The Phenomenological Loss of the Soul
Page III
The suggestion here is that we re-bracket Munch's visions within the realm of the objectively real, that we return what he experienced and rendered to the world and observe his images as the products of a mind living in a factual scenario. The women in his paintings are shown to us as only a perceiving mind experiences them. The people walking down Karl Johan Street are not in shock but reflect the shock felt by a mind that perceives them as they approach him. And in The Scream, 1895 (a lithograph version was displayed in the exhibition), the world does not in fact ripple with the vibrations of horror, and the portrayed figure does not hear the world screaming and does not scream to the world—the observer sees the portrayed figure surrounded and engulfed by a shriek that seems to distort the entirety of reality. In short, there is always a perceiving mind, which is the only true subject of the works, and each image shows us what that mind believes it sees. That mind is the subject of Munch's art.
Viewed in this way, the subject of Munch's work is the isolated mind—the mind lost within itself, captured by its own emotions, sleeved by its own reactions to the disappointments and failures of existence and tormented by its own feelings in reaction. It drowns in its own ocean, and in this, Munch's art can be seen truly as universal, for this is our lot. For each of us, it is impossible to remove our face from the mirror and see the world as it is, coolly and bereft of our own pretensions. We are tormented, and we are tormented by ourselves. Seen thus, the truest painting Munch produced is Self-Portrait in Hell, 1903, in which he painted himself—just one more subject, in the end—alone in a personal purgatory, standing naked among the flames of his unending torture. There is a hell on earth, and it is the mind.
Edvard Munch, Self-Portrait in
Hell, 1903
Oil on canvas, 32 5/16 x 26" (82 x 66 cm)
Munch Museum, Oslo (c) 2006 The Munch Museum/The Munch-Ellingsen
Group/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York,
Edvard Munch
This is the imagination of disaster that Munch delivers to us—the ultimate alertness to the growing dusk of our positions, the living sense of how lifeless our lives ultimately are, and ultimately will become. It is a mature art, an art of the most thorough maturity, for it envisions and evokes for us a mature conception—a fully felt understanding of itself and its position coupled with a knowledge of the world in which it lives. This is the mark of the adult mind: it rejects all delusion and all folly; it faces the darkest of facts, precisely as Nietzsche demanded we do. And seen in this way, Munch produces an art that fulfills the final responsibility of art: to mature the members of the society in which it occurs.
And seen in this way, the art of Edvard Munch is the tonic appropriate to our time, for we live in the depths of the deadness of the soul, in a time in which it makes perfect sense that we would be pulled by an impulse to imagine the entire world as a function of our own imagining, as a thing we make and, thus it is implied, we might learn to make as we wish. For we live now in the Culture of Oblivion. People have become, largely, oblivious—nothing gets through to them, no danger disturbs their thoughtless routines, and no responsibility will be tolerated if it disrupts the general impulse to leisure and vapid self-amusement. We have been entertained into a dullness of feeling and wit, into a deadness of the soul—experientially, Phenomenologically, we have lost our souls, for we no longer feel them, and so it follows that we would do the same to the entire world. For there is little difference in the end between the imagining that we imagine the world and the historically previous colonization of the globe—either way, it is we who dream that we take dominion over all creation. Only a culture in the depths of decadence could presume so much, and dream so poorly.
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We inhabit now a condition past all impact, all influence, all reaction. It is a state of being that swallows up all input. More than apathy, this condition is a bell jar that withdraws all incoming signals. We believe we live in an onslaught of information, but the truth is that nothing touches us, and the imagination of disaster has deserted us. We think we know better, but we avoid thought even as we think that we don't—and what we believe is that nothing terrible can happen to us. Even after 9/11, and the train bombings in Madrid, and the transit bombs in London, and the Iraq War, and the numerous other terrorist events, we are impervious to reality and take life as children do—as if nothing could touch us and all dangers were merely televised.
This is the stage after the Age of Anxiety—it is the age in which we no longer care enough to be anxious about meaning, in which we are content for everything to mean nothing. And so we live in a place defined by corporate culture, in which everyone is little more than the job that one has lucked into, in which the social environment of the white collar workplace is designed to be a surrogate family, the purpose of which is to instill a sense of devotion that results in the dedication of more hours and energy to one's work that one is being paid to give—it is a form of exploitation, and it is a lie. (I am probably one of the few publishing art critics who has held a job as a corporate executive, and I held it for years—I know whereof I speak.) And so we live in a place of political hypocrisy on all sides, of political bankruptcy in which the left is floated on a philosophy of mere worlds with no sense of the needs of capable action, with no memory of the requirements of political organizing, and the right is loud with calls for maintaining standards and proceeds to corrupt and destroy through mere incompetence everything it touches, destroying every standard it purports to esteem. And the entire political system is dedicated to answering the demands of the short attention span, which is not a function of cultural shifts or of the electronic information technologies but is a result of mere laziness and the political demand for convenience over principle, and it amounts to our insistence that we be governed by demagoguery and placated into a continuous stupor.
And the war continues, and it continues because no one cares, or not enough do. For the American Republican Party has set its own standard, as we have declared it is our business to do without quite realizing what we thus do to ourselves. It is by their own words that measure them now: Where is the outrage? And, where is the outrage now? It is nowhere to be found. And so, we are all guilty of murder, because we do nothing to stop this abomination, and we do nothing because we do not believe—not as a political body do we believe—that it is all really happening. This enterprise has been proved to be nothing other than the immature use of violence, the blind instinct to strike out after having been hurt, conducted on a global scale. And it was not done for the reasons given, and not for reasons behind the reasons given, for it was not done and is not being done by anyone—it is being done and has been done by us all. The individual actions committed by individuals are nothing but the machinery. This is our accomplishment, us as a body, and it is something more than Nietzsche's herd instinct that is at work here. It goes beyond that. This blind instinct to strike out was the function of what can be called the herd mind. Such a mind is most surely functionally there, which is not to say that it exists, that it is an objective fact, that it is extant, but that it is as good as extant. If it did, in fact, exist, nothing would be any different from the way it is now, nothing would have transpired any differently from the way it has—and that is Phenomenology.
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As I write this, the news tells us that the majority of Americans do not object to the NSA eavesdropping on their phone calls. This is the one point on which the Bush Administration continues to have majority support, and it is the one point among all those polled that directly and immediately affects everyone. There is no outrage and there is not likely to be, for the truth of the matter is no one cares. We live in an absurdity and we have grown small and childlike in it.
And so, assuming that art can make a difference, that art can make something happen, that art is in fact capable of maturing the members of the society in which it occurs, the art of Edvard Munch is distinctly appropriate to our time. For, seen properly, seen for the torment it portrays within a world recognizably our own, within a world that recognizably is the world, it is the vision of an adult mind, a mind that knows that life is a matter of life and death, a mind that knows terrible things do happen, and that we must deal with life on its own terms and not think we can make anything of it we wish, just by wishing, just by imagination. It is an art that shows there is dignity and nobility, not in suffering, but in the willingness and capability to face suffering, and that is something that we, and our time, sorely lack.
Mark Daniel Cohen
(Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2006. Copyright © 2006 Mark Daniel Cohen and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.)
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