s painting. Penetrating towards the being of things themselves, he felt intuitively that the hominization of the thing beyond moderation (and the hominization of things, their technological destruction has overstepped moderation long ago, and this is very obvious to us, who live a century later) was dangerous to the being not only of the thing but also of man himself. Losing his thingness, his sensible concreteness, his identity, so his substantial individuality as well, man loses his being as well, the substantial nucleus of his humanness. The being of man is equally easily vulnerable as the being of any other thing, because man, whatever we may say about him, is not merely pure spirit. He is limited, mortal, he has body, consequently, he is also a thingly being. Aggressive and blind hominization of the entityhood endangers the identity of both the thing and man as a finite individual. Only by preserving man’s thingness may we preserve his

The Thing and Art

145

humanness as well. There is no other road. Even more. Now another fundamental matter has shown up: treating natural things as pure means, going by blind instrumentalism and anthropocentric egoism, which repudiates any moderation, not expecting nature’s good graces, we have approached the abyss, which is called an ecological catastrophe. We should not annihilate things recklessly any longer; we should not thrust into them instrumentally oriented human meanings and senses anymore. Such sensification of nature is actually its destruction. Such hominization of things is not only their annihilation, but also man’s suicide. Man without things is nothing; by annihilating the being of things, he dooms himself to annihilation. Therefore, once again: only not losing moderation, only taking account of the fact that each thing is a substantial individual and has the right to be, man can preserve also his own substantial individuality, his being, and first of all his thingly being. And exactly that was Cézanne’s major purpose. Is such a purpose antihuman? Maybe at Cézanne’s time this purpose could be considered antihuman, but to accuse the painter of Aix of antihumanness now would be sheer infantilism. Identifying the thing by force, tearing it out of the realm of the Great Anonym, Cézanne, maybe laboriously, maybe hopelessly, but tried to do the same what the old masters had done so easily – to humanize the thing. And he is not to blame that humanization was possible only as a paradox, only as the thing’s distancing from man, as its dehumanization. But if we have not forgotten the long road of our thought, now we can say like this: Cézanne tried not to dehumanize, but to dehominize things. And to dehominize a thing ontotopically means to humanize it, to place it in the hollow of acquaintance, so, to restore the ontotopical rights of both the thing and man, as substantial individuals. Thereby we may consider Cézanne’s painting humanistic and the painter himself a humanist. And maybe this hard and tragic humanism of Cézanne is much more real than that naive, blind, and declarative humanism, which is for centuries, with the seriousness of a trained parrot, reiterating the same: man is above everything, to man everything is allowed, everything belongs to man, man is the peak of the creaturehood, man is the lord of nature, etc. And maybe there is nothing more dangerous to man himself than blind humanism, more ominous than anthropocentric night-blindness. Maybe things themselves will compel us (or have they already done so?) to understand such simple truths. Maybe? At this point, none of us knows that. But Cézanne knew that, although maybe only intuited. Yet, it is not so little, as this intuition turned into a crystal of a work of art. Cézanne’s intuition has been passed to us, and our task is to turn it into clear knowing.

Arvydas Šliogeris

146

20 Now we know what Cézanne was striving for, what the meaning of his magic word la réalization is, we know how he tried to attain his major goal – “to become a classic through nature”, to stop the disappearance of dying things, to restore the being of a substantial individual. However, we do not know whether he succeeded in realizing his goal, whether he indeed succeeded in becoming a classic, in short, whether his painting is classical and the art things he created are classical things. In 1921, in his letter to Hausenstein, Rilke wrote: “Probably all of us have noticed how this shift to the invisible, this worldly renunciation of the sensible equivalent, descending on us from all sides, happens; great despair, showing in Cézanne’s works, his struggle for la réalization often seemed to me like some endeavours once again, constrainedly, at all cost to identify a thing with its sense. However, already then this cost was an everyday resignation, making a sacrifice of life for a goal, hardly ever attainable. Over the works of Cézanne, whatever success they would be crowned with, the word ‘fate’ is inscribed” (2, 274). What fate? In general, Cézanne’s task to become a classic, to return to the classical, in itself was not fateful, and many of his contemporaries did not even have a clue about the necessity to return to the classical situation, because it was right there; many a colleague of Cézanne glutted various salons, exhibitions, boudoirs, and pavilions with “classical” pictures. Paris in the end of the 19th century was the centre of serial art production. Art industry was thriving; the supply of works of art clearly exceeded its demand, and even the state was intruding into the affairs of art, and first of all of plastic art. Academic painting predominated. And what can be more classical than academism? Academic art has always been “more classical” than the classical itself, because the canons the academists are guiding themselves with are purified to the precision of a mathematical formula. But exactly because of that academism is sterile: this is mummified classical art or a mummy of the classical. It was very easy to become a classic by taking the road of academism, by mimicking the outside of traditional painting, severed from the ontotopical roots. Cézanne took a different road; a lonely star of the painter was revolving in an orbit, destined only to it. Cézanne very simply, in seemingly insignificant words, explained how his goals differed from those of academists: the return to the classical is possible only through nature, in other words, through the senses. Consequently, one has to paint a picture in the presence of the sensible world and not having fenced oneself from it by the art of museums, by the walls of studios, by manuals on art, and by canons that have become dogmas; one has to paint not one’s or somebody else’s fictions, not literature or mythology, but reality itself, things themselves. And that posed Cézanne a fateful question, which was tormenting him all his life: how to reconcile the spontaneity of the constructing powers of an artist, intellect and imagination, with the receptiveness of the senses. A conflict of

The Thing and Art

147

intellect and the senses appeared, because the spontaneity of intellect and imagination was destroying the receptiveness of the senses. One member of this antinomy having been severed, everything more or less returned to their places. Having turned oneself from the sensible world and ignoring the direct sensory experience, a painter could emigrate to the sphere of the constructs of intellect and imagination and to produce sterile academic painting. In this sphere, a painter could feel himself a god and do what he liked, as the entire reality was being created by him only, and he was not disturbed by any external obstacles. Having rejected the constructing powers of intellect and imagination and having given oneself to “naive” sensibility, a painter could easily paint beautiful pictures, too, which would slide the surface of sensible appearance; he could create Impressionist painting – academism with the minus sign. But what happens when an artist cannot eliminate either member of the antinomy, when he raises the imperative of the synthesis of intellectual spontaneity and sensory receptiveness? This was the imperative that Cézanne raised to himself. Virtually, it was the same problem that Kant had been solving a century ago. We know well what difficulties the founder of critical philosophy underwent in trying to actualize the synthesis of intellect and sensibility. Cézanne, who was striving for the same by painting, met still greater difficulties. What is the source of those difficulties? At first glance, there should be nothing difficult. After all, any difficulties used to be easily overcome by classical philosophy as well as by traditional painting. In the classical situation, the harmony of the senses and intellect was a matter of course. And we already know why: the harmony of the senses and intellect was no other than an analogue of the structure of a humanized thing. The depth of such a thing, a human analogue of which was intellect in the widest sense (mind, thinking, imagination, the spontaneity of the subject), corresponded to the sensible surface, a human analogue of which was sensory perception. There was no discrepancy, no conflict between the sensible form of a familiar thing and its supersensible content, between its semblance and its supersensible sense; therefore, there was no conflict between the spontaneity of intellect and the receptiveness of the senses. The spontaneity was receptive, and the receptiveness spontaneous. The situation changes in the world of hominized things, towards which Kant’s philosophy was oriented indirectly and Cézanne’s works quite directly. A hominized thing is an obvious conflict between the sensible surface and the supersensible depth. The limitless sense of a thing no longer corresponds to the finite form of it, the supersensible depth to the sensible surface. Spontaneous powers of intellect are unfolding in the realm of pseudo-morphous meanings and senses, intellect is wandering in the formless and thingless space of pure relation, and the receptive senses are attached to sensibly evident thingly forms. Formless intellect has no contact with the form of a sensible thing. Sensible things open themselves only in the background of the pseudo-reality of formless pure relation; they can be perceived and seen not as substantial

148

Arvydas Šliogeris

individuals, but merely as the entirety of relations or as a complex of relations. The being of a sensible thing is senseless in itself, for it is constructed from formless anonymous senses, from supersensible relations. The statics of the thing’s being must be gained from the dynamics of pure relation. Consequently, pure relation must be reduced to its absolute contrary, to a sensibly evident substantial individual, which is beyond all relations. The visible form has to be moulded from the amorphous invisible, and the limitless sense has to be placed into a limited thing. Such are ontotopical roots of the conflict between intellect and the senses. Kant did not solve this conflict, he went round it by saying that it was not possible to identify the thing itself and that it was enough to be content with a mere “appearance”, i.e. with a sensible surface without the thingly depth, or with the sensible form without the substantial content. Kant banishes things-in-themselves to the realm of the Great Anonym and neglects them or finds meagre “moral” substitutes for them. Cézanne took another, the most difficult road: by the means of painting, he tried to put a “big” sense into a “small” thing, to construct the substantial being and form of a thing from the formless and insubstantial matter of pure relation. Thus, a mirage had to be turned into reality, an atom had to be created out of emptiness and being out of nothing. And this is where the fateful conflict sets between intellect and the senses, between spontaneity and receptiveness, between formlessness and the form, between the depth and the surface, between sense and the thing, between relation and being. This conflict was revealed to us by the Duino Elegies. What is the result? It seems that in the world of hominized things it is not possible harmoniously to identify sense with the thing, it seems that sense is too big for the thing, it does not fit in there and therefore blows the thing from inside. The thing collapses like a card house, the Great Anonym inundates and melts it. Let us look at Cézanne’s later works, say, studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire, done in 1905–1906, let us look at Van Gogh’s later works of the Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise period: The Starry Night, Cypresses, landscapes of Auvers. They all still contain things, but those things look like they are living their last moments. Another second and they will burst, disintegrate, and vanish in the hopeless monotony of the Great Anonym. The things of Cézanne and Van Gogh are in a fit of mortal convulsions, these are things-epileptics, things-bombs, lumps of dynamite, in the depth of which destructive energy is bubbling. Forms become mushy, lose stability, and the picture plane resolves into incoherent colour fragments or vibrates, as though the entire picture space were in shivers. It is a view of the collapsing world and dying things. That is why so naive and sad are enthusiastic clamours of post-Impressionist epigones about the expressiveness of the works by Cézanne and Van Gogh and so naive appear the raptures about the “symbolic” depth of these convulsive paintings. All such enthusiasm is an outcome of not understanding and misunderstanding. Cézanne and Van Gogh are considered innovators for those traits of their

The Thing and Art

149

painting from which they tried to escape, but could not, which they tried to avoid, but could not, which they fought against with all their might, but were destined to lose. Expression and symbolism pushed into their pictures against their will as a destructive unbridled monster of sense, which tormented Cézanne day and night and which too early drove Van Gogh to the grave – two noble and by their nature healthy classical people. The epigones inherited only their ailments and triumphantly finished the work of the destruction of things, which had been started by the Impressionists. Unfortunately, Cézanne could not resist that destruction, either. We might ask: but why, why did Cézanne not succeed in overcoming the furies of destruction and in doing that what was, and is, so easily done by an academist or a nicely drawing schoolgirl? There is no answer to this question. Maybe only such: there are people that are doomed to truth; there are not many of them, but they exist. Such a person was Cézanne, just as his alter ego – the painter Van Gogh or the poet Rilke. They are the people of truth. And why namely they had to shoulder the heavy load of truth nobody knows and cannot know.

21 Cézanne’s entire creative work is dramatic and tragic, and his each picture is a document of that dramatic nature, each canvas is a trace of a tragic conflict. But this drama is not psychological, it in general does not have anything in common with a personal drama; it is a drama of things themselves, of the entityhood itself, it is a drama of the eternal fight between being and non-being, between the thing and pure relation, it is a gigantomachy, which especially became prominent in the situation of hominized thingness. Being is only by constantly tearing itself out of nonbeing; by resisting each moment against the realm of pure relation, which bursts and destroys it; by “out-forming” itself each blink from chaos and “informing” itself into a substantial individual, into a phenomenon of being. The absoluteness of a phenomenon of being appears only as constant negation of its relativity. The constantly disintegrating harmony and the crumbling form have to restore their stability, and this restoration is an unparalleled miracle of the entityhood. “Why is there being and not rather non-being?” the major question, posed by the great metaphysicians, was guiding Cézanne’s brush as well. In general, neither being nor non-being is a naked fact. First, these are two possible human ontotopical orientations. Man or even an entire culture, an entire social organism can orient themselves either towards being or towards non-being. In this respect, being is an ideal, as also non-being is, only with a minus sign. And frequently man’s destiny depends on where the arrows of his metaphysical longing are aiming at. This longing cannot be measured in naturalistic values, it bears no relation to the instinct of selfpreservation. Man is afraid of death, but at the same time he whispers prayers

Arvydas Šliogeris

150

to the demons of non-being. It is a paradox, yet not of the thought, but of the human existence. It is a riddle to read which we are incapable.

22 Cézanne chose the road leading towards being, and to him being coincided with the preservation of the thing’s identity. What strikes the eye in all paintings by Cézanne and other post-Impressionists, first of all by Van Gogh, is indeed titanic endeavours to stop the disintegration of the being of the thing, to retain the identity of the thing at any cost. The view of the sensible world, like sand slipping through the fingers, dives into emptiness in their works; the thing balances on a razor edge; between being and nonbeing, between form and formlessness, between the harmonious surface and the chaotic depth, between beautiful appearance and frightening reality, between the sensible cosmos and the supersensible chaos. Exactly in this unstable, dangerous, and weird Between all creation of Cézanne and of his brothers in arms is unfolding. Only by the will of adamant do they manage to stay on the razor edge and not to fall into the abyss of the Great Anonym.

23 Truth, good, and beauty are three great archetypes of Western culture, three varieties of European ideal. Each of them has its own myth, tragedy, and tragic heroes. The last great myth of the West is the myth of beauty, the last tragedy is the tragedy of beauty, the last tragic hero is the knight of beauty. Cézanne is a hero of the last tragedy, of the tragedy of beauty, the last Don Quixote, having tilted at the windmills of pure relation, at the same time he is the last classic. But his classicalness is tragic, therefore no longer classical. I doubt whether Cézanne has created at least a single picture that can be called perfect in the same regard in which we call perfect the canvases of Rafael, Leonardo, or Vermeer. The creation of Cézanne is a spring flower, which blossomed in late autumn and was bitten by early frosts. Therefore, let us not look for perfection in his works. There is none there. His works are marked with a seal of tragedy and despair. The beauty of his pictures is not beautiful, it has an aftertaste of wormwood. We pay our respects to the old masters and bow to them. They are our superiors. A different lot fell to Cézanne. To him, we give our love, sad and clear as spring water. He is beside us and with us. We do not expect perfection of him, as we are so far from it ourselves. Besides, beauty not necessarily must be perfect. About this kind of beauty – probably about it – wonderful words were spoken by Marcel

The Thing and Art

151

Proust. Here they are: but true beauty is so individual, so novel always, that one does not recognize it as beauty.

24 Let us look at The Great Pine once again. It stands calm, grand, and speechless in front of us. It emanates the silence of being. It keeps silent not because it does not have anything to say, but because any saying would only distort that what it shows directly to our eyes and our souls. It shows us the being of a thing as a phenomenon of being, thus it shows also the beauty of a thing, senseless like the smile of Mona Lisa.

The Thing and Art

153

NOTES 1

The numbers in brackets indicate the work and page in the List of Works Cited at the end of the book. Some of them are compilations and have no, or several different, equivalents in English. The translation, therefore, will mostly stick to the Lithuanian original to show the author’s standpoint. (Translator’s notes here and forth.)

2

In the original, the pieces of Rilke’s poetry were translated by the author word for word. We shall do the same.

3

That is to say, “standing out, situated outside”.

LIST OF WORKS CITED

1.

Ƚɟɝɟɥɶ Ƚ. ȼ. ɗɫɬɟɬɢɤɚ. – Moscow, 1968. Ɍ. 1. (G W Hegel. Aesthetics.)

2.

Ɋɢɥɶɤɟ Ɋ. Ɇ. ȼɨɪɩɫɜɟɞɟ. Ɉɝɸɫɬ Ɋɨɞɟɧ. ɉɢɫɶɦɚ. ɋɬɢɯɢ. – Moscow, 1971. (R M Rilke. Worpswede. Auguste Rodin. Letters. Poems.)

3.

ɋɟɡɚɧ ɉ. ɉɟɪɟɩɢɫɤɚ. ȼɨɫɩɨɦɢɧɚɧɢɹ ɫɨɜɪɟɦɟɧɧɢɤɨɜ. – Moscow, 1972. (P Cézanne. Correspondence. Recollections of contemporaries.)

4.

Heidegger M. Holzwege. – Frankfurt a. M., 1972.

5.

Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. – Berlin, 1913. – Bd. 15.

6.

Rilke R M. Gedichte. – Moscow, 1981.

7.

Rilke R. M. Maltơs Lauridso Brigơs užrašai. – Vilnius, 1985. (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.)

8.

Rilke R M. Über Dichtung und Kunst. – Frankfurt a. M., 1974.