WHY
I am about to write this short essay because my daughter Beatrice cornered me, asking me why I resented so much “aesthetics”; I tried to draft an answer, but I understood that a few words and a few examples weren’t enough to satisfy the request. Beatrice has revealed a theme that everyone takes for granted and that I too, albeit in the opposite sense, took for granted.
I had assumed that the answer to the “aesthetics” theme was already in affirming that the meaning of life refers to the decisive and responsible construction of one’s own person. As with so many other aspects that have contributed to my conformation, even with regard to this, I believed that in-depth analyses, a continuous and profound delving, were sufficient to make people understand not only what I meant, but also the path that had led me to those considerations. And so came Beatrice who didn’t limit herself to saying “I don’t understand“, but demanded explanations from me, precisely in the etymological sense of ex-plications: to open the envelope (plicate), something that is folded and therefore bring to view of eyes and mind pages that could not be read.
As with every word that has a universe of life inside, and is not a simple name of things, aesthetics too needs to be subjected to a complex determination; unlike what happens for a deterministic analysis, it does not happen by creating a kind of flow diagram that identifies a path step by step. In fact, a continuous upheaval and restart of processes is necessary where time and space (in this case the word or the concept) go beyond a linear perspective. It is a question of conceiving a kind of chaos, unpredictable and imprescriptible, but within a horizon that admits movements in many directions that cannot be hypothesized and above all unpredictable at the starting moment.
A FOREWORD
It must be said that there is no real starting moment and the departure, the starting point is only an approximation which, however, is dense and is never “the zero point”. We have lived our life, we have built it and we have shaped it by questioning ourselves on various aspects and providing answers that we do not always blindly rely on: at a certain point we decide to linger on a word-concept, such as “aesthetics” , and we begin to go deeper, sometimes believing that we will find a bottom to stop at. That would be “the zero point“, but in reality at that moment the point is anything but zero and we occupy it with all that we are. We can call it pre-judgments in Gadamer’s sense, more or less solid, more or less formed, not necessarily coherent, not dutifully and neatly organized.
E(0) is the moment of our birth, E(1) is the moment in which we decided to ponder on aesthetics, E (n) is this moment in which I am writing and when I try to provide an even more understandable picture (at least in my opinion) of this study.
If we think that mountains are neither triangles nor pyramids, i.e. we think that reality is complex, even what we call aesthetics is necessarily a complex term-concept and this means that we cannot ignore two dimensions that belong to us and determine us, space and time. The becoming is not a metaphysical category but it is what most characterizes us, in worshiping one or more gods, in creating myths, in recognizing ourselves as rational beings, in discovering limits in our rationality. At the same time, space shapes us and we shape it, building barriers, digging canals, destroying and rebuilding cities, enjoying the climate that has been given to us and even cursing it, invading territories that others considered and declared theirs.
In short, we become, in space and time.
AESTHETICS AND WHAT WE THINK
I am not interested here in retracing the history of aesthetics that we find in many pages including high school ones, but in outlining the starting point E(2022) by widening our gaze and at the same time incorporating the object into a wider network. This network is not linear, but must necessarily be provisional not due to cognitive limits but due to the very nature of everything that falls under the landscape of life.
If it is today that we discover the complexity of the world and of human beings, it does not mean that primitive man was not complex, simply the level of complexity that characterized him was less complex than the level that characterizes us today: not only the understanding of world and life has become more complex and for this reason we have given ourselves more complex tools, but the world itself and life itself have become more complex. Beyond the various hypotheses on global warming, the natural world has also become more complex: volcanoes act today as they once did, but then they interacted only with “natural” elements while today they also interact with “human” elements, moreover always more varied and numerous.
All this to say that there cannot be a single approach to aesthetics, regardless of whether the Greeks said one thing and the Romantics another, regardless of whether you want to focus, on the individual or on society, on beauty and the art or beauty in general. Complexity in the field of aesthetics is no different from complexity in the field of meteorology or information technology and in this sense, if we want to talk about aesthetics, we must take into account the many different roads that go there or branch off from there.
In the study of phenomena (even words) normally a point is identified and one proceeds following a connecting line: from (a) one identifies (b), from (b) one arrives at (c) and so on proceeding by cause and effect, what is called logic.
Here I will proceed differently. I will analyze separately all the aspects that connect me, incoming and outgoing, to the word. In this way the connection cannot be linear, but must be reticular and often with networks of networks.
The term “aesthetics” is generally traced back to 1750 in the German context; yet the word is Greek and derives from “aesthesis, sensation” and “perception through the senses“, for this reason words such as exterior, external, aesthetic care were born, which indicate what is outside: the senses put us in contact with what is outside. Establishing a direct connection between these two moments is only a claim, something that has no justification in itself, because those two moments are not only distant in time and space, but they have been formed, con-formed, re-formed and trans-formed by events of all kinds (material and spiritual, to simplify). It is here that we must investigate, not in a chronological sense, but starting from today, making forward, retroactive, recursive, transversal movements.
“Aesthetics” today talks about beauty and art. Between the Greeks, the Germans and our contemporaries there was a leap that does not allow a linear and a deterministic analysis.
Until 1800, statements of extreme subjectivism such as “de gustibus non est disputandum” or ” every cockroach is beautiful to its mother ” circulated, but these were expressions of subordinate classes, while the ruling classes expressed absolute values, which were necessarily the figure of their power. Power manifested itself as potency, but also as values, elements that are valid and which are the banner of power.
The lands to be subdued, the values to be respected, the standards of beauty to be adapted, the works of art to be favoured are all aspects pertaining to the “Prince” and the ruling classes.
This way of seeing and experiencing things has increasingly cracked especially when and where an open universe has been created and it has broken with the closed one. The universe built at the beginning, out of need for conservation, a conservation that took a principle for granted, that of war, so if I occupy a piece of your territory, it is more difficult for you to occupy part of mine.
Very material will to power.
Christianity has thrown that universe into crisis and modern science and the rule of law have deepened that fracture: a non-linear process, often carried out with different objectives, through confused and tormented movements. Centuries later we are able to see this path, but we have given up on predicting its subsequent stages by determining the contours of the future.
In this whirlwind of times, from the Paleolithic to the affirmation of science, passing through all the roads and times we want (Egyptians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Turks, Japanese….), has been prepared the crucial leap that will bring with it a multiplicity of transformations that require the use of new methods and different horizons.
That leap is represented by the birth of mass society which overcomes the radical dichotomy between the ruling classes and the subaltern classes.
The spread of literacy, of mass schooling, of freedom of thought and communication, of the rule of law, of ever more complex means of communication has increasingly mended that fracture, effectively marking a decisive leap.
It is clear that differences in income, effort, power, satisfaction, recognition remain, but – as verified in recent years – every individual has a claim to recognition for what he says or does. “If you say so!” said ironically a young politician to Minister Padoan, University Professor; “One is worth one” was the watchword of the Movement “5 stars”; the merit (i.e. excellence) continues to be fought extensively; the “woke” and “cancel culture” movements bring differences back to a racial and ethnic level. All of which, prior to 1800, would have drawn laughter from readers or, at worst, imprisonment and torture.
Mass society. In a recursive relationship, more or less in the same years, there is also a leap in the fields of Science and Art. In a historical analysis we always find ourselves facing moments of continuity and moments of disruption, but these realities are never definitive and what initially suggests continuity, then we find disruption.
The examples are numerous and recurring.
We think of Decadence identified for a long time as a continuation of Romanticism; or the disruption of Romanticism with respect to the Enlightenment, brought back in closer terms by Gadamer; or even the disruption between Science of the 1600s and contemporary Baroque poetry, for centuries placed at the antipodes.
This happens above all because of us; we change perspective and therefore we see the phenomena with different eyes and new methods.
I SAID ART AND SCIENCE.
Art has always been considered as an imitation of reality; starting from the mid-nineteenth century it plays a completely different role, which denies the objective character of reality whether it is conceived as epiphanic or whether its role of creation is revealed. All poetry and the modern novel go in this direction and the same also happens in the figurative arts, especially in the painting field.
Science has always characterized itself as knowledge (Latin: scire) arriving at a precise definition in 1600 when, due to the results obtained, identified itself both as Modern Science and as True Science: it is based on absolute laws, on experience, on a precise method and all this allows the prediction, starting from the assumption, also common to the Arts, that reality is objective. Starting from the end of the 19th century, this vision begins to go into a crisis, a crisis that continues up to the present day, proceeding with a continuous disintegration of those paradigms considered absolute and universal. Quantum physics hit strongly and subsequently it is the theme of complexity that provides a completely new and different frame of reference.
MASS SOCIETY. ART OF CREATION. SCIENCE OF COMPLEXITY.
Let’s try to think about these three moments in their interconnection and in this way we better understand what we are experiencing and what waters we are swimming in. In all three cases, the dimension of the individual who feels like a protagonist emerges to a new extent and the result is not important, and so it often happens that this protagonism is diaphanous or even vain. A subjectivism makes its way that often becomes arbitrariness and is often denied in the name of social solidarity: to determinism of Modern Science is opposed Chance, to society the individual, to artistic canon creative freedom.
We must think of becoming as something slow, very slow, and cumbersome; it proceeds incessantly, but it does not do it in a linear, and much less direct, way, so when it seems to have taken the final straight line it stops, changes direction, goes back, moves in a turbulent way: so we, who thought we understood, are left dumbfounded. In this framework, ideology has ceased to provide the answers because the complexity of the world has been accompanied by the complexity of individuals, singles and in groups.
My hypothesis, very general, is that there has been a break with everything we were used to and that this forces us too to make a similar leap, even if it is difficult to think that individuals can decide quickly. This has been my mistake or rather my misunderstanding: let’s think about the fact the world took a century to make this change of references and paradigms. In complex systems phenomena act attracting each other and that tends to speed up transformations, but this does not mean that everything will be quick and easy.
“After the rain it pours” is the popular maxim.
Let’s go back to inserting the question we are dealing with, aesthetics, in this new framework. We need to keep away from it and remember what happened until the middle of the last century, when the separation between dominant classes and subordinate classes or between intellectuals and poorly literate-illiterates characterized the colours of society. Leaving aside the political component, let’s think about what happened in the field of the production and diffusion of ideas, of thought and even of opinions. There was a tip of the social iceberg which in variable ratios (times, interests, power) elaborated theories that were the result of convictions, studies and so on, while the rest took note of those theories, as far as they were able to absorb them. You don’t need to go very far; just think of the 1950s and 1960s, when on one side there were the intellectuals (university professors, writers, journalists, scientists, artists) who were the creators and developers, while on the other side either this or that thesis was approved, otherwise one was subjected to a consistent approximation: Gramsci elaborates a thought, an intellectual middle class (teachers, managers, senior employees) supports that thought with good reason (they have read the books) while the less educated part is limited to the words of order that the Italian Communist Party (PCI) has processed.
It is a question of a social division, but not of a fragmentation. The boundaries between the three areas were clear-cut and well marked: within each area there were contrasts, but of the same quality, high, medium, low. There were, for example, Crocians, followers of Gentile, Gramscians, pure Marxists, and then Sartreans, followers of the Frankfurt School and so on.
I am referring to the last century because in previous centuries the opposition between high and low was radical and the cases of passage from low to high were minimal and above all casual. The involvement in the understanding of ideas has been growing over the centuries, especially starting from 1600 with religious institutions and the theatre and later with gazettes and newspapers, up to compulsory elementary school and subsequent developments.
Today we are witnessing a fragmentation and the movements from bottom to top and vice versa are quite fluid; the intellectuals remain who develop ideas, thoughts and theories, but these elaborations do not last long and it is not necessary to write a book to question them, for an article of a few pages with a meager bibliography is often enough to criticize them. Let’s think about the fact that today there are millions of works either for the contribution of people of different languages or for the development of the publishing industry or for the explosion of social networks. Speaking of social networks, I am not referring only to structures such as TikTok or to very general platforms such as the Internet, but to the hundreds of sites on which short and less short essays are published, even free of charge, such as Academia and groups on Facebook, such as System Thinking, Social Complexity, Polymaths & Polymath, Phenomenology and Continental, Thus spoke Zarathustra to mention those to which I belong, but there are all types, all trends, all colours, micro and macro topics.
Up until 1968, annus fatalis, the cultural debate was quite clear and the different opposing positions did so in restricted, let’s say academic, groups: there was no shortage of magazines in which intellectuals expressed themselves, but the readers were an elite and as such very restricted. An elite made up those who read Il Ponte or Rinascita and then also Quaderni Piacentini and Quaderni Rossi or The New Anthology after the Second World War and many others, above all of Marxist inspiration but not only. The point was that no matter how high the circulation was, it was a question of a few thousand copies and therefore the reader was not the mass-man; I remember, in this regard, that even in the early years of the University I was dealing with Rinascita Magazine and I must confess that, despite having been a good high school student, I had difficulty understanding what I was reading.
Everything changes with 1968 and all the transformations I mentioned. Not that the new magazines weren’t brainy, indeed perhaps they were even more so, but the fact is that the new theories were transformed into simple slogans (Destroy, don’t change the State!… Fascists, bourgeois only a few months!…) but now there was an intermediate passage which provided an articulation of the new theories easily accessible to the average militant and to the mass man (leaflets, documents, assemblies, newspapers, political theses…). Through the diffusion of phenomena of mass society that I mentioned above, the vast majority of people acquired a culture made up of arguments that followed a certain logic and which they appropriated by consolidating the conviction of their own depth: it was no longer the simple slogan of the 50s and 60s that led the masses towards this or that party, because now, and more and more, everyone had arguments in which they recognized and which strengthened their identity. This path has been growing regardless of the fact that with the 1980s political commitment has diminished, because by now the development of mass culture allowed everyone to be the spokesperson for some ideas. The process reached its climax with the affirmation of the Five Star Movement and its famous “One is worth one”.
As I have tried to explain briefly, starting from 1800 and to an increasing extent, we have witnessed important social transformations which have given rise to increasingly broader and increasingly mutually related community structures, shaping the various components, often absorbing elements that were once very distant. Even the new community forms, born to defend one’s own territory, have presented themselves in the forms of a widespread sociality: nationalism has raised the barriers of historical-linguistic-cultural identity, while classism has done the same by simplistically separating groups social. And so the individual watered down his individuality in a value that transcended him: bourgeois, proletarian, petty bourgeois, French, German, Slavic and then man, woman, gay and again white, black, yellow, etc.
We could broaden this discourse by introducing other undoubtedly present and undoubtedly influential aspects, such as the birth of political parties, recognition in a religion and a specific confession, the professional aspect, cultural formation, the political regime. However, all this would not change the meaning of the discussion and the crux of the problem that here I want to deal with.
Starting from 1800 and then in an ever increasing way, the individual begins to sprout like a shoot and to demand recognition, recognition which at the beginning necessarily passes through his collective affiliation: that is, he needs to feel part of a group, of a broader community, and does not have the tools (social and cultural) to establish itself as a person, something which, although of greater consistency, remains possible only for politicians, intellectuals, professionals.
THE REALITY AND SURROUNDINGS
I think that to fully grasp the transformations of the last 150 years it is necessary to abandon the social dynamics which, however revolutionary, impose the principle of continuity; we need to go and see the decisive element which, while not denying the aspect of continuity, stands out for its evident and decisive break.
Where do we find this aspect?
We find it in the abandonment of a vision that had never been questioned, the objective character of reality. It is in the mid-1800s that this will happen in a non-episodic way but through a path that has been growing and strengthening.
Aristotle‘s physics framed reality in precise and above all delimited forms; the Latins used the term reality starting from the word res which simply means thing. The Summa of St. Thomas and the medieval Encyclopedia re-proposed the framework of Aristotle. For Descartes it was the res extensa and for Galileo nature was a book, with a beginning and an end, with characters that we know and that we must use (Mathematics), the same was for Kant and for all eighteenth-century rationalism up to positivism and Marxism.
The existence of something that was above or beyond reality did not question its objective character, on the contrary, it justified it precisely by being its antithesis: the Unmoved Mover, the Christian God, the Noumenon, the Absolute Spirit, History.
The interest in metaphysics (run out of by Nietzsche and Heidegger) is made possible precisely by the recognition of the existence of an objective and recognizable physical reality, regardless of whether it could relate to some disciplines, individual, nature, society, culture.
It was Baudelaire who perhaps naively declared that objective reality does not exist, it was modern art that proceeded in that groove, but it was science that completed the work, first with Poincaré’s doubts, then with Quantum Physics and finally with the acknowledgment demonstrated that the EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) hypothesis of the existence of hidden variables is not valid. The fact that a literary and artistic urgency has ended up influencing the scientific community shows the decisive nature of the phenomenon: it involved the customs and claims of every member of society, above all in relation to the transformations that have seen the birth of the individual-mass.
Since the theme of these reflections of mine concerns aesthetics, this is where I have to return, but the path will not be the simplest. It should be remembered that aesthetics deals with the evaluation of beauty above all in the artistic field, but that, with the birth and affirmation of a mass society, the evaluation in terms of beauty extends to the entire field of society: so we go in the direction of the maximum possible subjectivism which leads to agreeing or not with one of the many canons that have emerged in the meantime, sometimes disregarding those canons.
To say that the whole field of society is now involved means that judgments deemed pertinent are being made for clothes, for cars, for shoes, for food, for movies, for faces and bodies, for their parts, even for football goals, for sprints of cyclists, for house or garden plants, for furnishings, for smiles, for sexual encounters and so on.
Art is pulverized and it is no coincidence that for more than 50 years the flow of great artists (commonly judged as such), which has always characterized, in positive or negative judgement, the artistic production, has been interrupted. Today critics continue to express their judgment trying to explain and enhance their canon, but the judgment remains provisional and weak, completely dominated by the voice of that mass-individual who has become the protagonist and who has imposed, now with no possibility of return , a much broader terrain than the classic one of the “major and minor arts”.
Beauty. Today it is common language to express oneself in this way: Nice fuck, Nice lesson, Nice dinner, Nice big hunk, Nice steak, Nice presentation (of a book, a film…), Nice exam, Nice goal, Nice movie, Nice broadcast, Nice example etc. These are expressions that mean something other than aesthetic judgement, so they introduce analogies that would need other terms that include, but not necessarily, pleasure and are interconnected with the goodness of other tastes or of a moral type. The fact that I consider important is: previously the canon (classical, Renaissance, romantic or other) provided global reference points from which the elements were drawn to judge positively or negatively a painting, a sonata, a poem, a novel, etc. The canon would hardly have allowed us to judge “fuckings, steaks, goals” and all those microelements that today instead be part today’s of subjective judgment.
This fact is neither strange nor scandalous, because it fully responds to the urgency of the individual who today manifests the need for recognition and who occupies the stage of life at 360°.
It’s not even worth making fun of the expressive and conceptual poverty expressed by that urgency, because the high level continues with its reflections and theories, while the low level expels a rehash of those theories: those theories, however interesting and profound, are unable to cover the whole panorama of today’s life, as it happened in the past, when the great artist, scientist, philosopher, musician were opposed to “rednecks”, “rude people”, “illiterates”, “proletarians”, “underclasses” who repeated the lesson of the newspaper or the People’s House.
Let’s go back for a moment. Before Baudelaire, art was mimetic, of representation, it represented reality, not in the photographic sense but in the proper sense that was guaranteed to the artistic phenomenon. Reality could be faithfully presented, slightly distorted, idealized, but it remained the point of reference from which to start. The author chose which piece of reality to represent and then decided how to proceed: that piece, its articulation and its development, represented the content, while the way in which he developed all of this was part of the form. The what and the how. You could represent the same things but differently or use a similar shape to represent different things.
However, the form was not a simple suit with which to dress the body, it was something much more elaborate and had to do with the style and character of the author. Many aspects are included in the form that it makes no sense to summarize here, but it may be useful to provide some references. The point of view can be important, the preference between adjectives and nouns, the use of similes and metaphors, the choice of cultured or popular words, very rough and concrete terms or more abstract words; over the centuries an enormous amount of so-called rhetorical figures has been formed who help the reader to decipher the text, textbooks have been written and writing courses taken, even if this aspect is very recent. In any case, the form was separated from the content, so much so that even today at school we teach how to make a summary of a narrative text and change a poem into prose and there are many indications for the form.
The fact remains that the two aspects have continued to be separate. And this separation has gone progressively from top to bottom and, like all things that descend, has lost much of its initial weight and size, as well as meaning; and in this sense, down below, we limited ourselves to embodying only marginal aspects or rather to transforming something complex into simple. Despite the weight that form has always had (and I think I have highlighted it), it is for this reason, for example, that the value attributed to the form has been degrading, so much so that words like “formal” and “formalism” are become almost derogatory. Not only that, but above all with the advent of industrial society the interest in form is often seen as a noble heritage, some manifestation of affectation, while the weight of reality becomes increasingly heavy. The experience of socialist realism, Russian and Chinese but not only, has shown how what matters is the what and not the how.
Let’s think of how the “Baroque” was demonized for centuries, because it was interested only in formal aspects, first and foremost the metaphor, which could arouse “astonishment” in the reader.
Let’s think of all the discourse that still remains linear made on “Parnassianism”, attentive to every word because the certificate of beauty depended on the sculpture of the word, so much so that we speak of Baudelaire as a Parnassian.
We think, in this wake, of the aestheticism of the late nineteenth century reduced to pure contemplation for which even the poet G. Pascoli feels compelled to place out of poetry “an artist who nielloes and chisels the gold that others give him” (i.e. D’Annunzio) and the great Montale himself declares to distance himself from the laureate poets who “move only among the plants with seldom used names“.
Even the poets and writers, who do not limit themselves to a true, concrete, photographic representation, passing through the territories of fantasy and imagination do nothing but widen the territory that has always been called reality, certainly not questioning its objective characteristics .
Think of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso which is very rich in imaginative and fantastic elements and which, despite this, is considered a great representation of the human being, so much so that it is difficult for many students to understand this connection.
What does it mean that reality ceases to be objective?
First of all, it presents openings or even ceases to have borders, and for this reason the coordinates that allowed me to recognize defined characteristics, positions and movements in the territory are no longer the main tool for relating to the territory.
Moreover, the observer, that is, the Me, cannot place himself outside to reconstruct the map because the territory no longer belongs to a Euclidean geometry and therefore if the observer pretended to photograph the territory he would get lost. This means that the observer (poet, artist, scientist, simple person) is inside a territory, which he must learn to recognize in a new way and with new tools: therefore he cannot define either the position of things or their movement since it no longer has precise reference points and that it is the territory itself that moves (evident echoes of quantum physics, in particular of Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty principle”).
The observer is therefore personally involved in the observation and this is possible only by recognizing him as space and time: from here emerges his responsibility as a determining factor. Responsibility in giving names to things (Pascoli’s echo), in establishing relationships between the elements with which it comes into contact, responsibility for knowing one is on slippery ground, responsibility that, if the territory moves, it too moves and the absence of borders does not it belongs only to the territory but also to him.
Let’s go back to aesthetics. Standards of beauty and judgments on the beauty of art.
It seems quite clear to me that the possibility of identifying canons, i.e. elements of value, whatever they were, was possible in a context in which it was possible to map the territory (any territory) and being (not movement) was the significant datum. The content was given by the geometry that we found in the territory, while the shape highlighted its colours, movements, sounds, etc. One did not exist without the other, and vice versa, but in this relationship it was the form that dominated the aesthetic sphere: a pear may be tastier than an apple, but its beauty concerns the how, not the what. If the standard favours the colour it is probable that the apple wins, if instead we rely on the shape we can have two standards, the classic one will give primacy to the apple while the baroque one to the pear.
So to speak.
Today we have discovered that that context was not illusory, but an approximation that allowed us to work, operate, think with the simple tools we had.
Today we are witnessing a growing fall of all the corollaries that characterized our approach to reality: mountains are not pyramids and beauty questions itself. If I cannot de-fine things in the territory, the distinction between form and content also collapses; thus the need to reason, evaluate, judge, think, express oneself in terms of aesthetics is eliminated. And so the “I like” that we continue and will continue to say needs a redefinition, even though we know that it can’t be a matter of a moment to give up the pleasure of saying “I like“.
Here too we are in the magma of complexity.
If the end of the objective character of reality entails the end of the separation between form and content, the need for an aesthetic reflection ceases.
What to do?
The death of God and the collapse of values, that is, of everything that presents itself and claims a universal character, is there for all to see. Poetry and art have always been considered as something of an accessory for which it is hard to take them seriously, which in the etymological sense really means severe-grave-weighty. But the “gravitas and severitas” of philosophy and science cannot be questioned, but it is precisely here that the claim to give life to rules is disappearing, as well as the claim to create universal laws i.e. values that form (and not simply guide) our path.
In the scientific field we realize more and more that determinism is no longer practicable and that therefore the universe of research must open up to the dimension of possibility and no longer to that of certainty (See Prigogyne, Neurosciences etc.).
In the philosophical field the discourse appears more nuanced because we are in the centre of reflection and criticism and therefore the debate between opposing theories appears as a natural element and not a crisis. Yet even on a philosophical level there have been major and significant changes that suggest that we are not faced with the classic and usual debate.
Meanwhile, for more than a century, Anglo-Saxon philosophy, so-called analytic, has abandoned any type of metaphysical research, marrying science as regards the development of knowledge.
Continental philosophy finds it difficult to continue the effort of the classics to create an all-encompassing system capable of explaining reality and sees a stagnation in what has been the soul of philosophy for centuries, metaphysics to be precise. We owe Heidegger the last great attempt to proceed with the construction of some system of thought that could place and explain every aspect of reality in such a way that particular and general were able to recognize and link each other.
In “Being and Time” he tried to unravel the tangle, but demonstrated the impossibility of ex-plaining the whole formed by the contingent and the absolute. After Heidegger there have been important but sectorial and specific contributions where there have been contaminations with other disciplines which in the meantime were establishing themselves, such as psychoanalysis and sociology for example. Nonetheless, there were important reflections that have gradually widened as society has become increasingly complex and so new paths have been travelled that have privileged the critique of society and its institutions and lately the ethical component.
Of all the great systems, the one that seems indestructible is Marxism, which is also constantly being revised and adapted to the changes in progress. In general, however, the search for an overall system in the traditional way has not produced results with which to deal: so even in the philosophical field we are witnessing that fragmentation of interests which is common to all other disciplines, especially the arts.
In the absence of a new system of values, aesthetics also shatters and loses the possibility of recognition and identification. It has always been said that “What is beautiful is not beautiful, but what is liked is beautiful“, but this was a refrain that has always crossed the centuries and which left intellectuals indifferent, whose reflection and whose elaborations proceeded following the stream of thought and producing results that would later take the form of a popular slogan or proverb.
Faced with mass culture, mass-man and the crisis of values, the first and immediate response was the total fragmentation of judgment, whereby each individual is able to express a judgment on anything; not only he is able but he must do it if he doesn’t want to be nullified: today he can do it thanks to the new forms of mass communication, the so-called social networks. This answer is claimed as an affirmation of freedom, but it lacks a cultural background, as if the individual were at all times an autonomous producer of ideas, a God who creates things and gives them a name. In reality there is always a cultural background, that is a general thought, which justifies certain affirmations and certain judgements. In the case in question we are dealing with what we call “cultural relativism” which naturally spread at an academic level when it was realized that the end of values, the death of God, was not a nice phrase, but a very concrete reality. It is the adventure of post-modern thought in its various articulations (from deconstructionism to Foucault to “weak thinking”): from the reality of the whole to the reality of the particulars for which diversity becomes a recurring concept.
However, cultural relativism is not the necessary response, even if it is the easiest and most widespread because it is perceived at a popular level as a liberation of one’s subjectivity, a critique of power (always other than itself), a critique of society (always the result of strong powers and conspiracies from high, with the exclusion of one’s own person): in short, cultural relativism justifies the thought and actions of individuals by imagining them as revolutionary subjects who, by doing good for themselves, do good for humanity.
The discourse would take us far, towards that historical relativism that is very fashionable today, but which is on the sidelines of the discourse on aesthetics.
Let’s come instead to the possibility I’m talking about. It presupposes a cultural background which, in the face of impossibility of universal laws, does not oppose Chance, but speaks of horizons. How does science (Prigogine talks about “the arrow of time” and the fact that “Nature creates”), how does hermeneutic philosophy (from Gadamer) or complexity (from Morin to Ceruti) and how it anticipated literature.
We must therefore return to Baudelaire who, in addition to having spoken of a reality that cannot be classified in objective terms, wrote a poem that speaks of beauty (Hymn to Beauty). It may be that in him it was pure aestheticism, but the last lines of the poem speak of something else:
Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe,
O Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu!
Si ton oeil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte
D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu?
De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirene,
Qu’importe, si tu rends, — fée aux yeux de velours,
Rhythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! —
L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?
Beauty (so called) opens the doors of infinity and makes moments less horrendous and heavy. Hard to believe that the reference is purely aesthetic and, even if it were originally, it actually goes far beyond and goes far beyond even with the reference to God and Satan, to Heaven and Hell that take us beyond the moral dimension, connecting with what will soon be expressed by one of the fundamental concepts of Nietzsche’s thought, Beyond good and evil.
Aesthetic reflection, understood as canons of judgment on beauty, vanishes when there is no cultural system that supports its action; it remains as individual talk useful for a positioning that establishes connections and forms line-ups. Nothing more.
The expression “I like”, having come out of the playing field of aesthetics, opens up to very different and interesting horizons. Behind that sentence there is the static nature of the traditional aesthetic vision or the cognitive effort to try to understand how the object qualified with pleasure or dis-pleasure speaks to us about us: this effort applies to our existence and is not necessarily exhaustive and it may be that it also appear as a wall or closed door. It is not the result that is important, but the method and the understanding of its necessity. On the other hand, that phrase, which comes from the universe of aesthetics, can be transformed into something new and introduce the concept of creation.
Within the new idea of creating art, we try to unite Baudelaire with a modern poet like Octavio Paz, for whom “the text demands the death of the poet who writes and the birth of the poet who reads“. Already in Hymn to Beauty this word came out of the value that is normally attributed to it and for years I translated it with “happiness“, a word that shifts the meaning from a static dimension to something dynamic.
…your eye, your smile, your foot open the door to an Infinite that I love and have never known.
…. Do you make the universe less horrible and moments less heavy.
Baudelaire can certainly think that the observation of a painting, the reading of verses judged valuable can open the doors of infinity and make life less sad, but it makes no sense to limit yourself to this after having said that:
“Nature is a temple in which living pillars
Sometimes they let out confusing words;
Man passes through forests of symbols there
Who observe him with familiar eyes.
Like long echoes that merge from afar
In a dark and deep unity,
Vast as night and as light,
The scents, colors and sounds respond to each other.”
It is not a simple literary commitment, but something that flows with living realities that involve man’s senses, those senses that allow us to taste perfumes, see colours, hear sounds and produce all these in a reciprocal relationship, in a con-respondence that is life itself and not so much a part of it, literary or artistic one.
All of Baudelaire’s poetry goes in this direction, historical and not ideological; historical in the sense that when he talks about Spleen he does not want to make a generic discourse on anguish, but to express through the words of those verses the transformation of his own person (concrete and real) achieved through the effort to produce those words. In this sense, he is a super-man in the Nietzschean sense of beyond (super) Baudelaire, a different Baudelaire, new compared to the Baudelaire who had begun that poem. Merit of words.
And when he said that beauty is a “huge, frightening, naive monster” he didn’t limit himself to an identikit but invited the reader to confront these expressions: huge isn’t just big; scary creates fear but fear has infinite shapes and shades; naive is not just ingenuous.
It is here that the reader is called to make his contribution starting from the person that he is, or better that he has formed and con-formed.
Thus Octavio Paz’s words allow us to give the sense of this process and bring to light, dis-close, dis-(en)velop, ex-plicitate what was implied in Baudelaire, but which Rimbaud had fully grasped:
“So the poet is quite a thief of fire. He is responsible for humanity, even for animals; he will have to hear and make people hear, listen to his inventions; if what he brings back from there has shape, he gives shape; if it is formless, he gives formlessness. Finding a language… this language will be of the soul for the soul,… thought that hooks the thought that pulls. The poet would define the quantity of the unknown that awakens in his time in the universal soul: he would give more – than the formula of his thought and the acknowledgment of his progress towards Progress! The e-normity that becomes the norm absorbed by everyone: it would really be a multiplier of progress.”
It is therefore not a competition or a debate between artists. It is a path that gives meaning to the poet’s research, but which involves every man. The transformations of which I have spoken at length ensure that the involvement, which in the second half of the 1800s concerned only the poet, today brings everyone’s life into play.
The judgment that was aesthetic now takes on completely different values: it develops knowledge and above all the creation of one’s own person. And this no longer concerns only the professional intellectual, but each of us, because today each of us is a producer of “artistic” phenomena; it is no coincidence that Paz spoke of a “poet who reads” because the reader is the individual-mass no longer just the critic or any artist; and it is he who uses the word of others to dig inside himself, removing and putting, destroying and building, until this process has allowed him to change its person, to create a new con-formation, that is, a new individual (even a little or very little new). This is why Baudelaire spoke of opening the doors of the Infinite, because this destructive-constructive process has neither individual nor, as Rimbaud recalls in The Seer’s Letter, historical-social limits.
No longer aesthetics, but knowledge-creation-responsibility.
POST SCRIPTUM
To better understand how poetry (and art in general) can have a creative and non-aesthetic function, see:
1) POETRY BUILDS THE EGO
2) NON-DETERMINISTIC LITERATURE COURSE
To understand instead how the word can perform a creative function and not simply name things, see:
- WORDS AND COMPLEXITY
