[George] Steiner’s mot , that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ ... puts its finger on a huge problem for the willed, self-conscious nature of modernist art, and art since modernism. For there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. In fact originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving.
...There’s a fear that without novelty there is only banality; but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love. Spiritual texts present the same problem, that they can use only banalities, which mean something totally different from the inside of the experience. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know--only release something in us that is already there.
Iain McGilchrist,The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press. [All excerpts in this post come from Chapter 12: "The Modern and the Post-Modern Worlds".]
This goes to what I was writing earlier this week about archetypes and energy and to what I wrote about "originality" in a post in December regarding Renaissance Neoplatonism. What matters is not whether there's something cleverly new in the execution, but whether it uncovers something in Being that in its uncovering releases transformative cognitive energy:
The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.
The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of consciousness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we can see what he saw.
The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired, disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies opaquely hidden or at best filtered in the world around us. In other words, great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.
In other words, the encounter with the Divine Mind awakens what is already in us, which is the innate but nascent image and likeness in us of the Divine Mind. "Innate" does not mean realized. It is like a seed. But its germination and cultivation is not just an individual project; it is a cultural one.
The scope of possibility in such a task is largely enabled--or thwarted-- by the constraints of one's culture. Some cultures provide richer soil for such a a seed to grow and develop; others provide rather poor soil. One might ask why the genius of Beethoven or Mozart was recognized and appreciated in their lifetimes, and why no such geniuses with such creative scope and depth of soul have emerged in the last one hundred years. Theirs was a culture in which such genius could ripen; ours is not.
We are a culture that accepts novelty as a poor substitute for originality. True originality requires a return to the origins. We have lost any sense of the origins because our culture has all but sealed us off from it. Sealed off from it as we are, we have come to believe that there is no such thing. Who among us draws from the origins in a way that has anything like the vitality of the Romantics or the great Renaissance artists?
Sealed off as we are, it's hard for us to appreciate how the encounter with Plato in the late 1400s was so central to their understanding the nature of their artistic and scientific task. We see Neoplatonism as dry abstractions because it no longer interprets our experience or inspires our aspirations. The Renaissance artists and the English Romantics saw it as providing a framework that inspired their plunge into the mystery in the world around them. This was a world whose origins they believed participated in the mind of God, the hidden infrastructure of the created world. The Divine Mind for them was not a static abstraction; its apprehension was accompanied by creative inspiration, what Ficino called 'divine furuore', or divine frenzy. Their art originated in heightened states of consciousness.
The artist's or philosopher's task was to open himself up the depths of Being where the creative energies of the Divine Mind could be encountered, and in such an encounter to have one's mind awakened--i.e., to be transformatively energized--was a step toward realizing its own inner potentiality to become more "like" the Divine Mind. In this sense the human being co-creates the world by bringing dimensions of it about which he is unconscious into consciousness. This idea is picked up later by Schelling, Hegel, and even Heidegger. The human being is where Being becomes conscious of itself; the human is the clearing in the forest of Being.
This older idea of the mission of art has become unbelievable for sealed-off, alienated, buffered moderns, but I believe it's retrievable. Isn't this really the Heideggerian project? It certainly seems to be McG's. I know that neither would frame it in the Neoplatonic way that I am doing, but the similarities are more significant than the differences.
But first we need to understand the nature of our alienation of the origins. McG goes on to talk about how art itself has become something so self-conscious and left-brained that it has sealed itself off from the possibility art as the product of divine frenzy:
The Aesthetes’ creed of ‘art for art’s sake’, while it sounds like an elevation of the value of art, in that it denies that it should have an ulterior purpose beyond itself – so far, so good – is also a devaluation of art, in that it marginalises its relationship with life. In other words it sacrifices the betweenness of art with life, instead allowing art to become self-reflexively fulfilled. There is a difference between the forlorn business of creating ‘art for art’s sake’, and art nonetheless having to be judged solely ‘as art’, not as for another purpose.
By "betweenness" he means that the art object as symbolic representation lies between and mediates something beyond it to the human being who encounters it. And, of course, art should never be subordinated to politics or economic interests. It has its own mission, which is to open up undisclosed dimensions of Being. But this is different from art that becomes self-consciously self-referential. It doesn't open up; it closes off.
In the process of creation, the artist’s plane of focus needs to be somewhere beyond and through the work of art, not just on its being art, otherwise it becomes less than art. In viewing the art work, we too are carried beyond the work of art, precisely because the artist was not focussed on the art as such, but in something beyond it; and that is part of its greatness, by which, as it might seem paradoxically, we come to judge the work of art solely on its merits as a work of art--not, in other words, for some ulterior purpose for which art is being used. We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the art work, as Merleau-Ponty says, necessitating that it is neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but ‘semi-transparent’.
I'd go further than McG seems willing to do by saying that the semi-transparency of the work of art when it works as great art is in some degree revealing or disclosing the originary energies of the immanent presence of the Divine Mind--whether it is recognized as such or not.
And this is where the Neoplatonic idea of the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation overlaps with the use of archetypes in stories, whether fairy tales or in Shakespeare. Because the human mind, when it is at its most creative is most disclosive of the Divine Mind because the human mind is the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. in other words, what is deepest and most transformatively creative in the human mind is reflective of its participation in the Divine Mind. I wrote about this last week.
Great works of art are impossible without tradition or culture to provide a language and a symbol system as a pre-conscious meaning matrix, but this matrix is not a textual prison as Lacan, Derrida and their followers seem to think. Language--symbol systems in general--can be, maybe most often are in our everyday experience, closed systems, but they need not be. They can instead function as portals through which something from beyond enters into awareness.
So truly great art opens us up, helps us to see through it into dimensions of reality that transcend the semiotic systems inherited by tradition and acculturation. We are indeed acculturated linguistic beings, but the idea that we are completely sealed in by culture and language is a prejudice of left-hemispheric thinking and its quasi-pathological smugness.
The heart of McG's book is to explain why contemporary elites' experience of language feels like a closed system because of the tendency of their hyper-self-consciousness to operate within a hall of mirrors. They experience the world as a domain fundamentally alienated from the life world of the Deep Real--where the originary archetypes of the Divine Mind sleep waiting for us to wake them and in our doing so to awaken what in our soul is capable of cognizing them.
What prevents this from happening more often has almost everything to do with how our culture has become so oppressively left-brained. The left brain hemisphere usurps control both of one's experience of the world in creating a model of the real that we mistake for reality. And this model reinforces patterns of perception and thinking that seal us off from the origins, and this is what makes us 'forgetful' of Being.
The problem for buffered moderns is that in their left-hemispheric, overly meta-self-consciousness, they've all but lost the capacity for experiencing the givenness of the world with even a degree of "naïveté". This has led to an experience of the world that is borderline psychopathic:
This coded-message model, which ‘has very much the status of an axiom in most versions of structuralism’, is the perfect expression of the left hemisphere trying to understand right-hemisphere language. Aware that there is more going on here than meets the eye, the left hemisphere sets about making things explicit, in an attempt to discover what it is; but meanwhile is not really aware of the ‘thisness’ of the work of art, in which the real ‘meaning’ lies, at all.
This is the crucial point. The left-hemisphere--the part of our minds that "makes explicit"--can only work with what is given to it implicitly in raw experience from the right hemisphere. So everything depends on the quality of the "data", what is given, that is available for the left hemisphere to work with. But if the left hemisphere excludes a priori huge swaths of experience because they are not measurable, testable, or just too subjective, then it closes the experience off or de-legitimizes the experiences that are the most important in making us human. And so for this reason we often have the experience but miss the meaning.
So a rebalancing is called for, but, McG argues, modern and postmodern cultural elites have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction in rejecting objectivity and rationality, and in doing so have created worse problems--
The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality--the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside--but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to. The contrast is not between the fixity of the artificial and the fluidity of the real, but between the fixity and the chaos of two kinds of artificiality. Post-modern indeterminacy affirms not that there is a reality, towards which we must carefully, tentatively, patiently struggle; it does not posit a truth which is nonetheless real because it defies the determinacy imposed on it by the self-conscious left-hemisphere interpreter (and the only structures available to it). On the contrary, it affirms that there is no reality, no truth to interpret or determine.
And then he points to the kind of 'unknowing' that postmodern unknowing parodies:
The contrast here is like the difference between the ‘unknowing’ of a believer and the ‘unknowing’ of an atheist. Both believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about God will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The difference is not in what is said, but in the disposition each holds toward the world. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with ‘care’) towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say ‘no’) to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but rather through and beyond them.
This is why the left hemisphere is not its enemy, but its valued emissary. Once, however, the left hemisphere is convinced of its own importance,...it revels in its own freedom from constraint, in what might be called, in a phrase of Robert Graves’s, the ‘ecstasy of chaos’. One says ‘I do not know,’ the other ‘I know – that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.
I spent quite a lot of time talking about the ecstasy of chaos in my post last week, and also in that post I made the point that it's precisely the smugness of the nihilistic 'unknowing' that must be overcome with second naïveté. McG is describing here a believing something that cannot be proved but which can be apprehended and spoken about with confidence, even if always provisionally and incompletely.
If it is possible to say true or untrue, good or bad, better or worse, there has to be a spectrum on which experiences fall which distinguishes one from the other. What defines this spectrum? I'd argue that the more ecstatically present the Divine Mind is in an experience, the truer and the better. The more the ecstasy of chaos is present, the worse. The trick is to know the difference, and for that you need a human being with an integrated center. And such people develop more frequently in a culture that has a sapiential tradition that has developed proven capabilities to discern one from the other.
So Ficino's divine frenzy and the ecstatic Dionysian frenzy of chaos are not the same thing. They define polarities in the human psyche, which must be held in a kind of metaxic tension, but the long-term human project is to integrate chaos and its energies into the the living flame of the Divine Mind. We do that by gradually awakening that flame in our own minds--or hearts, which is the same thing.
11/27/23 Ed note: I slightly modified parts of this essay to expand and clarify some ideas in the light developments in my thinking since first writing it.