II. Talk on the Common Course (1952)
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We may define a metaphor as the sensual manifestation of significance. But what is significance? What is being signified in art?
Heraclitus says that Apollo neither reveals nor conceals. What can be revealed or concealed? Truth. Apollo neither reveals nor conceals truth, but he signifies it. The miracle of beauty is to signify truth, to point to it, to promise it, to indicate its presence, and yet never to reveal it. This non-revealing does not mean concealment. Who has eyes to see will see -- provided he has artistic eyes. Apollo is at the same time the god of art and the god of oracles. Like art, oracles only signify truth, they do not reveal and tell it. It depends upon the man who receives the oracle whether or not he will understand its truth. Without eyes nobody is able to see beauty signifying truth and without the "know thyself," inscribed on the temple in Delphi, nobody is able to grasp the truth of the oracle. The key to the understanding of a work of art, like the key to the oracles given in Delphi, lies in the beholder himself.
The work of art does more for the beholder than the oracle does for the man who comes to seek its advice. Beauty invokes truth in the beholder himself; it cannot tell him a truth which he never possessed, but it can bring to life in him a truth of which he had never before been aware. Beauty, signifying truth, arouses the beholder and enables him to join in the true artistic experience. The aura of significance throws its light to the beholder so that he now can see, like an artist, right through reality, through the merely existing being and discover new potentialities of truth behind it. He will see through his own feelings and experiences and discover a deeper meaning to them; and this discovery never comes to an end as long as he lives, because the great work of art will tell him different things at the different stages of his life, depending on his own experiences. The more truth he has in him, the more will beauty eventually reveal to him.
We ask once more: What is a metaphor? The metaphor is closely connected with maya, the great instrument of all art. The god of maya is Vishnu, one of the gods of India, who endlessly dreams up worlds, one after the other, in the infinite time and space of Indian religion. In the figure of Vishnu, mythological thinking became aware of its artistic element, the element of world dreaming. The artist is a world dreamer in the sense that he creates world images. This corresponds to one of man's deepest wishful dreams. Post-mythological thinking and creativity faces the reality of Being and stills its craving for meaning by making Being more meaningful; yet at the bottom of our heart, there remains the original shock of human confrontation with reality and the original desire to live in a perfect world, which by itself would unite Being and meaning, where meaning would simply exist and Being be meaningful in itself.
Physiognomical phenomena seem to indicate such a unity of being and meaning. Facial expressions, a smile, gestures, intonations of voice and forms of movement are sensual and yet endowed with a meaning such as can only be revealed to us through direct verbal communication. It is as though we sense significance with all our senses, yet we can neither grasp nor define it. The artist who thinks in metaphors can grasp this sensed significance; his vision consists of a sensual image of Being which he gets hold of through his "sixth sense," the synthesizer of the other senues. This image contains the significance which we only "sense" but which the artist can work out in detail.
Artistic creativity develops in three stages: There is first the unoontrollod life experience of the artist, the almost mythical mass of sensations, thoughts, intentions and feelings, out of which he conceives the nuclear metaphor of his work. He then proceeds to develop the whole web of related metaphors which eventually constitute the work of art. This procedure follows certain correlative significances, which make one thing after another meaningful until a whole fabric of similar experiences is assembled and organized. One metaphor leads to another metaphor; it is a mutual give and take process in which the metaphor inspires the artist and the artist works out the metaphor.
A metaphor is not a symbol. A symbol, meaningless in itself, is a sign that stands for something else. Symbols are used in scientific thinking and are illustrated by examples. In the statement: Three things are in this room, we have used a verbal logical symbol, thing and a mathematical symbol, the number three. Thing is in itself meaningless, but can be exemplified by chair, table and couch. I call them all things and thereby establish a relationship among them, a unity of three; this relationship between the three things in the room exists only insofar as they all are things, they are not interrelated and there is no communication between the symbol, thing and what it may stand for: chair, table, etc.
In the metaphor: "The ship plows the sea," an interrelationship between ship and sea is established; at the same time, plow and ship communicate their activity to each other through which (characteistic of Homer) an intercommunication between land and sea is brought about. The artistic vision lies in the action of carrying-over (meta-phor), the evoking of one experience through another and the resulting correspondences. The symbol works like a magic ray which penetrates Being, unites certain things, throws a special light on them which shows table, chair and couch as things, and brings about a transfiguration of Being. The metaphor works like a magic chain reaction which is started through the inner human experience with the world, carrying over the experience of one activity into another, of one movement into another, of one significance into another, bringing about a transfiguration of Meaning. Metaphorical thinking is constantly overwhelmed by the vision of such correspondences.
All art is metaphorical and artistic creation is projective metaphorical thinking. In mythical art, it is true, symbols play a dominant role, not because mythical art uses symbols to represent and stand for something else, but because mythology itself is a world which is supposed to stand for the real world, to hide reality from man. In this sense, mythical art is truly "surrealistic," it depicts the "true" reality of the surrealistic world of the myth. Therefore, the mythical artist uses not only mental symbols but needs the real magic symbol, the fetish, which plays a role even in the highest developed mythical art. The reason why we can understand mythical art even though we no longer believe in mythical symbols and fetishes is that the metaphor here, as in all true art, has prevailed. Metaphysical art is supramundane, it reaches out beyond the world and tries to establish another, the truly metaphysical world order. Characteristic of it is the allegory in which a concrete event is represented by a figurative story destined to cover several similar happenings. As such, the allegory is similar to the symbol; its figure also unites different "things" without establishing an artistic intercommunication between them. This is the reason for the proverbial dryness of allegories. In a great metaphysical poet like Dante the allegory receives metaphorical significance; in the Divina Comedia allegories and symbols merely assist the rise of the great Dantean metaphors. Free art is transcendent; it does not represent anything that cannot be grasped by the metaphor alone.
Homer is the first artist who created a world in free imagination. No longer bound by mythology and not yet under the authority of metaphysics, he uses metaphors with such incredible purity and freshness that they have become the admiration of all succeeding generations. Symbols make their appearance in Greek art only after Homer; they already play a role in the Greek drama, whose lyrics are still built on Homeric metaphors, but whose "plots" develop around metaphysical ideas. Symbols have played the greatest and the most ruinous role in pictorial art, which developed in its amazing modern form after Cezanne liberated it from all symbolic meaning. (It seems probable that at some historical moment between Homer and ourselves transcending art broke through all layers of symbols -- in Shakespeare and in Rembrandt). Cezanne's art represents metaphorical ideas; in this sense modern art is non-representative, regardless of whether it is abstract or non-abstract art.
Free art is neither mythical nor realistic, neither classic nor romantic. Homer's art can not be placed in any of these categories; it is truly transcending and Olympic because it transcends towards the Olympus. The Olympus, as conceived by Homer, is neither a fictional world in the midst of the real one nor a supramundane realm far above us, but the pinnacle set on top of this, our world. From the Olympus of free art, which is open to everybody, we look down into ourselves and into the world.
Colors and plasticity of Homer's style (compare with Milton) make it difficult to believe that he was blind; and yet, every reading of the Iliad or the Odyssey again suggests this possibility. Only a blind man, one feels, is so completely alone in the world with nothing to stand on but his own being, and only in blindness can there develop a visionary power which will gather the whole world around one man who becomes its veritable center.
Homer's hero is Man. His heroes, Achilles and Ulysses, are metaphors for man, not symbols -- as Adam in Christian speculation, or as Dante, who is his own hero and at the same time a symbol for man, or as the Ulysses of Joyce. They are single individuals, full personalities whose lives form the topic of the two epic poems. They are the central metaphors out of which all other metaphors are developed into a web of consistent composition. The tragedy of Achilles' early death is enhanced by not showing it; death is always present in Achilles' life, in his brooding and raging. Achilles is absolutely alone because he is doomed, doomed by his own free decision. This free decision forces the predestined order of moira (necessity) of Greek myth (as well as the closed cosmological order of Greek metaphysics) wide open; we do not know whether Homer himself invented this or whether mythical stories before him had already indicated this possibility. The figure of Ulysses makes the former alternative more probable. In any case, the non-dependence of both Achilles and Ulysses on necessity and fate is the reason why they were neglected in Greek tragedy; and even if Homer did not altogether invent their freedom of decision, he chose them as his heroes for that reason.
Achilles' choice was for a short life, with the opportunity of bestowing upon it an eternal significance (which is the Greek understanding of fame), worthy to be forever praised by poets. In the Odyssey Homer clearly shows the greatness of this decision against a long, happy existence without special significance. Here Ulysses meets Achilles in Hades: Achilles knows that it is better, in a sense, to be alive as a miserable slave on earth than to be the lifeless shadow of a great man in the world of the dead. A similar decision occurs in the Odyssey when Ulysses refuses to become the immortal husband of the nymph Calypso -- almost a blasphemy for Greek religious feeling which admired and envied its gods for their immortality. Ulysses' reason is different; he had already defied Poseidon, the god of the seas, when he insisted on establishing his own identity. Ulysses chose to remain himself, human and mortal, with the possibility of free self-determination outside of and above everything else.
Homer places Achilles in the middle of world events which happen around him so that he may have the opportunity to do his one great deed: defeat Hector and win victory for the Greeks. There he sits in his tent, the center of everything that goes on, the fighting gods above him and the fighting men around him, he himself almost motionless, imprisoned within himself. A prisoner of his own self-chosen destiny, he has also become the center of himself so that it seems unlikely that he will be able to break through his lonely brooding and undertake the one great deed for which he has doomed himself. Only the death of his friend, Patroclos, breaks the spell and draws him out of himself. Not Ulysses but Achilles is the great sufferer in Homer; Achilles suffers and rages, Ulysses endures and prevails. With one single decision, Achilles has designed his whole life and its end; he acts in the world as though he acted from beyond the grave. He anticipated his own death and now time stands still around him, and space is reduced to the space within himself. Everything that goes on around him in the space which is the world contradicts him and almost mocks him. And the same is true for the time of the others, which is absolutely separated from his own predictably limited time. Between the infinite time of the gods and the absolutely limited time of Achilles lies the time of the mortals around him, which has an end but an end that no man foreknows. Because he has chosen the shortest span of life, Achilles has become the opposite of the gods. In a sense, Homer puts him above the gods of Greek myth, who are, as it were, condemned to immortality and therefore cannot prove eternal courage like Achilles.