Module Paper, 2015, KCL, London - Art as a Symbol. Mania, Expression and Immediateness.

ART AS A SYMBOL MANIA, EXPRESSION AND IMMEDIATENESS ‘Language is for philosophy that which is for music and for painting: an incorrect means of representation.’ Novalis. Fragmente. fr. 59 INTRODUCTION

The problematic that this paper would like to address is to try to trace the conditions and elements, if any, that constitute art in its proper sense as opposed to a mere divertissement. The thesis here sustained is that art is such inasmuch as its expressions are symbols i.e. ‘exteriorities’, to use Hegelian language, that open an access to the spectator to the same Erlebnis, which has produced, through the artist, the ‘work of art’ itself. The whole point of this paper will be to set up the co-ordinates to understand how this Erlebnis should be understood and what are the features that make art a symbol. The following questions will be the guidelines to this essay: Does art have a purpose? If it has one, for art to correspond to its purpose can it behold inside itself any kind of Erlebnis i.e. any experience whatsoever? What does it mean that art is a symbol of an Erlebnis? What it has to be understood with the notion of ‘symbol’? These questions structure the following enquiry around the problem of art as opposed to a mere divertissement. The topic is vast and difficult to tackle in a limited space, however a lot of the issues can be resolved trying to inhabit the perspective of a philosophy of expression, that is, to conceive the ‘world as expression’, as developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Colli in his work Filosofia dell’Espressione1. This entails pinning down the notion of ‘expression’ which in this case will assume a very complicated and stratified ‘meaning’: so I will give the key elements of Giorgio Colli’s thought, which will firstly include a consistent amount of purely theoretical considerations starting from Kant and Schopenhauer, and secondly a passage through his intense dialogue with Nietzsche, thus highlighting his critiques to Nietzsche’s understanding of the Apollo-Dionysus opposition, and then I will conclude attempting a definition of the notion of ‘symbol’ and hence underlining certain features that art should have to be such. Furthermore, poetical texts in general will be here considered in the same way as if they were philosophical essays, the claims of which should be taken seriously The corollary to this approach for a ‘definition’ of art is that ‘art’ becomes a parte ‘artist’ a technique (techne, ars) to induce Erlebnis and a parte ‘spectator’ a symbol i.e. a representationexpression that, as a support, opens to an access to such Erlebnis. PHILOSOPHY OF EXPRESSION

Colli conceives his philosophical contribution as a continuation, development and deepening of a line that goes from Kant, through Schopenhauer, to Nietzsche: indeed, all these thinkers produce a philosophical discourse that gravitates around a fundamental opposition i.e. thing-initself-appearance (Kant), will-representation (Schopenhauer) and Dionysus-Apollo (Nietzsche), then Colli adds his own opposition: immediateness-expression. Already, we can approximate an answer to the first two questions. The Erlebnis of which art should be a symbol is the Erlebnis of immediateness. Hence, art, in its highest sense, should be an expression of the Erlebnis of immediateness, and not of any state of consciousness or everyday experience. Then what does ‘immediateness’ mean? To answer this question it is necessary to reproduce some passages that bring to the conception of a philosophy of expression i.e. of a ‘world as expression’. 1

Giorgio Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione (Milano: Adelphi, 1969), 5-237.

Our only available data for our experience, thought and knowledge is the KantianSchopenhauerian representation (Vorstellung). Representation is the relation between subject and object: and neither of these terms can be thought outside the relation with the other. It is not possible, strictly speaking, to reduce one term to the other, that is, how on one side ‘idealism’ pretends, reducing everything to the subject (e.g. Hegel in his famous Vorwort to the Phänomenologie des Geistes where he says that the Substance has to be thought as a Subject), or how on the other side a naturalism, materialism or any positive ontology tries to reduce and derive the ‘subject’ from the ‘object’ par excellence i.e. nature or more broadly matter. On one hand, pretending to reduce the subject-object opposition to a ‘subject’, which generally is intended as a sort of activity, is intrinsically contradictory because anything which has been represented is ipso facto an object: es werde vor-gestellt, it is set in front as a Gegen-stand, something that stands against, thus one isn’t talking of the subject, but just of objects. Furthermore, the assumption that a certain bundle of representations is actually the bundle of representations that resolves totality, or better said, that that bundle of representations can be considered as the perspective of the absolute – the true perspective – falls, again, short because that subjectobject(representation) relation can be considered altogether as an object of another subject and so on falling into a regressus ad infinitum. Thereby, there isn’t the point, the absolute perspective, or more strictly speaking, as soon as it would be found it ceases to be such.2 At this height the theoretical turn of the philosophy of expression inserts itself. The philosophy of expression sets itself as a genetic foundation/explanation of the ‘world as representation’: it tries thus to overcome the problem of the ursprüngliche Teilung i.e. the original partition between the subject and the object, that, following Hölderlin, is uniquely produced by judgement, which separates what is ‘intimately’ unified ‘in the intellectual intuition’ – this unification is alluded with the term being (Sein). Such unification, however, can’t be expressed with the mere principle of identity A=A or I=I, indeed, even here this is uniquely possible because ‘I oppose myself to myself, I separated myself from myself and notwithstanding this separation I know myself as the same in the opposite…But in what sense as the same?...The I is, in fact, opposed to himself from another point of view. Identity is hence not an absolute unification of subject-object; thus identity isn’t = to the absolute being’.3 And also Novalis will retain the principle of identity an ambiguous expression of ‘that which is’, to recall Parmenides Peri Physeos, by writing: ‘The proposition a is a contains nothing but a positing, differentiating and combining. It is a philosophical parallelism. In order to make a more distinct, A is divided (analysed). The essence of identity can only be presented in an illusory proposition [Scheinsatz]. We abandon the identical in order to present it.’4 What has all this to do with our problem of expression and immediateness? And furthermore with art? The two passages taken from theoretical fragments of Hölderlin and Novalis both suggest that there is an intrinsic problem with the Darstellung (presentation) of totality, being or the identical: what seems to be its most immediate expression actually abandons what it is trying to See Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, I. La Rappresentazione, 5-17.; see also Arthur Schopenhauer, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. I-II”, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Arthur Hübscher, vol. II-III (Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1972), Book I, par. 7, 30-41, where Schopenhauer discusses the solutions his predecessors have suggested in trying to think the crucial problem of post-Kantian philosophy i.e. the Ursprüngliche Teilung, to use Hölderlin’s expression, S. writes at page 33 ‘in Wahrheit alles Objektive, schon als solches, durch das erkennende Subjekt, mit den Formen seines Erkennens, auf mannigfaltige Weise bedingt ist und sie zur Voraussetzung hat, mithin ganz verschwindet, wenn man das Subjekt wegdenkt. Der Materialismus ist also der Versuch, das uns unmittelbar Gegebene aus dem mittelbar Gegebenen zu erklären.’; and see Immanuel Kant. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (A+B) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag GmbH, 1998), Einleitung, A1. - ‘Erfahrung ist ohne Zweifel das erste Produkt, welches unser Verstand hervorbringt, indem er den rohen Stoff sinnlicher Empfindungen bearbeitet.’, in this breath-taking incipit of the 1781 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason all the ‘tension’ and struggle of the ‘subject’ is kept open because on one side it is a parte subject that experience is produced and on the other the rohen Stoff has to be assumed, together with its corresponding faculty of the Rezeptivität. For an interesting discussion on these themes see Massimo Cacciari. Dell’Inizio (Milano: Adelphi, 1990), Libro Primo. Critica dell’idea di Inizio. Parte Prima – L’Inizio Logico, 17-25. 3 In Friedrich Hölderlin. Scritti di Estetica, trans. Riccardo Ruschi (Milano: SE, 2004), [Giudizio ed Essere], 55-56. 4 In Novalis. Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.

2

 

2

express. And this is the structure with which we have to think the concept of ‘expression’: as Colli stresses ‘it is in the nature of expression to have to leave something fall, to only unveil in an incomplete and imperfect way. That which is being squeezed is richer than the squeezed out’.5 We can now claim that in the relation between immediateness and expression, one has to understand immediateness as that which is ‘richer’ than expression and irreducible to the latter. However, it remains essential to understand in what sense this structure of expression with its ‘relation’ with immediateness has to be conceived as the genetic foundation of the ‘world as representation’. Colli suggests to intend the notion of ‘representation’ not through its German meaning of Vorstellung, but through its Latin ethymology of re-praesentatio, and thus to intend it as a ‘recalling’, in which ‘the accent doesn’t hence fall on the ‘object for a subject’, but on the ‘re-presenting’ function that implies memory and time.’6 Essentially, what happens is that the concept of Vor-stellung is only conceivable as an abstaction from a more primitive flux of memory, here that ‘recalling’, or ‘re-presenting’ of the ‘primeval mechanism of memory’ is conditioned by a ‘persistance’, by a ‘comunance with an extrarepresentational immediateness of something that ‘was’ before and still is after, even though in another form. Such is the testimony of memory, that hence deducts, justifies the assumption of expression as universal principle of interpretation. Memory conserves something and manifests it: it is appropriate to call this expression of that which was before’.7 This expression-immediateness opposition must not be confused, however, with the signifiersignified opposition of linguistics which entirely falls into the realm of expression.8 Indeed, as the identical in Novalis is abandoned in its very Darstellung, ‘immediateness’ in its expression is left behind i.e. is expressed, but in its expression something is structurally left unexpressed. To cut short we can consider a passage from Schopenhauer reading ‘immediateness’ where he talks about Wille, and ‘expression’ where he talks of ‘representation’, ‘phenomenon’ and kindred notions: ‘Erscheinung heißt Vorstellung, und weiter nichts: alle Vorstellung, welcher Art sie auch sei, alles Objekt, ist Erscheinung. Ding an sich aber ist allein der Wille: als solcher ist er durchaus nicht Vorstellung, sondern toto genere von ihr verschieden: er ist es, wovon alle Vorstellung, alles Objekt, die Erscheinung, die Sichtbarkeit, die Objektität ist. Er ist das Innerste, der Kern jedes Einzelnen und eben so des Ganzen: er erscheint in jeder blindwirkenden Naturkraft: er auch erscheint im überlegten Handeln des Menschen; welcher Beiden große Verschiedenheit doch nur den Grad des Erscheinens, nicht das Wesen des Erscheinenden trifft.’9 The ‘world as expression’ is to be conceived concentrating on the fact that the differences experienced in the realm of representation-expression are to be thought only due to the ‘Grad des Erscheinens’ and not to ‘das Wesen des Erscheinenden’. To better explicate the corollaries to this perspective, another parallelism can be made between Hölderlin and Colli: the first writes ‘No possibility at all is given to us to think what hasn’t already been real’, and the second ‘It is possible to express only that which we have been conscious of’10 – both allude to something past, that must have ‘happened’, or must ‘be’, so that the very same expression (may it be in the form of thinking, feeling, painting, talking, etc.) can, in the first place, occur. Indeed, ‘immediateness’ here doesn’t absolutely refer to what generally the philosophical tradition believes is immediate, that is: sensorial impressions, feelings, and even ‘the most interior feeling, the instant of Goethe or the ecstasy of Plotinus’11 because these are all already representationsexpressions. All these are already memory: ‘Knowledge is only memory, never real immediateness’. ‘Yet, we possess immediateness, without knowing it. The remembrances are the ones to testify it: it is the origin of memory, In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. L’Espressione, Le serie espressive, 23. In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. La Rappresentazione, Repraesentatio, 6. 7 In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. L’Espressione, Traccia per dedurre l’espressione, 22. 8 See Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. L’Espressione, Espressione’ e significato, 32. – I here translate all the paragraph: ‘That which exhaustively opposes itself to expression is only immediateness: but the signified less than anything will be immediateness. It follows that the signified is part of the field of expression, and according to the rule it will actually be the expression that is expressed by the ‘expression’.’ 9 In Schopenhauer, “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. I”, Book II, par. 21, 131. 10 Respectively in Hölderlin, Scritti di Estetica, [Giudizio ed Essere], 55. And in Giorgio Colli, Apollineo e Dionisiaco (Milano: Adelphi, 2010), [Ms. G I.4], 156. 11 In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. La Rappresentazione, La rappresentazione come dato, 9. 5 6

3

but stays totally outside of consciousness, without having any affinity with sensation, with feeling, with the will. The remembrance indicates us only the direction towards something that is exterior to space and time i.e. it is nonrepresentable, but that, as origin of memory, we possess, and that even gives sign of itself through time’.12 Thereby, the ‘world as expression’ is a stratified world in which every level, or surface of expression corresponds to a ‘state’ of consciousness; and yet every expression is ‘a sign, a hieroglyphic that indicates something else’13 may it be another expression or representation which has at its base, as a definite unknown, immediateness, that has to be conceived along with the mystic tradition as a coincidentia oppositorum: where subject-object merge into one – and this paradoxical ‘Erlebnis’ is what art, as a symbol, tries to express and induce to. Having excluded everything that falls into the common notion of experience from that Erlebnis, that has to be at the base of art as opposed to a mere divertissement, how can this Erlebnis be depicted or alluded to i.e. is it possible to approximate ‘immediateness’? And how should art correspond to such a task i.e. be expression of immediateness? FROM NIETZSCHE TO COLLI: APOLLO-DIONYSUS AS EXPRESSION

At this point essential becomes the dialogue with Nietzsche. If the following proportion holds: Dionysus = immediateness : Apollo = expression, it must be, however, discussed whether stricto sensu the Dionysian is what we intend here as immediateness and if Apollo can be reduced to pure ‘expression’. The claim that will be argued is that considering thoroughly what Apollo and Dionysus are, they together are modes of expression of ‘immediateness’, which from the perspective of representation can be alluded as mania i.e. ‘the manifestation of a violent hiatus from everyday consciousness’.14 The greatness of Nietzsche’s account of the two deities in the Geburt is to have perfectly underlined two different realms of expression, but his weakness lies to have traced down the Apollo-Dionysus opposition following the strict Schopenhauerian dichotomy of Wille and Vorstellung. In fact, Nietzsche conceives Apollo as the pure divinity of vision, measure, clarity, dream, logos, self-control and representation – i.e. of the principium individuationis. And in total opposition, Dionysus becomes intoxication, inspiration, possession, excess, oblivion, mysticism – i.e. mania.15 Therefore, it becomes legitimate the following proportion Wille = Dionysus : Vorstellung = Apollo, but does this really exhaust the properties of the two figures? Although it is true that Nietzsche sees their extreme interrelation, calling them the brother gods, saying that they ‘speak the same language’ (par. 21), up to arriving, in his late posthumous fragments of 1888, to admit the presence of ‘sexuality and voluptuousness’16 in the Apollonian strive. It remains irrefutable that Nietzsche conceives them as two opposites, which perhaps, if fate wants, could be reunited giving birth to incredible artistic creations such as the Greek tragedy, thanks to artists who are possessed by both impulses: nothing than this is that contradicting figure (a sort of contemplating Dionysian) which appears in the second section/paragraph (p. 26) of the Geburt. And the difference between the Oriental and more savage Dionysian rites with the Greek ones lays uniquely in the fact that in the former the Apollonian principle is totally absent, there is, indeed, as Nietzsche writes, a ‘Rückschritte des Menschen zum Tiger und Affen’17, a regression of man to tiger and ape. On the other hand, in Greece these rites and orgies assumed the meaning, or function, of feasts of redemption of the world and days of transfiguration. And Nietzsche

In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, III. Lo Specchio di Dioniso, Potenza della memoria, 35-36. In Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, II. L‘Espressione, L’espressione come termine metafisico, 20. 14 In Giorgio Colli, La Sapienza Greca I-III (Milano: Adelphi, 1977-1980), I. Dionysus, comment to fr. 1[A2], 373. 15 See Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milano: Adelphi, 1975), I. La Follia è la Fonte della Sapienza, 13-21.; and see Karl Schlechta ed., Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden (München: Carl Hansen Verlag, 1954-1956), Bd. I, Die Geburt der Tragödie, par. 1-7, 22-49. 16 In Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), IV. The Will to Power as Art, fr. 799 (March-June 1888), 420. 17 In Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden, Bd. I, Die Geburt der Tragödie, par. 2, 27. 12 13

4

underlines that in this ‘erreicht die Natur ihren künstlerischen Jubel, erst bei ihnen wird die Zerreißung des principii individuationis ein künstlerisches Phänomen’.18 Thereby, the Dionysian in Greece is shaded with Apollonian features: only this produces the difference with the savage pure Dionysian rites of the East, and it is the very Nietzsche who claims that Dionysus is the god that comes from the East – it is a stranger in the Olympic pantheon, in that, it is a chthonic figure. This conception of the two deities is, again, derived by the strong influence of Schopenhauer. Dionysus is conceived as the bearer of the ‘tragic wisdom’ (see par. 3 – the legend of the Silenus and King Midas) opposed to the dream and artistic illusion (Beauty) of Apollo. But does this really give satisfaction to the richness of these symbols? It appears, on the contrary, that the central god for knowledge in ancient Greece was Apollo and not Dionysus. Moreover, the same institution that made Apollo and not Dionysus the god of knowledge, that is, the oracle, presented features that one would describe as perfectly Dionysian. The priestesses of the oracle, at Delphi for example, presented phenomenological characters that would seem to pertain to a lascivious Bacchante or Maenad follower of Dionysus: she would speak with ‘voice heavy with trance’ delivering ‘riddles, expressed in a poetry that at times hardly seemed poetry at all’.19 Furthermore, the tradition doesn’t depict Apollo as the pure god of representation and measure, image which Nietzsche would like to convey us, but contrarily insists on its ‘obscure’, ambiguous and even lethal and destructive properties (see the malady provoked by Apollo’s arrows in Homer’s Iliad). These are primarily the key points that move against the rigid interpretation of Nietzsche derived by the Schopenhauerian scheme of will-representation. It is also a ‘witness of the weight of Plato’ that in his Phaedrus associates Apollo with precisely two forms of mania i.e. mania poetiké (poetical inspiration) and mania mantiké (prophecy – the oracle), together with Dionysus to which pertain the other two forms mania telestiké (mysteric ecstasy) and mania erotiké (eroticism) – it clearly follows, I believe, from these elements that mania is the background on which Apollonian and Dionysian expressions can have their origin: together Apollo and Dionysus exhaust the sphere of mania.20 Thus one can conceive the following diagram to aid the comprehension of the theoretical framework that has been here built up: (Immediateness) Mania World as representation

Logos Apollo-Dionysus (Expression) (ART/SYMBOLS?) Phoné-eidos (sound-image)

Is mania the same as ‘immediateness’? No, but it is the closest we can get to what here is intended with ‘immediateness’. That is to say, ‘immediateness’ can only be understood, under the perspective of representation-expression, transferring the concept of interpolation from mathematics to metaphysics, as the contact of subject and object, namely their being One. But this manifests itself as a vacuum in the continuum of the fabric of representation i.e. it is as the nonIn Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden, Bd. I, Die Geburt der Tragödie, par. 2, 27. See Peter Kingsley, In the dark places of Wisdom (Point Reyes: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999), Two, Apollo, 87-92 – in particular at page 88, from where the quotes are taken, ‘And his oracles were spoken by his prophet in a voice heavy with trance: oracles full of repetitions and riddles, expressed in a poetry that at times hardly seemed poetry at all. For Apollo was a god who operated on another level of consciousness with rules and a logic of its own’. 20 See Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milano: Adelphi, 1975), I. La Follia è la Fonte della Sapienza, 13-21. From which the quotation is taken from; and see John Burnet, Platonis Opera, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon, 1900), Phaedrus, 265b-265c. 18 19

5

spatial geometric point origin of two contiguous half-lines (being one half the subject and the other the object). ‘The contact is thus the indication of a representational nothing, of a metaphysical interstice, that however is a certain nothing, since what it isn’t, it’s representational neighbourhood, gives him an expressive determination.’ We can allude to the Erlebnis of immediateness, which rigorously is a being experiecend by ‘immediateness’, as mania, as a peculiar ‘state’ of consciousness, as an ex-stasis from everyday consciousness, ‘but these are only ways of shooting in the dark. They say more about the physical body than the state itself’.21 However, something we do have, that is, there has to be a hiatus, a fracture in the structure of representation and this permits us to give an expressive determination of ‘immediateness’ through what isn’t immediateness. That is, mania phenomenologically appears as a ‘conflict’: the contradictory simultaneity of A Λ –A, and according to the method of interpolation, this simultaneity of the extremes is nothing but a living expression of a coincidentia oppositorum, which has to be understood as the ‘immediateness’, as the ‘unexpressed’ of the apparently conflicting and contradicting expression.22 Before passing to a conclusion, it is necessary to explicate two more points. First, it is necessary, only to avoid misunderstandings, to repeat that here mania has been understood as a ‘hiatus from everyday consciousness’, that doesn’t imply a total oblivion of consciousness, or a regression to tiger and ape, as Nietzsche puts it. On the contrary, it’s an increase of consciousness to the extreme point and paradox in which its maximum coincides with it not being anymore consciousness of x – but it is the same with its ‘object’, therefore Plotinus writes: ‘in what way can we, indeed, tell of Him as a different, when he who has saw him hasn’t saw him different during the contemplation, but saw him identical to him?’23 Secondly, having said this, what are these modes of expression of mania, or ex-stasis, and how they differ in their being Apollonian or Dionysian? We have mentioned the key role of the oracle to understand the peculiarity of Apollo, of which Heraclitus writes: ‘The Lord, to which pertains that oracle, which lays at Delphi, doesn’t say, neither hides, but hints’.24 And this is the intrinsic mania of logos, which on one hand vainly attempts to say ‘immediateness’ through language, to capture ‘immediateness’ in wordily expressed concepts. But this strive is the same that will bring to the constitution of the ‘world as representation’ through an abstracting mimesis of the ‘world as expression’ through the use of concepts and the Vor-stellung of ‘objects’. And on the other hand, in its most high expressions, which merge into an artistic expression, logos fights with its own expressive possibilities: hence, produces riddles, apparently contradictory statements, enigmas, poetry. This ambiguity of logos (represented by the interrupted line connecting logos and ‘immediateness’) is why Heraclitus says that the oracle hints and neither says, nor hides. And, again, this is nothing but the structure of the very same expression that as such lets always something fall. In sinthesis, as modes of mania: Apollo tends to be centrifugal by producing even complex structures of representation-expression (logos, poetry, and all the canonic Apollonian features), in which, however, a tragic irony reigns making of all that structure just an enigma to be decoded and such enterprise is structurally without an end.25 See Colli, Filosofia dell’Espressione, L’Apparenza, III. Lo Specchio di Dioniso, 39-42. – from where the first quote is taken: precisely in the paragraph ‘Aporie della continuità’ (Aporias of Continuum) at page 42 and at the paragraph ‘Il metodo dell’interpolazione’ (The method of interpolation) at page 40, where he argues that the metaphysical interpolation is methodologically more accurate than the mathematical one, because between the interpreted data and the interpolated contact there is an heterogeneity in nature; and for the second quote see Kingsley, In the dark places of Wisdom, Two, Ecstasy, 111. 22 See Colli, La Sapienza Greca I-III, I. Introduzione, 15. ‘Dionysus is the impossible, the absurd that shows itself true with its presence’.; see Colli, La Sapienza Greca I-III, III. Heraclitus, fr. 14[A20], 35. – ‘the hidden weave is stronger that the manifested one’. 23 See Colli, La Sapienza Greca I-III, I. Introduzione, 19.; and see Henry-Schwyzer, Plotini Opera 3 vol. (Paris: Bruxelles: 1951, 1959, 1971), VI 9. 10, 20. – from where the quote is taken from. 24 In Colli, La Sapienza Greca I-III, III. Heraclitus, fr. 14[A1], 21. 25 See Massimo Cacciari, Dallo Steinhof. Prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento (Milano: Adelphi, 1980), Critica del Moderno, 48-56. 21

6

Instead, Dionysus is a tendency to be centripetal, it is obviously still expression, but instead of constructing complex nets of representation, which would appear nothing but a veil to uncover, it systematically produces expressions that directly attempt to break the continuity of representation: the recurrent example of the cry (Schrei), of the proxemics and of the musical dissonance in Nietzsche are perfect examples. To round up, Apollo is an expression of mania differed in time, as the symbol of the bow and arrow suggests, whilst Dionysus is the mania directly expressed by the most diverse psycho-physiological states.26 ART AS A SYMBOL

If the structure of expression has been understood, one could simply say that the symbol shares the same structure: this is the particularity of the symbol as opposed to the ‘allegory’, the ‘metaphor’ and the linguistic sign. Indeed, the latter are all figures of speech that can be reduced to the scheme of the linguistic sign i.e. the relation signifier-signified; instead, the former is precisely an expression, or if you will a signifier, to which there is no fixed relation with a signified, or defined meaning. A symbol may behold within itself an infinite plurality of other signifier-signified relations, because, as the structure of expression, what it ultimately hints to is ‘immediateness’ – one may also say that the whole ‘world as expression’ is a symbol. But how can this be transferred to art? Ideally, art, looking at the diagram, should be an expression that induces to ex-stasis27, and precisely by operating an inversion of the mysteric experience of Eleusis: here the ex-stasis produces a ‘cognitive hallucination’; on the contrary, in the case of art e.g. tragedy, the ‘expression’ becomes a ‘support’ to operate an inversion towards the primitive collective mania.28 In general, such inversion may operated through an evocation of ‘immediateness’ or as an invocation of the same. An evocation is tendentiously in the direction of being an expression of a representation: of a defined world view, thereby making art a ‘narrative’ with a contingent perspective. Instead, an invocation opens the problem of an intimate missingness, destroying every possible consolation of a divertissement, which then a parte spectator may become a powerful evocation of what he himself intimately misses. The idea just sketched here is that even under a moral point of view an invocation would permit, more than a unilateral evocation, to ‘tune together’ various consciousness’s by setting them in front of their own lack. What ultimately misses is ‘immediateness’: this is the lack, or better said that which structurally lacking, as the deep-end of consciousness, may ‘tune together’ the hypothetic spectators with one another. Indeed, ‘immediateness’ should be understood as the, so to say, ‘definitive’ dimension of what, through Hegel, Raymond Geuss defines as the bei sich/zu Hause sein29, the longing for which the great narratives of Western civilisation from art to philosophy and religion are attempts to correspond and deliver answers to. Hence, understanding art as an expression of this being ‘at home’, the suggestion that art should tend to be invocative rather than evocative becomes more palpable. As hinted above, an evocation would tend to be an expression of a representation, representation which in this case would pretend to be a Darstellung of totality (or truth, justice, right-wrong, good-bad). But, as I tried to argue in the paper, pretending to reduce ‘totality’ to its expression-representation arises structural problems, that is to say, those underlined by Novalis, Hölderlin and Colli: the reduction of totality to the realm of the principium individuationis and logos shows in its most diverse fields its See Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden, Bd. I, Die Geburt der Tragödie, par. 2, 28, and par. 24, 129-133. 27 See Martin Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2010), Die Wahrheit und die Kunst, 6768 – what is significant about Heidegger’s account of the relevance of art is that art is such inasmuch as it produces that hiatus aus dem Gewöhnlichen, otherwise it would be just a means to produce contingent feelings: a divertissement. 28 See Giorgio Colli, Dopo Nietzsche (Milano: Adelphi, 1974), 173. 29 See Raymond Geuss, “IV. Art and Theodicy”, in Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78-115. 26

7

privation of a foundation together with its tragi-comical strive to reduce its otherness i.e. ‘immediateness’ to its language, laws, signs and definitions. In other terms, Kant already has shown this in his Dialectic of Pure Reason and before him the very same origins of logos, the Greek dialectics, are concrete manifestations of how arguments can be produced for both claims A and – A, thereby testifying the otherness of something i.e. ‘immediateness’ to the possibilities of expression.30 If art as evocation tends to fall in the oblivion of the hiatus between expression and ‘immediateness’, on the other hand, the invocation understands its system of signs as = 0, in that, they are only a flux of signifiers which precisely say what ‘immediateness’ is not, thereby it follows the method of interpolation above suggested and thus we can claim that art as a symbol, in its most rigorous sense, should be understood as art as invocation. The sign is = 0 when there isn’t the reduction of totality to the principium individuationis. Thus the artistic expression itself, if it invokes, becomes 0, since it longs to overcome its own possibilities of expression, and by doing so, it testifies, in its happening, the structural otherness of ‘immediateness’.31

See Cacciari, Dallo Steinhof. Prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento (Milano: Adelphi, 1980), Critica del Moderno, 4856.; see Colli, La nascita della filosofia, VII. La Ragione Distruttiva, 85-93.   31 See Hölderlin, Scritti di Estetica, [Il significato delle tragedie], 149.; see Schlechta, Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden, Bd. I, Die Geburt der Tragödie, par. 12, 69-75. – where Nietzsche shows the passage between the archaic tragedy and the ‘Socratic’ tragedy of Euripides, which can be read as an oblivion of the hiatus between immediateness and expression. 30

8

BIBLIOGRAPHY Burnet, John, ed. Platonis Opera, vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon, 1900. Cacciari, Massimo. Dallo Steinhof. Prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento. Milano: Adelphi, 1980. Cacciari, Massimo. Dell’Inizio. Milano: Adelphi, 1990. Cacciari, Massimo. Della Cosa Ultima. Milano: Adelphi, 2004. Colli, Giorgio. Apollineo e Dionisiaco. Milano: Adelphi, 2010. Colli, Giorgio. Dopo Nietzsche. Milano: Adelphi, 1974. Colli, Giorgio. Filosofia dell’Espressione. Milano: Adelphi, 1969. Colli, Giorgio. La nascita della filosofia. Milano: Adelphi, 1975. Colli, Giorgio. La Sapienza Greca I-III. Milano: Adelphi, 1977-1980. Geuss, Raymond. “IV. Art and Theodicy”. In Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy, 78-115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Heidegger, Martin. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. Ditzingen: Reclam, 2010. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Scritti di Estetica. Translated by Riccardo Ruschi. Milano: SE, 2004. Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der reinen Vernunft (A+B). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag GmbH, 1998. Kingsley, Peter. In the dark places of Wisdom. Point Reyes: The Golden Sufi Center, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Novalis. Fichte Studies. Edited by Jane Kneller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Schopenhauer, Arthur. “Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. I-II”. In Sämtliche Werke, edited by Arthur Hübscher, vol. II-III. Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1972. Schlechta, Karl, ed. Friedrich Nietzsche – Werke in drei Bänden. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 19541956. Henry-Schwyzer. Plotini Opera, 3 volumes. Paris-Bruxelles: 1951, 1959, 1973.

9

10