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The Path of Wisdom/the Path to Wisdom.
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(For Mariske Westerndorp)
Few public sculptures are meaningful, let alone productive…
inspiring to thought, to reflection… This one is: it manifests philosophical
presence, in part from its material and situation, which trigger a set of
associations on the theme of understanding and its limitations; epistemology,
in short (and logic too, as it would map the boundary-line of meaning, and in
turn, be brought to face its own limitations). It is if we stand before a
‘course’ encompassing the problems of epistemology in modern thought, laid out
on a mountain side, overseen by a giant Buddha, and overlooking, what else… the
vast expanse of the sea.
Geographical
meta-frame. Between a mountain and the sea, between two significant,
meaning-provoking, types of space… both open (not ‘room’ like, enclosed). Both
with particular relationships to the infinite: the mountain through its deixis,
its pointing, which we witness, and its performative invitation, its ascent,
which we may do. The sea through its expanse… one which (we know but can not see)
extends beyond the horizon. And which reflects, borrows its surface, that which
we see, from the sky, its gold of the sun on the waves or its silver from the
moon, its grey of the clouds or its blue from the mood of the heavens. However,
by contrast, the experience of the ‘loop’, the ‘path’, does not carry this
feel, the sense of infinite openness, but rather the feel of a ‘room’, of a
sense of containment, of being enveloped; occupying a ‘room’ or ‘home’ in
Nature - one in which, moreover, the walls (imaginary) fold back and return,
repeat. A contrast of space, types of space… or place. And ‘place’, as we know,
but often forget, is the human gift to space…
Mountain… and
sea. Infinitely more place than space, and even without the personification of
genius loci, provoking feelings which, in turn, provoke meditative thought… The
thought of sacrality, a sense of the sacred, of first and last things, and so a
sense of the sublime (which is the secular term for such feelings). In turn
provoking further thought in those that are read in any relevant commentaries
or traditions…
Description. Etched, carved, incised, but also grown
(‘horti-cultured’) and even inserted into the landscape; taken together -‘as a
whole’- a sign, a symbol, a ‘picture’, or better, a sculptural construction
representing, forming, suggesting (as such a thing can not be shown) an
‘infinite’ loop. Made from; trunks of wood, each sliced in half, lengthwise,
positioned to offer the shape of a double, or ‘infinite’, loop on the side of a
hill (a ‘figure of eight’). So discontinuous, unlike the path that accompanies
these ‘pillars of wisdom’. A path which follows, traces out, the loop design in
full. Continuous, a horizontal path joining together the discontinuous,
vertically-pointing, trunks of the sculpture. One the prosaic, connected, sense
-making path we tread, step by step: the other proceeding by leaps, leaps of
inspiration, the leaps of thought (the trunks point to the heavens) that
support and inspire the connected, logical thought that results (here down
below the infinitely displaced vanishing point that is the deictic end of the
up-ward pointing trunks…).
Levels: of interpretation…
Hermeneutics (it has often been observed) requires a loop
structure which includes repetition, the re-travelling of the same ground; but
with a different experience… with a changing result. The repeating loop that is
not the same (if it was the same it would be represented by a circle, as the
process of hermeneutics often is…) is a picture of this process… A double loop
offers a more accurate picture (although an (endless) spiral would be more
accurate still…). The two ‘wings’ of the loop may be read as offering,
respectively, A and not-A, perhaps as A and A1, if the emphasis is on a
variation on a theme (or perhaps even stretching as far as A and B, as
variation breaks into qualitative change and a new concept is required). So
each new traversal, each new loop, offers an accretion of meaning, a change,
the growth of knowledge… of wisdom. In this way the double, or ‘infinite’, loop
offers us a physical, material Allegory; an allegorical model of the progress
of the understanding, but also of the problems of thought; of thought ‘at
thought’ on its problems; the problems of thinking when thinking is the
problem. Simply put: of inside and outside (the view from within, the view from
without); of repetition, conscious and unconscious; of self-contradiction as
the condition (as well as result) of self-reflexivity. So also represented (or
suggested) is the relationship of levels, of the place we are at, and those we
are not, (may have been to, or may be about to enter): such that: the upper
level absorbs, explains the lower, but is still the product of the lower…
supported, so to speak, by the lower - so no total supersession. Also there is
the view from every level; for every level, there is an implied point of view…
such that it finds itself as the centre of things, the beginning of something,
including the reappraisal of the previous level (perhaps this is what defines
being on a level).
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(The
In the beginning (outside). The whole is visible. We occupy the
eternal present with anticipation; we want to know what lies before us…
Beginning point (inside, on the line). At the beginning we see
the loop spread out before us, extending from us, from our position, in two
directions; map and physical geography as one. The way there and the way back,
clearly marked…
Contrast I. Are there other such ‘metaphysical’ parks and
spaces? To what might we compare the ‘Wisdom Path’? Perhaps not to a, would be,
epitaph to High Modernism, the Park de la
Villette in
Fulcrum (midpoint, at once midday and midnight - midpoint of the
gyre’s turning). The other way to conceptualise this kind of physical and
cultural event, art object or sculpture, is as ritual (ritual equivalent or
form of rituality): matter configured for ritual (use), symbolising ritual;
performing, with the catalyst of our participation, ritual. So we may speak of
a ritual space; demarked and suggestive; suggestive of meditation as meditation
on, or ‘in’ another time… (as ritual always involves some degree of reference
to an ‘outside time’, from the implied ‘universal’ of a greeting (on repetition
this is what is always done) to invoking myth-time or eternity in the
performance of a ritual ‘proper’). ‘As if’ the participants were
(simultaneously) in another time/space. Another place (or is place the result
of the superimposition of the other time and space on this one)? Either way
what we see, experience, is… ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’: performed. The external
view, being outside, gives a different meaning (part, image, distance, seeable
as a whole) to the view from within, from being inside… (surrounding one, not
seeable as (a) whole; so allegory of all manner of ‘invisibles’ that are such ;
language, culture, community, identity, the Social…). Ritual effect of the new
space-time, as somewhere we can enter and leave as definition of a spatial
‘inside’, the place of the ‘loop’ (an inside which is outside, is ‘elsewhere’
to everyday or initial, everyday space-time.) Allegory of the eternal present
as eternity. And (actual) place of the second stage of the eternal present, now
facing, Janus-like, both past and future; all (both) contained in the ‘now’
moment, the view back over what-has-been, the first loop; the path forwards, to
what-is-to-come, the loop before one…). But
where is the fulcrum: there (as seen from the outside) it seemed to be the
physical crossroads, the point of the intersection of the two lines, symbol of
repetition in the loop: here (from within, from on the line) it seems to be at
the topmost end, the further-est point away (from the place we began) – before
we begin to go back, to go down, to return… to repeat …to perform the mirror
image of what we have done…place of the actual beginning of repetition:
repetition, essence of ritual.
History II. The content of the texts inscribed on the flat
surface of the semi-circular (in cross section) trunks that constitute the
loop, as … emptiness. The ‘Nothingness Sutra’, as of much of Buddhism’s basic
writings and the concepts they seek to explicate, is open to a number of
possible readings, from the nihilism generally attributed to the
Zen/Chan-reading of Nirvana or Enlightenment (or my reading of their reading…),
to the more traditional reading of ‘non-attachment’. As in Western philosophy,
the concept, or the sense, of ‘nothingness’ is subject to debate… producing
differing versions of religion and an overlap with philosophy… Certainly the
most nihilistic of readings dispenses with much that reason can not stomach
(whilst chiming with Western ‘Existentialism’ and Phenomenology); product of
the suspicion of the intellectual or educated regarding the structures and
practices of organised religion, the matter of much religious belief and custom
as popular superstition and the behaviour of the ‘teachers’ or ‘gurus’… the
‘priestly caste’. Certainly the gap between the philosophy of a given religion
(for example associated with Buddhism and Hinduism) and the customs and
practices of belief often feels impossibly and irreparably wide.
Geography II. Public sculpture. The ‘Wisdom Path’ may be
classified as a Land Art type of sculpture, a form which works better (is more
popular) than other form of public) sculpture. ‘Site-specific’ works, where the
context is the key, naturally leads to suitability… How one wishes architects
would exercise the same approach to their constructions, and not the
aggressive, insertive, pushing of the eyesore, an attempt at outstandingness
(sic). Subjunctive perhaps (an ego-crutch or phallic gesture); the sacrifice
due to assertiveness. A manner of visual bullying that is, regrettably, such a
key aspect of modern architecture. Another geography (another form of attention
to geography) offers art and thought, their balance; feeling and thinking;
conceptual weight and aesthetic appeal. The participatory element also
reinforces the performative or ritual aspect of the work.
Contrast II. Another geography; another metaphysical landscape:
another ‘forest’; the ‘forest’ of memory in the Jewish Museum, Berlin (good,
meaningful; suggesting recall, the showing of a past (traced inside) not the
gnosis of an elite vision of a future (de
la Villette) that could not be. So through Proper Name and context, every
detail, every ‘defamiliarised’ line and point, every ‘unnatural’ angle, all
work to evoke the mourning for a lost culture. (And not accidentally (and indirectly)
invoking, in works of commentary (so not evoking) directly, the memory of what
had been before…what has been lost). Both the Jewish Museum (especially the
‘forest’) and the Wisdom Path offer their meanings unmediated by specialist
commentary (our thought does not require extra, ‘expert’, guidance to arrive at
the required memory, insight or allegory).
Metaphysics II. Meta-set. Meta-sets may also be incarnated, be
made physical (so loosing their claim to be such, of being the ‘last word’; but
then the concept too looses this status, even as it is formulated, as it
foolishly claims this status…). Meta as physical (not as matter, meta-set of a
materialism that must forget that it too is a concept, if it is to be thought,
to be useful, and not inert, unconscious… a statement about the priority of the
pre-conscious by the conscious…). So giving us an incarnation of the
meta-physical as metaphysical (in its thought, we thinking about it, ‘it’
thinking about itself, not as matter as such). Both as necessity and as
impossibility: as our thinking about it; as the contradictions that arise from
doing so (logically speaking the contradictions resulting from self-reference
and reference to a meta-set may be repeated to infinity… from inside we fall
into the ‘black hole’ of self-reference, from outside we jump from meta-set to
meta-set). Incarnated, impossibly, as a physical place or site of another
(‘quite other’) point of view (inside we can only repeat…). Yet in moving away
to get an overview… (stepping outside we also step up to a meta-set). In
reality, in the physical world, we can see outside or take in whole objects,
but in thought… (as we have seen, fundamental schools of philosophy evolve from
here…). From outside to see meaning… to see the loop from without is meaningful
and thought-provoking, like a piece of writing on the landscape: but more
meaningful is the view from within… (as seen from within, or as realized that
all such visions are made from within, their ‘condition of enunciation’, in
another school of philosophy’s apt jargon). Immanent criticism (the view from
within the loop) would appear to be more worthy than the transcendental (the
view from without) - is there a point where these two (paradoxical) styles of
thought (because both finally generate paradox) change places (as in the
‘turning point’ of the loop)? Physically, as we have seen, to find the outside,
external position, requires that we leave the loop, leave the path; but in
reality, that is in thought (sic), we have no place to run to, nowhere to
stand… and worse, if we construct such, then we find that we never did take the
heroic step beyond, but only stepped back into the self-same river… to repeat
our previous move… (in science only may we do this, as when we imagine an
externality on the basis of quantitative extension, mathematical space, down on
which we can ‘look’; or when we imagine ourselves as another, this latter being
perhaps a half-way point, or necessary fiction…we may likewise imagine
ourselves as ‘out of history’ looking down on the process that should be
‘behind us’, not ‘below us’ – for, in actuality, our time, like our history, is
something we can not leave).
End point. At the end, we are at the beginning (again)).
Repeating (again). (But how many times have we repeated?) Ritual place of
knowledge making, identity making, (we) as the ones who think about things… to
reflect on those remains, to make those meanings, to reflect on their
repetitions. To repeat, to hermeneuticise… On the spiral ‘upwards’,
self-reflexive. A kind of an ascent, spiritual.
Ends and endings too are folded into time, into the eternal
present (unless apocalyptic, and infinity always suggests the end of time,
after which eternity begins…). In the end one looks back over what one has
done, where one has been. The same ‘one’, even thought we have travelled a
certain (intellectual and geographical) distance. We occupy the eternal present
and gaze at the past, reviewing, remembering … and then, spurred on by the
catalyst of infinity, the illusion of ‘seeing’ infinity before us, we jump (the
‘Zen/Chan’ moment, the moment of the ‘break’) into Eternity. The view back as
remembering, and so thinking afresh, learning and positing, then envisaging the
whole; so suggesting a new realm, also infinite like the eternal present, but
not the same: on another plane… elsewhere… outside time (outside of the eternal
present, outside of history). Not a frame, but another level, eternity as the
‘higher’ image of the intuited, eternal present… (a projection, an ‘out’ that
we need, must make, but that ‘is not’…).The thought of which, however, takes
place on the same level, in the, our, Eternal Present… (Capitalized now for there is no other
place, no other level, no ‘larger set’, no meta-set, as in reality (in our experience),
it is our final Meta-set). Starting and finishing point for all thought, all
experience.
Actually the
fulcrum –the place of the ‘cross’ on the map, the cross-over on the loop- was
where we should have started (logically, but not geographically). In Medias
Res. Point through which we (should have) passed three times… (‘negation of the
negation’, negated…) But this awareness comes only at the end. As we place the
mental map we have gained through reflection over the physical map we have
pursued.
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However, (last word) the loop is infinite… it keeps going, we
keep repeating, trapped in our present (and identity constituting) rituals of
life and thought… so the levels of the loop accrete, meta-set and
self-reference as their upper and lower infinite displacements (depending on
where and how we think each level is added: as above, as encompassing; or
below, as referring back to itself in contradictory fashion; going ‘up’ or
‘down’, ‘outside’ or ‘inside’…). And their potentially endless repetition to infinity
(well, if we were immortal…).
As the
comparison to logic has been made… so the limitations of logic these display
foreshadow the limitations of knowledge, the limitations of the human point of
view (which, however, we can not escape… (only retrace, in an infinite loop…)).
Wittgenstein suggests that we can employ a faultless, tautological, logic; but
one that is incapable of addressing any worthwhile issues: Gödel and the
relationship of logic to natural language suggest that even the best of second
order languages is dependant and so ‘leaks’… So showing that a tool that was to
be ‘infinite’ (universal) in its application is (like all tools) finite in its
usefulness, its reliability…
Last, last word? Irony as the last word? Ironic self-awareness
as the best result of the accumulation of knowledge, or experience…? But then
the next step on the loop is taken and a ‘broader view’ (encompassing ours)
results… and so on.
Irony born of
self-reflexivity as the conscious knowledge of the infinity of self-contradiction
that results; this conscious knowledge, or overview, as giving birth to the
irony of the infinity of meta-sets (infinite potential overviews) that then
results. Therefore irony as the ‘final’ state of such self-consciousness. Limit state of self-knowledge as of
universal knowledge…
The power of the loop is that it is not so much constructed from
linear propositions, narrative-like, like our passage through time as we walk
it (although, of course, we begin by interpreting it this way): but from
levels… not so much ‘horizontal’ as ‘vertical’; so equally the Stairway to
Heaven (advance by meta-set accumulation) or to Descent into Hell (advance by
accumulation (or alternation) of logical self-contradictions). The ‘repeat’
moment of the loop, of course, combines both these, a picture of a repetition
of a thought-move (like logical self-reference) AND a picture of a ‘higher’
encompassing motion or thought phase (move to a meta-set). While the latter is
the home to traditional interpretations as the path to a ‘higher’ wisdom, who
is to say it is not the former, its ‘polar’ opposite… self-delusion, based upon
repetitive self-contradiction… that is not more productive (as the repetition
of self-contradictions are under-taken consciously, as… ironic - this degree of recognition being the best we can do…). Or
with A AND B true together… but only by way of negation; both as on the path of
illusion, the ‘path of Maya’. But also the ‘Wisdom Path’. The path to wisdom
(small case).
‘Upper case’,
universals, we are already skeptical about; their ‘true’ existence has been put
into doubt, we use them, as we must… with the ironic knowledge of their
limitation (or downright fictionality). A new order of concept, of ‘knowledge’:
the (empirically) untrue, but necessary?
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2013