THE FRIENDHIP BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY & ART 9THLECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL: MAY 10, 2009 BY MARCUS STEINWEG (ABSTRACT)
THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL
AN ARTWORK BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
http://www.thebijlmerspinozafestival.nl/_home/home.html
AN ARTWORK BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
http://www.thebijlmerspinozafestival.nl/_home/home.html
1.What is Art?
2.What is Philosophy?
3.What is the Friendship between Philosophy and Art?
ART:
- Assertion or Affirmation of Form
- Confrontation of the Here and Now
- Experience of the Inconcistency of the World
- Opening towards the Impossible
- Selfacceleration towards the Unknowable
- Affirmation of Incommensurability
PHILOSOPHY:
- Assertion of Truth
- Transgression of Knowledge
- Fight for the Impossible
- Fight against narcisstic Hypersensitivism an Selfvictimization
- Affirmation of Contingency
- Suspension of Facts
- Excess of the Past
- Affirmation of Freedom
ART AND PHILOSOPHY:
- Both are more in Assertion and Affirmation then in Information and Communication
- Both share the Desire for the Impossible and the New
- Both have to do with the Experience of the Real or the Truth by confronting the Reality of the Here and Now
- Both insist on the Necessity to avoid Selfassimilatio to the Order of Facts
- Together they resist to the Dictatorship of Facts, to the Ideology of Opinions, to the Weakness of Culture, to the Stupidity of Power.
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I believe in the friendship between art and philosophy. What art and philosophy share is courage in the complete confrontation in the here-and-now to accelerate out of the texture of facts which is the universe of our shared evidence — our opinions, hopes, consistencies — to go through the experience of the inconsistency of this consistent universe that we call reality. In art and philosophy it is not a matter of basing oneself on hard facts; it is a matter of seeking out the inconsistency of these facts themselves in the experience of what I call truth, the truth of reality.
What does it mean for philosophy to relate itself to truth? For every philosopher it holds that he or she puts forth their own concept of philosophy, just as every artist provides their own concept of art. The artist provides his or her concept of art through his or her work which can include lectures and writings. The philosopher provides his or her concept of philosophy through the linguistic utterances which his or her lectures, books and other writings are. It is always a matter of not allowing oneself to be inscribed in an existing field, in an already existing concept of art and philosophy in order, in a critical engagement with the history of thinking, with the history of philosophy, to question this history so as to risk one's own concept of philosophy. It is obvious that philosophy is not philosophy about.1 There is an irreconcilable difference between the work of the historian of philosophy (whose necessity is incontestable) and that of the philosopher. The philosopher’s pretension consists in transcending, transgressing, surpassing the work on the history of philosophy, which makes up a part of his work, toward the wager of hazarding his own formulations, his own philosophical assertions. Philosophy as I understand it is not primarily an argumentative practice, an academic, theoretical, dialogical or historicizing procedure. It is never exhausted in commentary. It is never exhausted in transcribing the thinking of other thinkers. It is obvious that philosophy is something other than a critical engagement with the thinking of others, that the critical engagement with the positions of Western, and also non-Western traditions of thinking can only be a first step in philosophical work, and not the decisive step. The decisive step consists in articulating in this critical engagement one's own philosophical position, a position which is also a rupture, a cut, incision or a caesura because it enters into a necessarily polemical relationship to its history.
I think that one thing is absolutely clear when it is a matter of defining a work of art: an art work is not a fact among facts. That is the thesis which I want to link with a further thesis: that it makes sense in art as in philosophy to fight for the impossible and to relate this struggle to the non-existent. Of course I do not have any evidence in my hands. It is not a matter of proving something in philosophy, but rather it is a matter of hazarding an assertion which, as unprovable, fights for its own clarity or evidence. Without doubt, in the struggle for the impossible it is not a matter of relating oneself to a second, dreamy reality. We have got used to denouncing philosophy as this movement of flight into a second world. In this denunciation all political Utopias are implied, and that to a certain degree also rightly. That is the notion that philosophy, instead of confronting, in the here-and-now of established realities, the harshness of these realities, relates itself to something beyond these realities. It is important to understand that this beyond of realities does not exist, and therefore I do not propose any Utopian model. What I call truth is the factual non-existence of a second world. There is only one world. This one, politically and culturally and economically over-codified world, this world overdetermined by the history of ideas, this zone of reality on whose immanent or implicit limitation philosophy unceasingly insists, is the lasting challenge for any thinking — a challenge which demands of philosophy that it emancipate itself from the heritage of an orthodox Platonism.
Art exists only as an assertion. Every assertion is headless, blind and exaggerated. To assert headlessness itself demands of art a kind of breathless precision. The subject of art is a subject of this self-assertion. It asserts itself as a subject of breathlessness which leads it to the limit of its being as subject.2 By subject I denote that which is irreducible to its status as object, to its objective reality. The object-status constitutes the subject's portion of reality. A subject is what transcends, transgresses, surpasses this reality since it is something other than an object codified and represented in the realm of facts. The factical codification of the subject can be neither disputed nor made absolute. It is nothing other than a fact. In relation to this fact, the subject asserts itself as a nameless resistance in order at no time to assimilate itself to the authority of facts.