The experience of understanding the essence of art and artistic creativity (considering S.S. Neretina's study of Goethe's tragedy "Faust")

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

In a new book for me, presented by the author, by Svetlana Neretina, "No word is better than another. Philosophy and Literature" there is a short story under such an unusual title "Goethe: When Faust Died, or From Word to Deed-a Ghost." I was doubly captivated by this novel: both by the analysis of Goethe's work and even more by deep considerations about art and artistic creativity. Since I published a book this year where I discussed the nature of art, I wanted to compare our ideas. Naturally, I will start with Svetlana Sergeevna. The first thing that caught my eye, even when I was reading the Preface, was the reliance on the concept of St. Augustine and Severin Boethius, in which, quite in the spirit of early Christian consciousness, creativity is interpreted as a process of transition ("transmutation", an alchemist would later say) from the content revealed only to God to the sounds of words, opening the way to concrete expressions, people and things.

"Translating," writes Neretina, "the Latin verbum as a word ("In the beginning there was a Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"), we understood and understand this Word as the ancient Greek Logos. The Latins who translated the Bible seemed to be more sensitive to this "Word", translating it as verbum, a sound tremor, a tremor of sound that changed an inexpressible, unpronounceable, silent Word. From this Word came what can be called the beginning: the resulting mixed unstructured hum, under the pressure of an intentional increasing creative force divided into diffuse sounds, sprouted out as ambiguous and already understandable sound combinations."  ^{[1, p. 27]}  

Svetlana Sergeevna quotes this position more than once, so that the thought arises that she fully shares the corresponding views of St. Augustine. "Augustine," she explains, "produced the Word Verbum from verberare, which means "to tremble" and "to amaze" either the hearing or the air. This, in his opinion, could have been changed in the process of pronouncing verum-true, or by combining two syllables…Augustine, in his treatise On Dialectics, collected ? correctly-incorrectly ? all the interpretations that went around in his time, the tropes of the word verbum, the beginning of the creation of that world that was new and unique, i.e., a primarily poetic creation, a work of art in which we participate and to which we are tied by lightning, as Heidegger used to say, of the divine, obliging us to take part in a poetic conversation as in a conversation related to history."  ^{[1, pp. 27-28]}  

Somewhat surprised, I asked Neretina by email: "It turns out that Augustine or Boethius are almost our contemporaries, they think more correctly than many of our philosophers. But they thought differently than you or me. Or do you think like Augustine?". To which Svetlana Sergeevna replied to me: "I think it is. Philosophy is alien to time in this sense, times are simultaneous in it: Hegel, and with him McTaggart are right ? we have different phenomena, different attitudes, different concerns, but the concern about the meaning is the same, we can ignore the truth ? this makes her neither hot nor cold, but we continue to COMPARE, which means we have to grasp something from there, not to mention the desire to fasten everything to ourselves. Another thing is that the language meanings are unrecognizable and it is possible that we are busy and see completely different beginnings, but they remain beginnings ? they make sense."

After thinking about it, I had to agree: am I not myself proposing a reconstruction of science or art, or technology, claiming that this was actually the case in history, that I correctly recreated its course. However, at the same time, I still admit that this story is my "pseudo?genetic" reconstruction (no more, but no less).    

I will return to Neretina's interpretation of art and creativity (it was "primarily a poetic creation, a work of art") and express my ideas on this, but in the meantime I will note that the position formulated by Neretina refers to two topics at once ? artistic creativity and cultural creation in the Christian worldview (explaining the creation of a new world out of nothing, although as from nothing ? from God) and in this work I will be interested mainly in the first.

If the first, considered above, characteristic of art and creativity in Neretina's work was associated with medieval, Christian culture, then the second ? with the New European. Here we discuss, on the one hand, how one can understand the independent existence of artistic reality (works of art do not depict or express the external or internal world, but are precisely an independent artfully constructed objectivity, eventfulness, life that are in certain relations with this world), on the other hand, that art is a kind of otherness and the form of human life and personality.

"The unity of life and poetry, the understanding of life as poetry ? this "display" is literature.  <...> For a poet cannot distort anything if he is a poet. He gives birth to a new work with his poetics and should not be guided by a folklore sample, especially to forbid the hero to give up something if he does not want to destroy the poetic logic. <...> a man born or created can become a man only after passing the art of art ... <...> all the artistry and beauty of a work lies not in the idea itself (so, according to Fet, Hegel argued. ? V.R.), but in its embodiment, in the idea of an individual, tangible image. <...> However, we are not talking about a universal logical point of view, but about a New European one, because above it was said about a different understanding of truth and beauty in the Middle Ages. <...> But the point is not even in this, but in the ability to conceptualize ("grasp") the essence of a thing and thus show the way of its manifestation <...> Remembering that the artist presents to us not a raw squabble with reality, but its reflection in his own magic lantern, we will cease to be surprised ...<...> Euphorion and the Homunculus (Faust's heroes. ? V.R.) are complementary to each other, and without this complementarity, a new image of culture is unthinkable. They are superimposed on one another ? reality on fiction, imagination and rational project, Science and Poetry, but with the condition of transforming everything into poetry." ^{[2, c. 270, 275? 285, 288, 289, 290, 294]}

The third level of characterization of artistic creativity and art is based in Svetlana Sergeevna's work directly on the analysis of Goethe's tragedy "Faust". It shows that the features of the poetic reality of "Faust" were largely determined by Goethe's personality, in which the most diverse contents of Modern European culture converged, colliding, contradicting and denying ? word and deed, with the priority of the second, science and art, faith and its denial (irony), antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern times, the desire for immortality and the understanding of its impossibility, the pursuit of virtue and violence, a mental and imaginary life outside of time in different cultures and a finite life in its own time.    

"The author's idea," writes Neretina, "to live several lives, different lives of different cultures, inevitably faces the need to live at least one (with a certain arsenal of means developed by civilization, rolled up in mentality, in logical concepts), i.e. to die. Glorification of activity ("O active spirit, how close to you", "In the beginning there was a thing!") as the fundamental principles of life, tragedy permeates from beginning to end. <...> If in the Middle Ages man was aware of himself as both god and creature together, and omnipotent and insignificant, then here ? in this tragic consciousness ? the balance disappeared. An abyss of infirmity opens up before Faust…Only in this epoch, a person caught between the abysses of the past and the future without relying on heaven or hell could set himself the problem of suicide again <...> We only note that here we mean not mysticism, not mysterious adventures of the soul in the afterlife, but a lot of cultural lives in which the author places his hero, forcing him to go through various stages of personality formation (medieval, ancient ...), to lose various options of actions and actions (the story with Margarita, Elena), to realize these stages as an independent being and to develop his own special, different from others path of personal formation. Fantasy, finally... culture is always ironic in relation to itself. Goethe shows how Faust carried the burden of his own time through all times, revealing himself on this edge of time" ^{[2, pp. 283-284, 297-298, 300-301, 302]}

Now I can proceed to the presentation of my own views on artistic creativity and art. As an empirical material, I will cite a poem that I wrote in 2008 to my wife on Valentine's Day.

I had a strange dream,That we both died,

And like birds light

They ascended into the heavens.

In the shining halls

They appeared before the Lord,

There are guardian angels there

Voices were heard.

"Repent, my travelers" -

The Creator said calmly.

And a thick book of destinies

I took it out of the locker.

"Sins of varying severity

A lot has accumulated in my life" -

Page by page He

He leafed thoughtfully.

And choirs of angels sang,

So scary and beautiful.

Listening to us and the Lord,

Inclining his gaze to the floor.

That we're like at a concert

They listened involuntarily,

Forgetting why hurriedly

They came to this city.

We woke up from the voice

The guardian angel.

"Let me put in a word" -

He asked the Lord.

The Creator nodded affably,

He slammed the mournful book,

And a beautiful head

On clouds inclined."I'm sorry, Heavenly Father,

We do not deny our sins.

We know about them ourselves,

We suffer and blame

Myself for indifference,

For those who have been forgotten,

Who was not helped

Although they were with him.

But maybe worthy

We are still descents,

Because they lived honestly

In patience and hard work.

They managed to raise the children,

Although they are, of course,

Well, not really, of course,

How I would like to–Ah!"

"Go with God, children,  -

The Creator answered the angel, -

Love washes away sins,

Like pure water.

Did you love your parents,

Their children and grandchildren,

Did you love each other,

You have always regretted.

An angel took us by the hands

I put it on the cloud.

It's like an air balloon

It floated across the sky.

"Now you are angels yourself" -

The keeper said sadly.

And, spreading the feathers,

We lay down on the wing.

February 14, 2008

Why was this poem chosen? It's not hard to guess: I composed it myself, I know my wife well, so it was difficult for me to make a mistake in choosing the plot and that I can easily reconstruct how my wife could read and experience the poem presented. It is with the latter that I will begin.

 First of all, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that individual words and sentences of the poem were easy to understand, but they only introduced the events of artistic reality. These events formed the story: a dream, death, ascent to heaven, singing-concert of angels, confession before God, forgiveness, transformation into angels. At the same time, the story and its events for the reader (my wife was the first, then her friend and other friends) were perceived quite organically, although it was fiction, but the journey to heaven and further twists and turns did not cause doubts, they were plausible in the logic of the poem, I wanted to say, my wife joked, but how else. How was this organic, fantastic, nevertheless, special nature achieved? Not only the organization of words played a role, but also knowledge of the genre, following the rhythm, stanzas, understanding images, themes, dramaturgy ? all this is called "expressive means" in art studies. My wife is not an art critic, but she knows this concept from me.

The second main way for a poet to create organicity and naturalness (I am a philosopher, but I acted in this situation as a poet) is to confirm some events or their aspects by others, which is created by the skillful organization of words, sentences, and the use of expressive means. For example, a strange dream confirms an equally strange journey to heaven, getting to heaven ? meeting with angels and God, repentance and confession before the Lord, as well as forgiveness of sins ? the transformation of heroes, etc. Further, the rhythm supports and confirms the organization of stanzas, stanzas beginning and ending themes, themes of the general history.

Perhaps the third way is an opportunity for the reader to realize himself, to experience the events that excite him. This also includes the interest from a trip provided by a poetic work. The themes of the poem concerned our common life, its successes and failures in relation to children, relationships with each other, so they could not but hurt, not to excite my wife. And a little trip, and where ? straight to heaven to the Lord ? can not entertain.

In this case, the wife understood and easily read the genre, convention (a gift for Valentine's Day, fantasy) and the plot of the poem. But this does not always happen, here are two small poems, separated by many years, which were well understood by my wife, but she found it difficult to tell what it was, however, and I, although I wrote it myself.

In the forest, the road goes into the distance,And my soul is sad.

And there is longing on your face,

How cold your hand is.

You're slipping away like in a dream,

I must have dreamed about you?

Or did I have this dream,

In which I'm in love with you.

In the forest, the road is three versts long.

Your eyebrows are flying bridges.

            --- . ---

Early morning, walking alone,

I met a gentleman on the way.

With a huge great Dane, black as night.

The dog does not want to talk to me.

He brings a stick, barks, growls.

The sleepy owner, smokes, is silent.

Then I walk more than one:

The dog is in front, and the gentleman is with me.

The sun has risen, we are going to the east.

The owner turns the leash in his hand.

  Now I will tell you how I composed the first poem, i.e. we will talk about some of the features of artistic creativity.

Usually, on my birthday or some other holidays, I compose a poem to my wife. So in this case I decided not to deviate from the custom. In some ways, this situation resembles the one described by Svetlana Sergeevna: there is an invisible and unconscious plot specifically and you need a "Word" as a poem built on the basis of this plot. By the way, I thought briefly, if I have a poetic talent, then God will help, I don't know how. But in any case, I am already charged with nothing yet, pure energy, an idea and a desire to write a poem to the woman I love. How can one "conceptualize ("grasp") the essence of a thing and show the way it manifests", how to "translate an idea into an individual, perceptible image"? Yeah, you need an idea, a concept, on which you can then string everything else.

At this point, I involuntarily recall the task that was solved by my former student, currently a well-known psychologist and head of the musical movement of the Heptahor group Aida Aylamayan, when she had to stage a performance at the Moscow Action festival in 2005, a performance of Scriabin's "Poem of Ecstasy" by several free dance groups.  "When," wrote Aida, "I was looking for a "move" to Scriabin, I was actually solving a number of problems. This is really a “move”, that is, it was necessary to find some idea that would allow all these tasks to be “assembled”, somehow connected in one fell swoop… In the case of Scriabin, it was not a moment, not a separate fragment or some kind of sensation, but suddenly the whole work was seen as a clearly developed, consistent movement of thought, as a symbolic expression of some theosophical (and not only theosophical) ideas, as a very thoughtful and precisely calculated musical form with a clear structure. And this structure was heard and indicated, although at that time I had not yet got acquainted with the score of the “Poem of Ecstasy”. And this structure turned out to be surprisingly suitable for the task at hand - to include different groups in the action, since the themes and parts that differ in nature were clearly distinguished, bearing obviously different energies and spiritual contents. The comparison of these energies, representing the universe of cosmic and spiritual forces as a whole, with dance, with movement peculiar to different directions, unexpectedly revealed that free dance in its various manifestations, plans and experiences also represents this universe of human, and maybe not only human existence. The idea was found.  And then I thought, or rather, I felt that the living expression of these elements inherent in each of the presented directions (musical movement, rhythmics, Alekseevskaya gymnastics, eurythmy, buto) (these are all different directions of musical movement. ? V.R.) in their struggle and fusion, opposition and complementarity will be a real action that will give a feeling the mysteries as an event taking place here are the events of the unification of people in dance." (cited in ^{[3, pp. 334, 335-336]})

 Remembering these reflections, I realized what to do and immediately came to a decision. I have a book dedicated to the work and personality of Emanuel Swedenborg ^[8]. There is such a plot in his teaching: every person is a spirit; the one who loves good after death (this is not even death, but transfiguration) becomes an angel and ascends to heaven to serve God, and those who gravitate to evil become demons and descend into hell. Why not, I thought, imagine that my wife and I died and became angels, having undergone a transformation after confession to God? Well, yes, we had such a dream, and we are not just angels like Swedenborg, but after confession. He began to build reality, at the same time coordinating events with each other, supporting one another, strengthening with rhythm and stanzas. I chose the rhythm and rhymes after several trials, and played them all the time, repeating the same thing to myself many times. It was difficult to unfold the planned long story, so I broke it into separate fragments, starting and ending each time with a separate theme and stanzas. To make everything more convincing and realistic, I came up with a concert of angels, filled the confession with content, introduced a guardian angel into the game. I tried to see everyone as alive and familiar, that's how I came to the image of God, who put his head on the clouds, or my wife and I as birds ("we lay down on the wing").

And through all the topics and events, I carried out my problems, which then, as well-known to both of us, my wife easily read out. When Neretina writes, "that the artist presents to us not a raw squabble with reality, but its reflection in his own magic lantern," she is absolutely right. The sketch in the last poem can be understood not just as a description of a morning walk, but its perception through the prism of years, disappointments and forced humility, the transition from the mirage of night dreams to the realism and everyday life of the day.   

The means that I used in constructing this poem can be divided into two classes: some (expressive means and a script taken from Swedenborg) are not mine, they belong to culture, and others (the same script, but already as an idea of plot construction, artistic images, themes, words and sentences) are the result my creativity. On the one hand, I realized myself by discussing the problems of our life together, on the other hand, artistic culture acted through me.

In Neretina, it is approximately clear how poetic reality is created: the divine substance passes through sound into another, which is why the artistic construction is an independent thing and object. And how do I, in my system of views, explain that words and other poetic means allow us to fully live in the world of artistic reality? For example, in the above poem, we rise into the sky and fly. How to understand this, do we really believe that we have become birds? It seems not, we understand that they are not birds. And at the same time we are flying. I remember that as a child I did not understand for a long time when they read to me that Vasilisa the Wise hit the ground, turned into a dove and flew away. And then I had a dream that I was flying like a bird. I woke up and began to think. It turns out that you can fly only in a dream ^[6]. And Vasilisa the Wise flew, but in a fairy tale.  Since then I realized that there may be things in a fairy tale that are impossible in ordinary life.

Now I can clarify my childish decision. In order to be able to think and feel the things discussed here, for example, flights or transformation, it is necessary to create (discover) a new reality. There was the reality of ordinary life, now there is the reality (world) of dreams, the world of art, the world of games, the world of communication then, starting from school, the world of thinking and science, etc. These worlds (realities) have their own objects and events, for example, there is an ordinary sun or moon in the sky, and in art they are unusual, not only because we create them ourselves (we talk about the sun, draw it, shoot it at sunset), but also because such a sun is very different from the usual one (can talk, do what we want, be in the stomach of a bad crocodile) ^{[5; 7; 9]}.

At the same time, do not be mistaken that, they say, ordinary reality is real, and the listed ones are illusory. The ordinary world is as semiotic and illusory as the world of art. Here, for example, is how the eclipse was understood in the archaic culture.  "In the language of tupi,? writes E. Taylor, ?a solar eclipse is expressed by the words: "the jaguar ate the sun." The full meaning of this phrase is still revealed by some tribes by the fact that they shoot burning arrows to drive away a ferocious beast from its prey. On the northern mainland, some savages also believed in a huge sun-eating dog, while others shot arrows into the sky to protect their luminaries from imaginary enemies attacking them. But next to these prevailing concepts, there are others. Karaites, for example, imagined the eclipsed moon hungry, sick or dying…The Hurons considered the moon to be sick and performed their usual sharivari with shooting and howling dogs to heal her" ^{[10, p. 228]}. 

Note that archaic people in this case act as if they really see the Jaguar. But there isn't one. Which means, no. Not in the physical sense, from the point of view of a natural-scientific reality about which savages know nothing. But "jaguar" is defined by language, more precisely by a "semiotic scheme", and in this sense it exists in the consciousness of an archaic person no less fully than things of the ordinary world. Another thing is that since the original things and events turn out to be in different realities and are included in different actions and practices, they begin to diverge and change greatly, even beyond recognition.

In previous cultures, it was possible to attribute stable characteristics to the reality of art (imitation, expression, the beautiful, the sublime, classicism, romanticism, etc.), but in ours it no longer works, just as it is impossible for the creator to find a world where he can live in harmony with himself. Faust, Neretina writes, "survived three destinies in different epochs, but did not take root anywhere. Except in the unknown future, what Fet, following Schopenhauer, calls pessimism. In the twentieth century, this idea was repeated by Goethe N.A.Berdyaev, emphasizing that "culture has always been a great failure of life," believing that its meaning is revealed beyond its limits." ^{[2, p. 301]}                 

It is quite natural that in the twentieth century, postmodernism became the leading form of awareness of the reality of art. On the one hand, it is certainly destructive (deconstruction, irony, ridicule, rejection of meta?narratives, etc.; especially "applied postmodernism" ^[4]), but on the other hand, it gives the artist freedom, independence from frozen aesthetic norms. The influence, and that of the "soft power" type, is shifting in the other direction. What, for example, did the author get in his analysis of poetic activity? There are three main determinants: personality (solving its problems), culture (expressive means, borrowed ideas), individual techniques and inventions (in fact, the same three factors determined Goethe's creativity according to Neretina). But after all, personalities, if it's just a personality, are different for everyone, culture is understood differently today, and individual techniques and inventions should be unique, everyone has their own. In this situation, it is not difficult to assume that the realities of art for individual artists (writers, composers) should also be different. Which, of course, does not exclude some common features.

In conclusion, a few words about another aspect of art, communicative and social ^{[7; 9]}. I was once told that my talent as a poet had died. Why did I die when I have a desire to write poetry? But I really am not a poet, because I do not do this professionally (unlike philosophy and science), I do not publish in literary collections, I do not try to publish my poems specifically, and there are not very many of them, and several people read them. Someone might say, what does it matter if you get good poems? For art, it is huge, because it is a sphere of sociality that opposes ordinary life and work, or the same dreams. If in ordinary life or at work a person is absorbed in his activities and communicates with others only out of necessity, then in the field of art he can switch to himself, communicate by interests, observe and think on free topics, create something not for the sake of need. Unlike dreams, works of art still need to be created, and in such a way that others understand them, so that they become interested in them. Unlike a book that we absolutely need to read, for example, for business, we will read poetry only if we have an interest in them, and we will immediately postpone the work if it is not ours or does not go. The sphere of art differs in culture from the game, from communication, and from science. As an independent sphere, art presupposes its creators and its users (readers, viewers, listeners), its languages and discourses, its intermediaries (critics, philosophers of art, art historians) who help creativity and understanding. A poem or a story that is not included in these complex relationships and structures, which I have barely outlined, exist only for their author, but not for art and culture. They are potentially there for art, suddenly they will be published and attention will be paid to them, but they are not really there. However, we exist for ourselves in two ways ? we are, and we often are not, as self-aware and understanding how we really live and what we are.       

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