Commentary on Political Economy

Saturday 8 December 2012

Aesthesis vs. Aesthetics: Cacciari on Nietzsche


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!

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