On The S/O Dilemma

First and foremost: you’re going to want background, as this entry is partially a rebuttal of and continuation regarding both this post (read first) and this post (read second). Otherwise I doubt that what follows will make 100% sense. Do as ye will.

There are what seems to be two schools of thought regarding the nature of art and how it informs both the artist and the intended audience. One school is neatly summarized below, and is taken verbatim from Paul’s blog (first link), who in turn quotes Michael Chekhov’s To The Actor. The other school I’ll be getting to shortly. Chekhov states (apologies for the length, but it is relevant):

The great German director Max Reinhardt confessed, “I am always surrounded by images.” Charles Dickens wrote in his journal, “I have been sitting here in my study all morning, waiting for Oliver Twist who has not yet arrived!” Goethe declared that inspiring images must appear before us as God’s children and call to us, “We are here!” Raphael saw an image moving within his room that later became the Sistine Madonna on his canvas. Michelangelo complained despairingly that images pursued him and forced him to sculpt in all sorts of materials, even solid rock.

How can we question the beliefs of these master artists and writers that their imaginative life came to them from outside themselves? And would they not scorn the narrow conception of creativity that relies solely upon personal memories and efforts? They would undoubtedly feel that today we deny our communication with the objective world of imagination, in direct contrast to their free excursions into it. The creative impulse of the masters was an expansion toward the world beyond them, while ours is often a contraction within ourselves.

The old masters of European and Asian culture might even shout to us, “Look at your creations. They are not confined to reproductions of our petty, personal lives, desires, and limited surroundings. Unlike the artists of today, we forgot our individual selves in order to be conscious and active servants of otherworldly images. Truly, we did not want to be slaves to these unguided visions. But in our work, we incorporated them like an unexpected blessing. Why are you then creating so many specimens of ugliness, disease, and chaotic contortions? Is it not simply because you are too concerned with yourselves alone and not your art?”

The conviction that there is an objective world in which our images lead their independent life widens our horizon and strengthens our creative will. Developing and assuming new conceptions concerning the creative process in art is the way for the artist to grow and to understand his or her talent. One of those new conceptions is the objective existence of the world of the artist’s creative images. What is the reward of artists brave enough to acknowledge the objectivity of the world of imagination? They free themselves from the constant pressure of their too personal, too intellectual interference with the creative process, the greater part of which is intensely personal and takes place in the sphere that lies beyond the intellect…

Poor indeed is the imagination that leaves the artist’s mind cold, and poor indeed is the influx of wisdom to such an artist, when one hears him say, “I have built my art upon my convictions.” Would it not be better for an artist to say that he has built his convictions upon his art? But this is only true of the artist who is really gifted. Haven’t we noticed that the less talented the person is, the earlier he forms his “convictions” and the longer he tenaciously clings to them?

My good friend Ted (second link) holds that imagination is necessarily subjective, and therefore – effectively – Chekhov is full of shit. More on this in a second. Chekhov additionally implies two paragraphs above that beauty is objective and the standards of beauty are universal, by saying: “Why are you then creating so many specimens of ugliness, disease, and chaotic contortions?” He is clearly willing to go out on a limb and not only say that he thinks a given piece of art is ugly, but also that it is universally ugly. He goes on to say that this ugliness stems from self-centered creation, i.e. creation that is based on personal idiom and experience, rather than the preferred “otherworldly images” from the “objective world of imagination”. I’m going to touch on the difference between art as a concept and art as a craft, as well as what this has to do with beauty and ugliness, in the next installment. Let’s turn now to the nature of imagination.

The Subjectivity/Objectivity Dilemma

Chekhov believes imagination stems from an objective, exterior world, full of imagery that comes to the artist unbidden; Ted believes that imagination comes from the inner workings of the mind and is based on subjective personal experience. So which is it?

Let’s take a huge conceptual leap back and look at it from a purely biological/neurological perspective. I have thoughts. Surely you agree. These thoughts are necessarily correlated to the triggering of neural firing pathways (read: symbols) in the brain; if I’m thinking of a dog, the symbol for “dog” is active. If I’m thinking of “dog covered in cottage cheese”, the symbols for “dog”, “covered”, and “cheese” are all active, in addition to a host of related ones. You get the point. (I’m thinking the symbol for “gross” would be appropriate here.) There are basically two cases that cause thoughts to be triggered, as I see it; actual and hypothetical. Let’s cover them in detail.

Case One: Actual. I’m walking down the street and I see a stray cat on the sidewalk, sauntering up to me. The neurons in my eyes send information to my visual cortex, which undergoes a significant amount of processing to present my conscious with the qualia of the visual field; colors, shapes, patterns, textures, movement. A split-second later, the symbol-processing area of my brain (central cortex) receives the qualia and categorizes the raw data based on my previous experiences. Since I’ve taken walks on sidewalks before, and am additionally expecting to be walking on a sidewalk, the data corresponding to the surrounding environment is instantly identified and decided to be unimportant. The data corresponding to the cat is identified as a cat (face it, I’m highly familiar with cats), the cat-symbol is triggered, and I have a name for it and a reaction in place before I’m really even aware that I see it. Everything up to this point is non-conscious processing. Finally, the conscious mind is presented with the information: “Everything’s usual, except there is a cat.” I like cats, so my decision is informed by my previous pleasant experiences with cats: I walk up to it, let it sniff me. I pet it. You get the picture. Literally.

Case Two: Hypothetical. I’m walking down the street and I imagine a cat on the sidewalk, sauntering up to me. No qualia this time; my sensory apparatus does not actually perceive a cat. No abstraction of lower-level signals necessary. The symbol for cat is activated directly, this time by a higher-level process: conscious imagination. There’s no pre-conscious processing. I imagine a cat, imagine my interaction with it (in turn activating my self-symbol) and daydream about walking up to it and taking it home. It has brown fur, blue eyes, one of its paws is white. Its tail is crooked. So cute!

Moving back to imagination and the S/O dichotomy: Imagination is the same as hypothetical thought, which in turn is nothing more than interaction with symbols and systems of symbols that have no external trigger. Let’s assume for a moment that the trigger for these symbols is wholly external and objective: some alternative world, be it spiritual or just non-detectable, is activating various symbols directly and effectively showing us, the artists, an objective and alternate reality of symbols which all art and beauty originates from. Just to be clear: this is the same as assuming that hypothetical thought is caused by external forces instead of conscious control. Moving on.

The obvious caveat: our system of symbols is necessarily a personal one. Suppose I’ve never seen a cat before, not even one of the jungle cats. Would I have a symbol for the visual representation of a cat? Of course not. It’s silly to posit that humans have a full complement of symbols from birth. This is easily verified by observing human children who have never seen a cat before refer to cats as dogs, before they are corrected by their parents. What would a “full complement of symbols” even mean? It makes sense that children are birthed with a rudimentary set of symbols (like a symbol for “me”, for “nipple”, for “food”, & c.) + the ability to create and map novel experiences onto new symbols. Anything above that just doesn’t follow.

It is, quite logically, also possible that the external trigger doesn’t presuppose our knowledge of cats; that’s admittedly kind of a silly idea, anyway. So there could also be a completely and wholly external pattern of symbol triggering that isn’t based on specific symbols or systems. Sounds good. I’m an agnostic, but I’m willing to accept that spirits or other non-physical beings (read: God) could be causing this triggering. I have no problem with that.

The really obvious thing now, of course, is that if you agree

1) that symbols come into being through interpretation of novel experience;

2) that everyone is going to have different symbols;

then it pretty much follows that any symbol-triggering, even from an outside source, is necessarily going to be unique to each person (everyone has different symbols) and based wholly and completely on their experience set (symbols come into being through novel experience), and therefore 100% unavoidably subjective. Q.E.D.

“Art is necessarily informed only by personal values and experience.”