Wrestling with Nature
The Obscuring Mirror & the Dream of True Perception
by Rainer J. Hanshe
Neue Galerie, New York, March 22 – July 2, 2007
To download the entire essay as Adobe PDF format |
| right click the link “Wrestling with Nature.”
Select “save target as” to save to your PC.
Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, October 2007. Copyright © 2007 Rainer J. Hanshe and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound.
—Shakespeare, King Lear, 1.2.1-2
To be one with all living things, to return, by a radiant self-forgetting, to the All of Nature.
—Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles
I suddenly woke up in the midst of this dream, but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I must go on dreaming lest I perish . . . What is “appearance” for me now! Certainly not the opposite of some essence . . . Appearance is for me that which lives and is effective . . . among all these dreamers, I, too, the “knower,” am dancing my dance
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science
When I dream and invent without return, am I not . . . nature?
—Valery
To see or not to see—that is, to lift or not to lift the veil, is not that the question?
“Phusis kruptesthai philei,” said Heraclitus, and ever since, his enigmatic statement has been malformed, interpreted and transfigured throughout time. Theologians, philosophers and artists have utilized it to shape our perception of and relationship to nature. In this, are we not shaping our relationship to our selves—and we are a multiplicity of warring, separated selves and not a singularity? For in coming to know nature, however much we are at all capable of knowing that which hides or disappears as it appears, what is it that we are beginning to discern, or interpret, but our very own lives? The mirror we are gazing into though is not transparent, but obscured, just as the eye of the camera is not lucid but darkened glass; it is not objective for never is there only the eye of the camera—behind that Cyclopean eye there is always another eye, and that too is a single eye. Distortion abounds; darkness proliferates. Ascend, descend, traverse and pursue, what is there but cave within cave and ground behind ground. Our record of the world, though we think it true or factual, is but a phantasm, flickering images appearing on the screen of life, this dream that is a cinema. There is no true world—what would a ‘true’ world be anyhow?—only perspectives of a world that we will never know. The world just is what it is; it is beyond truth and falsity. “Appearance,” Nietzsche realized, “is reality”; it “resists any transformation into an imaginary ‘true world’.” If truth does not exist, art is worth more than truth, for through its generation of appearances, it is more akin to becoming, a reflection of the unfolding film in which we participate, each of us splintered by light, coming to fruition through decay. It is a reflection that does not purport to possess irrefutable clarity; it knows that its vision is full of obscurities. Thus, to love our illusions, knowing all the while that they are illusions and nothing more, is to remain cognizant of our ultimate anopsia. But we are deceived both by our illusions—they are seductive and powerful—and by what we think are truths—they are tricky and also seductive—, what we think we discover objectively, for as much as it blesses us, the sun blinds, and as much as they provoke thought, the stars mystify. Our clarity is our encompassing darkness. The veils of Isis conceal but more and more veils ~ few can plummet into the abyss from the bewildering dizziness of vertigo and laugh. For all your ills, said Rabelais, and consciousness is an ill, I give you laughter. . .
Thus Spoke Zarathustra)
In outlining a moral code for psychologists Nietzsche warns against observing merely “for the sake of observing! That,” he declares, “produces a false perspective, a squint, something forced and exaggerated.” The ‘psychologist’ who presumes that he sees more clearly because he is not directly involved in what is being experienced, that his perspective is purer, which is to say, disinterested, is deluded. One is always interested, one is always involved; there is no detached observation as there is no detached creation. The move outside of the world is one that we never can make; thus, any claim to seeing clearly is a delusion—it simply isn’t possible for us to ever know if there is any clarity to what we perceive. We are always completely absorbed, layer folded within layer folded within layer. The umbilical chord is never cut, but forever transmits the music of the world; it is in orbit that we perpetually remain and the artist as the philosopher must be a psychologist, but one who is immersed in things, one who knows that his vision will always be occluded. Enraptured in the fold, the flower exfoliates from our entrails and we are seduced by the beauty of our visions. “To experience from a desire to experience—that,” also, Nietzsche pronounces, “will not succeed. One cannot observe oneself while in the midst of an experience, or one’s eye will become an ‘evil eye’.”
To imagine that we gain an objective viewpoint of our own experiences while in the midst of them is to delude our selves—that notorious ‘one’ is always a multitude—and to observe our selves while in the midst of our experiences is to disrupt and alter those very experiences. As Pierre Hadot noted, for Goethe, “only nature—that is, mankind’s senses understood as free from all intermediaries—can see nature. Even observation, which disturbs the phenomenon and immobilizes it, prevents us from seeing living reality.” Thus, not only has ‘one’ corrupted one’s experience, a gross self-deception is committed when believing that it is possible to experience and observe what is experienced, that it is seen as if transparent, naked, unveiled. The truth one believes one has gained is simply a perspective disguised. There is no tearing of the veil—each veil reveals but another, a blindness we cannot overcome. In the end, one hasn’t experienced anything, but destroyed one’s experience as if with an ‘evil eye.’ What is necessary is surrender, sacrificing one’s selves in trust, knowing that that which was undergone will remain. To remember and re-create existence, first we must forget. That is the secret whispered in our ears by Dionysus; that is what seduced Ariadne.
“A born psychologist,” Nietzsche continues, “instinctively guards against seeing for the sake of seeing; the same applies to the born painter. He never works ‘from nature’—he leaves it to his instinct, his camera obscura, to sift and express the ‘case,’ ‘nature,’ the object of the ‘experience’ . . . . He is conscious only of the general, the conclusion, the outcome: he knows nothing of the arbitrary abstraction from the individual case.” While one is to obey one’s instincts and to guard against false notions of objectivity, one must also guard against individualized distortions, one must sift what one experiences through one’s own obscuring camera, that is, one’s instincts, which must guide one, retaining what is general in order to develop a more overarching perspective, such as a historical or geometric one. The individual has been sacrificed. It is in deference to historical or cultural perspectives that the psychologist must subsume its potential individual abstractions, eschewing personal prejudices or distortions, such as, for instance, the Christian’s perception of nature as ‘evil.’ In his Religio Medici, even Sir Thomas Browne noted that “the ordinary effects of nature wrought more admiration in [the heathens] than, in the [the children of Israel], all his miracles. Surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature.” Amen. One does not work ‘from nature’ alone, simply recording it like a camera obscura as if capturing a truth, but one questions like a scientist what one has experienced since the senses cannot be trusted; one expresses, therefore interprets nature for the ‘real’ is not knowable. Geometry may hold the world together, but where do we stand after that? The abyss remains. There is no real and there is no essence, there is only the glittering illusion. In truth, it is not that reality doesn’t exist, but that we can never access it, thus, petty facts yield not objective truths; they are, as Oscar Wilde said in “The Decay of Lying,” not only discreditable, they usurp “the domain of fancy” and vulgarize mankind because of their indifference to the poetic. Facts interest not Nietzsche either, but the poetic cinema of existence, for only that cinema is aware of its darkness. “Nature, artistically considered, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study ‘from nature’ seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism—this lying in the dust before petits faits is unworthy of the complete artist. Seeing what is—that pertains to a different species of spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual one. One has to know who one is,” which is to say, one has to be a different genus altogether. One has to be a beast and a god, that is, one must be a philosopher, that is, one who gives birth to images out of the spirit of Dionysus.
Genitor of surfaces and images, Wilde too found realism dubious; it was to him a complete failure. The dream of true perception is the dream that Dionysus does not dream. As if embodying Nietzsche, Wilde said: “no great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.” “Truth,” he declared, “is entirely and absolutely a matter of style” and “it is style that makes us believe in a thing, nothing but style.” Nature, as man, and man is nature, is not to be trusted. It not only exaggerates and distorts but it leaves things to chance and the psychologist as the artist cannot leave things to chance—that is anti-artistic. It is to succumb to a presumption, which is not to create but to think that one has seen, that a veil has been removed and the cinema overcome. Chance does not reveal some greater truth. One will not seize ‘the real’ or a more supposedly truthful perspective of the world simply through observing chance events. The chance event is but a moment of becoming, not an overarching truth that is indicative of some lasting reality. To leave things to chance is to blindly trust what cannot be trusted, to rely on the transitory as the eternal when there is no eternal; it is to believe that the caterpillar remains a caterpillar, while the one who engages in further observations, the one who does not rely upon what is first sensed, knows that the caterpillar is but an instance of a different, larger, more elusive reality. Nature is as submissive, as weak, as fatalistic as man; ‘petty facts’ do not capture reality and chance Nietzsche infers, at least in this regard, is a passing actuality one must interrogate. Seeing what is, truly seeing is not possible, nor is it desirable; insights are not brought forth simply through the naked observance of nature. The psychologist must be like a deep sea diver who penetrates into the nether regions, across, over, and down, and the unconscious, which is our only perhaps valuable or trustworthy guide, must be the psychologist’s Vergil. Or we must dance on the surface of the world as if we were vectors along its circumference, or twirl eternally like dervishes in ceaseless motion, spinning into ever quicker and quicker circles of ecstasy, giving harmony even to conflict.
If art’s concern is life, if it is to be as philosophical as philosophy, the artist as the philosopher must know itself as well as it can. In making art then, the artist cannot leave things to chance alone; the arbitrary is not representative of becoming. It yields not some greater limpidity but is still caliginous. What is of paramount importance here is the ‘psychologist’s’ relation to the world, the mode of observation that the ‘psychologist’ engages in. It reveals whether one is a born painter—or whether one has made oneself into one—or if one has Cyclopean vision. To observe and to know that what one observes is but a perspective and not an ultimate reality is imperative. It is a philosophical necessity, and as a painter who is also a psychologist, van Gogh and the painters commonly referred to as ‘Expressionist’ were concerned with observing and with experiencing the world and depicting their experience of the world as vigorously and as faithfully as possible. The real was not to be captured through mere impressions, that is, it could not be; it is not discernible through such means, and their artistic vision as well as their techniques and their method of painting articulate this awareness. Realism and Naturalism were not truths but lies in the mouths of those who could not laugh; obscuring clouds which thought they were reflecting mirrors, and philosophy and science were disrupting the validity of such artistic practices and such modes of perception. In order to get closer and closer to becoming, van Gogh and the ‘Expressionists’ developed new practices of painting which were, in Nietzsche’s sense, psychological. While their modes of observation and expression are related, their nuances reveal how distinct they actually are from one another, if not to a large degree even opposed. What is of concern is their relation to nature and their modes of observation and expression. Are they stripping Isis of her veils, are they adorers of her surfaces, or do they invoke completely different gods?
In the Neue Galerie’s exhibition Van Gogh and Expressionism, the “tremendous influence which van Gogh exerted upon Austrian and German Expressionist artists” was explored as an exhibition for the first time. It was developed in association with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the show originated and ran from 24 November 2006 - 4 March 2007. When Max Pechstein, one of the Die Brücke artists, declared that van Gogh was father to all the ‘Expressionists,’ the Dutch painter’s fate as one of the progenitors of early twentieth century art was reverently declared. What influence signifies demands interrogation, but that will temporarily be deferred. Aside from such testimony, and the letters, diaries, and journals of the ‘Expressionist’ artists further substantiate the debt, the paintings themselves provide the most compelling and forceful evidence, attesting that van Gogh’s impact on ‘Expressionism’ is incontrovertible. Sons though—all but one of the painters, Gabriel Münter, in the exhibition were men—are not the mere shadows of their fathers; often, even while influenced by them they are simultaneously at war with them, locked in violent contests in order to free themselves to discover their own paths. It is an agonistic event. At very least, van Gogh was a dynamic catalyst whose life and paintings served as explosive models for an age on the verge of creation and destruction.
| page up |
Continue| Reading | Page II