The Intimate Universal by William Desmond

Author:William Desmond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, PHI022000, Philosophy/Religious
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-11-22T00:00:00+00:00

First and Second Art (1): On Mutations in the Aesthetic Field and the Intimate Universal

In aesthetic communication there is a certain promiscuity between self and other. There is also a fluid doubleness that develops between the aesthetic field as a given happening and our own aesthetic self-shaping. To effect the latter we must employ the former but tilt it away from its otherness in our own direction. This need not be exploitative in a violent or destructive way, but it does signal a tension between the given aesthetic field and our endeavor to define ourselves in terms primarily envisaged by ourselves. There is an intimacy to both those sides, and an equivocity, but in the coming forth of the second, the intimacy of the first can come to count for less. Our art, so to say, takes over from the aesthetic happening that, if it has its own art, is one that is (relatively) other to us, with its own ebbs and flows and its own mysterious tides of coming into being and passing away. Initially this first art might be more mysteriously poetic also, though in coming to give us a sense of our own power, in our endeavor-to-be, it can generate a second art that is more dedicated to instrumentally turning the given otherness into something appreciated in terms of its use for us. The aesthetic happening is the womb that nurtures our aesthetic selving and, with it, our possible art—but this art, in the doubleness, can turn the aesthetic happening into a field for its own endeavor. Art as the skill that makes use of this field emerges from a first, more elemental art that is more than just useful art.

In truth, a threefold distinction is suggested.22 There is, first, the poetic art of naturing, bringing beings to be; second, there is our poetic art, as having come to be endowed with original power to be; third, there is an instrumental art that forms our endowed power in a useful direction. I am not saying these are distinctly set apart at the outset; here too there is promiscuity in keeping with aesthetic happening. Thus we should not be surprised that the art of earlier peoples might have a useful function that yet is inseparable from a religious sense of sacred power. Our poetic art comes to be out of the divine poiesis of naturing, and this is carried into our instrumental arts. What usefulness here means does not coincide with the modern definition where the world has already been massively reduced to a valueless thereness. In the charged field of aesthetic happening, the most useful thing might be the art of a sacred magic that enters into the fluid porosity between the human and the divine. What is “useful” in this field has an aesthetic charge that cannot be separated from the sacred and the beneficences and curses of the powers on us.

The emergence of more prosaic art reconfigures the doubleness: intimacy with the original aesthetic charge

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