What is the difference between the natural and the artificial?
What is the difference between the natural and the artificial?
It is the pastoral or the self-consciously pious versus metaphysical poetry, scholastic philosophy, or ludic postmodernism.
It is the theatrical problem not of the self’s truest way of seeming, or mask; but the question the mask, or character as played by the actor asks about the self it represents. Is it authentic (enough)? What if instead there were only appearances?
Modernism says the important thing is to grasp that the only true self is the one that knows itself as mask. Postmodernism said, ok, fine, let’s explore the way things appear.
The ideals of the natural and artificial are both false. The former is lives of peasants as glorified by cultured urban courtiers; the latter is that of the dandy aesthete, but also the information worker imagined as rootless cosmopolitan comfortable with any language but knowing none as natural. The ideal of being natural is a fantasy of returning from mediation by language to the purely perceiving being of animals, and this is an enduring fantasy that can be found in some appropriations of Buddhism and other things. The opposite ideal is to be angels, who understand and so can transmit every message, but have no bodies, are untroubled by trauma, crisis, or affect, and so do not truly inhabit a world, but only a space of abstract and infinite possibilities (that of a mathematics, perhaps of a certain kind), and so are not subjects, because things do not happen to them, they just observe. In other words, the modern condition since the seventeenth century.
The self who only observes and is not really in the world is how in the 20th century the modernity of Descartes and empiricism began to be viewed, especially in romanticist-influenced thinking, particularly in Germany. A way of understanding that is more complex can be found, among others, in Shakespeare.
There is no way beings of language that we are can be truly authentic or natural, but of course we are natural as well as cultural beings. Our un-naturalness is not that we don't have a nature, but it is given as something not quite given, as something to which we can never have an untroubled relationship. But if we are more than animals, we are less than pure beings of language as a system of messages or statements that has no need for our characteristically insecure (it cannot be secure) relationship to something like a world.
The problem of language is that of subjectivity; it is that of enunciation, the consequence of the fact that in language, statements have not just about-ness but are spoken by an "I" who addresses some real or potential "you."
It is the fact that we don't just use words and statements to say things about things, and get or do what we want. It is that people address others and are addressed, and to be addressed is to be asked a question, and so as it were put on trial, but the question has no answer, and it also has an infinite number of possible answers none of which really is one.
The address is love. Love is attention to persons as well as to problems. It is problematization of what is personal, and so matters. It is caring about how things are. If, as Heidegger said, guilt is wanting to have a conscience, love is wanting to live in the world, and in this it is different than knowledge. To be something is to want to be it; this is the condition of responsibility, of having to answer for oneself, which is necessitated by the fact that, as Kant discovered, what we are aware of always involves an implicit reference to the subject, the one who can say “I,” and thus put his own way of being into question. If I believe or think I see that the cat is on the mat, I must know that if true, it could be otherwise, but also that it is my thought, and so my observing it must have something to do with me. Ethics is perhaps just the set of consequences of this fact. It is what it means to exist, since to be implies possibility.
Mastery knows, love understands. It wants to make sense of things, which are often troubling or problematic, and it can want to make sense of things because in some way they already do make sense, and that’s how are involved in them. Without love, without caring, we would find ourselves in a meaningless information glut. Authenticity is not the answer; it is merely an aesthetic problem of theater. We are theatrical subjects because we not only have ways of going on in being the characters we are with their peculiar potentialities that may appear as a destiny. We also address others and are addressed. The religious form of this, prayer, is a lyric poem or interior monologue addressed this time to an absented but specific and not only general audience. Despair and hope have to do with the choice to care about things. We face this as a demand, not a given.
There is no proper way of being. But our use of language seems to imply that such a propriety is demanded. If it exists, it exists in the life of a business society, where people busily work to get things done. When things fall apart, wars or punishments become likely.
The contrary fetish of those who love the arts is the idea of what is interesting. What is interesting is neither simply given nor simply produced; it is wrested from things.
Tomorrow the world will be even more perfected and operating smoothly most of the time. As the Chinese model of governance is approached through the mediation of the infotech industry, which promises people easy opportunities to get whatever they want, at the price of an utter eclipse of freedom as privacy rather than potentiality (as in English rather than German and French philosophy and theory). But at the end of the day, people will still have a certain wonder, and a certain angst. No mathematics without poetry, this would be a good political demand. We want not just to improve and perfect the world, but also call to everything including ourselves into question, and look for ways to tear apart what has been built, in case something else might be possible, or needed.
A God might condemn creative people in particular for the destruction we know as dying just for that reason. What he does not seem to have ever been able to do is give us a world that, perhaps with the help of an accompanying instruction manual, is merely given so that all one has to do is follow the rules.
There is thus no single consistent model of Being, a discovery of 20th century mathematics and philosophy. There is no world that has no fault, and to want to live without faults is a fantastic project appropriate only to ruling masters who want people to believe in the world's goodness and their own innocence.
Thus, the totalitarian bugbear will continue to threaten. Perhaps it will last until management is thoroughly politicized and religion is replaced not by medicine, as has happened, but art.
Managing must give way to thinking. The theorists have merely told us how we must change the world (while perhaps vigilantly suspecting ourselves and each other of largely political sins; that is, we change or improve the world by doing some work that is well-managed); the important thing is to better understand it, and occupy ourselves with doing so.
All truths of practical life are obvious. What is unsaid in all that is said about practical problems is not the mystery of perceptible being, as in certain forms of Buddhism, but all that can be developed and understand in the field of possibilities that is driven by the question of meaning.
There are only bodies and languages, unless there is thinking, which produces truths. Truths are plural, and they are constructed, not merely found. God has long been silent.
Meaning is not perception embraced as the speech of God or the truth of beings. It is perception and experience put into words, for the sole purpose of seeing and understanding better. This is why art must replace religion, as has been noted since Hegel. It also must replace the medicine of minds and persons, since a medicine for the mind is a practice of management, appropriately only to a society of laborers managed by a knowledge-based elite. Such a medicine is of course a secular form of religion, and its institutions are a new universal state church. As with the old one, it focuses on the sins and crimes of individuals, whose fundamental obligation is faith in the institutions and authorities, which cannot be questioned (systems of governance and economy can be criticized, but not morally; only the individual, not the state, can be guilty). But because the condition of our late modernity involves being more political than ever, we are as it were called to the higher truths of anarchy, and the future belongs to art liberated from the managerial tasks of therapy, which combines law and medicine but excludes precisely the political. The watchwords may just be the value of the interesting versus the boring. What saves us from the aestheticism of the dandy is that we find most interesting what most vitally matters. That is why in the Messianic Age people will occupy themselves with understanding the problems that, themselves having none, in the now permanent Sunday of life, troubled their ancestors, the problems of a world in need of repair. Today, there are things to do; tomorrow, who can say?