81. Serenity or excitement?
According to Schopenhauer artistic genius
is exceptional in its capability to escape from the drive of the will towards
ever new unsatisfiable desires, into the serene contemplation of platonic,
pure, eternal ideas. It is an escape from the emotional into the intellectual.
For Nietzsche, by contrast, artistic genius is a manifestation of the will to
power, in creative destruction. Schopenhauer lauded asceticism, breakdown of
the will, Nietzsche abhorred it. Schopenhauer sought serenity, Nietzsche sought
Dionysian exuberance.
So, is art serene contemplation of order,
harmony? Or is it excitement in transcending order, breaking harmony? Nietzsche
made the distinction between on the one hand the Apollonian, representing the
harmonious, the static, the eternal, and on the other hand the Dionysian,
representing the disharmony, intoxication, the dynamic, creative destruction.
According to Schopenhauer a work of art is
the perfect representation of a universal, or constitutes a new universal by
itself. But perhaps it is the opposite: a denial of the universal, the triumph
of the individual, something in its own that does not fit any universal. A
declaration of independence.
If the intellectual is the contemplation of
the universal, then the rebellion of the individual is the emotional, romantic,
and art is emotion, not an escape from the will but a celebration of it, but
the Nietzschean, not the Schopenhauerian will.
But I don’t agree that the intellectual is
just serene contemplation of the universal, the eternal, the harmony. I think
it also includes the exhilaration of the novel connection, the shift, the
breakthrough, the discovery.
And yet, I admit, serenity also is part of
artistic experience. It can be contemplation in a feeling of time standing
still, of a balance, a harmony achieved.
My panel of artists rejects the separation
of harmony and destruction. It is both, they say. Can art be both Apollo and
Dionysus, serenity and excitement, enjoying and breaking balance? How, then,
would the two combine or connect?
As follows, perhaps. The excitement lies in
having an idea, a hunch, but then it needs to be realized, be ‘made to work’.
In scientific discovery also, a famous scientist once said ‘I have got an idea
but I don’t yet know how to get it’. When is a work of art finished? When the
artist has the feeling that it is, when there is nothing to be added or
subtracted, when ‘it is just right’. A mathematical theorem has beauty in that
way: just right, incontrovertible, nothing too much nor too little. That,
perhaps, is where the harmony lies.
Perhaps here again, as in the discussion of
invention (in item 31 of this blog), and in the discussion of the change of
meaning (in item 37), the cycle of change discussed there applies. From the
carriage of existing harmony into novel contexts, the material and inspiration
for change arise, in novel combinations that break through limits, to achieve
an emergent novelty that is next ordered, reduced and polished into a new harmony.
Beyond the level of the individual piece of
art, on the level of culture, evidence for this is found in the fact that new
artistic and intellectual impulses have typically arisen at the crossroads of
cultures, as the Renaissance in northern Italy. The novel enters from the
periphery to create a new centre, where the novelty becomes the mainstream and
may then consolidate into a new orthodoxy.