Философское - Джин Нодар. Страница 37

The question arises here: if true progress (different from its contemporary partial, i.e. illusory representation) — is a forward movement that brings man bask to Eden, — where and how should he proceed in order to be adequately reintegrated? This is, actually, an age-old socio-political question, a quest for an answer to which has led and still leads men to generate a variety of philosophical-political and politico-economic theories. Although this question is, obviously, of prime importance, we focus our attention on the essentially human, ontological aspect of the problem stated in the title, comprehending fully — as will be seen lower down — its indiseverable bond with the above.

But now let us consider another question: why is it that creativity returns men into the «milieu» of harmonious unity with the world, the unity of Adam not only with the tree, but also with the Serpent, the unity of Adam and Eve, a return into a «pre-disintegrated» milieu. An answer to this question is prompted by art, the most full-blooded form of creativity.

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By its very essence, art unobtrusively reconciles us to reality. It equalizes our consciousness with our reality, equalizes each of us and humanity, harmonizes our relations with the world, however cruel this world may look in a work of art. A work of art is a work of an artistic, entirely harmonized world, a world that has an appeasing influence on us. Art actually gives us that enjoyment which Adam parted with forever when he left Paradise. Art is a powerful source of life-giving energy and optimism, understood not in the down-to-earth, everyday, customary sense, neither in the concretely socio-political sense, but in the broadest, «existential» sense. Art is, essentially, a life-inspiring, life-asserting, essentially optimistic force, allowing every one who is drawn into its sphere to overcome the uneasy sense of one's finiteness, to be reconciled with existence. In this measure, art is love which generates that peculiar state when man, however convinced he may be that miracles do not happen, does not venture, nevertheless, to maintain that miracles cannot happen.

Owing to what does art succeed in achieving this effect, most essential to our existence?

An instrumentalistic approach would suggest the following answer: art means striking a balance between consciousness and reality through uniting thought and sense (emotion), an idea and an image. This «correct» answer is, however, far from the truth. This answer would have been quite correct if we had agreed to «recall» the very fact which has long and completely been «forgotten» by literally all researchers. The very fact is that «thought» and «feeling» have never been, never are and will never be parallel, independent and separately-existing phenomena. At the same time, they have never been, are not and cannot be such not only in the sphere of art, but also in no sphere of human existence. The assumption of separate existence of thought and feeling which has become axiomatic, is a tremendous delusion of reason cognizing the human soul. This delusion has been the cause of unending human calamities, but it was, nevertheless, inevitable. It was predetermined at the very moment when man plucked the fruit and issued from the Gate; in doing this man doomed himself to vivisection with the lancet of reason in whose nature it is to dissect every living thing and to schematize it. Cogito operates with conventions, but since Homo Sapiens came to «exhaust» the notion of Homo, these conventions are not at all apprehended as conventions, but as realities. The paradox of conventions in the Homo Sapiens world lies in the fact that they are spontaneously transformed into facts («non-conventions»).

In fact, if we put in an effort and try to overcome the primordial (initial) conventionality in the problem of «thought» and «feeling (emotion)», then in the light of the meta-principle of the whole-oneness of everything in existence, the truth of the essential oneness of thought and sense (feeling) comes into evidence.

It is not enough by far to speak of their close unity. «Thought» and «feeling» are dissected elements of that single, indissectible, essentially whole principle which we term — for lack of a better word — «Pathos». Thought and feeling make an integral whole, like consciousness and non-consciousness; pathos cannot be dismembered structurally, in the same way as the human soul, human psychics cannot be dismembered. Creativity is the domain of pathos. Pathos is not consciousness, neither it is non-consciousness, it is something that encompasses, essentially and as a whole, those principles which, again too conveniently, in the dissecting language of science, we determine as consciousness, on the one hand, and as non-consciousness, on the other; or, by distant association — as idea and as image. (Paul Valery wrote that painting gives us the possibility to perceive things as they once were, — when they were looked upon with love…)

Thus, the tragedy of the end suggested by consciousness is overcome in creation. Creation is the realm of pathos, the realm of man's organic unity with the Universe, the realm of interpenetration of the human and the non-human, the reciprocal balancing and complete fusion of consciousness and reality. Consequently, pathos is the only instrument of existential optimism, of self-assertion of life and self-assertion in life, and, thus, the only instrument which helps to obtain inner freedom; for, as Spinoza rightly thought, man's freedom lies in overcoming thoughts of death. The conventionally assumed structure of pathos is, we repeat, whole-oneness of thought and feeling. The existentially optimistic impulse provided by pathos is testified to, to say the least, by those historical epochs in whose culture thought and feeling were comparatively close together. Such are Antiquity and the Renaissance, eternal in their enlightening significance.

To sum it up, we can say — it is creativity that effects man's unrealized «comeback to himself», i.e. to the state of organic oneness with the world, the comeback of man to Adam, and of Adam himself — to Paradise.

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Now, concerning the connection of our observations with contemporaneity. To begin with, let us ask a question: if all the above is true, why is it that the above ideas have become so vital today? Why is it that just our time has seen the emergence of the tremendously important problem of the unconscious, a problem that could not have turned out to be a cardinal one if it were not closely bound with the cardinal aspect of existence? Why is it that Freud appeared in our day and why is it not yesterday, but today?

What happened, and happened today, is something most significant.

The steady and uncontrolled escalation of rationalism in all its manifestations, in all directions and at all levels, has become today that «quantitative leap» which changes the structure of existence rapidly. All the complex of such well-known processes as the «massification» of the world, as all-encompassing and all-penetrating peculiarization, the parcelling of the «separate» forces within man, his alienation from the Universe, the alienation of men from one another (moral and spiritual, political, economic and practical alienation), the rationalistic and hideously absurd, in its final results, formalization of human instincts which became an uncontrolled process of perfecting and accumulating means of self-destruction, — all this ponderous and redoubtable conglomerate of phenomena rooted in idolized rationalism hangs like a deadweight on the cogwheel of the very mechanism that serves to balance man's existence with his consciousness. This mechanism seems to be worn out, and the signs of it are multiple. They are, on the one hand, social depression and man's loss of initiative in expectation of the Apocalypse; on the other hand — the turmoil of chaotic spurts in desperate and unceasing efforts to find an outcome by means of all kinds of revolutions (economic, political, moral revolutions, «revolutions of consciousness», racial and class battles, confrontation of the sexes, of age groups, etc.). All this is, maybe, nothing new; but it is clear that the extreme intensification of even the most traditional processes cannot but provoke certain shifts in the generalized structure of existence. Homo-centrism, an old «infantile disease» of society, has taken on most hideously hypertrophic forms; it is expressed now in an all-round disintegration and decomposition of the whole, a falling apart that began from the very moment when man set himself apart not only from the world that was not man-made, but also from the entirely human world, from the world «authorized» by him. In a word, the mighty acceleration and boosting of habitual processes and changes have led to what contemporary «naturalists» term «the strong non-reversibility of time». The notion expresses difference between «after» and «before», a difference which has penetrated into now and has become the inner definition of now, thus doing away with the fundamental a p o r i a of existence: the past no longer exists, the future does not yet exist, the present is the zero border-line between both, — nil between nil and nil.