The Will to Art
Recently I published Homo Aestheticus: Philosophical Fragments on the Will to Art, available at most online bookstores in paperback, hardback, and also as a pdf (on a pay ‘what you want’ basis, edit the price as you wish).
In coming days and weeks I’ll post some of the chapters here on the Simplicity Collective.
Each chapter is a collection of philosophical fragments, thematically arranged, which over the course of the book form an argument. Here is Chapter 2.
The Will to Art
- Let us speak a word for aestheticism, for aesthetic freedom and wildness, as opposed to a freedom that is metaphysically constrained.
- The Will to Art is the foundational creative energy of the aesthetic universe, a living dialectic that generates its own sensuous experience and interpretive infinities. It is the eternally striving art-force that permeates and sustains all existence and drives the dialectic onward.
- Just as light behaves both as a wave and a particle, the Will to Art takes form both as mind and matter – both as will and representation – which are dual aspects of the same fundamental substance. (This dissolves the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness).
- A neo-Schopenhauerian cosmology: take art as a metaphor and apply it to the cosmic scale. The Will to Art manifests in hierarchies of organisation throughout the universe, starting with the laws of physics (where there is least freedom), developing through inanimate objects, evolving into organic, plant life, then animal life, and culminating in poetic consciousness (where there is most freedom). But fundamentally there is only one creative force throughout this cosmology – the Will to Art – manifesting in different forms but all of which ultimately arise from the same primary substance or energy.
- This is not so much a definition of a concept as a declaration of an undertaking – the announcement of a journey. (Or rather, all definitions are acts of creation, and all acts of creation are journeys).
- Here we are dealing with a ‘final vocabulary’ – the bedrock of a justificatory project, beneath which there is no further argumentative recourse.
- Schlegel’s anti-foundationalist paradox: one must have, and cannot have, a philosophical system.
- We should hesitate to stay silent on the mysteries of existence simply out of fear of being wrong, when doing so ensures that we have no chance of living in some positive but uncertain truth.
- Not offering a creation story is still an interpretation of the cosmos and our place in it.
- Try thinking of things this way: the universe-as-art, not universe- as-machine. What follows?
- This mythopoetic origin story arises out of metaphor – out of an aesthetics of existence – rather than being grounded in the graveyard of metaphysics.
- To speak of the Will to Art is to infuse the world with an underlying tendency toward artistic and aesthetic flourishing.
- This relentless cosmological striving will remain dissatisfied and in search of harmony until its primal energy achieves the creative expression and serene aesthetic experience it seeks.
- This is a Grand Narrative, whose author is perfectly aware of its narrativity. But it is not for that reason untrue.
- Could there be times when believing as if something were true might be a precondition for it becoming true?
- The Will to Art is true because one can experience its truthfulness.
- How sublime that the universe holds such depth of feeling within itself!
- There may be other true theories of existence also – true in the pragmatic sense of being useful for the art of life.
- In a post-metaphysical age, it is always possible that existence and the world undergo persuasive redescription in previously unimagined ways. Literary or ‘poeticized’ cultures embrace this aspect of the human condition as a tantalizing gift.
- Poetry, according to Shelley, is the ‘expression of the imagination.’
- The Will to Art as a metaphor to live by: to be judged, not according to its correspondence to a pre-existing reality, but according to its effects. It begins as an invitation to experiment, and can only be justified by its results.
- The question is not merely: can this new poetics of existence solve problems and achieve one’s highest values better than the old paradigm? The question is also: what problems should we be trying to solve and what should our highest values be?
- Paradigm shifts are not simply about doing the old world better. They are, instead, the conceptual and experiential architecture of new worlds, new modes of being.
- The Will to Art is experienced most directly in human consciousness as the insatiable drive of desire – the seemingly reckless and amoral yearning for beauty, meaning, pleasure, and freedom.
- Human beings learn most about the universe by looking inward, to our own creative natures, where we experience, most directly, the innermost being of the thing-in-itself – the Will to Art. This experience of the Will is not a representation of something ‘out there’, but rather the inner dimension of a shared, metaphor- dependent fundamental reality.
- Having grasped our own nature as creative beings, we can best understand the aesthetic universe which holds us. We are microcosms of the cosmic order, with the subject reflecting the object in ways that conflate the subject-object distinction.
- Could the most fundamental building blocks of existence be vibrating strings, as theoretical physicists suggest? Could the cosmos, at base, be music?
- Truth might be an evolving series of questions rather than a singular answer.
- In its pre-harmonic state, the Will to Art is suffering.
- Sentient life experiences suffering and seeks the cessation of suffering.
- Humans suffer as a result of craving for, or being attached to, the wrong things in the wrong ways.
- Aesthetic enlightenment: the cessation of suffering entails living artfully, in accordance with the laws of beauty, through which the dissonance of the Will to Art resolves into harmony.
- Nietzsche: ‘We possess art lest we perish of the truth.’
- Pessimism is the nihilistic renunciation of a world that one believes ought not to exist.
- Schopenhauer: ‘Life must be some sort of mistake.’
- Disenchanted materialism: when – or if – our Godot arrives, Vladimir assures us, ‘We’ll be saved.’7 But he never arrives. And so we wait, suffering, without understanding why. Life is absurd. At some point, the curtain closes and, without metaphysical comfort or understanding, our existence expires. Worms slowly consume our decaying bodies. The end. Absolutely. Life’s mystery is never resolved and there is no moment of redemption that offers us consolation for our transcendental loneliness. We’re just endlessly dead.
- Nietzsche: ‘Life without music would be a mistake.’
- The aesthetic justification of existence is not a proposition of truth but an affective evaluation: it just needs to succeed psychologically, that is, to induce an affective attachment to life.
- Voluntary simplicity: an affective attachment to life itself makes one want to avoid all attachments that are superfluous to life.
- Despite living in a dying civilization, on a dying planet, situated in what seems to be a godless and absurd universe, aesthetic experience affirms that existence can be justified.
- After the ‘death of god’ and the demise of pure reason, the only way to move from life-negation to life-affirmation is via the aesthetic dimension. Art provides a bridge over this great chasm.
- The therapeutic and energising approaches to aesthetic experience can be interpreted from either the spectator view (contemplating works of art can justify existence) or from the creator-artist perspective (creating works of art can justify existence).
- Contemplating great art can provoke us to consider whether we, ourselves, might have unfilled creative potentials still to be realised.
- Thrown into an existence we never asked for, our sacred capacity to experience beauty shows that human beings have a place in the universe – at least potentially.
- Our sacred capacity to create beauty provides us with a noble, orienting purpose.
- The Will to Art invites us, on the path to beauty, to take our own suffering and give it aesthetic form.
- Upon seeing suffering everywhere, it is tempting to conclude that life is of negative value and that the world should not exist. But could not an affirmative account of suffering undercut the logic of pessimism?
- Nietzsche’s revaluation of suffering offers such an affirmative account, since giving form to one’s own suffering becomes a necessary part of the good. It even becomes part of the beautiful, since giving form to one’s own suffering (making it meaningful) becomes part of an authentic stylisation of existence.
- From a cosmological perspective, suffering is the latent ideal of beauty trying to realise itself through the Will to Art.
- Art does not resolve, but rather dissolves, the problem of pessimism.
- Amor fati – love thy fate.
- Radical acceptance: through mindfulness and self-fashioning one
is able to love what is necessary and see it as beautiful.
- What is power for? To universalise opportunities for artistic expression, to revel in the sublime joys of creativity, and to share in the sacred and sensuous experience of beauty.
- The Will to Art is the cause of that poetic madness that inspires, even compels, the artist to sit down and compose something out of nothing.
- By creating something out of nothing, the artist is able to commune with that wild Dionysian impulse from which existence itself has emerged.
- The artist’s awareness of the Will to Art is also the Will to Art coming to self-awareness through the artist.
- Art and beauty exist: are we not obliged to reverse engineer a cosmological narrative that explains how and why?
