The Phenomenological Loss of the Soul

Page II

So, it is little wonder that Munch may seem strange now. It has been a long time since art aspiring to insight and the conveying of wisdom was the norm, which is to say that it has been a long time since a Nietzschean tragic art has been the norm, or the expected ambition on the part of the serious artist

Yet, there is another aspect to the matter, for critical judgment must be applied to the very foundation of Munch's stated aesthetic ambition and to the supposition in all art that claims the emotional understanding on the part of the artist is applicable to anyone other than the artist, is an adequate guide to insights concerning life itself. For the aesthetic proposition has self—evident difficulties. Specifically, it is Munch's supposition, as conveyed in his work, that the emotional tonality is outside the observer, is in the scenario or situation itself, that must be examined. In Munch's case, there are material reasons to doubt the proposal. Look carefully at Munch's renderings of women—they are all clearly accretions of the male gaze. The women in Madonna, 1894-95, and Mermaid, 1896, are sirens—objects of male desire. Even to this male writer, it is self-evident that no woman could see herself in this manner. The woman of Vampire, 1893, who bites the neck of the man she embraces, is almost comically the object of a masculine fear, and here the initial emotion may well be on its way to moribund, or so we may hope. The young woman in Summer Night's Dream (The Voice) is little better, upon examination. She leans forward with yearning, and, once one considers it, obviously toward the object of her gaze, her yearning for him. This is not an image of blossoming desire so much as it is an image of feminine response to desire, and the evening darkness is in the eye of the man to whom she responds. And, the woman in the lithograph On the Waves of Love, 1896, is shown surrounded by and lying among undulating lines of pleasure that seem to fuse with her hair. This would be one of Munch's few images of hope were it not for the undeniable bias that it punctuates. The men in his paintings brood and think on the general plight; the women luxuriate and yearn and threaten.

There is obviously nothing universal in this. What matters most in these observations is the indication of the perils in the reliance on personal emotional reaction to establish the foundation of insight into the implications of life and its episodes. Clearly, Munch is painting in many cases his own projections onto circumstances that, apart from his projections, are repeated in every life: the beginnings and the failures of love, the loss of loved ones, the approach of death. It can be objected that art has always relied on emotional response, that incorporation of the emotional response is precisely what distinguishes art from other forms of knowledge. But the uncritical trust in one's personal viewpoint and one's personal reactions to outside stimuli, to such a degree that the reactions are taken to be part of the outside stimuli themselves, is not a portion of art's perennial trust. Such a naïve acceptance of individual impulses as universal components of reality may be specific to Expressionism, with something else occurring in art generally and largely before the Modern era, a judgment more tempered and experienced. (Certainly, the justification for trust in personal emotional response has been struggled with and argued by many Modern artists in their writings, from Kandinsky to the Abstract-Expressionist Robert Motherwell.)

In his uncritical reliance on personal viewpoint, Munch may be engaging in something that is more contemporary than is his refusal to forsake emotion entirely—something that may be called the Phenomenological error. As will be evident to anyone reading this essay, the attempt to deal with Phenomenology per se is rife with difficulties: the field of endeavor is far from having become an organized movement and scholarly work has yet to specify reliably any general attributes that hold for all major exponents. There is something perilous even in raising the term, and the matter can be dealt with here only in the most cursory way. But, there is a reason to approach the subject because it appears after some reflection to sit at the heart of an increasingly dubious and increasingly practiced philosophical approach.

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To begin, the distinction ought to be made between Phenomenology as a method and Phenomenology as an accumulating series of propositions, if not quite a philosophical movement, even if only de facto. The Phenomenological method is not what is being observed here, although it ought to be noted that the method in its general Husserlian sense has certain doubtful aspects. There are no clear logical errors in the method driven by the instruction "Zu den Sachen!", in the bracketing of existence and, through the epoché, the systematic attempt to determine the necessary conditions for the possibility of the experience of the phenomenon by the examining of experience to determine its requisite conditions. It is, as it were, an attempt to determine the specifications of the Kantian transcendental ideals without the reliance on assertion—to feel one's way towards those specifications, so to speak, from within. Even so, judgments must be made and judgments can only be made on the basis of axiomatic assertions, which are not given if one is to accept the necessary conditions of experience as possessing the status of, say, mathematics. Even though everything asserted by the Phenomenological method can be demonstrated to be logically coherent, there is something that is not being said. But this matter is better approached by examining briefly Phenomenology as a philosophical position.

Even here, distinctions must be made at the start, distinctions between those species of Phenomenology that, despite the purposively non-empirical orientation of the enterprise, acknowledge the position of Phenomenological events (put simply, experience, or perception) within the larger realm that incorporates the empirical, and more significant still, the ontological (going by such titles as "Naturalistic Phenomenology," "Generative Historicist Phenomenology," "Hermeneutical Phenomenology," and "Realistic Phenomenology"), and, on the other hand, those Phenomenological projects that do not so acknowledge the position of the empirical, or the position of the Phenomenological event within the empirical, and ultimately the ontological, realms. There seems little difficulty with projects of the first sort, and little power to them, for such inquiries are clearly by and large matters for scientific investigation, the vicious circle of self-justifying initial assumptions aside, and with them aside, evidently we should go to the lab if we wish to perceive how it is we perceive.

However, projects of the other sort, those that do not acknowledge the position of the empirical, the position of the larger world in relation to the perception of the phenomenon, run the risk of dispensing with such a world entirely. The epoché is a risky affair, so used, for it is significant to doubt existence only if the gesture is strategic, only if the gesture is at some point revoked and existence and the world are re-asserted. It is much like the employment of irrational numbers in algorithms, such as the use of the square root of negative one—much can be accomplished but, if the irrational component is not removed somewhere along the way, the solution to the algorithm, as measured by practical value, is nonsense. So, too, with the epoché—if we finish our negotiations with the mysteries of existence by continuing to doubt existence, we risk ending up in an absurdity, for we risk ending up in solipsism. This is as much as to say that the epistemological circle in Phenomenology is a significant problem—the difficulty involved in having Phenomenological stipulations determined in reference to appropriately selected examples of hypothetical experience and the determination of the accuracy of the hypothetical examples (the accuracy of the hypothesis) through reference to the Phenomenological assertions. In short, there is no outside standard of judgment with the unrevoked employment of the epoché, which is functionally comparable to the assertion of no outside world, no world outside direct experience.

In short, it is all a matter of whether one, in the end, chooses to bracket the Phenomenological realm within the ontological realm, or the other way round—whether ontological assertions are taken to be mere constructions of our thoughts with no further potential significance or possibly true claims regarding the nature of a world beyond the range of our senses. More briefly still—it is all a question of what one takes to be truth, for that will be the outside standard, outside all other matters of consideration, which are then bracketed within it. If perception is the only issue of truth, then there is no world; there are only our thoughts about the "world." And, if the world is the truth, then we are perilously close to attempting science when we attempt Phenomenology, but at least we are not asserting ourselves to be the prisoners of our own minds, or, more properly, of someone's Mind.

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The bracketing of the world within the mind would seem at first to be a position that would arise only as a matter of inadvertency. However, consideration of the more recent strains of philosophy, particularly among those devoted to the most current species of Post-Structuralist thought, would suggest the possibility that, to some degree, the postulation of such a scenario is precisely the driving impulse. It is therefore worth a few moment's effort to consider the possibility that such an impulse is the real motive behind the growth of interest and effort in Phenomenology, at least in some quarters—to consider that there is a Phenomenological impulse that has been developing and that is seeking a philosophically justifiable position that would reject the increasingly sophisticated ontological description of the world—in short, the scientific picture of the universe, accepted as an unvarnished truth.

Working with this hypothesis, offered as only a hypothesis, it is possible to suggest that the Phenomenological impulse has roots earlier than might have been suspected, that it can be traced back, at least, to Goethe's dispute with Newtonian science. Goethe wished a new science, as he argued his case in his books on botany, morphology, and meteorology, as well as in his Theory of Colors, which was written to dispute Newton's Opticks. What Goethe found lacking in science was the "living quality" of the object of study. He saw science as too mechanistic, arid, and arithmetic a conception of the world, typified by Newton's theory of, specifically, light—an inherently unobservable, theoretical quantity—as opposed to color: what light is when perceived, when experienced in life. The principle of experience is definitive for Goethe in this—in The Theory of Colors, he asserts, "our senses themselves do the real experimenting with phenomena, testing them and proving their validity, in so far as phenomena are what they are only for the respective sense in question. Man himself is the greatest, most universal physical apparatus." It is phenomena specifically that Goethe wished to make the object of science—the world as it appears, not as it is presumed to be when we are not looking, as best we can make out what it must be.

What Goethe wanted to avoid was a world conceived without human sensibility anywhere to be found in it—a machine conception of purely cause-and-effect eventualities in which no place was available for mind as mind. And there is, of course, the inherent potential absurdity of the mind rendering a picture of the universe that contains no mind in it, leaving the human mind as looking at the universe from without, from somewhere other than within the world. However, what Goethe stipulated was at least as bad, and not very much different—a world that was entirely human centered, with everything of reality nothing other than what the human mind makes of it. He rendered, or wished to, a world in which we make all that is, in which everything is dependent upon our mental experience. For it seems evident that Goethe did not see the contradiction in his own statement—if "phenomena are what they are only for the respective sense in question," then when we experiment with phenomena, what is being investigated? What is extant and available to examine? Is this not merely a vision of the senses examining themselves? For there are nothing but phenomena, and phenomena exist only within our sensory experience. Attempting to remove us from the God—like position of standing outside the world and examining it as under a microscope, Goethe put us in the God-like position of creating all we survey.

It is a blunder of the first order, and uncharacteristic of the great thinker, unless it is not—unless it is just the kind of mistake a mind of that characteristic and caliber would commit. For here we see an early example of the Phenomenological impulse and its error—the error of placing our minds around the world, of bracketing the world within the realm of experience so as to infuse the events of the world with the quality of living experience, or, more, to retain that quality during scientific inquiry—and we come upon them emerging from the mind of a great artist. The Phenomenological error may well be a function of the artistic impulse, or the impulse toward an artistic approach to the world on the part of philosophers, perhaps in response to the very thing to which Goethe was reacting: the encroachment of the scientific explanation. Such a speculation suggests that Phenomenology, if so conceived and with certain portions of its enterprise removed from this consideration, may well be an attempt on the part of philosophy to adopt the prerogatives of art, perhaps having lost the claims it once had to the prerogatives of the more recent field of science, natural philosophy having long ago taken on a new name and departed to another hallway of the university.

Which returns this speculation to Munch. His reliance on his personal emotional responses as a measure of the truth of existence is not a great deal different, categorically, from Goethe's insistence on incorporating the full complement of sensory stimuli into scientific inquiry—both involve employments of internal responses in the investigation and deciphering of the world at large and both are potentially engagements in the Phenomenological error of mistaking one's internal life for the whole of reality, of making oneself in some manner the measure of the truth of things. The same would hold for Expressionism in general—a practice of excessive reliance on the personal standing in for the objectively available and the failure to account for the very possibility of the ontological. There are gradations and inflections here, but the core misjudgment is essentially the same. However, in the case of Munch, the recognition of the structural pattern of the Phenomenological error—the inverse bracketing of the world within the realm of phenomena rather than the other way round—can lead us to a better "reading" of the artist's work, to a more profitable view of his accomplishment. Even if this puts us at odds with the artist's own view of his work, to rely on his stated purposes would involve us in the intentional fallacy, and worse, would involve us in cheating ourselves of our better chance. And it remains the case that Munch may well have done better than even he knew. It is our purpose to rely on our own eyes, and make the best of what we see.

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