“He who is incapable of participating or who is in need of nothing through being self-sufficient is no part of the city, and so is either a beast or a god.”
- Aristotle, The Politics
- F. Nieztsche, The Genealogy of Morals
“The modern ontic turn away from man and God to nature thus in the end still assumes a continuing metaphysical and structural importance for the very categories it seeks to transcend. - Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity
In what is perhaps the most important 20th century work of philosophy, Martin Heidegger made a famous distinction between the
ontic and the
ontological. The root for both terms comes from the Greek word for Being, “
to on.” Both have to do with Being, or what “is.”
The word "ontic" simply designates the description of Being and the relations between its various levels. These ontic levels are generally identified and distinguished as God, man, and nature. For those queasy at the mention of God, the ontically divine realm also includes any transcendent metaphysical principle like Plato's
Ideas, Liebniz's
Monad, Hegel's
World Spirit, and even Marx's belief in the historical inevitability of the proletariat revolution. “Ontological,” on the other hand, refers to an analysis of the specific nature and properties of each realm.
Heidegger believed the entire history of philosophy was driven by the single question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” In 1927 his
Being and Time hoped to explain
dasein (the German translation of the Greek word for “Being”) as a function of time.
More recently, in 2008 a book titled
The Theological Origins of Modernity, Duke professor of political philosophy Michael Allen Gillespie asserts that Modern philosophy has been nothing other than an attempt to resolve problems of priority between the three ontic realms originating in medieval theology.
The crucial debate at that time was over the true nature of God. Answers cleaved into competing factions, the metaphysical realism of the Scholastics influenced by Aristotle, and the nominalism of William of Ockham. Gillespie makes the bold claim that this dispute, which will seem so antiquated to many of us Moderns, is
the conflict that set Modern philosophy and Modernity itself in motion.
At stake was the possibility of human reason to know God, and the ontic consequences of each answer. Simply put, each subsequent attempt to resolve the problem has altered our understanding of the relationship between the ontic three realms of Being. Each solution places an emphasis on one realm to the exclusion of another, or has resulted in the transference of attributes of one realm, say God, onto another, say man. Gillespie's analysis concludes that Late Modern philosophy has attempted to translate God and man into nature while paradoxically remaining dependent on the distinctions between them.
While there is not space to do proper justice to Gillespie’s historically rigorous account, it reaches its apex in an ontic gloss on Kant’s Critiques. Kant was perhaps the most thoroughgoing and self consciously critical in attempting to properly situate the three realms. The essence of the three critiques is an attempt to circumscribe, order, and connect the realms and resolve the antinomy that had opened up between them. Identified as the phenomenal and the noumenal, the antinomy distinguishes the ironclad necessity of nature from man’s moral freedom and autonomy. Kant summed up the divide rather poetically as the “starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."
The idea of human freedom is then, of course, inconsistent with the presuppositions and findings of natural science. Science sees a iron clad chain of causes and effects in which there can be no arbitrary "swerve," unmoved mover, break, and certainly no truly free will. Maybe scientists will one day see a "will" under a microscope. If so, it will be subject to the same physical laws as a falling rock. Did the rock move itself? From the scientific point of view, free will can be no more than ironic, a convenient fiction that gets us through our day. Even Nietzsche, who so struggled with the need for the idea of the Will, seems to have only ever been able to accept it, along with the first person pronoun, as a necessary illusion for life.
Genuine human freedom and autonomy rest on the assumption, so often veiled, ignored, or suppressed, that man can somehow stand outside the processes of nature in determining his actions and his history. In the most direct formulation of the problem: How can man be free in one ontic realm and determined in another simultaneously? Can there be such slippage between the three realms? How can he have the autonomous freedom of God and the immanence of a biological machine? How can man freely give himself moral laws of action, if the physical and biological laws of movement are determined and immutable?
Historically speaking Kant’s reconciliation of the ontic realms, buffering man between God and animal, didn't stick. The history of philosophy, politics, and culture since has been an almost cataclysmic shuffling and reprioritizing of this trinity. The result has been a kaleidoscopic and perpetually shifting set of the images of human being ever since. This explosion of various ontic amalgamations of human being is intimately reflected in the history of art since that time.
The image of man found in Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling is one of near perfection. In his ideal physique and proud posture Adam is envisioned as something like a pagan river god. His Adam is man as he was before the Fall. This is a state, I will venture, that no mere human has attained outside of artistic fiction. Like perhaps no other, the image marries the natural and divine elements thought to be combined within human nature itself. Even as Adam and Eve are escorted off the Edenic stage in the subsequent frame, they are not portrayed with the pathos and shame of Masaccio’s exile. In the most famous panel Adam is the apparition of man as the imago dei, one made in God’s image.
Through the idealization of his anatomy, so corporeal, Michelangelo suggests the body as merely the outward appearance of a partially divine inner nature. If the philosophical genius of Kant and Hegel couldn't manage this ontic synthesis, God could. The name “Adam” in the Hebrew Bible in not a proper noun, but is adamah. It literally means the “clay” to which God gave his spark, and in so doing reconciled the antinomious realms of the natural and the divine in that middling being man.
As a learned Catholic who had studied at Ficino’s version of the Academia, Michelangelo was keenly aware of the Italian Humanist tradition while being no less inspired by Luther's Reformation. One of the central discrepancies between the Humanists and Reformers was the ontic priority of man in relation to God. How close or far was man from the divine? Each side would emphasize one half to the detriment of the other.
Humanists like Pico Della Mirandola stressed man’s dignity, thereby raising his ontic status closer to God. For Miradola that divine spark made his nature indeterminate. As pure potential man could, existentially, make of himself almost anything he willed. In contradistinction Luther repudiated this heresy by reasserting man’s falleness from the divine realm. For him man was a slave in bondage to an omnipotent God that he could not hope to know or understand rationally, but must have unquestioned faith in. For the Humanists man was an imago dei, closer to God than nature. For Reformers Man had fallen all too far toward terrestrial being to be so proud of his partly divine origins. Luther saw man in his hybris as the prodigal son who must humbly return to the true Father which is not the Catholic Church.
Intimately aware of the theological debates of his day, Michelangelo would not have failed to glean the significance of his juggling act between the divine, human, and natural realms intrinsic to his depiction of the first man. Theologically significant is his navigation between the Scylla and Charbydis of the two extremes presented by the debate. In the Sistine ceiling man is neither a self-legislating God, nor a fallen animal. He is presented as that being whose dual nature, far from rending him in two, is harmoniously brought together in an exalted whole. However close Michelangelo may have come, man as depicted in the Sistine frescoes never storms heaven attempting to kill his Father.
That his Adam embodies a particular tincture of the three ontic realms, is hardly unique or unusual. The entire history of art can be understood in this light as a reflection of the juggling, and displacing of these realms in the image of man and the idea of the artist. The idealization of form and space in Renaissance art, for example, can never be properly understood if interpreted as a mere human projection, rather than the symbolic language for an orderly cosmos and the divinity which raises mankind in dominion over animals and Earth.
The successive revaluations of ontic priority percolating since the Middle Ages are by no means linear over time or homogeneous within a given epoch. The history of art since the Middle Ages has evidenced a perpetual shell game of shifting ontic priorities, placing emphasis on one, then the another, and again the other. Each time an equilibrium seems imminent the balance is undone thus providing for the peculiar vitality of Western life, thought, and culture during what has come to be known as Modernity.
For the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich nature was impregnated by the Holy Spirit in a manner not unlike the Virgin Mary herself. His paintings then were hardly intended as geographical transcriptions. For the Romantics generally Nature was not "matter in motion" understood empirically in the manner of a Hobbes or Descartes, but the revelation of God’s will itself. The vistas before which Friedrich’s
ruckenfigurs stand are not the “environment” or the “biosphere,” but the mysterious workings of God manifest in his creation. The idea of divine nature is still quite evident in Vincent Van Gogh’s
Starry Night, a work inspired by Friedrich.
Even with the demise of Romanticism, Nineteenth century art never consistently embraced the progressive Positivism so prevalent in European thought up to The Great War. For all their proto-Impressionistic concerns with nature and light, the work of Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot and the Barbizon School never depict
nature a l’etat brut. It's not until Courbet and the Impressionists that the divine impulse is stripped from landscape depiction altogether.
Post-impressionism however quickly reversed this positivistic impluse either by directly addressing the divine realm as exterior to them, or suggesting that it had been transferred inward, to the artist themselves as the
demiurge creator of a whole new world to be revealed in their images. With Postimpressionism begins the inward turn that led to Modernism. The virtually divine powers of the human effectively replace nature as the source of creation.
The symbol of the Symbolist’s might be nothing other than the material correspondent to the hidden God, the absentee Father who had absconded from man’s view in an age of Modern decadence. Ironically the Symbolists identified decline, not with bohemian aestheticism, but a positivistic society which identified progress with material, and technological advance. For these artists, in advancing forward man had fallen away.
Even with the Impressionists the ontic status of the divine might well just be transferred to the human domain in their overriding concern for the vision of nature, not in-itself, but for the human sight and intuition. Nature is not seen objectively,
qua nature, but rather as material for human perception and increasingly subjective interpretation. Impressionism becomes an exaltation of the human perspective on nature more than nature itself. In the late work of Monet this vision becomes increasingly subjective, and his paintings verge on creating a new pictorial world rather than representing an old one.
In Postimpressionism divinity was increasingly transferred to the mind and passions of man in artists like Cézanne and Gauguin. Ironically Cézanne seems to deify Nature, yet acknowledged that at least some part of her is rationally comprehensible to the human imagination. To do “Poussin after nature,” seems to imply that the reverence for nature needs to be combined with the lights of constructive human visual comprehension. Cézanne married the forms of nature to the human categories of visual understanding such as the cone, cylinder, and sphere. The reception of Cézanne in Fauvism and Cubism seems to have disregarded his reverence for Nature and deified man's creative acts of construction.
"Novelty is in the mind that creates, and not in nature, the thing painted.” - Eugène Delacroix
The work and theory of Eugène Delacroix marks a decisive turn in Western art toward the intensified cultivation of human subjectivity.
His emphasis on novelty and creativity was a radical heresy to the tradition of Classical art. Delacroix's subjectivism helped lead to the Modernist emphasis on novelty, human creativity, and the pictorial autonomy which results from them. Novelty is autonomy from the past, creativity is autonomy from the Newtonian laws. In the radical ontic distinction between man and nature the artist becomes the
demiurge.
For absolute pictorial autonomy to be taken seriously, man must become a god.
“When religion, science and morality are shaken, when the external supports threaten to collapse, then man’s gaze turns away from the external towards himself.” – Kandinsky
The Christian and quasi-Christian guises of God were not the primary masks the divine would take in Modernism. It was perhaps in the form of Man himself that god would achieve his apotheosis in Modern art. The death of god was the death in the belief of the sureties which unngirded the cosmic hierarchy of God, man, and nature. As a consequence if this death "man has been rolling from the center toward "x" as Nietzsche said." By the end of the 19th century even the faith in and veracity of science was being called into question in the work of Nietzsche, Weber, and Husserl.
Only certain of his own existence, man was left homeless in the universe with only his own devices to guide him. As God recedes and "dies," human subjectivity becomes deified in Modernism in the form of autonomous freedom of expression. Modernity's attempt to conquer nature made man its master and possessor in a manner in which only God had been previously understood. In the fine arts man conquered nature by no longer being content to describe it. By prescribing form to nature through his imaginative and intellectual faculties he remade it in his own image.
“Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things” (i.e. be nonobjective).”
-Kasimir Malevich
The practical autonomy the artist had gained from the church, state, and society was reflected in an increasingly autonomous image, now rent from the depiction of nature and its world of things as well. Piet Mondrian "plastic" form was a type of pictorial and sculptural language rent form the appearance and representation of nature. Plastic art did not mirrore nature but reflected the potentialities of the format and medium of painting itself intent on depicting cosmic harmonies that stood beyond the appearances of the natural world.
This tendancy reaches a pinnacle in Kasimir Malevich's
Black Square. Born from emotion, his self styled school "Suprematisim" meant to represent the "supremacy of pure feeling." Feeling was not however an end in itself. Like Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian, subjectivity was the umbilical cord to the divine consmiczc realm. In this prevalent strain of Modernist abstraction, the image of God as it had been presented in the tradition of Christian art was iconoclastically effaced for a new, perhaps more universal, symbol of the Absolute.
This deifying impulse strangely reaches its culmination in Abstract Expressionism. This movement was largely inspired by unveiling subconscious universal archetypes and a transcendent Sublime, yet culminates in a the watershed debate about the true nature of the work in Jackson Pollock. Pollock is, in the game of ontic priorities caught between a vision of free willing deified man, and as man reduced to an automatistic machine of nature, not consciously in control of the gestures he makes.
The narrative that he is completely free to actualize his will is closest to Harold Rosenberg’s canvassed drama, while man as nature is embodied in the automatistic unconscious vision of Pollock inspired by his contact with Surrealism. Caught between two giants of theory, Pollock himself was ambivalent about the final meaning of his work. Clement Greenberg’s vision walks a path somewhere between the between the two. The Apollinian and Dionysian suggest compositional control against a mediumistic being creating a work no different in kind from a sunset. A strict reading of Nietzsche’s idea’s from
The Birth of Tragedy makes clear both alternatives reduce man to a mere mouth piece, or conduit like a Greek rhapsode, for divine or natural forces beyond his control, forces which he neither fully comprehends nor is fully conscious.
Regardless of his final take on the Nietzschean binary, it is clear that Greenberg's conception of history is equally problematic. Inspired by Hegel and Marx, each artists operates in an historical context which is a progress of form from Manet, to Cézanne, to Picasso and Matisse, culminating in Pollock. While the latter Greenberg disowned the dialectical progressive view of history of his early writing, many of his most important articles are undergirded and structured by such a narrative.
Like Hegel and Marx, Greenberg has a choice about how History truly progresses. Either it is the work of free willing men and their own conscious labors(a view which the determinism of science could not except). Or, people are moved by historical forces beyond their control to the “inevitable”
telos. In the first example we have Man as God, the maker of his own destiny, and in the second we have History as a God, either a God working behind nature over time, or working as divine nature over time working toward a purpose.
The deification of man and his history runs through the 19th and 20th century thought and art. We now look down on this deification ironically, but that seems not to be how it was understood at the time. It was the hybris perceived in the deification of the artist and the work they created that lunched Post War art in the from of all the more anonymous schools such as Neo-Dada, Minimalism, Pop Art, and Concept and Word art.
The Death of God ultimately meant the death of that divine spark in man and his translation back into nature. The perceived failure of Modern autonomy in art and ideas thus ushered in the “Post-Human” era. Now the individual artist and their “expression,” were translated into determing social, linguistic, or economic games which the individual was unable to achieve autonomy from or transcend.
The divide between the humanistic and the posthuman emerges in the contrast between Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, where the authentic genius is juxtaposed to the ironic genius. The authentic genius subjectively creates masterpieces, while the ironic genius presents us ready-made images speaking not of interior or biographical states, but ubiquitous social and economic realities patently transparent to the any person. The Newman or Rothko hopes to transcend the everyday and arrive at the Sublime, whereas the Warhol denies that possibility by intending to remain immanently within banal everyday economic realities. So goes the Warholian syllogism: Clement Greenberg likes Coke and so do you, and you can understand a Warhol just like Clement Greenberg.
In this transformation from what has often been called Modernism to Postmodernism the possibility of man’s transcendence to the divine was thwarted or denied. The use of chance in Dada and Postmodern art is the reduction of man to a unconscious conduit for nature. Through chance man is translated back into nature and his intentionality made ironic.
The "death of God" does not necessarily result in the deification of man but in the breakdown of the ontic heirarchy in the form of nihilism. Nihilism means the transformation of ontic concers from a vertical to a horizontal orientation. Eventually God and Nature were jettison altogether and art was only left with historical conventions lacking all necessity or intrinsic value. Art became a linguistic game. Initiated by Duchamp, art is only what a social group decides to call it. Like the findings of natural science, perhaps true, but a deadly truth.
Man was not made in the image of God, but God made in the image of man motivated by an aberrant psychology in need of psychoanalytic adjustment. Transcendence today, for cosmopolitan society is sheer farce, either false humility, hybris, or unconscious self-aggrandizement. There are innumerable reasons and motivations for severing ourselves from the divine, but the result has been a serious diminution in the possibility and number of great themes in art.
Principles are reduced to ideologies, intentions mere rationalizations for unconscious drives, the figure to the body, the artist to the businessman, the masterpiece to the market-piece. By reducing man to pure immanence and denying transcendence, the great themes of art have been radically attenuated and any attempt to address such themes is seen as misguided, anachronistic, parochial, or just all of the above.Hasn't one heard old man, that god is dead?!
Reducing man to pure immanence, translating him back into nature, seems consistent with natural science and our liberal political tendencies. Yet it is well documented in blood and bodies, that returning man to a theoretical state of nature has led to much disenchantment in Modernity. This has been described by
Robert Pippin as the philosophical problem of the time. Simultaneous with the conquest of reason in the industrial and French revolutions, was the emergence of counter-revolutionary forces such as Romanticism which questioned the capacity of modern reason to adequately provide a robust and satisfying account of human existence. This disenchantment continued in the varied forms of Romanticism, Modernism, even Postmodernism in the aesthetic realm, and Marxism, Fascism, Communism, Existentialism, and Poststructuralism in the theoretical realm. Disenchantment with Modern reductionism is now clearly evident in Islamic extremism as a result of the inroads made by liberalism and capitalism in the Middle East.
Yet the liberal belief in progress and self-legislating moral freedom, however wholesome it may be, can only be justified and explained, if not by the belief in God, by some nugget of divinity self-evidently found in human Being which might extricate it from nature's necessity. Will science find that nugget?
This is no mere theoretical exercise. The manner in which we orchestrate the ontic realms will have direct consequences on political organization and the treatment of other beings. Recently the
United Nations tabled a motion to give rights to the Earth and all her nonhuman inhabitants.
Is it
hybris for man to grant himself ontic priority over the animals in the modern rights game? Will our neglect of the rights of animals which balance the world's ecosystems lead to our own demise? We can gladly acknowledge the mechanical nature of man on way to the emergency room, but wonder if anyone can live by that truth alone. Who seriously acts as if they are merely biological matter in motion? Even if we do
act that way as per natural necessity, we certainly do not, or can not consistently
think that way.
We may surely be able to surpress our use of the word "God" in the jargon of various philosophical discourses and related language games. We cannot however be so sure that in this attempted elimination of the ontically divine, we haven't merely
transferred the ontic attributes of the divine realm onto other apparently mundane and imminent signifiers. A good liberal himself, Gillespie believes we'll have to extend our liberality to God in our discussion of ontic priorities if we are to get out of the well dug trenches of today’s thought.
