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.”
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.”
Helianthus_annuus, gouache on vellum, in: Gottorfer Codex
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.
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.
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