Response to:
Tom Pynn's "Say the Things Are the Stars of Our Life:
Merleau-Ponty and the Heart Sutra

Georgia Continental Philosophy Circle
Olglethorpe University, Atlanta GA
19 April 2003

Tom' essay on Merleau-Ponty and the Heart Sutra is a timely and most welcome contribution to comparative philosophy, an exercise that, as he puts it, "may lead to a deeper penetration of our understanding of reality as well as a deepening of mutual understanding between Western and Buddhist philosophers" (p. 4).  In his carefully argued and subtly articulated presentation, he concludes that:

From the standpoint of Mahayana interpretations of the Heart Sutra as well as Merleau-Ponty's reversibility thesis, things are neither in-themselves nor for-themselves, but arise dependently within a nexus of causality and conditions characterized by impermanence (p. 14).
 

I agree completely -- this is a major point of contact between the two lines of thought. Tom's essay sets these two views of reality into mutual amplification, deepening both -- which is no small task.  We should realize our debt to him.

Briefly, what I want to do in this response, perhaps better characterized as a follow-up, is take up Tom's exemplary lead, and hazard some remarks on what might be a point of divergence between the philosophy of the flesh and the Mahayana, centering on the status of self.

            In his last writings and working notes, where he formulates the concepts of flesh, reversibility, and the chiasm, Merleau-Ponty criticized his earlier adaptation of the subject-object relation proper to the modern philosophy of consciousness (remarking on Husserl's early published presentations of intentionality).  And yet the new formulation of flesh by no means eliminates subjectivity; through the chiasms of flesh, what counts as being subject and what counts as being object shift, reverses, fluctuate.  Subjectivity is continually being born and reborn in the folds of flesh, forever changing, emerging, and even reversing with and within the world.  Through this incessant flow and flux, there is regularly a self-sense as discreet and separate. That is, while there is no self as subject in the Cartesian mold, that is, as self-grounding substance, there is egoic separateness always already emerging and changing in the course of lived embodiment.

            I take Merleau-Ponty's late work as a brilliant and mostly successful effort (despite its unfinished quality) to orient us towards addressing dissociations proper to the Cartesian moment of philosophy, where on the one hand the emergence of the subject was a welcome championing of reason, evidence, and introspection, but on the other there was a down-side in suppressing or marginalizing those dimensions of being in the world that are non-rational, such as our embodiment and affective life.  By adopting a monological stance, the Cartesian moment helped set up the parameters for modern science (again, most welcome), but also lead to the bogus "problem" of other minds and contributed to the real problems of isolated individuals (cf. Weber on hypertrophic subjectivity and the various critiques of our cultural of narcissism) and the reign of a style of rationality that is one-sidedly instrumental.  In counterpoint, Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of flesh recovers the lived body; acknowledges time and flux; explores the foldings of percept and concept; and opens up a dialogic rather than monologic understanding of experience through the thesis of reversibility. The upshot is a more integrated understanding of the relative self as a body-mind -- what Eric Erickson called the centaur -- which indeed is a quite mature, well-developed, integrated mode of human dwelling.  And Merleau-Ponty's late work presses even deeper - and this is what I belief Tom's essay so nicely presents  --  pointing to what Heidegger called the clearing or opening, that ontological "space" or, in Merleau-Ponty's view, that primordial "element," which continually gives birth to beings, to both impermanent subjects and objects.

            Now, the Heart Sutra's phrase "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" also points to the clearing, to that Basic Space "before" time and space, "beyond" birth and death such that emptiness and form are nondual, that is, "not two."  But in the Mahayana tradition, and unlike in Merleau-Ponty, realizing directly that "form is emptiness, emptiness is form" entails a most radical self-forgetting, the complete de-contraction of self, and not only as a glimpse (which produces only a memory of the nondual - the usual case with philosophers writing about such matters), but what in Mahayana is called big death as contrasted with the little death of the perishing of the physical body.  All subject-object relations, as we typically experience them, drop, dissolve; experience without an experiencer.  As the great thirteenth Zen Master, and founder of the Japanese Soto lineage, Dogen said:

To study the Buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of enlightenment remains [meaning the concept of enlightenment], and this no-trace continues endlessly (Enlightenment Unfolds, p. 36).

Here even the body-mind of the centaur drops as the locus of a self-sense.  Deep nondual realization means that "there are no others."  Or rather, to use a different formulation to point towards, rather than conceptually define, the matter: I and other are nondual, "not two."

            As the great and late twentieth Tibetan lama Kalu Rinpoche, root guru to many of the leading Western Tibetan teachers working in the United States today, said:

You live in confusion and the illusion of things. There is a reality. You are that reality. When you know that, you will know that you are nothing and, in being nothing, are everything. That is all (cited in McLeod, Waking Up to Your Life, p. 382).   

Some masters in the Tibetan tradition point to this level of realization as the dropping of all reference points that signal a self separate from the world and from others.  Wise, compassionate action is said to become spontaneous and reference-less, now uninhibited by the psychic knots that constitute the contraction as ego.

            To the extent that Merleau-Ponty teaches us to re-inhabit our lived embodiment, he brilliantly points to the required shadow work (in the Jungian sense), to the dissociations, proper to the modern Western psyche, a call to mend the mind-body split and open up to the world in a less contracted and more dialogical manner. But from the Mahayana perspective, integrating this shadow, and living as a centauric self, even one radically open to flesh, is not the same as liberation.  But, for us Westerns, it is probably a needed step towards awakening.  As the legendary twentieth-century Indian sage, Ramana Maharshi said (where, as prominent commentators have noted, his view of the nondual and that of the Mahayana are very close), the first and grounding thought of the separate self is the silent, extremely subtle felt-sense "I am the body."  When this archaic thought is annihilated, so is the ego.  But, then, it might prove best to recover the lived body rather than to leave it as a hidden and fractured source of identity

Let me end this brief follow up to Tom's paper by taking up a side-note in his discussions, that of Western self-consciousness and its association with anxiety.  Often self-consciousness is seen as a defect or problem. But it would seem that self-consciousness is a major and perhaps essential spur towards liberation.  As David Loy has made clear, self-consciousness entails a sense, often suppressed, of the self's lack of any grounding as real; when this lack is not covered over, through keeping busy, thinking incessantly, and all the others sundry activities that constitute our immortality projects, anxiety manifests - anxiety being, in the Heideggerian view, an objectless existential fear that signals the self's lack of grounds, its abysmal nature, what Heidegger technically and brilliantly analyses as Dasein's being-towards-death.  Kierkegaard teaches us something even more pressing, something Heidegger (who drew heavily upon Kierkegaard) leaves out: that anxiety is best dealt with by allowing it to burn itself up.  And, to be sure, this is the Zen way of zazen, the Tibetan Dzogchen way of treckchod.  In this respect, let us heed what is so often a threat to our philosophical egos and their own immortality projects, especially when engaged in East-West comparative study: that Buddhism, unlike the Western philosophical and religious traditions, has maintained a continuous practice tradition, a rich resource of spiritual technologies tested out over millennia by millions of adepts, exercises designed to burn out all the anxiety and thoroughly fry the separate self into nothingness, the realization of no-thing-ness.  Here, I believe, is where Western philosophy needs to listen much more openly and welcome more fully its Eastern neighbor.

            I hope my follow-up to Tom's paper does at least some degree of justice to the excellent line of comparative work he has inaugurated - that what I have just hazarded honors the spirit of his truly rich presentation.

1. World Disclosure

To begin, I know of no deeper modern reflection on the character of art than Heidegger's Kunstwerk essay, first delivered as a lecture in the mid-1930s.  The essay retains some of the vocabulary proper to the existential analytic of human being found in Being and Time, while deploying terms from the recent turn to the history of being.  The earlier treatise posits two principal modes of the being of non-human entities: equipment and representational objects.  The former are more primordial while the latter are modifications of the former during breakdowns in the normal use of equipment.  A key innovation of the Kunstwerk essay is the introduction of a third mode of being of non-human entities: art.

Art is not simply a tool in the world, although it can function as such; nor is it a philosophical reflection upon the world (art is not theory, although it can relay ideas and even perform philosophical insight, as in the first phases of postmodern art); instead, art has the unique capacity to open a world, to show a world, to disclose a world: art, as Heidegger so famously maintained, is world-disclosive.

With the modern differentiation of values spheres, a topic to which we shall return, and the lopsided growth of the authority of natural science and quantification (what Habermas analyzes as the colonization of the lifeworld), validity claims came to be seen one-sidely as concerned with outer empiricism and the measurement of phenomena, art in the common mind-set thereby having little to do with matters of truth.  Kant set the stage when cleaved the terms of beauty and truth, disrupting, as John Sallis has put it, the long-standing Western philosophical trope of shining truth.  In the wake of these developments, Continental philosophers have regularly felt called to re-consider the relation between art and truth.  In the Kunstwerk essay, Heidegger does so by distinguishing levels of truth.  Correspondence theories of truth, which predominate in the metaphysical tradition, are said to depend on a deeper sense of truth, what Heidegger calls, in a creative repetition of Greek thought, truth as aletheia: truth as the revealing-concealing of beings. Heidegger's point is that an entity need first be present before a proposition can correspond or not.   Art, then, is not primarily involved with correspondence truth, at least not in the first instance, but with aletheia.  Art imitates not a pre-given nature but a world; or, rather, art imitates Being's bringing forth of a world.  The truth of art is in its revealing/concealing of a world - an art world - that is the condition of possibility for any interpretation of the artwork, for any claim about the world that art brings forth.  Seen in this way, the bewildering array of contemporary occasions of art is a stunning display of world-disclosure, the bringing forth of all sorts of worlds, deep and shallow, profound and insipid, and in ever new media.

2. Media

While there is much to draw upon in the Kunstwerk essay, there are several "shadows" that when brought to light with the lens of other great thinkers, amplify the field of philosophical concepts of art that Heidegger has opened up.  I wish to address three of these "shadows."  The first is insensitivity to distinctions in art's media.  Heidegger discusses a Greek temple, a Van Gogh painting, a Hoelderlin poem -- all under the rubric of art as poeticizing.  Finding its first definitive expression in Lessing's Laocoon of 1766, and later its first great philosophical expression in Hegel's aesthetics, modern thinking has been attentive to different expressive capacities and limits of specific art media.  Heidegger's analyses of artworks, while holding out important lessons, nonetheless have an abstractness about them that is in part due to the leveling of media distinctions under the rubric of "poeticizing" - where, technicalities aside, the word conjures the model of verbal language and poetry for all media of art.

This is not to go so far to say that there is a fixed essence to the capacities and limits of artistic media, as we can perhaps find in Hegel's exposition, but following Michael Fried (in a telling footnote from his 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood") that there is an ever shifting "essence" to any given medium that has to do with the ongoing history of that medium on the one hand and its relation to other media and their ongoing histories on the other.  Attention to artistic media is an important facet of reflecting on art today - Deleuze's monumental study of cinema is a case in point - for as novel media emerge, we are challenged anew: one only need think of video games, their widespread impact, and how this new expressive-interactive medium is opening up ways of being in the world for our children.

3. Aesthetics

Related to the lack of media distinctions is a second "shadow" in Heidegger's great essay: the marginalized treatment of the sensuous-perceptual character of art.  Heidegger, concerned with moving beyond what Wilfrid Sellars would later call the "myth of the given," historicizes the mode of being of historical worlds and the subjects and objects appearing in those worlds.  Nature, too, has a history of presencing.  In the late modern age, nature shows up as standing reserve, Bestand, raw materials always already available for up take into the circuits of enframing, Gestell, until the materials are used up and discarded.  The poeticizing manner of enowning, as is proper to art, brings forth nature in a contrastive manner, as earth, Erde, clearing a more balanced human attunement with and respect for nature akin to pre-Socratic physis - a nostalgic, retro-Romantic view of physis, to be sure, that Heidegger would himself rightly call into question in his last seminars. 

While Heidegger's project of the history of being is worthwhile, his insights into the modes of nature's coming forth valuable, the radicalness of his vocabulary at times entails philosophical loss; in our case the marginalizing of the sensuous-perceptual character of art, now re-framed as poeticizing earth, contributing to the leveling of distinctions in media (music is heard, a painting is seen, where these respective perceptual fields are incommensurable).  In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari attune to media differences in re-conceiving  artworks as percepts and affects.  Art expresses perceptions and affectations, but are not themselves perceptions and affectations, percepts and affects having  a life of their own, expressing perceived and felt worlds beyond the confines of any one consciousness -- worlds as developmentally primitive as the base sensation of the body in constituting an animistic world and its bodily-constricted sense of self; worlds as evolved as the intermeshing multiplicity of perspectives and identities expressive of our planetary situation , as disclosed in the movie Syriana.

Art opens a world; and this world is a percept-affect - leading us to reconsider the terms of aesthetics.  Since Kant's third critique we associate aesthetics with beauty and sublimity.  But with Baumgarten's Aesthetica, which introduced the term into modern philosophical discussion, aesthetics has less to do with beauty and sublimity and more to do with the levels of value and meaning laden in perception.  (Indeed, the Greek term aesthesis refers to perception.)  It is in this light that art as percept is aesthetical, disclosing a world; and that this world, as percept, is affective - meaning that there is a feeling-tone pervading and saturating the percept, close to what Heidegger calls a fundamental mood that is deeper than this or that portrayed emotion, and in permeating the percept this mood pre-interprets the world.  This view of an aesthetics of art, in turn, frees the much needed conceptual space to reconsider the place of beauty and sublimity in the study of art - where currently in discussions of art each of these terms is used to refer to widely diverging experiences and phenomena.

4. Twofoldness

A third "shadow" in the Kunstwerk essay has to do with Heidegger's strong claim that the work of art can found and establish the world of a historical people.  Beyond the issue of media-specificity - a Greek temple most likely has had a greater impact in this manner than a largely unread modernist poem - the claim tends to take up uncritically and romantically art's modern claims to autonomy, projecting this onto all historical contexts, whereas, as we shall see, autonomous art, in the differentiation of value spheres proper to modernity, is characterized by the emergence of institutions of literature, performance music, and exhibition art. Heidegger's view that art founds the world of a people sneaks in a modernist view of art in its historically established autonomy, and where that autonomy was never as "autonomous" as modernism would have had it.

Rather than saying that art founds a world, let us say that art opens a world within the world - a twofoldness of worldhood.   Merleau-Ponty, with reference to painting in "Eye and Mind," says that one does not see a painting as one sees a tree, but rather sees according to the painting, the picture as a visible to the second power.  To say that the work of art opens a world within the world is to say that art is a doubling of world, a folding of the fabric of the world that opens an art-world within and woven into that same world-fabric.  Art is never elsewhere. 

With the partial exception of some of the critical theorists, Continental philosophers have been disinclined to concern themselves with specifics of the worlds in which and from which artworks emerge and become situated, often presupposing the modern notion of  art's "purposelessness," which points to art's distancing itself from instrumentality rationality's cancer-like growth. But this instrumental "purposelessness" has its purposes too.  How then might art's mimetic capacities matter to human beings in the first place?  To take up this issue, we shall turn to Adorno and Wilber.

5. Mimesis and Drives

Central to Adorno's ever sliding theory of art is the relation between mimesis and the primordial drives of thantatos (the death wish) and self-preservation (the will to live).  For Adorno, mimesis is a capacity in service to self-preservation.  It is can be discerned in the behavior of animals, as when in the presence of a predator an insect feigns death in order to survive (here, the imitiation of death serving life).  Early on humans evolved this mimetic capacity, as with magical ritual dances that imitate the elements in order to bring forth changes in climate.  Even in modern times, advanced modernist art is the privileged mimetic moment of encoding in non-conceptual form models of a good life that, in the Adornian vision, have all but vanished in the death-trips of our otherwise reified culture.

Artworks, in their mimetic opening of a world, engage and encode fundamental drives as these are expressive of and responsive to the world in which the work of art appears - as with a paleolithic cave painting conjuring the presence of the animals of the hunt for a world magically centered on survival needs -- such would be the upshot of this Adornian contribution to the philosophy of art.  To develop this insight further, we shall draw on two aspects of Ken Wilber's philosophy:  (1) that there are four, rather than two, fundamental drives; and (2) that evolution unfolds novel capacities that engage and transfigure these drives.

In Wilber's theory from the mid-1990s, manifestation is composed of holons - where a holon is a part/whole; and where all holons are sentient beings in Wilber's vision of a conscious-living universe.  Every holon possesses four basic drives: 1) self-preservation (or agency), that the individual preserves itself through time as it directs itself within an ever-changing environment; 2) self-adaptation (or communion), that the individual harmonizes and adapts itself to other individuals, both like and unlike itself; 3) self-transcendence (or Eros), that the individual has a propensity to grow and transform, transformation engendering novel capacities; and 4) self-dissolution (or Thanatos), that the individual can breakdown and loose higher order capacities.  These four drives are in constant tension with one another - such is the dance of samsara -- and as holons become more complex, there are more parts that can misalign and breakdown.  Fuller and deeper development regularly entails greater imbalances and tensions in the expression of the various drives.

For Wilber the universe is tilted overall towards Eros and creative novelty, even as development is remarkably messy with countless fits, starts, divergences, dead-ends, detours; and where any given line of development, any holonic grove, can end up sliding towards dissolution.

Drawing upon physics, biology, and the human sciences, Wilber (using a vocabulary from Tielhard de Chardin) sees evolution as having undergone three major phases.  At first there emerged a physiosphere, its sentient beings enacting the four drives;  then, after billions of years, a biosphere emerged that transcended and included the physiosphere (cells contain atoms, atoms do not contain cells), retaining the four drives and adding novel capacities like genetic-sexual reproduction as well as autopoesis (delineated by the post-modern biologists Manturana and Varela); and again, after billions of years, a third principal domain emerged, that of the noosphere, adding novel capacities like mental reflection upon  a holon's own drives and capacities.  The physiosphere is most fundamental - if it vanished, the other two spheres would also vanish; whereas the noosphere is most significant, having the greatest depth, complexity, and fullness of capacities - if the noosphere vanished, the other two spheres would not automatically cease to exist. 

Within the noosphere humans eventually came to develop a sense of a separate self, the flip-side of identity being a reflexive intuition of the possibility of the dissolution of this self: the birth of the awareness of death and its attendant death-terror. This death-terror - itself a cover (as David Loy argues) for a deeper terror, namely: the fear of emptiness and the lack of the inherent existence of the supposedly substantial self -- is so strong, so the story goes, that it was repressed, its energies mobilized into a count-veiling will for survival, control, and self-preservation: the birth of human self-assertion.  So fueled, the human noosphere (culture) would be the arena of an unprecedented acceleration in the evolutionary emergence of novel capacities in service to the preservation of self and the (projected) worlds of that self.

Mimesis takes on renewed importance in this context.  In the human domain, mimesis is most especially the capacity for socialization into the habits and practices of a world, transmitting such ways of being from generation to generation on the one hand, and on the other allowing for an unprecedented flexibility in these ways of world-making, empowering not only the drives of adaptation and preservation, but stimulating Eros and its drive towards self-transcendence.  Mimesis came to assume yet another place in human culture as well: the invention of art, where art is the miming of world.  There is a general insight from Hegel here that we are wont to retain: that art enacts human self-recognition, externalizing and objectifying a world, clarifying and stabilizing the ways of a self proper to a given world, while negotiating tensions amongst the four drives, and creating artful models for relieving those tensions - such would be some of the principal mimetic gifts of art.

6. Differentiation of Value Spheres

One of the most powerful and fruitful lines of characterizing modernity and art's place therein is the Weberian thesis of the differentiation of value spheres.  Through modernizing processes, it is said, art differentiates from its primary pre-modern embeddedness in domains like religion, differentiating into "autonomous" spheres of its own, and developing novel forms at an unprecedented pace, these innovative and brilliant art forms distinct from those arising in another new cultural domain, mass culture.  This Weberian line of analyses has two basic claims: (1) that pre-modern art is undifferentiated from other socio-cultural domains (with the partial exception of highly evolved pre-modern art traditions, like those of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy and landscape painting that serve respectively the scholarly and spiritual ideals of self-cultivation and Self-realization); and (2) that the differentiation of values spheres engendered two distinct if interacting domains -- autonomous art and mass culture.

In the lineage of critical theory,  there are three predominant evaluations of the relation between these two cultural spheres:  (1) a modernist position that values advanced art over mass culture; (2) an anti-modernist position that sees advanced art as having not only differentiated but having gone too far and dissociated from everyday life, calling for a negation of this dissociation; and (3) a later post-modernist position that, seeing itself operating under transformed economic and social conditions, deconstructs the modernist and ant-modernist hierarchies. 

Adorno exemplifies the modernist position.  In an early essay from 1938 "On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening," Adorno posits three spheres of music in modern culture: that of light music and the recorded hit; that of the concert hall performance of classical music with its regular play list; and that of advanced modernist music.  The first two spheres are each in their own ways affected by the reification of the musical product, exchange value now dominating use-value, audience consumption of the musical event a sign of an unwitting participation in (and unconscious cherishing of) a thoroughly commodified culture, where listening habits, conditioned to recognize the familiar note or musical passage, and unable to distinguish bad performances from good ones (the fetishized celebrity of the performer or composer now all important), regress to an infantile stage.  It is only the compositions of leading modernists, like Schoenberg and Webern, which offer a counter-measure, a space of otherness protesting reifying processes, with the musical form holding out a non-conceptual model of a life worthy to be lived.

Adorno's remarkable essay on music was in part a response Walter Benjamin's landmark essay of 1936 "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Benjamin was perhaps the first great theorist (with the possible exception of Bataille) who recognized the transformed status of art in modernity but did not simply champion artistic modernism over mass culture.  Benjamin's frame is political and communist, keyed by his fleeing to Paris with the rise of National Socialism in Germany.  He opens the essay by noting that the vulgar Marxist understanding that the base (economy) determines the superstructure (culture as ideology) can be supplemented with the view that at certain historical moments there is need to intervene into the culture itself in order to determine or direct the formation of a new economic order.  His focus is upon how fascism has come to use the new mass media - radio, print, film - for its own political ends, masking the injustices of its political power plays and agendas by using the language of art and aesthetics in place of that of politics itself, saying for example that the Fuehrer is a creative genius, the Third Reich his shining work of art.  For Benjamin this aestheticizing of politics masks the inherently political essence of art proper to the current historical moment.  He calls for a debunking of the fascist strategy and the forceful re-politicizing of art in the service of class struggle.

At the core of this argument is a history of art, the developing functions of art through humanity's culture stages as these have been coupled with the rise of art's reproducibility. While there were moments prior to the nineteenth-century when art was made in multiples, it was only with the invention of lithography and photography during the nineteenth century that art became in principle reproducible.  The pre-modern magic and mythic-religious phases of art stressed art's singularity in some or another space of ritual use; the modern phase stressing art's exhibition value - both with autonomous art's migration to the museum and concert hall as well as with the reproduction of art in mass culture that distributes the artwork to diverse audiences and beholders who engage the work in various non-ritualized settings.  Central to art's history is the shift from the pre-modern ritual value of art to its modern exhibition value.   Ritual is a sacred performance that re-iterates existing power relations and class structure.  Aura -- Benjamin's much misunderstood notion - is proper to the experience of the pre-modern artwork in its ritual function.  Aura is the pre-rational experience of the sacred that keeps one at a psychic distance no matter what the physical proximity.  It is an aesthetic charge that re-enforces the priestly and aristocratic privileged access to the artwork and thereby to the sacred.  The decay of aura in the modern world is not a loss, but an opportunity for overcoming class injustices.

It is not that the auratic charge simply disappears in modernity.  The modern museum and other institutions of modernist art retain something of the aura's quality (with the fetishistic charge of the expensive commodity yet another new variant of aura).  Benjamin looks to the mass media, and especially to film, as the privileged site of intervention.   While also having its own echoes of aura, as with the screen star's celebrity, film breaks from ritual values as it is distributed throughout society to audiences diverse in class status and cultural mores.  With a little help from Dadaist techniques of tactile shock, film can be mobilized to break through the distracted and defended modern psyche and awaken the proletariat's unconscious desire for revolutionary social justice.  The fascists, in contrast, countered this inherently political capacity of film, covering over the exhibition value of the apparatus by filming Nazis rituals, resuscitating art's pre-modern aura.

Benjamin's position is anti-modernist in that he champions mass culture over modernist art on the one hand, and on the other looks to anti-modernist art for the techniques needed to empower film for revolutionary purposes.  Fredric Jameson exemplifies a more post-modernist position on art and culture.  Beginning in the late 1970s Jameson has contributed significantly to our understanding of both fine art and mass cultural artifacts.  In an important essay titled "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Jameson deconstructs the high/low hierarchies of modernism and its anti-modernist reversals.  While respecting conditions in the making and viewing of fine art and mass culture that are distinct to each sphere, he suggests that both spheres have their moments of reification, both their moments of utopian vision.

Especially pregnant is Jameson's thesis of the political unconscious of mass cultural artifacts.  Whereas Benjamin advocated that film take up anti-modernist Dadaist techniques of tactile shock to penetrate a numbed modern consciousness and activate a latent proletariat desire for social justice, Jameson sees film as already allegorically encoding at the level of narrative form a collective wish for a more realized society.  To demonstrate Jameson's thesis, let's examine the television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, which ran from the late 1980s into the 1990s.  Star Trek opens a worldspace where planets stand for nation states, species stand for cultures, and where the Borg allegorize the loss of the sense of "I" in the circuits of the Gestell, posing a threat to the freedom and well-being of the democratic Federation and of the crew of the Enterprise, who embody in comparison to the Borg a healthy, multi-cultural community with benign, wise leadership, a collective that balances responsibility to the group with respect for individuating projects of self-actualization.  The show's narrative mirrors and unearths the audience's own unconscious anxieties about the encroaching administered world upon their lives that distorts a balanced and mature manner of being-in-the-world with others.  Victory by the Borg means the final triumph of reification and the administered world; while victory by the Federation means the realization of a multi-ethnic community that celebrates its members' individuating projects.  And the appeal of this vision cuts through class differences - an authentic expression, Jameson would say, of a collective desire for the good life.

All three of these interpretations are instructive.  Adorno reminds us that advanced art is challenging, cannot be readily consumed, and demands the deepening of capacities on its audience's behalf, while reified habits of experiencing art abound in our lives despite our own delusive denials to the contrary.  Benjamin instructs us that art's exhibition value has come to replace its prior ritual values, the apparatuses of the mass media having a new potential for instigating political growth and public reflection upon injustices, a potential however that is easily co-opted and redirected by the interest groups who control such media.  Jameson teaches us that the best mass cultural artifacts express collective visions of the good life, while advanced artworks can exude fetishized aura, as with the inexplicable price tag, and the occulted "mystery' thereof, of a multi-million dollar Picasso.

In the end these thinkers demonstrate the crucial importance of the concept of the differentiation of value spheres for reflecting on the occasions of art today.

7. Communication

The final concept that we shall consider is art's status in communication, as this clarifies art's role in the organization of social wholes. Wilber will again be our guide.

In his most recent writings, Wilber distinguishes four classes of manifest form: individual holons, socio-cultural holons (organized wholes of like individuals), artifacts, and heaps.  Only the first two enact the four primordial drives; and they do so in distinct manners.

Let's try a thought experiment.  If David Jones, the individual, turns to the right, all of David goes rightward and does so 100% of the time.  But if the collective called the CCPC is directed by David to go to the right, all of the CCPC does not go rightward 100% of the time.  Social wholes are not super-organisms, not meta-Subjects.  While individuals seemingly possess a monadic center that directs agency, collectives do not and yet enact a form of agency, which Wilber calls nexus-agency.  How is this done?

Drawing on the work of Niklas Luhmann, Wilber sees social systems as internally organized by re-iterated exchanges amongst its members. These habituated exchanges are called, in Luhmann's theory, communication.  And it is communication that coordinates the actions of the members of a social system.  All communicative exchanges have an exterior and interior dimension - exterior elements of exchange like money, signfiers, and body energies (gross, subtle, and causal) as these are correlated with and accompanied by the exchange of interior elements like symbolic capital, meaning, and states of consciousness.  The point is that communication is required for a society to enact the various holonic drives: preserving itself over time, adapting itself to new environments (which includes other groups), and transforming itself into greater complexity and depth.

In its shift from assuming ritual value to exhibition value, art comes to play an especially vital role in communicative processes.  With the emerging modern state, large populations were to be socialized in an efficient manner.  The disciplines, as brilliantly analyzed by Foucault, enabled people throughout society to be trained in standardized manners and embody normalized labor and military forces.  With the advent of mass media, art opened models of being in the world for entire populations, complementing disciplinary training, creating visions of self and other in the world now shared by people otherwise locally and regionally separate. Face to face interactions, for so long the primary means of socializing processes, came to be supplemented more and more by the worlds opened up in the mass media - film, recorded music, radio, comics, tv, - just think of the effect video games have on children.  And the socializing roles of mass art, original confined to a given nation state, are rapidly going global.  One suspects that it is less this or that content of a given art-world and more the cumulative effect of the form of art specific to a given medium that most forcibly models the ways of being in the world.

As we have seen, autonomous art also emerged in modernity.  And pre-modern traditions of art do not simply disappear but often adapt themselves to these new conditions, as with the elder men making calligraphy in the public square in Shanghai, explicitly attempting to preserve an older way of life in the wake of China's economic boom.  The various spheres of art today - pre-modern, modernist, postmodernist, mass media - interact with each other in creating the bewildering array of art occasions that we alluded to in the opening of this paper.

And, to be sure, it is to the field of concepts that we have just crafted - art as opening a world within the world, this art-world a percept affectively presenting itself in its media-specificity (its "aesthetic"), and where this world of art serves purposes proper to the lived world in which it is situated -- ritual, exhibition, and self-cultivating purposes -- in all cases mimetically encoding and expressing primordial drives like self-preservation and self-transcendence - it is to this field that we can turn to begin making non-reductive sense out of the bewildering occasions of art today.  For in the end, the fruit of any theoretical field of concepts is found in its use-value - here, engagement with specific works of art in their contexts.

In closing, let me to cut to the chase and offer a general observation.

While there are unprecedented social tensions and imbalances in modern and global developments, and much art is an expression of or response to the resulting dissolutions and regressions (the critical theoretical term "reification" only capturing part of the picture), art has never been as ready as it is today to evoke self-transcending visions --from the post-modern installations of Christo and Jean-Claude, to Rumi's poetry now so wildly popular, to U2's mystical Christian lyrics, to ever widening appreciation for the non-dual sense of the world evoked in the best Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, or the luminous emptiness evoked in an abstract monochrome, to a film like American Beauty,  which won several Academy Awards, a film about a very ordinary, even neurotic man Awakening to Freedom and Compassion in the midst of everyday life.

Maybe then - just maybe - amidst all the complexity and confusion, Eros in the realm of art is having its way...

BOOK REVIEW  [Continental Philosophy Review, 2006]

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Jason M. Wirth, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time (Albany: SUNY, 2003), 320pp. ISBN 0791457931 (cloth), US$71.50, 079145794X (paper), US$23.95.

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Schelling is in many ways the philosopher's philosopher, the thinker whom so many of the greatest, most influential theorists of the past 150-plus years have read and re-read, igniting sparks in their own creative lines of thought. Happily, there is something of a "Schellingian Renaissance" these days; sadly, it is largely confined to specialists for Schelling's work has yet to occupy a widespread and an unambiguously fundamental place in Anglophone histories of modern and contemporary philosophy, whether in survey text or classroom presentation. In part, this has to do with the conceptual difficulty of his texts; in part, it has to do with the spiritual depth of his philosophical vision.

            As a guide through the waters of Schelling's thought, there is no one better than Jason Wirth, translator of the third draft of The Ages of the World,[1] and a young philosopher whose latest two books are also on Schelling. One is an anthology that he has edited, Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings. The other is an extraordinary monograph, The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time, which will serve as the focus of this review.

            Wirth announces at the outset that like Schelling "I too endeavor to speak to a life beyond the illusion of living things and dead things. In this book I want to capture some of the spirit of this life that conspires beyond and within life and death" (1).  The eight chapters that follow are, as the subtitle has it, "mediations on Schelling and his time." I like to think of Wirth's approach as an exemplary instance of what Gadamer called effective-historical inquiry. The book is profoundly erudite, steeped in the texts and culture of both German Idealism and contemporary Continental philosophy. This enables Wirth to thematize the horizon of Schelling's thought, situate it within various lineages of thought, and compare it to contemporary concerns and formulations. As is proper to any deep hermeneutical encounter, all three modes of history, as expounded by the young Nietzsche, come into play: antiquarian, as the objectification of the past horizon within our own; critical, as the dialogue between past and present concerns; and monumental, as exemplary insights from the past flash forward, bespeaking their validity and guiding us today. In Wirth's able hands, this is not a mechanical "method" that results in some static "fusion of horizons," but instead is conducted as a glorious dance, weaving and reweaving the various moments of the hermeneutical encounter, enacting, as the subtitle has it, meditations on Schelling and his time.

            Each of the chapters is thematic, where the topic at hand often calls for centering on texts from this or that station in Schelling's corpus. Remaining sensitive to developments in Schelling's thought, Wirth is clear that Schelling was consistently "a thinker of the whole" (36). The ever shifting changes of approach and topic, so that the body of writing never forms a "system," is an expression of the intuition that there can be no one articulation of the richness and vastness of the whole, that there is no singular beginning to discursive reflection on the infinite - such being the finitude of thought.

            A key to the whole study is Chapter Four on "Direct Experience." In one sense the various projects of Idealism turn on how the given thinker poses the terms of intellectual intuition. For Schelling, the intellectual intuition is the direct experience of the unconditioned - a glimpse, to be sure, rather than a permanent realization of this expansive state. As such "Schelling's own discourse often sounded downright mystical. For example, Schelling often spoke of the development of the ‘spiritual eye' in a way almost reminiscent of the way that certain aspects of the Hindu spoke of opening one's third eye" (103). Wirth is sensitive to this kind of talk in philosophy-the dangers of claiming access to some mystic insight that can amount to no more than a projective, pre-rational fantasy. And rightly so. But, there is more to the matter, for stirred by the intellectual intuition, Schelling was committed anew to "fundamental practice," exercising and expanding sensitivity to the pervasive and perfect "isness" of manifestation, that boundless love for everything that is:

            Western traditions tend to ignore the problem of fundamental practice, as if one's           character or more importantly, the largeness of one's love, were irrelevant. One     tends to think of the understanding engaging primarily in its task of understanding    things or of faith seeking an understanding or even of the endeavor to     understanding faith. Generally missing ... is the sense that one must first be freed      for the understanding, that one must tackle the tacit             narcissism that is the conatus'    invisibly operating background. Philosophy does not begin with gaining something that one first lacks, but with the gift of the loss of oneself (112).

 Now, it is not that Schelling did not have a fundamental practice-Wirth argues convincingly that he did, which "included the cultivation of the life of sensitivity, of a spiritualized relationship to nature and to the tradition" (113)-but rather that this practice was peculiar to Schelling, "private" one might say, in line with modernity's emergent public/private divide in such matters, and hence has largely gone unknown to readers of his texts, rather than this practice being part of a tradition of time-tested techniques sustained by ongoing community, or its being responsive to a common cultural ethos that fundamental practice is requisite for authentic philosophical life.

            Stirred by the intellectual intuition, deepened and stabilized through fundamental practice, Schelling's vision is thoroughly nondual (cf. 36-38), akin to that of much of the advanced esoteric thought of the East. To give a brief sampling of the riches of Wirth's study, Chapter 1 focuses on "The Nameless Good," arguing that direct experience of the mystery can never be adequately named-and yet it must be named in order to fold this insight back into everyday life, nourishing the logos of manifestation. There are, then, better and worse ways of speaking about the unspeakable. How one does so is of the utmost importance, and goes right to the heart of the philosophy's discursive responsibility. In this light, calling forth Levinasian concerns, Wirth shows that, for Schelling, the Good "proceeds" the True, that thinking comes "later" than its source. This leads into a subtle discussion of the relationship between Hegel and Schelling, that the Hegelian project seems to believe in its capacity to think spirit all the way through into its own self-grounding, without remainder, as if the philosophical concept in its rational-dialectical mobilization can keep up with spirit's unfolding, in the end becoming adequate to the absolute self-synthesis. While seeing his thought as very close to that of Hegel's, Schelling in his mid and later writings understood this subordination of the Good to the True as a failure of a sufficient mortification of the philosophical ego, of the humiliation of the concept's drive to capture and present the mystery in its completeness and fullness, thus entailing his own turn to positive philosophy (16).

            Chapter 5 is on "Art". Here Wirth demonstrates that Schelling's vision of the individual artwork is profoundly consonant with intimations of the divine, of the indwelling formlessness within all form. What Schelling called the "complete work of art" (what Wirth calls philosophical art) is art about art in that the artwork, born of play, reflectively traces its own emergence out of chaos, out of the unformed mystery. Anticipating Heideggerian views, Schelling propounds that the artwork's creation of form out of the formless, freely giving rule to what is beyond all rules, parallels the self-generativity of nature (or, in Heideggerian terms, that the work of art imitates Being in its bringing forth a world). To see the grace in form, the formless in the artwork, requires opening the spiritual eye; yet the form is not a mere husk that can be discarded, a non-essential dimension in contrast to its essential core. As Wirth explains:

            Artworks are like monads, reflecting the enigma of their origin, but in concrete, historical, and intimate ways. If one uses the singularity of the work, if one    shields oneself from its sensations with abstract heuristics, then one is oblivious to the artwork's whisper of infinity. If one allows that infinity to roar so loud that it obliterates the artwork, then I can no longer whisper in its own, nonsubstitutable ways (153-4).

Art and philosophy, in this Schellingian vision, "dance together and belong together." Framed in light of Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?, Wirth goes on that: "philosophical art-the complete work of art-reflects and marks the ground of creation in its singularly local way. An artful philosophy finds new ways to conceive heretofore unconceived percepts. A complete work of art, on the other hand, furnishes new percepts that nonetheless can mark their status as percepts" (154). Said otherwise, the work of art opens up a world, which is focused and articulated by a properly nuanced philosophical language, this interplay of art and philosophy often able to direct us into the timeless mystery that is the source of all possible worlds.

            To give a last taste of the richness of the study, the final chapter is on Schelling's precocious call for Europe to open up to the Orient. Schelling was one of the first Westerners to ponder the Bhagavad Gita deeply, doing so in a manner comparable to the commentaries on the poem by the great 20^th century Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo. Both Schelling and Aurobindo understand the Gita as advancing a profound nondual vision: that the poem points to the Good beyond good and evil, to the Silence beyond sound and its absence, to the Mystery beyond the play of dualities proper to manifestation, calling us to not get lost in the Beyond but instead remain intimate with and attuned to the responsibilities inherent in the dance of form. For the Schelling of the late work, philosophy is a preparation for one's standing before the abyss without being overly afraid or surprised, empowering one to take that fateful leap of faith into selfless freedom.

            Nietzsche has come to stand as one of the heroes of postmodern thought. Early on in The Birth of Tragedy he recalls in an affirming tone that: "Indeed, Schopenhauer actually states that the mark of a person's capacity for philosophy is the gift for feeling [at least] occasionally as if people and all things were mere phantoms, or dream-images."[2] The direct experience of the dream-like, luminous, and "empty" essence of all of manifestation is of course nothing other than what Schelling called the intellectual intuition. In striking contrast, philosophical training today makes no demand that we exercise our spiritual eyes so to see the world in its luminous radiance and formless essence. That we might do well to take such a demand to heart finds no better source of inspiration and loving example than in Jason Wirth's The Conspiracy of Life.

[1] F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. and intro. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: SUNY, 2000).

[2] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, eds. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Spiers, trans. Ronald Spiers (Cambridge and New York: CUP, 1999), p.15.