Siddhartha
The freshness of the new as experienced in personal existence in the living present is in direct proportion to the depth of personal surrender to the moment. The depth of discovery is merely the depth of involvement. Concentration.
December 12, 1976
Art is not a judgement or assertion of the truth of the world, he says. The aesthetic experience, or art, is therefore unaware of itself as knowledge because it is unaware of the ideal division that can be made in knowledge, i.e. between the moments of imagining and assertion. Without this distinction art is pure imagination says Collingwood, and pure imagination is not a perfect expression of the Truth, though it does not miss completely.
In religion the imaginings of art are asserted. Therefore religion is a dialectical development of art. However religion does not distinguish between its assertion, which is embodied in symbol, i.e., God is the religious for absolute Reality, and what the symbol symbolizes. The symbol, to religion IS what it conveys. It is the Real, says Collingwood. Because this distinction is not made religion is mythological. When the distinction is made religion looses its mythological character; but it also ceases to be religious and becomes philosophical. Why is this, according to Collingwood?
Religion is thought constantly going toward an object that is other than the thinker*; God is other than man or he is not God. When thought recognizes that the symbol of the Truth is not the Truth, but A way to the Truth, the Real, then the Real, as the object of thought, ceases to be other than the thinker. So Collingwood says that philosophical thought is thought returning to itself. To say, then, that God is only a symbol of the absolute is to reduce him to the level of all symbols, while, at the same time, it is to boost religion to the level of philosophy.
In my own thinking I agree with most of what Collingwood says. The truth, the Real, being that by virtue of which all things are, is necessarily not fully exhausted by one symbol, i.e., God. So religion is mythological. Truth is embodied, rather, in every possible concept or symbol, which is precisely why philosophy can speak of it in so many different ways. (e.g. the “divided line” of Plato; the “One” of Parmenides, etc.) If a religious person comes to realize, then, the distinction between God as symbol and God as the Real, he is moving into the realm of philosophy where the Real is spoken of in perhaps as many ways as it manifests. It is a quality not a quantify. Many manifestations might participate in ‘red’ besides a blessed Rose.
If I approach someone, a mystic, say, and ask what is Truth?, he will, perhaps, give me many answers, all of which are true; he may even keep silent. And if I understand the Truth, I understand. But I understand just a little more than what he says, too. That is, I understand that thing which he is talking about, the meaning behind the words, the meaning as separate from the symbols. His sayings are a new beginning.
*As stated previously in this blog Science and History are likewise dialectical developments of art and religion. As Kierkegaard would have it they are Stages on Life’s Way. For Collingwood they are thought constantly going toward an object that is other than the thinker. Science will ultimately give us a ‘grand unifying theory’; History will ultimately culminate in a cultural utopia; Religion will finally take us to heaven – all are absolute others.
How does intuition relate to transcendence?
Faith must be freely chosen.
If God can’t be parsed from the whole of the Real there can be no transcendence except in the sense that arriving where you started you know the place for the first time.
The world of things is available to us through our senses alone yet there is a transcendent aspect of “things-in-themselves”. But it is not a separate realm. What is perceived in phenomenal reality is not entirely factual. “Plato himself esteemed beauty as the particular form of value that actually can be seen in things. To make this consistent with the rest of his theory, however, he had to say that beautiful objects were only “shadows” of the higher reality, “participating” in the Form of Beauty. Although Kant’s own aesthetics were subjectivist …., his metaphysics could allow for a more literal rendering of Plato’s own claim about beauty: Since transcendence is in phenomenal objects, the beauty that we see in things is in fact a perception right through factual reality to Beauty Itself.” (Kelly Ross)
Now, turn that a little further and you might get: Since transcendence is in phenomenal objects, the sacred that we see in things is in fact a perception right through factual reality to the Divine itself.
Intuition is this “perception right through factual reality” and as such is the faculty of transcendence, such as it is. Arriving where you began and knowing the place for the first time is thus explained. It is a real transcendence without the baggage of requiring a separate realm or level of reality. Faith is active intuition. When freely selected it can blossom into a full mode of existence, a way of life, a path to everlasting transcendence; a dwelling in the numinous. It is nothing short of a prolonged and everlasting Noesis. The only way you have faith is if you choose faith. It is the very essence of the affirmation of the Real. Faith and intuition are evidence of things unseen. They are inclusive; they are constant affirmation continuing across the entire spectrum of experience. In a sense they are the opposite of Science as a mode of being in the world which demands of the Real convincing proofs before the suspension of doubt.
False and fanciful notions of transcendence whether as a project of History, as in cultural Marxism, or, similarly, exoteric Religion, secular or otherwise, with its idea of a separate and perfect realm called Heaven, or Nirvana, or a perfect state of cultural utopia however defined by the social justice warriors, denizens of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, are root causes of a discarnate longing, insensate and boundless, a force of nature, a passion to finally arrive at a state of completion always just the other side of every day reality. The reason people are so miserable is they insist on making the world conform to their notion of transcendence. They say they have the answer to life’s problems and intend to force their ideas on everyone else – because they, unlike the rest of us, really do own the truth, have a direct path to the one true source, “God”, whether it is religious or secular. So, until everyone thinks “right thoughts” we will be mired in misery and it is their mission to make certain this misery is shared equally. The Progressive of the Cult hurries in a perpetual vanishing and has no reflexivity. He is discarnate longing for his Utopian dreams, wholly owned by the daemonic. This evil is the state of being insatiable, forever seeking fulfillment in an ever receding underivable future condition.
You can thank Christianity and its offshoots for this. As a force of nature, the boundless, insensate and discarnate passion, longing, to finally own completion in a final act of transcendence is Christianity’s gift to the world. Christianity posited the daemonic spirit in the world and is responsible for the modern malaise wherein western man has evolved into a spiritless self, a self filled with despair and self-loathing, utterly lost and confused and yet increasingly certain that they alone have the prescription for society’s ills. They are the “insensate prison of an alien and restless power in quest of a ‘hidden’ divinity” or surrogate thereof. (William Poteat)
John Hinds
Feb. 1972
I wonder if they grasp what Art is. Certainly its not self-loathing. Art is a question put to being itself. The first question. It doesn’t expect an answer, is blind to an answer. That is the purview of Religion which is the first fractalisation of Art as a modality of sentient life. Religion acknowledges Art’s question and claims possession of the answer which it posits in an absolute other. This parsing of the truth from the whole of being is failure. But I digress.
What gets my attention is the assertion at the link that performance art mistakes pain for meaning. I’m thinking if it mistakes pain for meaning then it is a form of self-loathing, which expresses some deep seated guilt, which is an off-shoot of fear. Well, fear is a mode of idea which in turn is a mode of thought. Thought is a mode of consciousness, which is a mode of being. And, Being Is, or, The Real Is.
The self-loathing subjects are far from – many stages deep – into the descending levels of these modalities of The Real. They Own – are bound up in Having – not in Being. You can see it in their decidedly care worn faces.
Yes, even a pile of excrement might in a certain light have a bit of shine to it. But that doesn’t make it beautiful. It just makes it a participant of beauty of the very lowest order.
It used to be that the cream rose to the top. Nowadays its the opposite and the piece in question puts that on full display. A shiny thing gets your attention but if it has to give you a jolting shock to do so then its no more than the shine on the excreta.
There is a recurring theme in our culture. I’ve thought for a long time that its rooted in Christianity, and Islam too, and farther back in ancient Bronze age belief, this discarnate longing, the Daemonic in nature, an insatiable desire, also known as Don Juanism. The Religiously posited absolute other is nothing but an expression of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology. Perfection is “above”, “beyond” the ken of fallen man. The source of guilt is man’s station, below the perfection of the Heavens – his estrangement; the parsing of Truth from the whole of Being, Reality, and fixing it in the “Heavens”. Guilt is the source of fear, self-loathing, a “sickness unto death”. The infinite regress of dystopian dreams in which we are embedded is nothing but a fractalisation of that old Aristotle model of The Real. If nothing else we are eternally bound to this wheel whose spokes we hug and kiss, truly, a sickness unto death.
“In the late ‘60s The Illustrated Weekly of India published articles by “an especially selected panel of Indian religious leaders, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and politicians,” under the broad title “I Believe”. Each contributor was encouraged to described his or her personal philosophy by answering the same set of questions. G.V. Desani’s response (below) was published Dec. 7, 1967.
“Desani later adapted his article plus his edited summaries of the responses of other participants into an academic paper for the University of Texas Philosophy Department and the UT Center for Asian Studies. The title was “An Indian View of God, Cosmos, Love, Marriage, Sex, et cetera.”
And, I consider this next excerpt particularly germane to me personally:
“People who go about asking questions about “God” and demanding satisfaction – without realizing it – request answers to all these questions [see above] and more. To put them off with, “… ‘God’ is a word, a symbol, a concept, a construction by the consciousness, a creation of the mind of man,” or “ … is a cipher, something intuited, a ‘no, no!’” could be an evasion, a subterfuge, and “no! no!” would be an item quoted from an Upanishad. Some pious folk, on the other hand, are satisfied with the authoritative answers given by the founders of religions. By accepting personal testimony, such people are said to have “faith”. Folk so blessed should not ask anybody questions about “God”. They should look up their scriptures.
“I happen to presume, however, that everybody at all believes in “God”: if the word means the highest value. It is by one’s highest value that one weighs and measures the worth of anything at all. So – bringing this abstruse term within the compass of empirical knowledge, hence discussion – money is “God” for most people I know. Power is “God” for some: ego, assertion, conquest, possession – including possessing people, their “love” is covered by the term.”