III. Homer (1954)
(Printer Friendly Version | Back to Lecture Transcripts)Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Next
My late friend Hermann Broch, being a very ethical thinker himself, once tried to introduce an ethical concept of good and evil into art in order to try to persuade us that kitsch (phony art) is the evil in art. But this is hopeless. In art there is no good and evil because as soon as kitsch comes into a work of art it is not a work of art any more. As long as art is art it is good by definition. It is impossible, so to speak, to serve evil with art. Art cannot be made into a servant of evil, because as Holderlin said, it is the one occupation that can never harm a man. Rather art is an Olympos which man enters in order to be free from all earthbound conditions. When Homer created Olympos as both an artistic and religious concept what he really did was to create a place we can all enter and within which we all can live in order to be free from all of the shackles and fetters of the human condition. To build a world completely in the imagination is easy in a way, and that is because the world shown to us by art and built by art is a world entirely free of contradictions. What is the basic contradiction that makes for the creative predicament of man? It is the fact that being and meaning are not identical. That with every being we encounter in the world we have to struggle, like Jacob with the angel, in order to get meaning out of it and to put meaning into it. In art on the other hand we have the great hope of mankind; namely, that this entire question never arises at all. The dualistic predicament of man is entirely transformed, because in every work of art meaning is being and being is meaning. They are identical to such a degree that they can never be separated.
How is this identity produced? It is produced in a way that enables being to be brought about by meaning and to exist only for the sake of meaning. In a work of art there can be no being, no patch of color, no word, nothing that is not there for the sake of meaning and only for the sake of meaning. This being comes about by meaning, because man has created it for meaning. Otherwise it would not be there. In every other aspect of his world building whether in pain or death, or in crime, or in glory, man struggles and performs his tasks between these two polarities, but in art these dual polarities become one. Art is like a flag that we raise in order to show to ourselves and to the world what we can do but by showing it we also signify our inner destination and inner will to make meaning identical with being, and to unify, through the imagination, these two realms of human life absolutely. The eternal task that man sets for himself is already proclaimed by art and it is also the eternal hope of man whenever he turns towards art and enters into the Olympos given to him by art, that he shall return with fresh strength, fortified by this great hope that he can decide, at any moment of his life, to try to put meaning into being. In this struggle between life and art man becomes like another figure of Greek myth, the giant Antaeus, who wrestles with Heracles until Heracles finally discovers that if he is to defeat the giant then he must strangle him in the air, because whenever this giant touches the earth, which is his mother, he gains new strength. Art is our mother who makes us gain new strength. As soon as we touch art we gain the strength to continue the struggle between being and meaning for all eternity, because it is the basic condition for man's freedom.
This is where the element of form is decisive for it seems that the artist, being beyond necessity (as no other being in the world can be) and therefore, in principle at least, absolutely free, is nevertheless unable to be free, because he does not experience this conflict between meaning and being which as we have said is the basic condition for freedom. Well, he does have it. He has it in creating form. The form that we see in every work of art has to be brought about by an inner struggle which is only once again, the struggle of every man. The technical details of it, the suffering entailed by it, we know well enough, because we have heard it described by the artists themselves. The over-sensibility that leads them astray again and again, the mastership of form acquired only after years of hard labor - all that this really shows is that the artist is only a man, but art is not. Art is somehow superhuman. In art there is magic, something unexplainable, and in art alone there will always remain magic, because magic has its origin in ritual and myth (before man discovered the magic of science which has become even more superstitious and harmful). The only place where magic is never harmful is in art and in art magic remains alive.
Immanuel Kant, one of the most decisive thinkers of mankind, living in an age where he could experience, at least from afar, a few of the greatest artists - Goethe, Bach, Handel, perhaps even Beethoven - this man wanted the term "genius" to be reserved entirely for the artist and for the artist alone. He was of course aware that philosophy and the art of reasoning (where he did his greatest work) are creative capabilities of the utmost importance and he knew exactly what science is, nevertheless he wanted to reserve the term genius only for the artist because he realized that even given the best philosophy of art (and his was by no means the best) there would always remain this unexplainable something in art and it was precisely this that was magic. That means it can never be entirely understood and this is what distinguishes it from the other creative capabilities of man which are in principle understandable. Here Kant unites with Plato and I am speaking now not of the Plato who rejected art for political and theological reasons, but the Plato who loved art and who said "this can never be explained... the gods have given it to you... Apollo made you, and now you have been slain by the madness of Apollo". This magic of artistic creativeness which ultimately no one can explain to us remains unexplainable even to the artist himself. That there comes a time when he suddenly starts to wonder "How did I do that?", "How could I do it?", "Where did this come from and how did I hit upon this solution?". There is a painter who is a friend of mine who once experienced this in the middle of his work and who said to me "do you see this red?... do you see how it wants to come through here?" Already he was obeying form. Form was working through him and had partly even started to work him. This inspiration that Plato called the madness of Apollo and which works its way blindly through the world always being guided by an inner eye that cannot be controlled is the only form of sheer and pure intuition which can never be permitted in philosophy, because as Aristotle once said "ignorance is no argument", and Kant knew exactly how dangerous this intuition can be when we appeal to it as an argument and into what errors it can lead us. That is the negative reason why he wanted to reserve the term genius for the artist, because as an inspired being, a being who is blind in life save only for his intuition, blindly being led by Apollo, blindly following his inner eye which is the eye of form, is the nearest thing to what we could mean by a genius.
This togetherness of myth and art consists in the need of man, first for myth, but now the need, the bitter need, of free men for art. We need this Olympos, this strengthening force within ourselves. We need this renewed hope that only art can bring, the hope that we can put meaning into being and force being to yield meaning. We have always needed it, even in the earliest times, because man finding himself in a world full of fear, not knowing himself, not knowing any answers, not even knowing yet how to ask questions, could only create myth as an absolute belief and superstition. This is understandable, because only a philosophical mind can ask questions. All of the thinkers we are considering made the discovery that man is a being who can ask relevant questions, because only with questions can the free performance of the mind start. Only through the performance of reasoning can man obtain answers to the questions he asks. They can never be ultimate answers but at least they can be clearer answers perhaps than those ever given before.
The situation of man in pre-historic time is very child-like. By this I do not mean to say there is such a thing as a childhood or old- age of humanity. These are all biological notions that come out of the 19th century and they are all nonsense. Mankind does not grow old. Rather what I mean to say (and here I believe the results of modern Psychology bear me out) is that there is a certain similarity between the mental states of children and the mental states of primitive peoples. This similarity is certainly there. As children we all begin by asking questions such as "What is that? How is that? Why is that?". We are never given an answer to the question "why?" and so we forget it, except for some children who are stubborn enough to persist in saying "But Papa, you didn't give me the reason why. You just told me how and what but you didn't say why!". This is the question of telos, of teleology, and if a child persists in asking this question he may be driven into the situation where he has to become a philosopher, because there is no other way to approach this question. Other children who are easily diverted by the questions of "what" and "how" may become scientists or doctors, because they do not feel compelled to know why something is so. This is all well and good but they will never be philosophers. Then there will always be a strange child, who never asks any questions. If he sees something he just volunteers an explanation by telling a story. The story is usually completely crazy and has nothing to do with the thing in question. Rather it has to do only with the experience of this child with that thing, and this performance of volunteering an answer, even before any question has been raised, this childish mind that will remain childish, even into old age, is the artist's mind. Never being able to ask a real question, because he is never hit by a real question, never seeking for answers because always he sees the world full of answers. Wherever he looks an answer is given to him, wherever he stands he hears an answer. He sees a relation, a metaphor gets hold of him and there he is in inspiration, and inspiration does not allow for questions or answers. Suddenly he is beyond reason as well as beyond good and evil, because the artistic state of inspiration in the sense I am using it begins where the inner eye starts to lead and all of the outer senses come under the command of the inner eye so the world is sensed in all of its meaning and then this meaning is put into the work of art.
We know very little about this side of the artistic experience and most of what we do know comes from philosophers who were themselves artists (and there are almost only two who were - Plato and Nietzsche). It is Nietzsche who gave the best description of this status, this rapture of the mind, which also frightened him, because he felt it was endangering him as a philosopher and that it might cost him his reason. He said:
"Do people today have any idea what poets of the
great ages called inspiration? I have a little
experience of it. There you are in the middle of
a turmoil and here is a place where everything
comes in the form of a metaphor that bows down
before you, and on the back of that metaphor I
can ride to every truth."
Yes, to every truth, because art taken by itself is also beyond truth. Truth is given in art but it is given to the senses in the form of beauty, because beauty is truth forever revealed and concealed at once. We know it and then we do not know it. We feel we are in touch with it and then we discover we cannot grasp it and use it. This truth goes into us, it reinforces and enriches us, it gives back to us our possibilities of experience, but we can never grasp it, because every work of art is infinitely interpretable. Every new age will interpret it differently and every person will interpret it differently. It mobilizes our experience and only in the light of our own experience can we interpret it, because it is not only we who judge a work of art. A work of art also judges us. This is what Goethe meant when he said:
"You are like the spirit you understand."
In art that is true. We are like the spirit of the work of art we understand. That is why taste plays such a tremendous role in art and why I always recommend to psychologists that if you really want to get at the root of a man's mental capabilities just go to a museum with him and listen to what he likes and what he doesn't like. Just let him tell you and you will see.
We grow with works of art. That is why it is so recommendable to live with certain great works of art (for instance Homer) again and again. Ten years from now you will see that it is entirely new to you, that it reveals new things to you, because you have put new meaning into it. You have gained more experience of your own and that experience enriches the experience of the work of art. This inter- relationship can never really be controlled, and that is the fourth miracle of art that it makes this kind of living participation possible. That our mind can work with the artist and his art in such a way as to make the artist immortal and to give ourselves a degree of human immortality.
This child, then, who can never find the time to ask questions, is already like the artist and the artist is very much like this child, not yet being able to ask questions in the philosophical sense but rather always having immediate answers in order to fence off the infinite fear of finding himself lost in the world. It is very significant that this situation of man being lost in the world was discovered in its real depths by Soren Kierkegaard, because only through nihilistic thinking could a philosopher bring himself into a position of such utter aloneness that he suddenly realizes that this is the most basic fear of every living man. That every man is thrown into a world not knowing where he came from or where he is going, and then suddenly to find this world crowding in on him leaving him with this tremendous infinite fear. And Kierkegaard thought that no reason could help us, that only by leaping into faith, could we escape this basic anxiety which existed for all men during mythical times and which now is the fundamental predicament of man. That is how the discoveries of myth were made and that is also why the first creative capability of man is the artistic capability.
Our first mode of survival is in art with its infinite possibility of relating every unknown thing to every other unknown thing, believing that we are making the world more known through it and more trustworthy because of this great power inherent in the metaphor. This is how the great world pictures of myth came about and although it is true they are still works of art, they are not works of art for art's sake but rather, to use the expression, clumsy works of art, art that exists primarily to put a veil of maya over the world in order to show man it is reliable and no longer threatening. Primitive art gives to man the borrowed courage to be able to endure both the world and his own situation in the world. This capacity to make man feel more sure of himself is first given by art, but art in its primitive aspect must not be considered the whole of myth. Into it must flow all of the other creative capabilities of man. Every myth we encounter is built out of a conglomeration of pre-philosophical, religious, political, and even erotic thinking. The rudiments of all of them are there and each myth is built into a structure which cannot be taken apart, because there is a center which holds it all together which we will never fully understand and that center is precisely the artistic power of the metaphor which rules everything. It is through this mythical structure in all of its creativeness that man first survives and gets primitive courage.
The men whom we now consider all lived in an age where myth breaks down and they are the ones who break it. Now every human creative capability comes into its own and must show its own value. It is here that Homer comes, breaking the power of Greek myth in order to show the pure form of the creative capability of art. In Homer art emerges out of myth just as philosophy emerges out of myth in Laotze, Buddha, Heraclitus, and Socrates; just as religious thinking emerges out of myth in Abraham and erotic thinking in Jesus of Nazareth, and just as political thinking emerges out of Solon. They all come and build a new system of relationships in freedom and which involve all of the creative capabilities of man. Involve them, that is, not in a rigid form where they are just a conglomeration of capacities that never can develop and grow, but rather in eternal questioning and understanding.
Myth is art obeyed and art is myth consumed for man. It is the eternal possibility of creating myth again and again, and it is this transformation which we will now examine in Homer.