We may thoroughly appreciate
now from our foregoing discussion the validity and correctness of Cacciari’s
judgement on the “inexistence of an aesthetics
in Nietzsche” separable from and subordinate
to philosophical reasoning.
1. Es conocida la afirmación de Nietzsche en El origen de la tragedia por la cual el
arte aparece como la verdadera actividad metafísica del hombre. Aun en el Ensayo de una autocrítica de 1886 él
recalca que aquella juvenile metafísica de artista contenía ya lo esencial de
su pensamiento sucesivo. Es lícito, por lo tanto, considerar en términos
sustancialmente unitarios la concepción nietzscheana del arte. Nietzsche no está interesado en la
elaboración de una estética como un dominio filosófico especial; el arte es
para él problema filosófico-metafísico: en la actividad artística está en juego
una apertura al ser, una iluminación metafísica sobre el sentido del ente.
Producción artística e interpretación del producto
artístico son ambos problemas filosóficos. No existe autonomía del arte
respecto a lo filosófico, así como no existe autonomía de lo filosófico
respecto al arte. Arte y filosofía se presentan perennemente unidas en aquella
deconstrucción de la tradición metafísica europea que constituye el objetivo de
la total crítica nietzscheana. (‘El Arte in N.’)
We could not agree more with
Cacciari’s position. As we have shown, for Nietsche art has to be “the true
metaphysical activity of human
beings” because for him art is prior
to philosophy, just as intuition and perception (which are “based” on metaphors
and “unthinkable” without them) are prior to reflection in terms of his
“onto-geny of thought” in which, once more, memory or re-collection or
re-flection plays a crucial role in the “construction of concepts” out of
“crystallised metaphors”. Once again, however, the metaphysical status of art
in Nietzsche’s early or inchoate conception of it as “the construction of
metaphors by an artistically creative subject” and as “the genius of falsity”
is open to objection on the grounds that (a) meta-phors re-fer (bring back)
invariably to a substratum “beyond
which they bring” (meta pherein, to bring beyond), and (b)
it is impossible to separate (as Nietzsche himself maintains, and here is
another chorismos) meta-phors from
the act of perception itself and
indeed from “concepts” – and therefore it cannot be accurate to describe human
perception and intuition as “the construction
of metaphors” and “appearances”! (On this, cf. our discussion of Merleau-Ponty
in ‘Immanence Re-visited’ and ‘The Philosophy of the Flesh’.)
Cacciari sharply points out
Nietzsche’s ambiguity on the first count: - that if “art is the genius of
falsehood”, then it follows that Nietzsche still posits a “Truth”, a “Fundamentum”, in relation to which art is
“falsehood”!
8 Nietzsche afirma que el arte constituye el "genio
de la mentira". Se trata de un ejemplo evidente de "platonismo invertido", en que
Nietzsche se obstina en separar de una manera demasiado abstracta "razón
clásica" y modernidad. (Cacciari, ‘El Hacer del Canto’, fn.8.)
Quite right! If indeed “art is
the genius of falsity”, this can occur if and only if there is some “thing”
that art can properly “falsify”, some “re-ality” in relation to which art can
actually lie. But this is precisely the starting point of Plato’s vehement
condemnation of art and its dissoi logoi
(“double talk”) and doxa (opinion,
chatter) as against philosophy’s logico-discursive dialectic reasoning (dianoia) leading to episteme (knowledge, science)! In complete contrast, what Nietzsche
meant by this expression was precisely that art is the genius of falsity in
opposition to or transgression against “the cemetery of intuitions” constituted
by that oppressive “structure of concepts” represented by “logic and science” –
by the two activities that, in opposition to art, pretend to represent “the Truth”
and therefore the Platonic world of supra-sensible “values” leading up
hierarchically to the summum bonum
(the Good), when in fact they are “distancing” human beings from the greatest
“truth” of all – and that is that all human perception and reasoning is “based
on the construction of artistic or aesthetic metaphors”! Nietzsche’s expression
about art is ironic to some extent; and yet its literal “inverted Platonism”
points once more to his early confusion with regard to a “reality” that art “genially
falsifies” by creating “contra-dictory appearances”.
And Cacciari is right also on
the second count because “the construction of metaphors” – that is, art – is
inseparable from the construction of concepts, which is the proper activity of
philosophy. “But,” observes Cacciari with great acumen, “this affinity is
revealed by a difference”:
Pero esta afinidad es revelable por diferencia. La consideración del
hecho artístico es llevada a cabo filosóficamente, no porque el arte sea
representación o se limite a imaginar las ideas filosóficas. El arte es problema filosófico en tanto su
estructura es problema para la filosofía; su presencia, la presencia de su palabra choca con la
dimensión conceptual del trabajo filosófico. Arte y filosofía se unen polarmente,
por oposición. De una vez Nietzsche
supera, por esta vía, toda estética decadentista de la autonomía pura del hecho
artístico, así como todo contenido ideológico. Arte y filosofía están indisolublemente conectados en tanto problema el
uno con la otra. Aún más: el arte es siempre presencia amenazante-inquietante
para la pura filosofía. (El Arte en N.)
Because philosophy itself
cannot be com-prehended (under-stood thoroughly) by its own logos and must remain therefore an artistic activity, a poiesis, and because artistic activity
is prior to philosophical re-flection or contemplation in that it is
in-comprehensible to and by the philosophical logos, it follows that artistic activity
reaffirms the primacy of in-vention over re-flection – which poses an insuperable
metaphysical problem for philosophy – again, not in the sense that art is a problem
for philosophy to consider, one among many, but rather in the sense that
art is the problem of philosophy, a problem that is ante-cedent to, that
pre-cedes philosophical reflection, and therefore also challenges its claim to
theoretico-practical pre-eminence as knowledge! As Cacciari again genially puts
it, “art is a philosophical problem in that its structure [its nature as activity]
is problematic for philosophy”. This cannot be said even of theology, as Werner
Jaeger has shown with his concept of “natural theology” (in The Theology of the Early Greek Philosophers),
in that the divine is not prior to “the
problem of metaphysics” (Heidegger) but forms only one of its problems or aspects because it is just as plausible that
reality is of divine origin as it is that it is entirely contingent.
This is precisely why art poses
“a menacing and disquieting presence for
pure philosophy” – because of its precedence over philosophy as an activity, as initium. Art shows
the “activist” reality of philosophy – its practical
initium, the fact that even conceptually its “doing”, its being a
“beginning”, is prior to and cannot be com-prehended
(grasped and explained totally) by pure thought or reflection given that
thought is itself an activity, namely, “thinking about thinking”, where the second “thinking” stands for the
meta-phorical activity of art upon which
philosophy is both a “re-flection” and
ultimately an artistic activity in itself! Of course, artistic activity is
in-conceivable without thought itself – as Nietzsche reminded us earlier,
without the “formation of meta-phors” (Bildung der Begriffe - and therefore of words, of language, something that Cacciari points out above but forgets in
his later elaboration of this thesis) inseparable from the act of intuition and
perception as appearance. Yet, if it
is not pre-conceptual, art is certainly pre-reflective
and (as Cacciari would say) pre-discursive
activity in that both its “doing” and its “feeling” or “sense” is prior to
philosophic reflection and its logos.
It is the “union” of these opposed moments in art – the “doing” and the
“feeling” - that poses a greater problem for philosophy than it does for art –
because the task of philosophy is precisely to com-prehend all activity,
including the artistic, and this it cannot do if philosophy remains an artistic
activity itself, an initium that is
incomprehensible by and inexplicable to philosophy. (This “materiality” or
immanence of thought, its being tied inextricably to perception and language,
is what escapes Arendt because of her formalistic-abstract, trans-scendental
approach to it in The Life of the Mind.
See our ‘Immanence Revisited’ and ‘Philosophy of the Flesh’.)
As we intimated earlier, in the
course of the elaboration of his central thesis on ‘El Arte en Nietzsche’,
Cacciari this time seems to agree with Nietzsche’s thesis that art is “the
genius of falsity” because life and the world are perceptible and knowable only
as appear-ances, and there-fore as intrinsically
“contra-dictory”.
El problema filosófico del arte se centraliza
en la relación arte-mentira. En el prefacio a la segunda edición de La Gaya Ciencia, Nietzsche dice:
Nos
ha fastidiado este mal gusto [...] querer la verdad a toda costa [...] esta
fascinación de adolescentes por el amor a la verdad. La artes son excogitadas como una especie de culto de lo no-verdadero.
Estas indicaciones se articulan plenamente sólo en los Fragmentos Póstumos sucesivos al Zaratustra. En el contexto de La Gaya Ciencia puede aún parecer que se
trata simplemente de descubrir al juglar escondido en nuestra pasión por el
conocimiento - y aquello que en el arte se limite a enfatizar la dimensión
romántica del ejercicio interminable de la ironía, solamente deconstructiva,
sobre el mundo-verdadero. En los Fragmentos
Póstumos, sobre todo en aquellos que pertenecen al período 87-88, es
evidente, en cambio, que Nietzsche no está
interesado en una estética especial -en el caso en cuestión, la
irónico-romántica -, sino en la definición de las estructuras fundamentales del
hecho artístico. En el arte él aprehende
una facultad general, un poder-Kraft que tiene validez universal. En el arte
está en juego una dimensión general del ser, una total facultad falsificante.
El arte es la facultad-Kraft que niega la verdad - o, mejor dicho el arte es
expresión de esta facultad universal, y por lo tanto activa en cualquier otro
dominio.
This is an unnecessary forzatura of Nietzsche’s thought caused
in part by his own careless and misguided manner of articulating the problem in
the early works. As we can see from our quotation below, for Nietzsche it is as
senseless to say that “the essence of things”, and therefore contra-diction,
exists as it is to state the contrary!
For our antithesis of individual and categories
is anthropomorphic
too
[i.e. is of
purely human origin] and does not come from the essence of things,
although on the
other hand we do not dare to say that it does not correspond
to it; for that would
be a dogmatic assertion and as such just as
undemonstrable
as its contrary. (UWL, p.180)
Nietzsche merely contends that
the principle of non-contradiction is inapplicable as a “metre” of both
artistic and of scientific “doing” precisely to the degree that they are
“doings”, initia, and not statements,
what Cacciari calls “logico-discursive reason” and “vestimenta-escritura del
pensamiento”!
Life and the world are not contradictory because they ec-sist only as “appearance”,” - but this term
now no longer stands in opposition to a “re-ality(!)”, to a “true world” – “the
true world has disappeared with the apparent one”, ironises Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols. Rather it indicates
the primacy of perception and its “participation” (methexis) in the perceived, as well as the impossibility of truth-as-certainty and of truth-as-totality, of “Truth” as
Jaspers’s “all-encompassing” (das Umgreifende).
The principle of non-contradiction is applicable only to the concept of truth-as-certainty
and totality, of “reality as the essence of things”, and not to that of “appearance”
which challenges the “objective existence” of such “being-as-presence” (as
Heidegger described it) as against Nietzsche’s “being-as-becoming” and that
therefore renders superfluous the notion of “truth-as-certainty and totality” together
with that of contra-diction. (We have shown in our Weberbuch and will discuss again soon how Weber misconceived this
essential point in his critique of “objectivity” in science – to wit, that as
philosophers as disparate as Nicholas of Cusa and Schopenhauer pointed out,
there is and there can be no “approximation” to “the Truth”, because the
concept of “truth-as-certainty and totality” is toto genere, toto caelo [Schopenhauer] categorically different from
that of “partial truths” or “verities” [Arendt] – which can ec-sist only as an
“ideo-logical” entity if one falsely believes in “the Truth”!)
If we understand “appearances”
correctly (as Nietzsche indicates but fails to do consistently), then they can
never be contra-dictory because as
such they do not re-fer to any “under-lying [sub-stantive] reality” or “essence
of things” or “things-in-themselves” against
which they can be judged to be false. This is what allows Nietzsche to
speak of “truth and falsehood in an extra-moral
sense” (ausser-moralisch), that is to
say, “outside the morality”, or better “the suprasensible world of values”, upon
which this false opposition of real events is absolutely dependent! The
polarity here is between the mani-fold
and multi-versality of experience
[appearances] which is re-presented and embodied by the human instinct to the
creation of metaphors, art and myth, against the truth-as-certainty and uni-versality
of “rational science” for which “reality” is definable in terms of ultimately
self-referential “natural laws” subject to the principle of non-contradiction
which they themselves must infringe.
It is precisely for these
reasons that we simply cannot go along with Cacciari and persist with the
terminology he adopts from Nietzsche with regard to “art as the genius of
falsity” and to the “contradictoriness” of the world. Indeed Cacciari at a
certain stage seems to suggest that art as “the genius of falsity” is “that
will to power that allows us to bend the cruel reality, contradictory and
without meaning, of the world, to our necessity to live”: “We hold on to art so
as not to perish before truth”:
Pero en el arte el genio de la
mentira resurge en su pureza - el poder de la mentira se muestra en toda su
luz y belleza. Aquella voluntad de poder que nos permite reducir la cruel
realidad, contradictoria y sin sentido
del mundo a nuestra necesidad de vivir - aquella voluntad de poder que es
la gran creadora de la posibilidad de vivir - pone sus nervios al desnudo en el
arte.Tenemos el arte para no perecer
frente a la verdad.
But understood in this sense,
Cacciari can no longer intend “truth” as “truth-as-certainty and totality”;
rather, he can only intend the opposite – that is, “truth-as contingency” and “truth-as-becoming”. Yet in this case “truth” and
“art” would simply be identical: far from being “contradictory”, this “truth”
and “cruel reality” would simply be “contingent”, they would be Da-sein (Heidegger), to which the
concept of “contra-diction” is entirely inapplicable. Instead, and inconsistently, it is evident
that in nearly every other context Cacciari, following Nietzsche, clearly
understands “truth” as “truth-as-certainty”. At any rate, however “tragic” may
be the attempt at mimesis, whether artistic or philosophico-scientific, it does
not evince the contradictoriness of
life and the world! Croce’s objection in the Logica against the Nietzschean thesis was precisely that if there
is no “truth” understood as “totality”, as “Truth”, then it is impossible to
prove the “truth” of this thesis! This is an objection of which Cacciari does
not seem to be mindful because, like Croce, he remains captive to the primacy
of “Truth” and thus equivocates about “the truth
of non-Truth”!
El arte de lo profundo es del todo solidario
con lo Verdadero de la metafísica. Para ambos la apariencia es mentira, y el
signo no otra cosa que vestimenta-escritura del pensamiento. Este arte miente
demasiado; en realidad, miente dos veces: la primera haciendo propia la mentira
del Fundamentum metafísico; la segunda reduciendo las propias configuraciones
sígnicas a seductores velos del logos. El poeta transformado opone a este
exceso de mentira la perfecta medida de
su arte: existen múltiples modos de abrirse
al mundo - el signo es una apertura al mundo; él afirma la verdad de la
apariencia, el carácter abismal (ab-gründlich:
sin fundamento, continuamente desfondante) de la apariencia, la verdad de
aquello que para la metafísica es no-verdad, por lo tanto, mentira, y por otra
parte, el carácter de velo, de ocultamiento de esta verdad de la apariencia que
reviste la Verdad metafísica. Como Derrida ha explicado: la Verdad falsificada
, deviene apariencia, o, mejor dicho, asume el rol que la apariencia tenía a
sus ojos, y la apariencia deviene única verdad, no porque sustituya al antiguo
Fundamento, sino porque indica la verdad
de la ausencia de Fundamento, verdad
de la no-Verdad. (El Arte en N.)
Indeed we certainly agree that for Nietzsche and for
us “appearance” takes the place of the old “objective Truth”, but this does not
mean at all that “appearance is now the truth of non-Truth”, for the simple
reason that if there is no “Truth” then there cannot be any “non-Truth” either;
and it is indeed absurd to refer to such a concept. “The absence of Foundation”
is a meaningless phrase – unless there truly is a “Foundation”, unless one existed objectively either as
presence or else as possibility, as opposed to ec-sisting ideologically! To exemplify further, it would be equally
meaningless for us to talk of “the truth of the non-Subject” because, having
denied the existence as well as the possibility of a Subject, both the
existence and the non-existence of a “non-Subject” must also be denied as
meaningless statements – because it is absurd to assert the existence of the
opposite of something that does not and cannot exist! The only way in which
“appearance” can be described as “the truth of non-Truth” is if we intend by
“appearance” the ab-sence, the non-being or non-existence, of “truth-as-certainty
and totality”, that is, of “truth-as-presence”. But in that case it is
incorrect to assign to “appearance” the meaning that Cacciari intends – and
that is, “appearance” as not only the ab-sence of “truth-as-presence”, as
“ob-jective truth”, but also of “appearance” as “life as contra-diction”, as
“falsity”! (There is a little shadow-boxing or ghost-fighting here, similar to
falling into the quixotic trap of the old refrain about Neville Chamberlain and
Hitler:
As I descended down the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away!
Cacciari’s “man who wasn’t
there” is the notion of “truth as the contra-dictoriness of reality”!)
(Incidentally, the Popperian
test of “falsifiability” of scientific truth runs against this insurmountable
objection: - that it invalidates the very notion of “scientificity” because
only “false statements” are “falsifiable”! In other words, Popper’s test of
“scientificity” mis-conceives the entire notion of “scientificity” and is quite
simply an ideological attempt to
rescue bourgeois science from the Nietzschean critique of it as “the will to
truth” and “truth-as-certainty” that underlie and sustain it: - it is no test
at all given that even, and especially,
blatant lies are “falsifiable” by definition and that, as we shall argue below
in agreement with Nietzsche, the notion of “scientific truth” cannot stand on
contingency – what Arendt called “verities” - but rather on the
physical-mathematical necessity of
“the laws of nature”!)
[In our next piece we will
attempt to draw closer to a novel approach to the social synthesis through the
critique of Cacciari and Vattimo.]
We argued above that except for
the fact that philosophic reflection cannot com-prehend artistic expression and
is in-deed only one of its manifestations as artistic activity, philosophic
reflection remains just as “artistic” as any other form of human ex-pression or
pro-duction. Consequently, the mimetic gap ec-sists only for philosophy
and its transcendental logos; it does
not exist in reality for art, whose
only reality is that of so-called “appearances” and “meta-phors”! (We shall
argue later that the terms “appearances” and “metaphors” and even “art” are
inappropriate and can only add confusion to our analysis of perception.) We can state therefore that there is
no independent or autonomous sphere of artistic expression and production – and
that indeed all human action is essentially artistic.
The fact that under certain historical conditions this essential aspect of
human action is overcome and repressed through the social synthesis and the
mode of social reproduction that sustains it does not detract from this fundamental
fact; it is instead the reality of what is widely known as “alienation” (cf.
Hegel, Marx), and what Nietzsche describes instead as “internalization” (Verinnerlichung) of morality and of “all
Values [aller Werthe]” occasioned by
the ontogenetic “disgregation of the instincts” – which is what constitutes for
him “the ontogeny of thought”. We will examine this aspect of Nietzsche’s
critique shortly in connection with the social synthesis.
For the moment, we wish to turn
to Cacciari’s analysis of artistic production to highlight the salient features
of our own analysis:
Un instante hace irrupción,
donde una voz que constituye siempre el a priori de toda idea del artesano, se
abate sobre el hombre, transformándolo en su propio instrumento. A través de
él, que no es, por lo tanto, el sujeto de la creación (y cuyo "hacer"
no tiene su origen en el no-ser), esa voz se manifiesta visiblemente, se
expresa audiblemente, resuena, se transforma en ese canto. (El Hacer del
Canto)
But what can it possibly mean
to say “an instant irrupts [breaks in], whereby a voice that always constitutes
the a priori of all the ideas of the
artisan, strikes the human being” – what can we possibly achieve and how is it
even feasible to separate “the human being” or “artisan” from its
“inspiration”, from “the voice that constitutes the a priori of every one of the artisan’s ideas”? And how is it even
conceivable to argue that this in-spiration,
this “voice” (surely, a divine afflatus?)
or “de-lirium”, somehow “transforms
the artisan into its own proper instrument”?
For it is entirely evident to us instead – as immanentists – that the artisan
and the “voice” or inspiration are in reality, in deed, in the “act” of pro-duction of the art form, one and the same entity – because
perception and creation are one and the same activity, not two separate entities
as all transcendental philosophy would have us believe!
We agree with Cacciari’s sharp
realization that “[the artisan] is not the subject
of creation”: but this is only because no in-dividual
human being can be treated as the “subject” or “creator” of the act of
perception and production (which is inevitably artistic) because this belongs
to the species and not to the In-dividuum
– because it is the creative activity of being
human and not the individual action of a single human being! To consider poiesis
ontogenetically as a reality that pertains to in-dividual human beings and not phylogenetically to being human is to relapse in the “philosophical” hypostatization of
“art” as an autonomous sphere of human activity and not as the very essence of
being human: it is to relapse into the notion of art as transcendence, as “divine inspiration” that Cacciari himself had
earlier eschewed. And it is Cacciari himself who gives the game away when he
(perhaps unwittingly, but inevitably, given his entire approach to the problem)
relapses into the language of the old philosophical logos he ostensibly detests:
Ese canto es mímesis,
en el sentido en que está de acuerdo, en armonía, solo con esa voz, y por lo
tanto realmente con nada, ya que esa voz, en tanto tal, no se da nunca
verdaderamente.
Ese canto, en suma, no es la mímesis
sino de su propio presupuesto, que trasciende
[!!] toda medida, toda utilidad y toda techne normal. Ese
"hacer" que constituye el canto es, pues, verdaderamente un delirio
en relación con el habitus de la poesía, de las technai que
teje el arte de la realeza.
(El Hacer del Canto)
Cacciari’s mysticism here
becomes truly mystifying! It is a fact that the audible and visible or
perceptible manifestations, or ex-pressions, of artistic activity cannot be confused
with the “in-spiration” of art, with its creative moment. Yet it is palpably
absurd to deny that the two are in reality fused and that instead this
“creation”, the artistic expression, is pro-duced seemingly “out of nothing”,
out of sheer “de-lirium”. On the contrary, this “pro-duction”, as Cacciari
himself asseverates, distinguishes all human activity – indeed, this
id-entification (this same-ness) of artistic inspiration with its pro-duction,
this “objectification of artistic inspiration”, is precisely what allows that
“symbolic exchange” between human beings that makes possible “the social
synthesis”. It is utter nonsense, then, for Cacciari to describe artistic
inspiration and pro-duction as he does above by separating onto-logically (yet another chorismos!) human inspiration (poiesis) and
human production (techne) – because the two are
inextricably bound and fused! There is no “techne”, on one side, and “poiesis”
on the other, just as there is no Subject and Object in opposition to each
other: both poiesis and techne are inseparable aspects of the
one metaphor-producing “creative” activity – remembering that “creativity”, the
initium, is not “subject-ity”.
[Artistic Form as “thought”]
Cacciari’s mysticism is again
on show:
El arte en cuanto juego de
configuraciones sígnicas es entonces el pensamiento de la verdad de la
apariencia, de la verdad de la no-verdad… pero la Forma [artistica] no tiene nada de formalístico: ella es universal facultad falsificante, pone la verdad
como no-verdad. La Forma artística abre
al mundo, es apertura al ser, en cuanto divina tirada de dados, abismo del Azar
y de sus combinaciones, teoría trágica del eterno crear-destruir. (El Arte en
N.)
Note that this “play of sign
[semiotic] configurations” or “the artistic Form” can be understood only in
relation to the reality of social formations, only in terms of “the social
synthesis”, without which our entire speculative efforts relapse into sheer
mysticism, which is what Cacciari slips into in the quotation above. True, as Cacciari
himself shows in ‘El Hacer del Canto’, the mimetic gap does remit the telos of philosophy and its logos back to the mystical world of divine “inspiration” and “contingency” (“divina tirada de dados”), of “delirium” – a thesis advanced long ago
by Werner Jaeger in The Theology of the
EarlyGreek Philosophers (see our ‘Postcard from Istanbul’). The painful
realization of this common artistic-metaphorical matrix is what pro-voked the
wrath of Plato’s “condemnation” of art and mythology because these expose the
“tragic” inability of philosophy and science to bridge this mimetic gap. But as we emphasized earlier, the mimetic gap between the act of
perception and its “ob-ject” ec-sists only for philosophy and its
transcendental logos; it does not exist
in reality because like all human objectification the only “reality” for art is
that of so-called “appearances” and “meta-phors”, and therefore the unity of
perception, thought and language! The error here for Cacciari as for Nietzsche
consists in seeking to separate
thought from its “ob-ject” (a separation implicit in the notion of
“meta-phor”), thought from language, - and then in reducing all language and concepts to logic. Then, having established this last
false equation, they correctly deny that all knowledge is logico-discursive but
incorrectly conclude from the equation of knowledge with logic that it is
possible to descry “a new union between knowledge and falsity, a new relation
that is no longer one of mutual exclusion”.
Por lo tanto: la filosofía última, llegando al
reconocimiento de la necesidad del arte, llega al reconocimiento de esta
facultad falsificante como una formula universal del conocer, como estructura
del conocer. O, viceversa, el arte en cuanto actividad metafísica en gran
estilo torna visible una nueva unión entre conocimiento y mentira, una nueva
relación ya no más de recíproca exclusión.
The
idea that knowledge and falsity are not mutually exclusive, that reality is
“contra-dictory”, arises from the mistaken equation of knowledge with
logico-discursive thought and the latter’s doomed attempt to ob-literate all
contradiction.
El problema que aquí sale a
la luz tiene relación con un presupuesto vital de la tradición filosófica
europea. En base a tal presupuesto, el mundo se nos abriría exclusivamente
mediante pensamientos pro-ducidos
lingüísticamente, o sea mediante un logos predicativo-discursivo. El
mundo nos es dado exclusivamente a través de las formas de la discursividad
lingüística, de las cuales siempre es posible afirmar verdad o falsedad. Ahora
para tal tradición no tendría sentido interrogarse sobre la verdad o falsedad
del arte. Por lo tanto, en el caso de un hecho artístico, no tendremos nunca
nada que ver con pensamientos, con conocimiento sino con fantasías, del todo
irrelevantes para el auténtico logos -o, como máximo, expresantes de los
limites o de los necesarios días de descanso, o aún, de los lapsus de la
actividad discursiva.
We know very well, from
“em-pathy” for instance, that knowledge cannot be reduced to logic. There is therefore
no sense in affirming the co-existence of knowledge and falsity as if knowledge
referred to “truth-as-certainty and totality” – because we know that knowledge
is not “formal-logical” or “logico-discursive” whereas falsity can only exist
for logic. Yet knowledge can ec-sist
only symbolically, through language: and we should remember that language is
not logic – and that indeed logic itself is not “logical”! Therefore the phrase
“logico-discursive” covers only one aspect of “language”. Indeed, we demonstrated
earlier that the “logico-discursive” form (philosophy) too is “artistic”! The
metaphysical dimension of art and the artistic dimension of metaphysics entail
precisely that human perception, thought, and knowledge cannot be reduced to
“logic”. But can they be “divorced” from language? The answer we gave earlier
(in ‘Immanence Re-visited’ and ‘Philosophy of the Flesh’) is that they can-not!