The Fortress of Mystery: Socrates and the Artist

Life is not about being in the know,

it’s about being in the mystery.

It can be seen in works of truly great art that each creative thought has been subject to, and transformed by, the intense pressure of the imagination of the artist. In this the artist is displaying a unique singularity of purpose and direction. Eckhart Tolle might say that the great artists achieve such pressures by relieving the mind of its power, and trusting instead an instinctive natural power, the animal being, the universal energy from far above and beyond the mere human. In this forge alone can the pressure and temperature required for creation be generated. How many artists describe their inspiration as not coming from internal choice, but coming from beyond them, traveling through them? For most of human history, this force was called God.

But doesn’t it seem to us so self-evident that production is done not through some mystery from the beyond, but through attention, thought, and application? Is this not our ethic of production, as humans, as animal workhorses? But perhaps this kind of personal immersion, the go-it-alone intensity of thinker-as-hermit, is not a channelling of power, but a disconnection from the energy of the real world. Perhaps this is where Socrates was as he stood motionless, so lost in the labyrinth of his own thought that he remained unrousable for several days. Would this kind of distance from universal power, and instead a reliance on earthly human thought alone, not bring forth this most aggressively literal and logical father of philosophy? Nietzsche recognised Socrates as a merely “theoretical man”, and so eventually a nihilist who cared not if he lived or died. Benjamin describes the Socratic method as “the erection of knowledge”, which “hounds the answer as dogs would a noble stag” (Socrates, 1916). They both identify in Socrates an element of paltriness and pedantry, of submission to the mundane. Socrates does not channel the power of God and release it in the world, he locks out everything but that which he can name and debate. In place of the great tragedies, mysteries and contradictions that had formed until then the backbone of human culture, he brings dull reality, clear transparency and the supremacy of truth.

Or have Nietzsche and Benjamin fallen into the trap (as did Lessing and accordingly all art historians and critics since) of defining their theory by their own taste? They find something vulgar about Socrates, something common. They see in him the twilight of man as a mystery, and the dawn of man as an animal, and they hate him for this. He lacks subtlety, he lacks complexity, he seeks to undo the metaphysical knots in which academicians love to tie themselves. Really he frightens them: he can cut them down to size, castrate them, he can expose their webs of pseudo-enlightenment as froth and sham. These philosophers who lack his rigour inhabit an elitist fortress of mystery into which only the great and the good have access. He strips power from those who hold the reins of subjectivity, and democratises thought. He is not an artist but a politician.

As for me, Nietzsche is my co-pilot, not Socrates. This fortress of mystery is not for some intellectual elite: each of us lives within its walls and we cannot know what lies without. When we look at the world we see only our shadows silhouetted (our “I”, which never leaves us) and we call that shadow truth. We can no more hunt down the truth than we can trap our own shadows. Why not leave the shadow to its own devices – it will look after itself.

After all, life is not about being in the know, it’s about being in the mystery.

Artist and Artisan

The notion of artisan is not at all clear in this age, and in fact very few people are artisans in the traditional sense. Artisan in the arts and crafts definition refers to a nostaligia for the pre-industrial age, the continuity between creator and product. Here I mean artisan as a worker who uses an art form as a tool in the service of creating another product; using an artform as a means to an end, as opposed to an artist, for whom the art form is an end in itself. In visual arts, the artisan now is the graphic designer, logo creator, brander; in music, the jingle and ringtone composer; in writing, the marketer and writer of guff.

Such an artisan cannot have a fully developed artistic sensibility. The graphic designer is using art, the artform, as a product, a tool; to do so would be impossible with a full understanding and appreciation of the achievement of art. Equally the jingle and ringtone writer is a musician only out of pure trade, not out of love or necessity. They cannot be both a producer of a product, and an appreciator of art. The artist produces out of necessity the fruits of the relentless pressure of his mind and heart on some divine flow; the artisan on the other hand rejects the lofty in favour of the mundane, the creation in favour of the product. How could a person do this and claim to really respect exactly what they forsake? Instead, the artisan has a necessarily dulled artistic sense. They are incising from art that which makes it special, using higher forms who have their home and origin in nature in the Oneness, into parcels, units, pieces, packages, products. The sacred is harnessed to glorify the profane. Art comes from above and beyond us, if the artisan saw what contempt for inspiration he used, he would be ashamed of how he debases the divine. Instead, the artisan is deadened to art, dulled to its wonder. Otherwise, how could they go on? Every person who hijacks art in the service of vapidity is an enemy of art, and stands against the evolution of man to a higher plane of consciousness. They are obscuring the light in the darkness of existence.

An exaggerated parody of this occurs in This is Spinal Tap. Nigel Tufnel is playing a melancholy song on the piano, and is asked about it, diverging as it does from the heavy metal they normally play. Influenced by Mozart and Bach (“Mach, kind of”), he says it’s “in D minor, which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don't know why.” In fact, he is right – Mozart almost exclusively used D minor when writing in a minor key, Bach’s Art of Fugue, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and many of the most tragic works are in this key – the solitary flat, punctuating the long open scale seems to give this key a particular sparseness, evoked emptiness. When asked what the name of the piece is, Tufnel replies “Lick my love pump.”
How far from this is the graphic designer who studies the sketches of Michaelangelo to inform logo design? Can one really be in touch with the mystery and otherworldiness of what Michaelangelo creates, and also use that in logos or to advertise any product? It’s an insult to him, as Tufnel is a (comic) insult to those who use music to take humans beyond their mortal prisons. Equally, the person who writes things like “Flip-flops this summer - To be or not to be?” cannot love Shakespeare and by extension does not ‘get’ literature as a form of art. They show that at worst the artisan is intellectually and artistically lacking: in this case they cannot fathom intellectually that this is a question of suicide (what Wittgenstein described as the only important question) and that artistically they cannot grasp the anguish of Hamlet’s knowing self-destruction. At best they are just cynical, parasites on one of the few things which make us special, devaluing that which gives our great living tragedy any worth.