[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

The Form of Feeling

Page III

The most advanced “thought” during the last hundred years or so can be seen to have sensed a crisis coming, to have intuited the approach of the breakdown of any possible belief that thought has insight, has implication, has content—a meaning. In the sciences, we have had to confront the growing eradication of established categories of conceivable being—we have encountered cosmological facts of incomprehensible power and scale, beautiful images of cosmic events that have been photographed with an arbitrarily selected, arbitrarily limited band of light waves and wear imposed colors for they have no colors in themselves, that have no human reference, subatomic particles that are precisely understood but inconceivable as material entities, electrons that “exist” without mass, that possess at any moment either position or velocity but not both, that are waves unless they appear as particles and are particles unless they appear as waves. We find our computations are fully capable of encapsulating “entities” that we cannot begin to present to ourselves through our mind’s eye.

And in the arts, Modernism complicated to the point of conundrum the relationship between content and form, or style, to such a degree that the idea of content, or a meaning, to a work of art began to become inconceivable.

To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.

—Jean-Luc Godard

What is “content”? Or, more precisely, what is left of the notion of content when we have transcended the antithesis of style (or form) and content? Part of the answer lies in the fact that for a work of art to have “content” is, in itself, a rather special stylistic convention. The great task which remains to critical theory is to examine in detail the formal function of subject-matter.

—Susan Sontag, “On Style”

Content raises now the question: what formal function does it serve, what does it do, what shape does it take, what action does it commit? The “thought” that a work of art “contains” a thought, conveys a message, carries an import, passes beyond the brinks of obscurity. This, as much as anything, is what Modernism reached towards—not an insight, but a relation of parts, a demonstration of interaction, of correspondence. This, as much as anything, was the lesson of abstraction.

And so meaning becomes an illusion of reflex action, an appearance of what thinking is when it triggers thinking, which is what it does—merely the forced appearance from the inside of the thing. It becomes mere effect, a mark made, an indentation caused by a collision of an intangible, mental gesture with itself, a bruise of “intellectual” clumsiness—an accident. In short, the mind becomes mindless.

And Borges was right. With the loss of consciousness as that which is authentically conscious—conscious “of” something—comes the loss of the center of consciousness. Without awareness, there is, in no “meaningful” sense, no mind, no self, no soul. No one is there. There is only the fleeting play of sensation, even when it is the apparent sensation of a “thought.”

And Nietzsche saw the matter, as well. Those who occupy a place in the Nietzsche industry tend to interpret him in the very sense that Sontag objected with regard to art—frequently they over-write what he said for the sake of what they think, of what they would have him say. Nietzsche’s demotions of thought are too often taken as qualifications of the standard understanding, rather than redefinitions of what we believe. And there is a great peril in that approach. Anyone of Nietzsche’s caliber—assuming for the moment that everything said so far is put by the boards and there can be someone of Nietzsche’s caliber: a thinker who really thinks—“means” what he says. And Nietzsche’s “meaning” could not be more plain. Thought is an accident of evolution, signifying nothing.

As he did when he wrote, “We need ‘unities’ in order to be able to reckon: that does not mean we must suppose that such unities exist. We have borrowed the concept of unity from our ‘ego’ concept—our oldest article of faith.” This is, as it is with Borges, simply the Hume hypothesis: going beyond Berkeley’s dismissal of existence as anything more than perception, his limitation of the existence of objects to that which is known, Hume relegated the mind of the perceiver to nothing more than “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” The “perpetual flux” should be familiar to anyone who has spent time poring over Nietzsche’s ontological theories—it should be familiar to anyone who has made his way through The Birth of Tragedy, wrestled with the Dionysian, and considered the implications of Nietzsche’s rejection of the principium individuationis—a position he never abandoned.

Which is to say that in his ontology, Nietzsche adopted the Idealist posture—on this matter, the matter of the status of the subject, to this extreme. It is a posture not a great deal different from that of Schopenhauer, although the further back to intellectual foundations one tracks, the more their, well, “thinking” diverges. Schopenhauer’s Will is greatly what Nietzsche thought it to be—too object-like, too stabilized, too capable of interactive causation, too able of initiating action. Nietzsche had a better feel for flux, for the lack of self-identity, for indefiniteness—he simply had a better conception of the inconceivable.

But both take a significant stand at this time, when seen from this time, for they achieved prescience for, they arrived early at, the foundering of the specifically human version of knowledge. The human reference in all our knowledge is fast becoming meaningless. We study light waves as the network that binds the universe and that travel through the vacuum of space, where there is nothing that can wave—but that is how we understand waving, out of our direct, human experience. We encounter particles (objects) that persist without possessing mass—but that is how we understand objects, out of our direct, human experience. And we discover, through scientific experiment, that we physically begin to commit our intentional actions microseconds before our brains register our decisions—but that is how we understand decisions, out of our direct, human experience. Our subjective lives are becoming immaterial to what we are coming to know.

And our knowledge increasingly has a mathematical precision, in algorithms that describe what we cannot conceive in any way more directly—but “more directly” means by the mind’s eye, which is how we believe we properly understand, out of our direct, human experience. (And one might well ask, who invented the mathematics? But perhaps it was not “invented” at all.) And what we learn, more and more, makes a mockery of our sense of sublimity, which is tied to the “monumentality” of mountains and oceans, measured against us, of our understanding of significance, which is tied to the effects of events on us, in our small corner of the universe, of our comprehension of survival, which evidently means nothing to us beyond our own survival, which ultimately makes all our judgments a matter of convenience to us.

Theirs is all the more significant, for we can be seen to be, philosophically, in a period of reaction, in a time struggling to hold the back the wave threatening to submerge the remaining vestiges of distinctively human thought. For what is Phenomenology but the last terrified shriek before the destruction of human consciousness—an attempt to insist on the pertinence of the human center to all things, of human experience positioned “as if the world pivoted around it,” of the concerns of living as if they were issues of existence in a universe that dwarfs us, of “facticity,” which, for all its inconceivability, ratifies and reinforces us as the matter of concern for existence itself, as if the existence that matters is our own.

We are coming to a time in which philosophy may not survive, may become consumed by science as the only knowledge worthy of the name, as the only knowledge that is not a surreptitious self-justification—not a fairy tale. Unless we learn the lesson from Nietzsche—that we must think of what is without concerning ourselves with ourselves, perhaps that we must learn authentically to think for the first time, if that even is an option and not merely another of our naiveties.

And art may not survive, for how much art has there been that is not a presentation, a recounting, of specifically human concerns, of the world as viewed by human beings, throwing up our naïve sense of what is important—of the human drama? And yet there has been much, for this too is the achievement of Modernism, of abstraction—an art project that has attempted to look beyond the human, to incorporate the larger world, to comprehend the “drama,” if that is what it can be called, of the world beyond ourselves. What is non-representational is specifically nonrepresentational of what we have known. What it may well represent we have not yet learned to say. Perhaps we are finding that we know better than we “know.”

That attempt has certainly been made, and it has certainly been tried in the sculpture of Raoul Hague, in which the disembodied gestures of mental life, the sweeping moves of fleeting impressions, the feeling forms of mere flux in place of endowed and self-aware selfhood, is embodied like a natural growth—as natural, as simply organic, as a tree.

His may be among the few bodies of work that, at this late date, survive—that, specifically, survive us.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008)

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