First of all, I think this is an excellent session theme and a much needed topic of investigation, one related to much of my work in the philosophy of art. Given a frequent approach that applies phenomenological aesthetics to specific artists and the arts in general, including photographic art, I feel that my proposed paper for the session can offer a meaningful contribution to this thematic territory.
As summarized in the session description, there are numerous approaches to the theme. I chose the “alternative vision” of Adi Da Samraj because although his work has been partially documented previously, it has not been extensively addressed in the context of the philosophy of art or via a philosophico-phenomenolgical approach to the philosophy of art. The art and art commentaries of Adi Da emphatically present an alternative vision in regards to subject, object, consciousness and reality.
I have followed his work for years. Adi Da worked with photographic imagery earlier in his life, but in 1998 he began a six-year intensive of photographic and videographic work, moving from black and white to highly saturated color, and featuring multiple exposures composed in-camera. His work of that period addresses the root issues of human existence. In 2006 the artist moved to digital technology, while still combining hand-drawn and painted forms as well as photographs within his compositions.
The session description stirred up my longtime interest in the subject-object dichotomy, ekphrastic writing, the spiritual impulse in modern art, and issues surrounding appearance and invisibility in the photographic medium. Thus my proposal submission.
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The (Art) Object Vanishes:
Epochē and the Performance-assisted Subjective Process
by
Bob Kalivac Carroll, PhD
Introduction
This paper, which will likely be expanded later into a book, generates a number of questions. Given its title, a necessarily fundamental and precursory question arises. How can any “object” vanish? Responding to that question ushers in additional questions. How, for example, can any philosophical orientation address and transcend the virtually universal presumption of a subject-object dichotomy? To address that question calls out a subsequent question—how is phenomenology related to esoteric or non-dualistic spirituality?
One way to explicate this theme is to utilize a philsophico-phenomenological approach that incorporates points from the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), Max Scheler (1974-1928), Edith Stein (1891-1942) and other modern phenomenologists. Husserl’s writings and lectures are preeminent here, so that Husserlian transcendental phenomenology and nonobjective abstract art together serve as thematic pivot. An invaluable tool is the Husserlian epochē, with its methodological ability to temporarily eliminate obstructive belief systems and other “natural attitude” presuppositions.Phenomenological elements related to the bracketing out action of epochē must necessarily be considered as well—Husserlian intuition, intentionality, givenness, image consciousness (Bildbewußtein, also translated as “depicting consciousness”), fantasy or imagination to yield a more logical and conceptual rendering of the ineffable nature of the proposed theme, and are all used here to explore some nonobjective modern art of a few artists.
A creative artistic dynamic can fuel an impulse to make visible through art the invisibility of what German theologian Rudolf Otto called “the numinous.” Art as well as aesthetic commentaries by Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), and Adi Da Samraj (1939-2008) are examined. Although each of these artists also made representational and expressionistic art, they are better-known as artists who created nonobjective abstract visual art—each distinctively and in some respects uniquely—as means of expressing a sensibility to the numinous or absolute reality itself. Specifically in this context, transcendental phenomenology offers the strongest possibility of articulating and explicating the complex aesthetic elements germane to the work of the abstract artists briefly presented in this paper. However, the primary purpose and theme of this paper is not an explication of abstract art per se, but how the Husserlian epochē and associated elements can methodologically serve an artistically detailed study of a complex compositional theme such as the present one. To assert that an object can “vanish” stirs up some obvious subtopics and additional questions, and to address this phenomenon via a Husserlian phenomenology rather than that of with some of Husserl’s students or individuals influenced by Husserl’s work—the most famous of these being Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roman Ingarden, and Jacques Derrida, among numerous others. Similarly a number of art scholars have unpacked phenomenology to apply to art and the creative process, but very few of those writers took Husserl seriously in this regard, which is understandable given Husserl’s limited (nonetheless existing)[i] encounters with art.
Husserlian Transcendental Phenomenology as Aesthetic
Nonetheless, understanding Husserl includes developing a sensibility to whatever attention he gave to art and aesthetics. Husserl is chosen because of his attention to details and a native ability to examine and evolve, and yet to be able to “begin again” (Husserl, as is well-known, subtitled most of his books “introductions” to phenomenology). There exists a deep integrity, along with an open-minded yet scientific attitude, and a sheer pertinacity in Husserl’s work. Husserl’s writings and lectures about phenomenology may be excessively detailed and dense, but they also excavate and examine the roots of phenomenology and offer very valuable phenomenological tools for those of us who would like to use a transcendental phenomenological methodology for investigating anything, including art and aesthetics, as well as esoteric spirituality.
Again, what is meant by “vanished”? Is the case of Rene Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe (as well Michel Foucault’s essay of homage to Magritte’s painting) relevant here? While Magritte’s pipe is a picture of an object rather than an object per se, does a given object (and by extension every object) even actually “exist”? When transcendental phenomenological elements are combined with what artist and writer Adi Da Samraj describes as the “performance-assisted subjective process” an enriched means to understanding abstract art and the subject-object dichotomy surfaces.
The Hofmannsthal Letter
Although Husserl never proposed a formal aesthetic theory or philosophy of art, he did on occasion address art and aesthetics in some of his lectures and writings, usually in a context of explicating a broader usage of phenomenological principles. This occurred, for example, in a 1907 letter to the highly regarded poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, also a distant cousin of his wife Malvine. At that time, Husserl had recently established some of his primary phenomenological principles, and there are a number of important issues disclosed in this letter. Husserl’s letter reveals some of his more general ideas and opinions about a philosophy of art.
In the letter, excerpted here in some length so as to give a sense of Husserl’s notion of the relationship between art and phenomenology, Husserl compares Hofmannsthal’s theory of aesthetic experience to the phenomenological method:
[The phenomenological method] demands an attitude towards all forms of objectivity that fundamentally departs from its “natural” counterpart, and which is closely related to the attitude and stance in which your art, as something purely aesthetic, places us with respect to the presented objects and the whole of the surrounding world. The intuition of a purely aesthetic work of art is enacted under a strict suspension of all existential attitudes of the intellect and of all attitudes relating to emotions and the will which presuppose such an existential attitude. Or more precisely: the work of art places us in (almost forces us into) a state of aesthetic intuition that excludes these attitudes…. For the phenomenological method too demands a strict suspension of all existential attitudes. Above all in the critique of knowledge.
As soon as the sphinx of knowledge has posed its question, as soon as we have looked into the abyssal depths of the possibility of a knowledge that would be enacted in subjective experiences and yet contain an in-itself existing objectivity, our attitude to all pre-given knowledge and all pre-given being—to all of science and all assumed reality—has become a radically different one. Everything questionable, everything incomprehensible, everything enigmatic! The enigma can only be solved if we place ourselves on its own ground and treat all knowledge as questionable, and accept no existence as pre-given. This means that all science and all reality (including the reality of one’s own I) have become mere “phenomena”….Phenomenological intuiting is thus closely related to the aesthetic intuiting in “pure” art; obviously it is not an intuiting that serves the purpose of aesthetic pleasure, but rather the purpose of continued investigations and cognition, and of constituting scientific insights in a new sphere (the philosophical sphere) (Husserl, “Letter to Hofmannsthal,” excerpts).[ii]
Epochē was obviously very much on Husserl’s mind in the Hofmannsthal letter, but that is not surprising given Husserl’s constant attention on and immersion in creating his transcendental phenomenology. The letter also signals some issues the letter mentions or indicates. The fact that Husserl talked about art and aesthetics in a nonscientific context is very useful here. In the Hofmannsthal letter, he affirms some affinities between a pure phenomenology and purity in art, and considers the role of intuition in both phenomenology and art, albeit in distinctive ways. For Husserl, a trope of purity exists in both phenomenology and art. Husserl explains how the “natural” attitude and all existential attitudes must be suspended both in phenomenological methodology and in viewing art:
One does wonder if Husserl thinks of this “bracketing” out of existential influences as Kantian “disinterestedness.” In an essay on the Hofmannsthal letter, Sven-Olov Wallenstein points out the trope of purity in both Husserl’s phenomenological and aesthetic considerations as well as the Kantian elements reflected or echoed in Husserl’s thoughts about art:
The task of the artist is threefold, Husserl concludes: he must be a genius (once more a Kantian echo: unlike science, art need not account for all of its steps and procedures, and it does not attempt to grasp the world in concepts); he follows his own demon; and he observes the world in a “purely aesthetic and phenomenological fashion.”Together, this demon and this capacity for observation, Husserl suggests, lead to an “intuiting-blind production” (schauend-blindem Wirken). The idea of a pure art and a pure phenomenology in this way remain closely tied together, and the first wave of abstraction that emerged at the same time Husserl wrote his letter was one way to articulate this connection. Others would follow, opposing themselves to a certain modernist “purity” by, often unwittingly, drawing on other aspects of the phenomenological heritage, most notably temporality and kinesthesia. The story of these highly complex exchanges remains to be written (Wallenstein 4).
In general, Wallenstein is supportive of the notion of a Husserlian aesthetic, to the extent that there is one. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and the related Hofmannsthal letter introduce a new, so to speak, entry into art and aesthetic scholarship. Husserl offers the most analytical and logical methodology available in the Continental tradition, which also points to why Husserlian approaches are increasingly utilized by various scientific and other fields, from mathematics to cognitive science to psychoanalysis.[iii] To address art via a Husserlian phenomenology rather than that of Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, or other scholar in the phenomenological field is unusual and thus far not extensively developed. Nonetheless, allowing a new approach to Husserl includes developing a sensibility to whatever attention he gave to art and aesthetics, and allowing a Husserlian phenomenological approach to surface and evolve. Husserl is chosen because of his attention to details and a native ability to examine and evolve, and yet to be able to “begin again” (Husserl, as is well-known, subtitled most of his books “introductions” to phenomenology). There is the deep integrity, open-minded yet scientific attitude, and sheer pertinacity about Husserl’s work. Husserl’s writings and lectures about phenomenology may be excessively detailed and dense, but they also excavate the roots of phenomenology and offer very valuable phenomenological tools for those of us who would like to use a transcendental phenomenological methodology for investigating anything, including art and aesthetics.
Specifically here, transcendental phenomenology offers the strongest possibility of articulating and explicating the complex aesthetic elements germane to the work of abstract artists briefly presented in this paper. However, the primary purpose and theme of this paper is not an explication of abstract art per se, but how the Husserlian epochē and associated elements can methodologically serve an artistically detailed study of a complex compositional theme such as the present one. The assertion that an object can vanish necessarily ushers in many questions about that theme. What is meant by “vanished”? Is this a case like Rene Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe (as well as the essay of homage to Magritte’s painting by Michel Foucault), which is to say, merely a picture of an object, albeit one that may convey more than a “picture” of a pipe? In nonobjective art, is the object literally gone and truly absent, or has it simply become invisible? Does a given object (and by extension every object) even actually “exist”? (By “given” is meant both the common “given,” as in designated or specified—signaling a specific example within a pluralistic possibility—or more extensively, given as in phenomenological “givenness.”) If an object exists is it existing as a physical thing or as an imagined appearance of a thing? Was it a mentally fantasized object as in fantasy and science fiction literature, or did the object become invisible in some arcane, alchemical, nonrational, or in a seemingly magical manner?
One might argue that abstract art is frequently changed from a representative object to a less recognizable appearance that is not representational or is only semi-representational. Or a work of art may not even appear to be directly related to representational compositions, regardless of how it changed. This change from representational to semi-representational, expressionistic, or cubist can be shown via the art itself, as can nonobjective abstraction.
While there are various methodologies that might serve such an argument, several approaches are combined here. First, the epochē or bracketing out of what Husserl calls the “natural attitude” is an essential methodology (Ideas 53-60). Employing the epochē allows any belief systems and other presuppositions—be they sociopolitical, religious, scientific, or other prejudices, conscious or unconscious—to be temporarily put aside or bracketed out.
When transcendental phenomenological elements are combined with what artist, writer, and spiritual teacher Adi Da Samraj describes as the “performance-assisted subjective process” (Transcendental Realism 94), what modernist abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) calls “inner necessity,”[iv] as well as the spiritualist mediumistic orientation of Swedish painter and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944),[v] a more enriched approach to understanding abstract art surfaces. This paper, which is intended as a in-progress version of an introduction to a subsequent book about this topic, is not intended to thoroughly unpack the aesthetics of these three artists. The focus herein is on some phenomenological issues that surface via using the so-called Husserlian reduction.
The Subject-Object Dichotomy
To propose that an abstract art object vanishes goes against a commonplace presumption (questioned only by some spiritual teachers and a few philosophers) that a subject-object dichotomy is valid. That presupposition in turn authenticates the validity of related issues, such as separative self-identification, the “other,” and a range of issues rooted in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. This is extremely challenging in that the subject-object dichotomy, separative self-identification, and “I think therefore I am,” all seem to be obviously true. Furthermore, if I view a painting by Chagall, for example, that circumstance seems to validate this dichotomy. Developing a cogito sensibility which seems to fit with the natural attitude phenomenon of a subject perceiving an object does emphatically declare the need for epochē. Were it so simple and unproblematic, there might be less of a need for philosophico-phenomenological[vi] investigation of that dichotomy. In short, and peaking existentially, there seems to be an obvious subject and an obvious object, key elements of life. Seems to be. Even though that dichotomy seems to be accepted by Husserl, a reciprocally active confluence and convergence of methodological elements does wear away the presuppositional notion that the subject-object dichotomy is a completely valid and seminal phenomenon. The proposal here is that this dichotomy is neither valid nor seminal in an absolute or definitive sense, setting up a nonlinear or seemingly illogical understanding that is actually quite common in Asian philosophy and Eastern thought in general.
Advaita Vedanta and Nondualism
Asian philosophy has reflects a different orientation to phenomenology in that a sensibility to nondualistic philosophy exists, especially in regards to esoteric spirituality like that of Advaita Vedanta. Some Asian scholars address themes in both Eurocentric and Asian contexts. J. N. Mohanty (born 1928), who notes that he began reading Husserl in 1949, offers various commentaries on Husserl and transcendental phenomenology. In speaking about his experience and difficulties with philosophy in general, he comments on what he feels is about the Husserlian path in comparison: “On the contrary, what is distinctive about the Husserlian path—this being: an openness to phenomena, to the given qua given, to the intended meanings precisely as they are intended—challenges you to face up to the task of understanding the other, the other culture, the other philosophical school, the other person” (Mohanty, “Phenomenology” 8).
However, comparing Husserlian phenomenology to other philosophies is not such an efficient way of thinking. As Mohanty points out: “What Husserlian mode of thinking provides us with is not an effective tool for doing what is called ‘comparative philosophy’, but rather for understanding the other’s point of view as a noematic structure and then to go behind it in order to lay bare the experiential phenomenon that is embodied in this structure. The same holds good of phenomenology itself” (ibid).
If one studies and takes into account Indian aesthetics, an expanded role for phenomenology becomes possible. [vii]
Max Scheler’s Phenomenology
Scheler brings a unique addition to the history of modern phenomenological scholarship, one that can serve this thematic territory, especially in regards to the spiritual impulse in art. Scheler’s work will be examined in more detail in subsequent drafts of this paper.
The Art and Aesthetics of Nonobjective Abstract Art in the Work of Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, and Adi Da Samraj
One point to keep in mind is that applying a Husserlian philosophy of art to the three artists named reveals how each artist has a distinct approach to the art object. Even so, in each case the object is a fundamental component, as it is in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. Kandinsky and the other artists are, to put it simply, working to move beyond the art object. How is this distinction reconciled in a Husserlian aesthetic that addresses the creative process? Kandinsky is actually motivated to move beyond the recognizable object, which is not at odds with the Husserlian epochē. Also, Kandinsky and the other artists quests to transcend the object in art necessarily accentuates the object in art in the sense that the recognizable object’s absence remains present in a nonobjective work. But this is more relevant to art that is moving from fully representational to less representational—Expressionism, Impressionism, Cubism, to use some salient examples.
Among the influences and experiences fueling Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s artistic journey to non-objective abstract painting is a 1908 anecdote told by the artist:
Much later, after my arrival in Munich, I was enchanted on one occasion by an unexpected spectacle that confronted me in my studio. It was the hour when dusk draws in. I returned home with my painting box having finished a study, still dreamy and absorbed in the work I had completed, and suddenly saw an indescribably beautiful picture, pervaded by an inner glow. At first, I stopped short and then quickly approached this mysterious picture, on which I could discern only forms and colors and whose content was incomprehensible. At once, I discovered the key to the puzzle: it was a picture I had painted, standing on its side against the wall. The next day, I tried to recreate my impression of the picture from the previous evening by daylight. I only half succeeded, however; even on its side, I constantly recognized objects, and the fine bloom of dusk was missing. Now I could see clearly that objects harmed my pictures (Kandinsky, “Reminiscences” 369-370).[viii]
Kandinsky’s intense interest in the spiritual in art, when combined with this moment of perceptual “not-knowing” or mystery in consciousness, illustrates a thematic aspect of this paper. When Edmund Husserl wrote in lecture notes that “aesthetic consciousness [is] essentially connected with the distinction between the consciousness of an object as such and the object’s manner of appearing,” Husserl could just as well have been addressing Kandinsky’s encounter with his own unrecognized painting.
Nor is Kandinsky’s story unique to him or to art. The moment of unfamiliarity, of mystery or not-knowing occurs—as a contemporary phenomenological scholar argues—against the background of daily life experience:
The “quotidian” is the sense of life built up in daily experience by everyday habits, by the sedimentation of ordinary expectation of the world, but also by the tensions between the regularity of the familiar and necessary innovation. The quotidian is that background in contrast to which new discoveries emerge and we are surprised; and more pointedly, it is a necessary condition for surprise, the regularity in contrast to which something new and unexpected occurs.
Unfamiliarity, wonder, and mysteriousness are both embedded in and turnings-away from familiarity and predictability. These turnings away, our stepping outside of the ordinary, do not leave it behind, but draw energy and vivacity from this deviation (Gosetti-Ferencei 1).
The argument here is that excavating some of the artistic orientations to abstract art can serve as means to demonstrate how an (art) object can in fact vanish. The truth of the matter is that art in general provides a means to understand how an object is in a constant state of change, even after it is “completed” or made. Nonetheless, it is abstract art that reflects the transition from change to disappearance, and in fact this may be why various scholars and artists have asserted that all art is abstraction, or even, as with Adi Da Samraj, that all perception is abstraction (TranscendentalRealism 109).
Adi Da placed much attention on the art viewer, and thus developed what he described as a performance-assisted subjective process, although he did not intend the process to be “subjective” in the usual sense of that word. A performance-assisted subjective process is “a phrase Adi Da uses for the process of participation in his art and his theatrical works, which indicates that each individual goes through his or own inward (or subjective) course of response to the performance or artwork presented. The performance or artwork is not intended to be an objectified thing, but rather an assistance to a transformation of consciousness for the participant” (Transcendental Realism, glossary, 240). Adi Da made art throughout his life. Although he worked with abstraction most of that time, he only began to make non-objective art in his final period. He did not think of his art as religious, but very much about consciousness and reality itself.
Hilma af Klint’s work, on the other hand, is deeply imbedded in spiritualism and mediumistic communications. There is no denying her work’s connections to mysticism and spiritism. This paper is not the proper publishing venue for explicating and elucidating her complex and unconventional creative process, but here again is an example, like Kandinsky, of moving from semi-representational or expressionistic painting to nonobjective abstraction. In one study of af Klint, a writer used Mondrian’s aesthetic to bring in Husserlian possibilities:
Regardless of his disdain for and his disappointment in his fellow esotericists, on the theoretical level Mondrian addressed perception in general, as a phenomenon of the workings of both body and spirit. His vision of “objective investigation” and the simplification of the image, as set for in his statements on the “reductive annihilation” of visual appearances, is very close to the theory of “eidetic reduction” proposed by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). According to Husserl, one should not focus on the investigation of a concrete object but rather on the structure of one’s own thought and that of the object (Bax, 129-139).
Husserlian Elements:
Epochē
Various principles in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological investigations of appearance become accentuated as a Husserlian aesthetic when applied to visual art. Some scholars have noted the ocularcentric premises in Husserl’s phenomenology,[1] and that preference for immediate vision is an aspect of Husserl’s methodology that lends itself to a phenomenological explication of visual art (Jay 265-268, and Lyotard 40). Husserl’s use of epochē, in which phenomena are given in appearance prior to the assigning recognizable attributions or characteristics, acts as a clearing mechanism in order to proceed without becoming entangled with preconceptual issues that are, thematically speaking, of peripheral significance. This also points to a phrase Husserl often used: “back to the things themselves.”
Kandinsky’s division between two impulses, expression and reception, is better understood by using the epochē, or phenomenological reduction. “The Greek term epochē is used by Husserl (sometimes transliterated in German as Epoche) to mean a procedure of bracketing, excluding, canceling, putting out of action certain belief components of our experience” (Moran and Cohen, Husserl Dictionary, 106).
Kandinsky’s Spontaneous Epochē
A special version of bracketing or epochē could be said to have occurred in an instinctive and spontaneous way when Kandinsky was attempting to identify the content of his own painting as described in his anecdote earlier in this paper.[ix] What was known or presumed to be known via visual familiarity was instinctively bracketed out because nothing about the painting in those particular circumstances was familiar or recognizable. Usually in Husserl’s epochē the “lived experience” is bracketed out in order to distill to an essence of what is being considered; in the case of the painting, the presumptions and presuppositions inherent in the lived experience were nullified and presented as “not knowing,” resulting in Kandinsky viewing a non-objective abstraction.
Intentionality and Givenness
The Husserlian epochē has already been referenced and utilized in phenomenological aesthetic studies of modernism, such as Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond with Ariane Mildenberg’s essay about the Hussserlian epochē and the breakdown of the object, especially in the literature Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens (Mildenberg 41-49). Alexandra Munroe, “Art of Perceptual Experience: Pure Abstraction and Ecstatic Minimalism” in Alexandra Munroe, curator, The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2009), 295-296. On a similar note, Alexandra Munroe, the Senior Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim and the curator of the exhibition The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989, discusses in that exhibition’s catalog the influence of phenomenology on Minimalist abstraction, and “the early Minimalists” discovery of Edmund Husserl’s theory of “phenomenological reduction” or “bracketing out” of surrounding phenomena in the direct perception and apprehension of an object” (Munroe 295-296). Likewise, contemporary French scholar Natalie Depraz has emphasized the inherent relationship between epochē and imagination, noting that in the first volume of Husserl’s Ideen “he provides us with an intrinsic link between imagination and the very method of phenomenology, namely, the epochē”(Depraz 155-156). Explaining how imagination (unlike perception) “suspends the actual existence of the object,” directing toward its “ineffective modality,” Depraz suggests that this clears the way to a great variety of possibility instead of (as in perception) one unique reality. In this context both epochē and imagination override factual limitations and allow fresh possibilities (ibid). More specifically. Husserl’s epochē serves the explication of non-objective abstraction and the phenomenological, aesthetic and spiritual implications inherent in that non-objective imagery. Michel Henry does not hesitate to apply Husserl’s epochē to Kandinsky’s work:
[Kandinsky] showed how by separating a letter or sign from its linguistic meaning or any other context in which it usually occurs one could again experience its “pure form,” its “purely pictorial” form. But once the world and all its meanings have been set aside, once its logos, which has always been that which is spoken by men, has been silenced, what exactly is left? According to Husserl and those artists who gave up realism, we are left with the sensate appearances to which the true, given world is reduced, the pure experience of the world (Henry, Seeing 377).
Describing the mystery inherent in the paintings of Kandinsky’s last decade of work, the so-called Paris period, Henry argues that resting within this mystery is “the identity of abstract painting and the cosmos,” and that “by setting the world aside, abstract painting assigned itself a new and paradoxical goal, the invisible” (ibid).
Intuition and Image Consciousness
Thus intuition that allows “invisibility” in the creative process necessarily bypasses what is commonly defined as object perception. If the outer impulse is bracketed via Husserlian epochē, the artist can be observed allowing and receiving the mystery of the unrecognizable object, or art without a recognizable object. In this receptive impulse, the artist receives the outer influence not just as recognition of natural beauty, but (in Husserlian terms) as the givenness (an object is “given” to perceptual consciousness of the object itself (Lyotard, Phenomenology 44). This orientation ultimately allows the artist to receive the givenness of nonobjective abstraction.
Intentionality is closely partnered with intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology. Thus it is necessary to understand first how Husserl uses the term “intuition.” The most immediate and primary definition of intuition is that intuition is “immediate apprehension” (OED). Derived from the Latin intueri, often translated as meaning “to look inside” or “to contemplate,” intuition when defined as “immediate apprehension” allows for a broad interpretation, covering many states such as sensation, knowledge, and even mystical rapport. Intuition in Husserl’s phenomenology is used in several ways, including as “evidence” and as eidetic intuition, the intuition of an eidos or essence.
While some of the subtle distinctions among Husserl’s uses of “intuition” are explicated and broken down by his student Emmanuel Levinas[x] what is important here is to emphasize how Levinas’s explication of Husserlian intentionality recognizes the uncommon significance (beyond the common one of intending to do something) that Husserl assigns to intentionality:
It expresses the fact, which at first does not seem original, that each act of consciousness is conscious of something: each perception is the perception of a perceived object, each desire the desire of desired object, each judgment the judgment of a “state of affairs” (Sachverhalt) about which one makes a pronouncement. The philosophical interest of this property of consciousness points to a profound transformation that it brings to the very notion of consciousness (Levinas, Theory 41)
In the context of Levinas’s description of the Husserlian rendering of consciousness, intentionality and apprehension ultimately yield an intuition of immediate structure as evidence of life in art. At the same time, intentionality redefines the relation of subject and object, described here by P. Sven Arvidson:
With Husserl’s Logical Investigations, phenomenology established a new sense of the traditional relation between object and subject in philosophy. This doctrine of intentionality in phenomenology asserts that the subject (as consciousness) is already directed toward or involved with an object, when object is understood in the very general sense as anything that is presented. The subject and object are part of a structure of relations in which meaning is revealed between them” (Arvidson 125).
Similarly, Levinas emphasizes that when intentionality becomes (in Husserlian phenomenology) a bridge between the world and consciousness, what occurs is the breakdown of the subject-object dichotomy, so that “[intentionality] is not the way in which a subject tries to make contact with an object that exists beside it. Intentionality is what makes up the very subjectivity of subject (Levinas, Theory 41). Levinas asserts that Husserl, by overcoming the substantialist concept of existence, demonstrated how “a subject is not something that first exists and then relates to objects” (Ibid).
Phantasy (fantasy) and Memory
Husserl observed that all art moves between two extremes, one being image art, mediated through image consciousness, and the other being “purely a matter of phantasy, producing phantasy formations in the modification of pure neutrality. At least producing no concrete depictive image” (Husserl, Phantasy, 651). The fact that Husserlian transcendental phenomenology addresses imagination, image consciousness, phantasy, memory, and time consciousness allows these principles to be applied aesthetically. Husserl considered, for example, how perspectival distortion and the alteration of shape because of a change in an object’s position has to be accounted for via the imagination and image consciousness. “This achievement of the imagination does not affect the side of sensibility but the side of the expected, that is, in a certain sense the side of the schema. It is a method of perspectival correction (Umzeichnung) and positional alteration of the expected object” (Lomar 102).
Before considering Husserlian image consciousness, a general phenomenological principle should be noted here: “Phenomenology does not attempt to speak about things, but only about the way they manifest themselves, and hence it tries to describe the nature of appearance as such” (Lewis and Staehler, 1). Appearances are given to consciousness, thus givenness (Gegebenheit) becomes relevant when examining an artist’s creative process. Givenness in Husserlian terms is an experience of something, the object appearing (being given in appearance) and experienced (received), at which point the subject (the artist, and also the viewer of art) is perceiving the object that is given in appearance. Some points arise about Husserl’s orientation to image consciousness, or Bildbewusstein, also translated as “depicting consciousness” (Moran and Cohen, Dictionary 158-159). Although perception obviously plays a major role in making and viewing visual art, perception and image consciousness are not identical in Husserl’s phenomenology. The specific modality of consciousness that is Husserlian image consciousness is separate from but combined with perception, including being combined in the creative process. One key to understanding this lies in Husserlian givenness, the appearance itself. There are multifarious influential elements, depending on the form of consciousness being experienced, that enter into Husserlian givenness. Besides perceiving and imagining, there is Husserlian picture consciousness, sign consciousness (signitive consciousness).[xi] “As Husserl writes, even external perception is a constant pretension to accomplish what it is not in a position to accomplish, namely, the complete givenness of the object; we are never with aplus ultra (Steinbock,Phenomenology 35)[xii] Memory, fantasy, and image consciousness are all forms of presentation for Husserl, although image consciousness is related to perception “where what is actually intended is not the same as what is sensuously presented” (Moran and Cohen, Dictionary 158). A photograph of a person first appears, for example, as a paper object, not as a person, and a painting first appears as paint applied to canvas rather than as a composition.
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Notes
[i] Particularly relevant in proposing a Husserlian aesthetic are Husserl’s investigations of perception as presentation and the varieties of intuitive re-presentation he defines as image consciousness, phantasy, and memory, topics he sometimes illustrates via specific points in art and aesthetic examples. See, for example, Gregory Minissale, in his Faming Consciousness in Art; Minissale uses Husserl’s description in Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology of a Dresden Gallery painting by David Teniers to explicate a theme of frames-in-frames and consciousness. Also, in Husserl’s writings in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925), 38-41, 132: discussing Raphael and Dürer, 182-184: discussing Titian, 192-193: discussing a painting by Franz and Ida Brentano. Throughout this volume are many general considerations of art and aesthetics, including both visual and literary art, as well as music. See also Husserl’s discussion of Durer’s “The Knight, Death, and the Devil” in his Ideas, 228-229.
[ii] Husserliana Dokumente, Briefwechsel, vol. VII, Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 133–36. Translation: Sven-Olov Wallenstein. http://danielrisberg.wordpress.com/2009/07/24/husserls-letter-tohofmannstahl
[iii] See, for example, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary
Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, edited by Jean Petitot and others; Mind in
Life: biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, by Evan Thompson; or The
Phenomena of Awareness: Husserl, Cantor, Jung, by Cecile T. Tougas.
[iv] Inner necessity is discussed in Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art.
[v] Af Klint does have a philosophy of art, albeit one based on a distinctively different aesthetic.
[vi] The phrase “philosophico-phenomenological” is borrowed from Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology & Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience.
[vii] See especially Boner, Alice, Sadasiva Rath Sarma, and Bettina Bäumer, translation and notes. Vastusutra Upanisad: The Essence of Form in Sacred Art; Gnoli, Raniero. The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta; and c
[viii] Wassily Kandinsky, “Reminiscences,” in Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo, eds., Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art(Boston: Da Capo Press, 1994), 369-370.
[ix] See page 5.
[x] See Emmanuel Levinas’ The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology.
[xi] Forms of consciousness are discussed numerous times in Husserl’s writings, but especially relevant here are his discussions in Logical Investigations and in Phantasy, Image Consciousness, and Memory (1898-1925).
[xii] Steinbeck here references Edmund Husserl’s Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, Anthony J. Steinbock, trns. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), introduction to Part 2.
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