"Философское" - читать интересную книгу автора (Джин Нодар)

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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.