The following is a slightly expanded and modified version of a presentation I gave at the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Jose, California, on October 22, 2015. The title of the talk was "The Mind of Art: Consciousness and the Aesthetic Dimension." Since people in attendance and others who didn't attend have expressed interest in reading the text, I've posted it here in full. Be warned that by web standards, it's a long read.

​What I’d like to do is talk about how art can give us insights into the nature of consciousness, insights that may not be available to discursive modes of inquiry such as traditional science and philosophy. I should note from the outset that by “art,” I don’t mean just the visual arts but also music, cinema, theatre, dance, literature—all forms of artistic expression. I should also note that my intention isn’t to discuss the metaphysical views of this or that particular artist, although some of these will briefly come into play; rather, the focus here is on what the things artists create—the works of art themselves—tell us about the nature of mind and matter, self and world, regardless of their authors’ personal beliefs. There is, I believe, a metaphysics that art as a medium endorses whenever its deployment results in a genuine artwork. In McLuhanian terms I am asking the question: What is the message of the medium of art with regards to the nature of consciousness?
 
Unlike science and philosophy as commonly practiced, art isn’t discursive. Artistic expression isn’t an attempt to represent reality as it might appear “objectively” to a pure intellect. On the contrary, artistic expression captures something in reality while preserving the artist’s intimate, direct experience of it. Works of art include the experiential dimension, everything we normally associate with “consciousness.” 

​In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, I illustrate this by comparing a technical drawing of a sunflower one might find in a botanical textbook with one of Vincent van Gogh’s famous sunflower paintings. The technical illustration has a goal, and that is to convey the concept “sunflower”—the species helianthus annuus—outside of any particular occurrence of that species. It is essentially a Platonic construct, presenting us with the ideal or perfect sunflower of which every particular sunflower is an imperfect copy. 

​Van Gogh’s image, in contrast, captures the sunflower as an experience, an encounter. As a result, the plant in the painting exudes a presence that amounts to a kind of monstrous sentience. The sunflowers here are not instances of a type but sui generis; each is a unique and unrepeatable event in reality’s unfolding. It is only after the fact, only once the intellect has stepped in to analyze the experience, that we can neatly label the image “sunflowers in a vase.” So, if the botanical drawing can be related to Plato’s metaphysics of static being, Van Gogh’s painting throws us back to the likes of Heraclitus, the Pre-Socratic philosopher who held that there is no fixed being, that all is becoming. 

​In this painting, something familiar is reimaged in light of an ineffable newness that inhabits it and makes it an event. We suddenly see that there was never any such thing as “sunflowers” in the abstract, but only this event that the intellect classifies under a fixed concept, which for its part exists only in and for the intellect. In Reclaiming Art, I write: “Whereas the [botanical] diagram eliminates every anomaly in order to represent the abstract specimen, the painting eliminates all that is general in order to conserve only the anomaly. In other words art isn’t after the ideal model of a thing but its immediate manifestation, which is all that truly exists, experientially speaking.”
 
As an aesthetic enterprise, then, art isn’t concerned with the conceptual representation of the world. The aesthetic does not deal with concepts but with direct sensations or “affects.” The aesthetic defines an engagement with reality at the preconceptual level of instinct and intuition. Van Gogh’s picture conveys the sunflower as a pure sensation—that is, the sunflower as it appears prior to any conceptualization. That’s what makes it art and not botany.

Matthew David Segall has written an interesting post on the limitations of entrenched positions when it comes to determining what “stuff” the world is made of. Specifically, he is talking about the two major positions that have largely defined ontological discourse in the modern West: materialism and idealism.

Materialism is the belief that the world is made up entirely of physical “matter,” and that this matter somehow gives rise to subjective minds when organized with sufficient complexity in the form of nervous systems. Idealism goes the opposite route, arguing that in fact there is only mind, and that matter exists only as a content of mind, that is to say, as a representation for a transcendent subject. For the true idealist, there is nothing to reality but subjective perceptions: the universe is "inside" consciousness and not the other way around, as materialists would have it.

Materialism has been dominant since the end of the nineteenth century. Today it remains something of a default view even though a growing number of people are dissatisfied with its insistence on a universe made up of dead stuff, not to mention its total failure to account for conscious experience. Idealism, for its part, is relatively unpopular among university types but extremely popular in the culture at large (e.g., so-called New Age thought).

I think Segall is right to say that both materialism and idealism “as polemical positions are themselves misunderstandings of or partial perspectives on a more complex truth.” The question, which Segall readily discerns, is whether this more complex truth is in any way knowable in rational terms.  At the end of his short but rich post, Segall challenges the mainstream association of mind with reason and logic, suggesting that there is “a certain madness at the core of the Intellect, something unruly, chaotic, creative...” As soon as we entertain the thought that mind is not fundamentally or primarily rational, new avenues open up to philosophical thought. Philosophy becomes less inquisitive (or at least less inquisitorial) and more creative, experimental. Its traditional concern with formulating truthful propositions can take a backseat to a revived interest in creating truth in a manner analogous to art. In other words, instead of mastering thought to rationalize (and thus absolutize) the human world, philosophy can follow thought into new, non-human territories, and potentially expand our world beyond its actual confines.

What ontology could support such a view of the intellect? Certainly not materialism or idealism, which both hinge upon an extreme form of rationalism. The most promising inroads, in my view, are being made under panpsychism, which David Skrbina defines as a meta-theory about the nature of matter and mind rather than a “polemical position” in itself.

Panpsychism holds that matter exists just as materialists say it does, but adds that matter includes psyche—that all matter is in some way alive, experiential, or sentient. Everything, all of nature, has an “interior,” an imaginal dimension. In the spirit of Pan, the wild horned god whom the name of this philosophical school evokes, Nature has two manifestations: there is an external nature that we perceive in the form of physical forces, and an internal nature that we perceive as image and psyche. Nature, in short, includes thought, emotion, imagination, soul.* Matter is not merely material but energetic as the physicists tell us and psychical as the depth psychologists hold.

What I like about panpsychism is that it is a totally immanent prospect: it does not require one to posit a conceptual substance that transcends the universe that plants and animals inhabit. Materialists and idealists require just such a transcendent substance—an absolute—that lies behind the phenomenal world, generating it. Under both philosophies, existence is necessarily relegated to the realm of illusion. For materialists, the universe is really a blind play of quantities, totally inaccessible to the mind which, for its part, merely apprehends these quantities under the guise of a qualitative mirage. Materialism offers us a world devoid of meanings, purposes, or values; psyche is epiphenomenal, a kind of fume on the surface of the mathematical marshes of pure quantitative relations in space-time. 

As for idealism, it admits of nothing but subjective representations. For idealists, the qualities we perceive in the universe are all that exist—there are no real things possessing those qualities. There are no objects, no events, only images that we as "naïve realists" take to be objects and events. Life is literally a dream, the theatre of which is either your own personal mind if you’re a solipsist (the most honest, as well as the most odious idealist position) or the mind of God if you’re willing to grant other people the privilege of also having a mind (for then you need to explain the existence of the common world in which these various minds interact). 

If, in total contrast to this, panpsychism shows promise, it is because it allows one to affirm that the world we experience is real, that it exists as it seems to and requires no transcendent substance in order to do so.** Experience is neither a dream nor a hallucination, but a direct engagement between living beings in a living cosmos. 

Throughout his career, and more emphatically in the latter part of it, Gilles Deleuze said that our most pressing task today is that of finding a way "to believe again in this world." For several centuries now we have denied the world its reality; we have espoused an anthropocentric view in which humanity is the arbiter of all values, including the value of existence itself. The results of this world-denying attitude, whose two ontological faces are materialism and idealism, are now plain to see: we are in the midst of what could very well be the Last Days as far as humans (and countless other species) are concerned. And the catastrophe is entirely of our own making.

Finding a way to believe in this world is not a metaphysical problem but an ethical one. Yet it is an ethical problem that requires us to think metaphysically about the nature of the universe. If we are to deal with it, we need to abandon our anthropocentrism. For me, this means first and foremost breaking away from the Cult of Pure Reason.*** We must open ourselves to more imaginal avenues of thought and experience. The imaginal is unconcerned with rational truth. It is concerned rather with visions that affirm creation, existence, nature, life and death, joy and terror. Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Shestov, Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze and Segall are just a few philosophers who have made it their task to affirm life and world rather than negate them with formulas such as “the world is mere X” or “life is nothing more than Y.” If we are to think our way through these troubling times, we could do worse than follow their lead. 

Notes

* Panpsyche ("all-soul") could be translated, mythopoeically, as  "Pan's Soul." For a beautiful exploration of Pan as personification of "nature within" and "nature without," see James Hillman's monograph Pan and the Nightmare.

** This does not imply that there is no God, only that God is not logically necessary—which, if you ask me, is how any self-respecting God would have it.

*** To quote Deleuze again, “It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality.” (Anti-Oedipus, 1977, 122)

Last week, I was honoured to take part in a speaking event with two brilliant guys: art historian Graham Larkin and musicologist Phil Ford. Among the subjects we discussed was the idea of the “Real" that I sketch out in the course of my book. I’d like to expand a bit upon it here in light of our conversation. 

The metaphysics that undergirds Reclaiming Art is a form of weird realism. By “the Real,” I don’t mean the consensus world that can be analyzed by social scientists, measured by scientists, or delineated by idealist philosophers. Nor is it the “real world” worried parents and school counselors refer to when they give career advice to reckless teenagers. That world is an idea in our heads, a partial picture framed by reason and the notion of causality: “Everything has a cause, and whoever knows the cause can predict the effect.”

It was the Scottish philosopher David Hume who argued that, contrary to common belief, causality has no logical necessity. The real reason we expect a coin to fall to the ground when we toss it in the air isn’t that it logically must do so but that we have made a habit of believing that what goes up must come down. In truth, there is no reason whatsoever why specific effects must follow from specific causes. After all, it is perfectly possible to imagine a world where tossed coins simply float up into the ether, never to return. The fact that they haven’t in the past does little but explain our habit (mere habit!) of expecting things to keep going the way they have been until now.

So in reality, the outcome of every coin toss is unpredictable: maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. (NOTE: I realize I'm being flippant here, but bear with me.) The Real inheres in this unpredictability, this maybe. It points a strange, unknowable order that hides behind our preconceptions, habits, and judgements. In fact our habits— all the armature of culture — form a kind of veil to protect us against it. The Real is the interzone where anything could happen, all things are possible and no amount of expert knowledge can enable us to predict what might come next, or even what is actually going on in a given situation. In the book I qualify it with the term “radical mystery” — radical because it goes right to the root of things. “The dream hath no bottom.” This mystery isn’t a problem that has yet to be solved; it is naked reality itself, as experienced when the veil falls away.

The Real is the excess that makes every Weltanschauung we super-apes construct necessarily limited and ultimately inadequate. We never get to the bottom of things. We never arrive at the final truth. There is always something that eludes us. The concept of the Real is predicated on the notion that reality exceeds the capacities of human reason — absolutely. 

Compare the way people conceived the cosmos in the Middle Ages with the way we conceive it today. Here are some pretty incommensurable differences. Some might argue that the medievals were dead wrong about the world and that we today are right. But then, medieval people laughed at the naivety of the pagans who dwelt in metaphysical ignorance before the birth of Christ. Nor is it very difficult to imagine that people living three or four hundred years from today will laugh at us for our current beliefs. As Richard Grossinger puts it in Dark Pool of Light, “the universe is overdetermined.” It is too rich, too complex, too deep, too alien for the human mind to grasp in its totality. The gap between what goes on in our cogitations and what actually is is unbridgeable, even as it moves, shifts, expands, and contracts. That gap is the Real.

Picture the following scene, a cartoon cliché. You’re standing on a darkened street corner at night. Suddenly an immense form appears on the brick wall ahead, a terrible, monstrous shadow cast by something coming around the corner. When the creature casting the shadow finally appears, it turns out to be an inoffensive kitten. The whole thing was a trick of the light. 

Now, according to our conventional way of seeing things, the part of the scene where “truth" is revealed is the moment when the kitten shows itself. It’s at that point that you realize that the monstrous shadow was an illusion, that what was actually coming towards you was in fact the most mundane, benign, and knowable of God’s creatures. Yet if we entertain the concept of the Real I’ve just outlined, things change. The moment you were closest to “truth” — the moment you were most in touch with the Real — was in the interval during which you did not know what you were looking at. For then the monstrous shadow pointed you to a zone of potentiality with which you are not familiar, an open space between the little world you think you know and the big, real, unknowable world. What I mean to say here is that it is in moments of uncertainty, when we don’t know what we’re looking at, that we are epistemologically aligned with the true nature of existence.