What now in painting? Part 2: The visual form of meaning.

Summary of Part 1:
= Art as an illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day:
........... but who are the men of knowledge in late modernity?
........... artists have to build up their own knowledge base
= Knowledge as the outcome of:
........... an accumulation of knowings by scientists.
........... a philosophic vision of the human atom as particle of an unattainable whole.
........... our human ideals and visions of a better tomorrow.
= The outcome of knowledge:
........... the future is not a given. It is probabilistic. It is the materialization of one possible among many possibilities.
........... human ideals about the future are one among an ensemble of determining factors and the stronger those ideals the stronger they'll impact the setting of the future.
........... human ideals are visions of a better tomorrow they convey an image of beauty.


Abstract of part 2
It is in the nature of art to express beauty in the formal rendering of a work. Non-beauty, ugliness, inharmony are the results of the artist's envy, greed and most importantly his will. The artist can overcome those by letting the content of his creations flow out of the material of his support and what he'll discover there unmistakably will reflect upon the conditions of his time.






Part 2. The visual form of meaning.


2.1. Beauty is the reflection of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life.

In "The meaning of what to represent" I try to convey this idea that the meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality. I would now like to posit that reality is beautiful for the simple reason that it materialized into existence. Many more other possibles have failed indeed to materialize along this immemorial road of evolutionary changes that constitute our human reality. The failure of all those other possibles to be retained by the principle of life, or its synonym evolution, in our minds evokes something visually akin to non-beauty or ugliness.

The principle of life stores in its DNA (its program) the entirety of its evolutionary road and passes this information down to the next generations. In opposition to the ugliness that casts the rejected possibilities of change the successfully retained ones appear fantastically beautiful for no other reason that they appear to be the direct causes of our being here today. We are here today as the result of a chain of cascading successes, as the result of so many successful links in a chain of evolutionary changes that started sometime 4000 million years ago. Each of those links of changes were like emerging miracles and the miracles multiplied and multiplied in an endless chain. This whole process built of additional successes suggest a certain magical beauty of life being at the pinnacle of its glory. And this beauty is reflected in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth.

This begs the question of the nature of beauty. If beauty is the characteristic of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life than beauty is something objective and is in no way connected to human subjectivity. What we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something (lines, forms, colors, rythms, harmonics and sounds) evolution did not retain. Being thus encoded in the DNA of life beauty remains indeed largely inaccessible to the individuals who carry it. At best the individuals experience an unconscientious feel that something is ugly or beautiful without being able to express anything more than platitudes about the reason for their feeling. Some artists were lucky enough to touch that beauty at the top of their talent and their creations were applauded by all who unconscientiously came under the spell of those artists' reflection of the miraculous beauty laying at the hart of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life.

Other artists tried to theorize about the artistic necessity of beauty. Kandinsky came the closest to this realization of an artistic necessity in "Concerning the spiritual in art". (1) He called this artistic necessity of beauty "the inner need for inner meaning" and defined it as "the inevitable desire for outward expression of the objective element... If the artist be priest of beauty, nevertheless this beauty is to be sought only according to the principle of the inner need, and can be measured only according to the size of that need. That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul". Kandinsky seemed clearly aware of the existence of something objective out there that defines beauty. But, not understanding the nature of that objective element, he equated his intuition with an act of the soul and his following step was thus to posit that art has to reflect the spirituality of the soul. I bet, had Kandinsky known that the entirety of our evolutionary road is stored in our DNA, he would have equated "the inner need, which springs from the soul" with the inner need we feel to respect life as the beauty resulting from a chain of cascading evolutionary successes.

So if "The meaning of what to represent" lays in the knowledge of the men of knowledge of the day about the meaning of life then we have to conclude that artists, in late modernity, have to give visual signs of such knowledge while reflecting that meaning in the miraculous beauty laying at the hart of the chain of successful evolutionary changes in the principle of life. So it seems that for the first time in the history of visual art form and content are meant to join in the same object. This should be great news for all of us and for art lovers in particular.



2.2. Greed envy and will are the shapers of ugliness in human creations.

Will is shaped by desire and desire emerges out of envy and greed. All acts forged out of will reflect an innate rigidity in their form. They are set in the concrete of envy and greed and the lust they profile through the eventual satisfaction of the desires they evoke initially. And thus is eradicated any possibility of spontaneity and naturalness.

When will is absent we discover harmony. Harmony is something objective, it is what all great religions and philosophies strived to illustrate. Harmony can't be deranged. Whatever happens in the cosmos, in our human societies or in our personal lives, harmony is always resulting. It's kind of being the prevailing state of life around our universe. Disharmony in the whole is simply an impossibility, it is a creation of our egos that are driven by greed, want for possessions and glory that trick us to try imposing our will over the harmony reflected by the principle of life. Will is the shaper of disharmony.

As human creations paintings, and other fine art works, are subjective renderings and in consequence they are not automatically harmonious. Our driven egos are more often than not playing tricks on us resulting in subjective preferences that are blinding us. In a painting, of whatever style and by extension in whatever art form, some objective rules apply that are acting as the parapet protecting us from falling in the precipice of confusion that lays under the bridge leading towards harmony and beauty. THE HARMONIZATION OF THE CREATOR's SUBJECTIVITY, freed of his greed and glory driven ego, WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principle of life that is at work throughout our universe, THIS IS WHAT ART IS ALL ABOUT. In paintings, or for that matter in all fine art works, content and technique are blend into form. What I mean to say is that whatever technique is being used to express whatever content, the form of the resulting work must be harmonious or in other words that it must blend with the objective rules of beauty derived from the prevailing harmony that flows throughout our entire universe. Harmony is the general state of our universe, and the memory of its historical forms is stored in the DNA of life, that's how we call it the prevailing harmony. It is not something static, all the contrary, it is permanent change. It is an infinite chain of transformations.

These last centuries, western artists and thinkers concentrated on the idea of an absolute truth and they lost themselves in this Sisyphean act for a snapshot FOR truth leading more often than not in the deep valley of absolute certainty where they drowned under the passions arising with these very certainties.

We should now make the jump to a superior level of understanding and discover how to fabricate snapshots OF truth un-encumbered by greed, envy, and the ideologies founded on such. I firmly believe that to keep in tune WITH THE OBJECTIVE RULES OF BEAUTY, the principles of life at work throughout our universe, we have to concentrate on the sequences between the snapshots while freeing our SUBJECTIVITY from our greed and glory driven ego that tricks us into the desire or the preference of some outcomes. By design outcomes emerge as the conclusion of a process and are not destined to endure. We should thus not bow in contemplation of them. What really matters is the process leading to a successful outcome, for, whence such an outcome emerges it is bound to weaken in importance in light of the non-ending search for more complexity by the principle of life. Successful outcomes are indeed like the links in the long haul chain of the complexification of the principle of life. This chain is like the metastasize of the principle of life throughout the body of reality and once a link is welded, as the successful outcome at a particular moment in time, a process of change sets in that'll conclude with the welding of the next link.

For the observer, the sequencing of changes is what ultimately is making sense of each particular moment. The same goes for the art observer. It is indeed the sequencing of changes between colors, between sounds or between ideas and words that ultimately makes sense of those same colors, sounds, ideas and words in the whole of a work of art. In the understanding of this simple truth (universal principle) lays a unique chance to leave the heights of our past searches for certainties. By their very nature, changes don't let us the time to focus on certainties, indeed, the best we can do is to try to surf on the waves of changes, to try to be IN the reality of the situation or to say this otherwise, to try to be in the reality of each moment.



2.3. A way of enhancing and arousing the mind to various inventions. (2)

"I shall not refrain from including among these precepts a new aid to contemplation, which, although seemingly trivial and almost ridiculous, is none the less of great utility in arousing the mind to various inventions. And this is, if you look at any wall soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in many combinations. ... But although these stains may supply inventions they do not teach you how to finish any detail. Therefore painter, you should know that you can't be good if you are not a master universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form, which you will not know how to do unless you observe them and retain them in your mind."

Leonardo tells us here that painters should use some form of automatism to discern the content of their works into the stain or the material of their support. Such an automatism implies spontaneity. It excludes will and eliminates any formal rigidity emanating from desire. And Leonardo then to insist. "Therefore, O painter, take care that lust for gain does not override in your mind the glory of art." Leonardo implies here that what is not resulting from your will is conducive "to bring honor upon yourself through your art".

Under the influence of the popes of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung the idea of automatism was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century by the early surrealists. But as noted by Andre Masson "The tendency to allow oneself to be swamped by things, the ego being no more than the vase which they fill, really only represents a very low degree of knowledge. ... There is a whole world in a drop of water trembling on the edge of a leaf, but it is only there when the artist and the poet have the gift of seeing it in its immediacy. However to avoid making any mistakes, this revelation or inspired knowledge, and this contact with nature are only profound in so far as they have been prepared by the thought and by the intense consideration of the artist. This is the only way in which sensitive revelation can enrich knowledge." (3) Surrealism would then flow further into the irrational, the bizarre, and lose its creative power at discovering something useful to say about reality. That's when surrealism was done with.

Automatism as a practice to discover reality "in a stain on a canvas" has not lost its power at generating flowing lines and colors that starkly contrast the rigidity of a work labored under the duress of will. But as has been evidenced with Surrealism its power at "arousing the mind" is conditional to the painter possessing:
- a body of knowledge "universal enough to imitate with your art every kind of natural form" (2)
- a technique that does not hamper your representation for "although these stains may supply inventions they do not teach you how to finish any detail". (2)

Automatism by itself does not supply any meaning or any content. At best it helps painters who have a valid body of knowledge about reality to transfer on the canvas, in highly creative ways, elements of that knowledge while attaining a high degree, of naturalness, of fluidity and dynamism in their works. But as evidenced with Surrealism automatism becomes incomparably dangerous at the hands of people who do not master the knowledge of their day. Kandinsky was indeed cleverly prescient when he wrote "... the freedom of today has at once its dangers and its possibilities. We may be present at the conception of a new great epoch, or we may see the opportunity squandered in aimless extravagance." (1)

It was extravagance that won. It imposed its seal on all artworks that would be suceessfull on the market these last fifty years. This does by no means imply that art is dead. It just means that art, during an instant of inattention, has been debased to "whatever" the market deemed to carry success for itself. This meant art creations that would generate fiancial surplusses on the merit of marketing techniques alone. In this process the artistic had to be expunged of art works, for, it was distracting people's attention from what the marketing techniques intended it to focus on. So extravagance and whatever dominated the art scene for a while but art is back now and the conception of a new great epoch is at last free to emerge!



2.4. The "periodic characteristics" of a work of art.

The artist is a citizen as any other. He lives in a given historical, political and cultural context that are impacting on his attitudes, his behavior with other people, and his work. From animism to religion and then to modernity we observe constants, in each of those periods, in term of content of an art work and in term of the form in which artists render the meaning of their work. Ours is a period of change from modernity to what comes later in post modernity. In contrast to the two earlier transitions (animism to religion and religion to modernity) the passage from modernity to post modernity will be extremely fast and will take place on a global scale. The outcome of this transition is uncertain. It could conclude with the elimination of the human species from the surface of the earth but it could also promise us better tomorrows. What is for sure is that this transition will last at most a couple of centuries and it will be devastating for the human population and its societal forms of organization.

I'm very well aware of the risks of collapse along this transition: societal, civilizational and even for the human species. But this is part of the evolutionary process that the principle of life is bound to undergo; whatever this may be. We should understand that the principle of life is not depending on the survival of humanity to thrive further. Who are we to even think about equating ourselves with the principle of life? Yes we are a living species but we are only one among many other and nothing indicates that our actions as a specie are conducive to the metastatic expansion of the principle of life throughout the whole. There are many reasons to believe that, on the contrary, with modernity our specie acts more like a poison that kills life.

Whatever the outcome of the evolutionary transition we are entering fact is that in the last decades we learned some important lessons about the workings of our societal organizations and about human culture, art, the biology of life and so on. This idea that the evolutionary process of change is inscribed in each particular form of life's DNA; this allows us to have a peak at the beauty contained in each link of the chain of life. And art being the inscription of the knowledge of the day in visual signs to be shared with all; it seems to me that late modern artists should be drawing and painting nothing else than signs of the process of change from which shall emerge the beauty contained in the next link on the long chain of humanity's societal evolution.

I think that there is no point in painting our societal demise other than eventually frightening the human atoms. That's what the members of Cobra did in Europe after experiencing the atrocities of the second world war. But they were also in search of a better tomorrow and their creations eventually participated in modulating the societal mood that led to the emergence of a process of change that could possibly conclude with a viable post modern societal organization.

The present transition is a global affair that will need the sharing of a common worldview by the individuals in order for humanity to have a chance to make it, without too much of a damage, to the next link on the societal evolutionary chain.

It seems to me that all the conditions are starting to fall into place for such a worldview to arise:
- the most advanced late modern science sheds light - on the inaccessibility of the whole through rationality, - on our interconnectedness as particles of the whole, - and on the sheer vanity at the core of modernity that is responsible for igniting a chain reaction of side-effects that have the potential to annihilate us as a species. It also helps us better understand that we have to dump our present ways of living for a more organic and sustainable approach.
- science is now awakening to a growing conscience that animism and the civilizations that were built as its add-ons (the East globally) got it right from the beginning.
- science and the philosophies of the East could thus possibly be finding common ground in devising the building blocks of a worldview that could be shared on a worldwide scale.
- people's conscience, of the dangers that are lurking for humanity as a whole, is deepening fast around the whole world foreshadowing an approaching twilight of conversion to an emerging worldwide worldview.

I try to render visual signs of this coming worldview.



2.5. The tools of the visual trade.

To the traditional techniques that had been in use over thousands of years, modernity successively adds oil painting, lithography, photography, motion pictures and lately imaging software and we can't but marvel at the power of seduction of the images produced with these techniques. It should thus not come as a surprise that along the last century the visual relay to societies at large of new ideas, new understandings and new ideologies largely borrowed from the images produced with those modern techniques.

This recourse to modern techniques of representation acted like a parking at the margins of high and late modernity of the traditional techniques of representation and this happened while visual arts entered in a general state of confusion. But we should not deduce from that simultaneity any causality out of the use of those modern techniques. The surge of images produced with those modern techniques follows indeed the failure by the modern thinking artists of the avant-garde, at the turn of and further along the 20th century, to define a valid replacement of the first degree images that our eyes give us to see... images that they so much hated.

Today in late modernity artists have first and foremost:
1. to find the answers to the questions that the avant-garde of high-modernity struggled with and that it never solved.
2. to understand that the techniques made available along the span of high and late-modernity have been conceived in the intellectual context of those periods and as such they are not at all neutral. Those techniques contain the intellectual answers of our period and drive the artists who use them on a given path that does not allow them much freedom in term of the expression of their own vision (as answers to the questions implied in 1). It is not as if the artist was not free. It is that by using these techniques the artist limits his freedom to a choice between different options that are contained in those techniques. Those techniques act indeed like multi-answer questions. In other words the choice of answers is limited.
3. to understand that the meaning expressed in the content of their works comes first and that they should thus employ the technique that gives them the maximum ease in representing their meaning.

Personally I feel more at ease on a canvas using my hands, brushes, or whatever allows me to discover the meaning that sits unplugged in my unconscious and I don't know how I ever could better reproduce that discovered meaning than by letting flow the brush along the lines of the various inventions that are already there on the canvas and that I just discovered. Once a work is terminated software imaging techniques become my means to explore further, deeper, the content rendered with my hands.
But I guess everyone grew his own set of habits and technical skills and no one technique is thus more recommendable than another. In the end the imaging technique that best renders the meaning of the creator of visual signs is the technique that he best masters.



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(1). Kandinsky in "Concerning the spiritual in art." Dover publications. 1977.

(2). Leonardo in "On painting". The Invention and composition of narratives. Yale Nota Bene Book. 2001

(3). Andre Masson. "Painting is a wager". Horizon (London). In Herschel B, Chipp. Theories of modern art". University of California Press. 1968.
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What now in painting? Part 1: The meaning of what to represent.

The central thesis that runs through my rumblings about visual arts is that they are no more than the visual representation by artists, of the worldview of the men of knowledge of their days, for all to share. Under Animism they represent the worldview of the shaman, under Religious times they represent the creed professed by the priests and under Modernity they represent as many signs of the value system of the triumphing aristocracy and new rich merchants.

In high modernity a collision occurs into visual artists' minds between the disappearance of the men of knowledge in the traditional sense and an emergent subjective necessity to represent reality differently. It appears evident for the avant-garde that continuing to represent worldviews of the past makes no sense any longer. But this results in doubt and uncertainty in artists' minds:
- about what to represent (content of the work).
- about the technique of representation to use.

Today in late modernity, after nearly a century of trials and errors by the avant-garde, it is fair to say that it did not succeed in attaining the target it had set for itself. I mean that the avant-garde did not succeed to devise a new vision about reality that integrates the knowledge of the day. On the contrary its trials and errors concluded on a landscape of confusion. And in the midst of this intellectual confusion art has first been presented as being whatever the artist wanted it to be but that, in turn, engendered more than confusion, for, it was a direct conduit leading to cynicism and art then became the vector of finance. But as we all know finance is no art nor does it have any knowledge about what art is all about.

After a century of avant-gardism we artists are faced with the same questions that arose with the emergence of the avant-garde:
- what to represent or what meaning to give to the content of the work of art.
- what form to best dress the substance of our content.
- what technique to best represent, in our time, our content and its form.
The level of confusion in artists' minds is assuredly deafening but this does not eliminate the necessity to find answers to those questions that were first expressed nearly a century ago.

___________

1. The meaning of what to represent.



In this blog and in my book Artsense I posit that since the cultural dawn of humanity visual arts had a societal functionality. That function was to create visual signs, for all to share, about the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day. That functionality has been un-interrupted along tens of thousands of years and, the more archaeologists succeed in digging further down in history, the more it appears that it could well have been the case along hundreds of thousands of years. Or to put it otherwise this societal function of visual arts has been in practice over more than 99,9% of humanity's cultural span. High and Late modernity appear to have derogated to this societal functionality for less than 0.1% of humanity's cultural span. The least we can say is that what has been going on during the last 0.1% of the human time should by no means be considered as the norm of what is to come.

But who are the men of knowledge in late modernity to inspire the artists in their production of visual signs?

It was thought, for a time, during the swing of High modernity that science and rationality were the producers of the knowledge of modernity. This was effectively right but we start to discover that such knowledge was not really knowledge but an amalgamation of knowings that, in finale, are responsible, albeit indirectly, for the side-effects of modernity: 6th mass extinction of species, poisoning of our drinking water and our land bearing crops, climate change, over-population and rarity of raw materials, fossil energy, as well as those effects that are still unverified but that we somehow instinctively feel could well appear soon to be worse even than the ones we observe today: biological manipulations of plant, animal and human DNA, dispersion of nano-particles in the environment and so on

Furthermore the rise and expansion of modernity have been driven as a totalitarian push to convert to rationality. But that rationality now appears not to have been very reasonable after all. Its recipes are directly responsible for having caused:
- the poisoning of the oceans that ruptures the balance of the eco-systems sustaining marine life.
- the poisoning our arable land for the industrialization of our foods that is responsible in the last instance for the degrading quality of what we daily eat, drink, and for the disappearance of insects, bees, birds and so on.
- the poisoning of the air we breathe that is responsible for the increase in cancers, juvenile diabetes and so on.
- the rupture of the equilibrium between the multitude of parameters at work on earth and in the atmosphere. But that equilibrium, let us never forget this, is the source of the sustenance of life on earth. The rupture of the earth climate equilibrium leads to destabilizing changes; the species' equilibrium leads to declining variety that in turn leads to declining possibilities for the principle of life; the rupture of the human population equilibrium leading to over exploitation of material and energetic resources and so on and so on.

Now that humanity is on the verge of self-annihilation sirens are being heard from all quarters and capital, in a hurry, is positioning its ideology of rationalism as the answer to the very real problems it initially created.

As economic globalization expands the problems mentioned above are bound to multiply exponentially. The freeing of the genie of greed under the global assault of the values of modernity is going to make sure of that. But how could we, the 15% or less of humanity who have been reaping all the sweats of modernity until now, reproach to the other 85% to desire to share at the same table of modernity; come what may.

Necessity begs for answers and solutions. History is full of examples and the necessity that we feel in late-modernity is no different. Answers and solutions at the global level are slow to come by and slower yet to implement. But coming they will, imposed on us through the power of nature. The gravity of our late-modern problems is going to make sure that “non-rational” holistic solutions shall be implemented, solutions that emphasize the organic or functional relation between parts and whole.

One of the segments, in this all-encompassing range of problems to solve, concerns the re-balancing of the dis-equilibrium of the polarities of humanity itself: individuals versus societies. The re-balancing of that particular dis-equilibrium could very well be the central most pressing task that awaits us if we seriously want to save ourselves and our children from self-annihilation. Individualism in late-modernity has grown to such a point that it forms the sole substance of the societal dance between polarities. One of the two polarities, the societal, has been shuffled to the margins meaning that no actioning restraint mechanism functions any longer against individual excesses. In those conditions societies are simply incapable to determine solutions and if one particular group of interest wanted to impose its own perceived solutions it would never find the power to implement their application other than recoursing to totalitarian political adventure. The logic of capital has succeeded to impose the individual as the sole acting substance of its rationality but this has been reached at the expense of the loss of societal knowledge about its reproduction. Societies want to preserve what is there in order to guarantee their reproduction but that was going against the search by the logic of capital for growth and as a consequence the societal polarity has been sacrificed and thrown into the dustbin of modernity.

Whatever we might think about the limitation by society of individual rights and freedoms fact is that necessity shall impose the return in force of the societal polarity. Societal cohesion shall indeed be required to speed up the execution and implementation of the answers and solutions to our present state of necessity. And societal cohesion means first and foremost the sharing of a common worldview by all... This is where we close the circle, coming back to my initial definition of visual arts as being the representation of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share.

By no means do I suggest that visual artists collaborate with authoritarian powers to be. The power elite has indeed no clue about any valid knowledge about our global reality. They know about force to coerce, capital to invest and science to generate new avenues where to invest. They will eventually try to re-impose a past religious worldview that does not qualify as a workable worldview in the present and even less, in times of necessity, as a worldview that all could share.

The intersection that we observe starting to operate - between globalization, climate change, species' extinction, over-population, rarefaction of material and energetic resources and the other side-effects of modernity - is making for a messy process. A process that asks from us to respond, on the fly, with valid answers to the multiple urgencies. It goes without saying that pragmatism is the only valid key to open the doors on a livable future for our children.

I don't suppose that visual artists will transform, as by magic, into men of knowledge. Nowhere is the visual art education system preparing artists to think or to search for knowledge. And seen that knowledge is dispersed and not residing in any particular group of individuals, my best guess is that here and there we'll see some knowledgeable individuals having some practice in a method of representation starting to offer their take on reality for others to share. Those who search for meaning and more particularly meaning through visual representation can already experience what I try to expose. There is without any possible doubt an increase in quality meaning in the visual arts nowadays. For sure only a trained eye will detect and recognize such rare creators among the multitude of would-be artists.

The creative process toward meaning is akin to a process of sifting the grain from the shaft. Once someone succeeds to sift an appreciable quantity of grains then those grains start fast to interbreed bringing about fast personal improvement for their discoverers and that in turn is fast emulated by many others to create a line of pure-breeds in quality meaning. This process is somehow akin to what was going on under animism when the shaman created knowledge for his tribe and also the visual representation of that knowledge for all to share.

But how to start sifting the grains from the shaft? How to recognize the grains of the plants of knowledge that could feed us in the future? We for sure know that knowledge is the only valid answer. But where to find the men of knowledge whose worldview we could make ours? Nowhere it seems. The only path to actionable knowledge, in our present day circumstances, lays inside ourselves. There is no school nor any “ism” that masters the kind of global knowledge about reality that we are in need today. Parcels can be found here and there but we have to make the effort to assemble all those parcels into a coherent whole.

Not knowing if the whole of our reality is a pink elephant, a family of pink elephants, or even a pack of families the fallacy of a compartmental approach based on the observation of a detail inside one compartment of the whole can only result in a fantasy. That's typically the story of the classical scientific approach and why our application of its fantasies concludes invariably into dramas. We'll never know if the whole of our reality is a pink elephant, a family of pink elephants, or a pack of families but this should not impeach us to devise a methodology reflective of the working of the whole and that's exactly what humanity has been trying to attain along the hundreds of thousands of years when humans observed the rhythms and patterns of the universe, Gaia and their local environments. Anywhere around the world under animism "primitive" humans understood that they were connected in a web of complexity to all other living species in the "whole" and from that understanding they derived a deep respect for the life of all living species. The theories of complexity and the studies about change from chaos to order, and vice versa, in advanced sciences come to recognize today the validity of the animistic approach towards reality. But their discourse is unfortunately only accessible to a very narrow minority.

Following this line of argument, we deduce that reality is composed of a series of concentric circles, starting with ourselves (the observer) at the innermost point and spreading outwards and inwards:
- Outwards towards the self, the family, the village market place, the homeland, humanity itself, Gaia, the Milky Way, right out to the limit of our island universe knowing that further lays an unattainable that could be vaster that all that is attainable to us, an unattainable our attainable is a part of: a universe composed of one elephant, a family or a pack of families?
- Inwards towards the parts of our body, the molecules, the atoms, the sub-atomic particles.

Those concentric circles are in constant flux like interwoven by incessant interactions between circles and between particles in and among the circles. Reality is thus complexity in motion and what appears clearly here is that we are no more than time limited particles within that complexity in motion. Time limited particles that are driven by the whole that is characterized by this complexity in motion. This does not mean that what comes is invariably determined and that we therefore should take a fatalist approach. It simply means that what comes in the future is resulting as the “materialization” of one possible among the many possibles manifesting themselves at any given time. This leads me to think with Ilya Prygogyne that “... what we do today depends on our image of the future, rather than the future depending on what we do today. We build our equations by our actions. These equations, and the future they represent, are not written in nature. In other words, time becomes construction. Of course, we have some conditions that determine limits of the future but within these limits are many, many possibilities.
Therefore, since no deterministic prediction is likely to be valid, visions of the future--utopian visions--play a very important role in present conduct. I am more afraid of the lack of utopias.” (1) Anyone who is well versed in the Yi-Ching shall recognize in the words of Prygogyne the substance of what is at work in that very old work. Prygogyne is indeed one of those scientists who close the historical loop of knowledge by re-appropriating the foundational building blocks of animism; albeit in total unconsciousness of that very feat.

I summarized my understanding of reality in the following poem that I wrote in the fall of 2000 in Beijing. It became part of a gouache that I was working on around that time.

The contact between polarities generates a burst of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution. From this we know that the life of all species and their members is given by the changes occurring in the following 3 dimensions:

1. The SKY or the influences of environments, from vicinity to infinity, on each species and its members.
2. The EARTH or the influences of the hardware and software assigned to the members of each living species. This is called the drama of reproduction of the species through sex and of reproduction of the individuals through satisfaction of their objective needs.
3. The SELF or the influences of the cultural and economic works of each species upon itself, upon its members, upon other species and upon the environment.


But how to put such a vision and the knowledge it is based upon into visual signs? This is the subject of the following parts of this text.




1. Beyond Being and Becoming by Illya Prygogyne In NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly.
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Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

Nourished by the sap bubbling from our civilizational roots.

Abstract:
It's like a given for all of us that people of different civilizations are and behave very differently. We all inherited stereotypes about "the other" but once we start to better know people from another civilization it seems that those differences are fast melting away. In "the other" we discover a human as ourselves. But is this the real thing happening or is it only a mirage given by the picture of our perception in our heads? In this post I posit that civilizations imprint a subtle code of behavior within societies that reflects upon individual attitudes. This civilizational code remains largely ignored, for, to decode it you would need to understand the axioms upon which civilizations have been built originally. My plan is to illustrate the working of such a code, in people's daily lives, in China and in Europe (valid also in its geographic extensions). The following expands on my last post Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?".
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1. How daily life compares between Westerners and Chinese.

Food, health and belief are the main fields of the daily life of each of us on this earth. I'll succinctly dwell in each of these fields hoping to illustrate how the axioms of the Chinese and the European civilizations are "determining" the attitudes of the individuals. But ultimately I hope to succeed letting the reader discover how radically different are the views of Chinese and Westerners in all of those fields.


- Food.

We eat because we feel hungry and we are biologically tricked into pleasure when satisfying our hunger. This programming of our physical bodies acts identically anywhere and should I add anywhere for any species. While the pleasure of extinguishing hunger appears as the end motivator for all some attach an aesthetic component to the act of eating. Historically simple local and traditional cuisines for the people developed in parallel with more aesthetically pleasing cuisines reserved for the kings and their aristocracies. The same phenomenon can be observed the world over in association with the social polarization established since early kingdoms and empires.

While over the long time, in Europe, simple popular cuisine developed some local gustatory branches of sophistication the European immigrants in the Americas under duress of survival had to satisfy themselves with extinguishing hunger by filling their stomachs. And the available quantity of food thus developed into the form attribute of pleasure. All this helps us understand why industrial foods found such an easy access to American tables while locally crafted Cheeses, wines, butchery-specialties, breads and fine-pastries keep industrial foods away from French tables...

In the West the top of all aristocratic cuisines is without the shred of a doubt the French which later also developed as the premier Western commercial cuisine. "French cuisine has evolved extensively over the centuries. ...The national cuisine developed primarily in the city of Paris with the chefs to French royalty, but eventually it spread throughout the country and was even exported overseas". 1 In analogy to painting French cuisine is typically an art for art's sake. What I mean by this is that in French cuisine the aesthetic of the palate has taken the driver's seat displacing the original function of extinguishing hunger that eventually was forgotten over time. Food was not rare for the kings and their cohorts of aristocrats and the same aestheticism found in their appreciation of music or painting was thus seen at work at their dining tables.

This art for art's sake that characterizes aristocratic and later commercialized cuisine in the West is so firmly contrasted by Chinese cuisine that our comparison takes the traits of a caricature.

The the axioms of civilization of China are firmly at work in its cuisine as well in the emperor's cuisine as in the people's cuisine. In sum food is considered to impact the health of the body and as a consequence it is considered that food needs to help the body reaching its energetic and mineral balance. Aesthetics are not rejected they serve as gustatory and visual dress-up of a functional role. And in consequence the serving of food at a table has always to satisfy this idea of a functional balancing of the polarities of all unities seen to be active in the body - Yin and Yang, cold and warm, etc... -. Just as an imbalance between yin and yang is considered to produce destructive forces the Chinese also consider it is imperative to keep the 5 elements in balance, for, the deficit or excess of an element can lead to illness.

All this helps us to understand how food is considered the first component of a whole battery of instruments in Chinese Traditional Medicine. Harmony in the culinary sense concerns the balance of what is on the table while in TCM harmony rest in the body of the patient that has primarily to be balanced through the intake of a given food composition.

Summary table given in "The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, and Ingredients" by Eileen Yin-Fei Lo

Element	Yin	Yang	Feelings	Colors	Tastes
Wood	Liver	Gall Bladder	Rage	Green	Sour
Fire	Heart	Small Intestine	Happiness	Red	Bitter
Earth	Spleen	Stomach	Thought	Yellow	Sweet
Metal	Lungs	Large Intestine	Sorrow	White	Spicy
Water	Kidneys	Bladder	Fear	Black	Salty

This caricature about the different perceptions of food in the West and in China gives us to see how the Chinese culinary culture integrates the axioms of its civilization while in the West the best we can see is some application of art for art's sake.


- Health.

In China food and health are intertwined in the application of this idea that the energetic and mineral components of the body have to be kept in balance. Exercise is then conceived of as the ideal complement of food in order to keep healthy. The cure of sickness is done by treating the underlying causes that provoke the sickness. In other words Traditional Chinese Medicine considers that an initial chemical or energetic imbalance in the body is what causes sickness and so they act to re-establish the chemical and energetic balance of the body.

The following instruments of the Chinese medical orchestra are meant to complement food and exercise:
- pharmacopoeia containing thousands of substances of plant, animal, or mineral origin to complement food.
- Qigong and Tai Chi: as practices to balance the flows of energy in the body. Those are the two most practiced suite of exercises to complement the intake of foods in order to balance the body. Qigong is also a fully fledged component of TCM that is used by Chinese doctors to control the flow of QI (energy) and is implemented in association with other forms of care to treat specific illnesses. Qigong is also used to regulate breathing and in a holistic approach to health is used as a technique for deep meditation.
- acupuncture: is the control of energetic flows by the insertion of needles at given connection points.
- massage: is the control of energetic flows by rubbing muscles.

A healthy state is considered, by the Chinese, to be a good balance of the energetic flows and mineral components in the body. As such health is the source of a permanent attention and medicine is then predominantly a question of prevention wherein food plays a central role.

In contrast the health practice in the West is characterized by the waiting for symptoms of sickness to manifest the existence of a health problem. Even in prevention doctors search for symptoms or pre-symptoms. And when a symptom manifests itself the medical practice consists invariably in its suppression through chemical attack, radiation attack or the attack of the knives. In other words Western doctors focus on trying to cut the symptom. For sure Western medicine has evolved and new technologies are now the order of the day but in its most general application the description given here above is till largely valid.

The defining characteristic that best exemplifies how China diverges from the West in term of health lies again in its integration of the axioms of its civilization at the core of its health practice and that gives Chinese health care its holistic character (vision of the whole). Western medicine also takes its cues from the axioms of its civilization: good versus bad, healthy versus sick, etc... After observing sickness the West applies rationality in solving the problem and thus focuses on the body at its microscopic level trying to understand the mechanism at work behind an organ or a component of the body in order to find possible corrections to the mechanism. As such Western medicine is predominantly intervening to correct or to eliminate symptoms of existing illnesses while largely forgetting about prevention.


- Belief

The observation of the rhythms of nature along the long haul concluded in the Chinese psyche with an abstract system regulating their actions based on the reproduction of the rhythms and patterns detected by their ancestors in all unities at work under the sky. That system continues to help them to surf the waves of incessant transformations in the present. The active principle of that system are the polarities that they observed at work in all unities and they designated those by the abstract symbols of Yin and Yang:
- day and night, visible and invisible colors and absence of colors, white and black and so on in the cycle of days that they understood as the result of the rotation of the moon around the earth.
- women and men, female and male, weak and strong, and so on that allow humanity and other living species to reproduce.
- water and fire, cold and warm, and so on
Basically the interactions between the polarities of any unity generate bursts of energy fueling changes and transformations that are as the seconds on the ticking clock of evolution. The code of that system of action is given in the Yi-Ching the oldest book on earth. Archaeological evident suggest that carvings of Ying and yang and their derivations dating 6000 years BC were discovered near Luoyang in Henan.
The Yi-Ching is like a software modeling the changes that construct reality. Its principles have been put in application in all aspects of life:
- The "Yellow Emperor's book of health" dating back to 3000 BC approximately is still considered today as the way of Medicine and cuisine.
- The "Tao Te Ching" by Lao Tze dates 600 BC approximately and is the way of behaving through righteousness and morality. It's content is embedded in Confucianism, Chinese Buddhism, the culture of the mandarins, Chinese music, Xieyi painting and so on.
- The Confucian Classics cover the way to govern the country applying righteousness and morality.
- The classics about strategy, among the most famous Sun Tze's "Art of war", cover the way to win in a competition.

The stories of the Bible give the axiomatic roots of Western civilization. It all starts with a " first mover" that puts reality in motion (what Aristotle calls the "final cause" in a process of causality that powers change. After giving god as the starter of reality it is only logical that reality was given an ending point being the reunion in eternal happiness of "good men" in the kingdom of god. Such a system of causality with a beginning and an end gives life as the expression of the will of god and humans have then no other choice but to follow the rules. The religions of the word, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are thus canons of rules that humans have to follow if they don't want to end up burning in permanent suffering in hell.
Those canons were selected among many others by the men of power because, for given reasons, they appeared as opportunities in their quest to control their populations. They were thus imposed as the law of their kingdom or empire. To give maximum traction to those canons of laws all vestiges of past belief systems had to be eradicated and thus the disappearance of the body of knowledge that their people had accumulated over the haul of many tens of thousands of years.
And so all practical knowledge related to daily life was lost where the religions of the word (law) triumphed.

The axioms of their civilization give the Chinese a more pragmatic outlook on life than Westerners who see everything through the lens of the values of their system of belief. The axiomatic inscriptions in what happens in their daily lives, food and health for example, gives the Chinese a direct framework of reference for action while the belief system of Westerners seems to distract them from taking action on the realities that shape their daily life.


2. The impact of people's worldviews on their daily life.

The sharing of a worldview:
- supplies the individuals with peace of mind. ( Kauffman, meaning of life
- supplies societies with the psychic glue to bond the individuals which, in the last instance, assures their reproduction. ( rationality versus religion, rationality without soul, worldviews and visual arts, art answering "What is reality", Atomization, sick art )
Those general principles have been in application in any society as far as our eyes can see along the path of our history.

But this is one of the aspects that are the least well known in history. Societies are like living organisms and the worldviews shared by the individuals are an essential parameter of their state of health or sickness.

Let's say we want to understand the huge educational differences between the West and Confucian Asia (China, Korea, Japan). What springs immediately to the eye is that the enormously high financial inputs in the West are failing to generate the level of success reached in Confucian Asia with far less money. And the only way to start to understand the formation of such disparities in term of output is to look at how the differences in the worldviews of each side are impacting on their educational results.
Confucian Asia has a high respect for older age, for authority and education while in atomizing Western nations the individuals consider that the only thing that matters is their own satisfaction and their own beliefs. In such a contrasted environment knowledge takes forcibly a different dimension if you are in the West or in the Confucian world. In the West the road of the men of knowledge was separated from that of the men of power and as a consequence the men of knowledge had to compete on the level playing field of the market for ideas with all kinds of charlatans and the eruption of the web in our houses only de-multiplied the number of such charlatans. The result of this downgrading of knowledge to the level of a commodity has weakened it significantly by taking away from it the eyeballs of the citizens. In contrast knowledge is still a very much respected value in Confucian lands where the knowledge of the men of knowledge is still being "imposed" by the men of power on all of society. You'll eventually think that these are only words but I would like to dispel that idea by focusing on simple attitudes in daily life.
In the West teachers are poorly paid and as soon as they can get a better job in the private sector they leave the education system. This has led to a lowered social status for the teaching profession that was followed by a shrinking respectability for the teachers that irremediably weakened their authority over the kids they try to educate.
Contrast that with Confucian nations where teachers are well paid, receive high social respectability and are attributed a high level of authority on the kids they educate. If you think that these are still no more than words then check the results of different international competitions: PISA, IMO. Most countries placing at the top of the list are Confucian nations. And the few egalitarian Western European small countries placing equally at the top share a high social standing for their teachers that procures them the respect of parents and students alike.

What I mean to show here is how a radical difference, between East and West in term of the sharing of a common worldview by the individuals, is bringing about quite contrasted daily behaviors. In Western countries there is no longer a common worldview being shared by all and as a result societies have atomized into so many beliefs and ways of doing that somehow erased all that was a given in earlier times. In the East the individuals continue to share, most often unconscientiously, the axiomatic roots of their common understanding of reality and this, in the end of the day, is what homogenizes their behaviors in daily life.


3. Modernity and civilizational axioms.

We live with the assumption that once economic modernity has injected the rationality, that is inherent to the ways of doing and behaving proper to the logic of capital, all humans will behave in very similar ways. But is this a fact or is it no more than a rationalist reduction of all things of life to the logic of capital? In other words does modernity erase the historical particularities of daily life by homogenizing us all as actors on the level-playing-field of the market or is there, eventually, a civilizational substract that resists market homogenization?

I wrote here above "In the East the individuals continue to share, most often unconscientiously, the axiomatic roots of their common understanding of reality". This unconscious is, I think, the keyword from where we should start in order to understand what is going on under modernity.

Basically East and West diverged radically at the point of emergence of agriculture and power that followed the decline of plucking and hunting. The changes that were occurring were economic in nature. Women who had plucked fruits and collected seeds for tens of thousands of years had observed how seeds germinate in spring and this lead them gradually to help mother nature by throwing seeds in specific areas of their chosing. This learning process which spread over the long haul eventually resulted in fields that could sustain the population of the tribe and in consequence more children were surviving increasing gradually the population of tribes. All this weakened the absolute necessity to garner meat from hunting and the aggressive skills of men had to find an exit. They found it in wrestling the control of the tribe from the women and having eaten the fruit of power they wanted more of it which led to the desire to control more tribes. So the economic process of change toward agriculture was followed by a political revolution. But this political revolution that had been realized through the exercise of brute force found its limits with territorial expansion. It appeared indeed that, while force allowed to control the people where force was used, it was of no help where force was absent. And the more the territory was growing the weaker force became at sustaining its control. That's how emerged, in the minds of the men of power, the necessity for a control of the minds. It's at that point that East and West diverged.

In the East the men of power cultivated relations with the shaman who received, through oral transmission, the body of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors over tens of thousands of years. That's how the men of power used the shaman, the men of knowledge, as actors in their quest to preserve their power. The knowledge of reality under animism would thus become the glue that would glue the tribesmen into the unity of their tribes and the evolution of knowledge under Eastern civilizations would then be constituted by cultural and scientific add-ons to the body of knowledge arrived at with animism.

The story in the West took another turn. Tribes in the Middle-East rejected the body of knowledge accumulated by their ancestors and developed new, simple, foundational stories to supersede animism. Western civilizations and knowledge then developed through cultural and scientific add-ons to the body of knowledge contained in the initial foundational stories. The mechanism of the passage in the West from animism to simple foundational stories is not very well understood and I know of no historian who specialized in such study. The best I encountered is Arnold Toynbee but the subject of his studies concerns what follows the passage from animism to simple foundational stories. In other words Toynbee narrates the power struggles between tribes and early kingdoms after they had adopted their foundational stories. If you encountered something more specific about the passage from animism to simple foundational stories in the Middle-East your comment on the subject is most welcome.

With this advent of the men of knowledge being used by the men of power to preserve their power the world has witnessed a forking into civilizations rooted into animism versus civilizations rooted in the word of simple foundational stories.

It comes thus as no surprise that the simple foundational stories that sprouted in the Middle-East would eventually be displaced by the rationality that emerged out of the application of the logic of capital. In other words the stories of the religions of the word have gradually been undressed by rationality and appearing naked to the eye they lost their appeal for most of the people. For sure things are different for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Modernity has swallowed Judaism and Christianity but Judaism is well alive while Christianity can't resist the push of rationality in advanced nations. Things are different for Islam. Modernity has only touched the surface of Muslim societies, at the point, where opportunistic men of power and their cohorts convert the result of plundering their citizens into Western commodities. But, all in all, Muslim societies are resisting modernity to the chagrin of Western rationality and capital holders.
Whatever the particular circumstances of the countries that emerged within the realm of civilizations built on the words of simple stories, their people still believing their foundational stories or being converted to rationality, the fact is that the axioms built in their simple stories are guiding the daily actions of all their people. The same dualism is well alive in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Good versus bad remains the story of the day for believer as for rationalists. The good guys have to annihilate the bad guys, the bad sickness has to be extirpated, the good market has to displace any bad non-market exchanges, and so on and so on. While giving the general directions of Western actions dualism and other axioms of the simple foundational stories of the word are very poor in useful knowledge to be applied in people's daily lives. And this is perhaps the most striking and significant difference between the West and the East.

Being derived from the body of knowledge arrived at under animism the evolution of knowledge in Eastern civilizations could only be pragmatic and applied to people's daily lives. Such pragmatic knowledge can't be eradicated from people's ways. The end of history is thus not really in our sight.

Observing the enormous economic changes that have been wrought upon the Chinese population over the last 30 years one senses how deeply its traditional societal organization has been disrupted. But what impresses me most is the complete liquefaction of the foundational story that kept the Chinese in togetherness. What remains of Communism is only a word that has been emptied of its significance and the Chinese traditional philosophies, Taoism and Confucianism, have been broken by force under the vengeance of a ten years span of cultural revolution. One can understand that facing a ruthless Western power engine third world leaders fell they had no choice, their countries had no choice. It was either the demise of their countries, their nations, or the adoption of Western capitalistic ways toward the build-up of national power. But this engulfed their people under a cultural tsunami. Certainties became less certain and people began to doubt and then started to search for the comfort of foundational stories. Some fifteen years ago Falun Gong erupted in Chinese minds but it has been ruthlessly crushed under the hammer of communist power. Today there is a wide revival of religions of all kinds. Christianity is one of those religions gaining many adherents. But belief in China is not acting in the way it does in the West. The knowledge derived from the axioms of their civilization is indeed always firmly at play in the shaping of their daily lives and religious belief in China is thus more than anything else an opportunistic way of handling momentary uncertainties in the comfort found in belonging to a closely knit community. But such belief is bound to vanish as soon as traditional philosophies bloom again. And a revival of Chinese spiritual traditions is well under way. Sensing the direction the wind is blowing China's central authorities are moving to try to glue the Chinese population behind their traditional values. Their goal is to bring their population to accept the present changes being inflicted so ruthlessly on it by an elite that has an elaborate strategic vision of the role the Chinese nation should play in the future. It all starts with the idea of societal conservation. I mean that the Chinese leaders understand the social and political risks of destabilization that their push for China's entry into modernity entails. They think rightly that if the entry of the country into modernity should conclude with the dissolution of the Chinese nation the experiment would not have been worth the exercise. So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is meant to glue the individuals in a common worldview to assure the preservation and reproduction of the Chinese nation and society. If the Chinese nation is successfully preserved through its long march towards modernity then unmistakably it will soon be playing a leading economic role in the affairs of the world. Nobody contests that point. But what is most often forgotten is that economic might has always been followed by cultural hegemony. So the recourse to the Chinese spiritual traditions is also meant to offer the world a typically Chinese worldview that could successfully compete with the Christian worldview for gaining acceptance around the world.


Technorati tags: religion, civilization, China, West, worldviews, society, power

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Loss of certainty and the purpose of life?"

This post is a follow-up of my commentary in StumbleUpon about Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia by Spengler that was published by AsiaTimes.
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"Christianity is the great liquidator of traditional society, calling individuals out of their tribes and nations to join the ekklesia, which transcends race and nation." writes a proud Spengler.



Christianity has indeed been the ideological instrument used by tribe "unifiers" and builders of kingdoms and empires around the Middle-East and in Europe. But let's take a closer look at the emergence of its dominance. The place of Christianity was consecrated on the worldmap with its promotion as the religion of the Roman Empire by Emperor Constantine. Proclaimed Emperor in 306 (tetrarchy) the emperor converted to Christianity in 312 and in 313 he issued what later would come to be known as the Edict of Milan that put an end to institutionalized persecution of Christians in the Empire. In the following years "Constantine considered himself responsible to God for the spiritual health of his subjects, and thus he had a duty to maintain orthodoxy. For Constantine, the emperor did not decide doctrine - that was the responsibility of the bishops - rather his role was to enforce doctrine, root out heresy, and uphold ecclesiastical unity. The emperor ensured that God was properly worshiped in his empire; what proper worship consisted of was for the Church to determine". ...In 325 he summoned the First Council of Nicaea, effectively the first Ecumenical Council, which ... formulated the Trinity as it is known today. It also resulted in the formulation of the common Bible of Today.. 1



The promotion of Christianity has been realized at the price of a tabula rasa policy that destroyed the knowledge base that the people under the authority of Rome had accumulated along the previous tens of thousands of years of observation of all fields related to the principle of life. The societal ground had indeed to be cleared of all anterior beliefs and ideas for the Christian foundational story to possibly take root. And thus Christianity replaced the animistic body of knowledge with a simplistic foundational story that the West still largely lives off today. In short:


- History as a straight progressive line with a beginning and an end:

* The beginning of the story of human reality is presented as having been unleashed by a "first mover" called god.

* The end of that story is a promise to the "good people" that they will join god in eternal happiness while the bad ones shall be suffering for eternity. (in the meantime you better behave and practice the teachings of the creed!)


- Reality presented as a cauldron of cooking dualism 2:

* everything is seen as being on the side of, or good, or bad

* this unleashes a perpetual fight between good and bad

* and humanity is thus being extracted out of its organic ground to fight for the good.



This is quite far apart from the idea that "...it is the great migration of peoples that prepares the ground for Christianity, just as it did during the barbarian invasions of Europe during the Middle Ages".
But Spengler is absolutely right in writing that "When war or economics tear people away from their roots in traditional life, what once appeared constant now is shown to be ephemeral". This is true for traditional life as well as for modern life. But as an apologist of Christianity Spengler would like us believe that his religion is the absolute answer to any vacuum of "a worldview". This is simply grotesque.


Humans need to share a worldview in order to feel at peace with themselves 3,4. And, furthermore, the sharing of a worldview is what unifies all the individuals within their society. A worldview is a view of the world and of reality and as such it goes without saying that many worldviews can arise according to the local conditions and the history of the local people. And those worldviews can be not only of a religious type but also of a philosophic type.



What is grotesque in Spengler's view is that Christianity would be like spontaneously emerging anywhere people are "landing" into a void of belief. As if Christianity were contained in the structure of human DNA. This is simply absurd and so much more so coming from someone who can't fathom the idea of a spontaneous emergence of life.



Humanity has lived for tens of thousands if not for hundreds of thousands of years under a worldview that we came to call animism. That worldview was based on the long haul observation of nature, of the earth and the sky, and not surprisingly the building blocks of that worldview were similar the whole world over. China's civilization, and the civilization of India for that matter, did not erase the body of knowledge built under animism. Those civilizations simply further refined and developed the knowledge it contained. This also explains why China and India were having such an advanced and refined civilization in comparison with Europe that remained so utterly primitive in all aspects till well after the "great discoveries" had transferred to it the richness accumulated by long lines of generations all over the world.



Modernity has not shown to have been better than what existed earlier 5, 6. It only is more "EFFICIENT" 7 at exploiting man and nature. And the Western successes at exploiting man and nature resulted also in a bigger efficiency in term of their capacity to fight with others. All nations and people of the world have unfortunately suffered at the hands of that Western efficiency and the only way for them to resist has been to adopt the rationality of capital that emerged in Europe with the "great discoveries" in the hope of strengthening their own economies.



But the adoption of the logic of capital and its ideology of rationality while rendering a country more efficient is also very destabilizing socially, culturally, and so much more so when the leap into modernity is realized at such a neck breaking speed as it is happening in China. This is the reason why China is experiencing so much instability presently. How could it be otherwise? There are just no certainties left in such a maelstrom of societal changes and most people are thus yearning for some stability in their lives and in their miThat's the ideal swimming pool for religions and sects of all stripes. But rest reassured this is not a malady restricted to China alone. Something of the same nature is going the world over. 8, 9, 10



The Chinese authorities are well aware of the void and are eager participants in the debate that is taking place on the role to assign to Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism in a modern China. It is to be noted that this debate has now been raging for nearly a decade in intellectual circles and that it appears to have ignited a strong renaissance of traditional Chinese systems of thought. 11, 12, 13



But while Chinese traditional systems of thought are making a reappearance in urban areas Christianity is progressing in the rural areas of the country. Does this not tick a bell in your mind? Some story with red and blue states?



The renaissance of Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism is bound to evolve their animistic roots into a postmodern worldview that will reconcile the Chinese with the world around them and with nature. There is ample evidence of something of this sort already being at work in their foreign policy and their environmental and social policies. 14, 15, 16



Christianity has been proselytizing for centuries and, discovering that China and India are bound to dominate the world in all aspects within the next few decades, it tries to position itself in order not to fall at the margins of the "worldwide worldview" that shall be endorsed under the weight of sheer necessity by all the citizens of this earth in the not so distant future. A "worldwide worldview" that is already on the Chinese and Indian drawing boards.



Totally buried under the weight of his Christian views Spengler can see nothing else than an evolution of the world according to the axioms that are deeply buried in his religion. Dualism is at the center of such a view. On one side the good Christians, on the other the bad Muslims and in consequence he sees their fight going on for ages in the future. As for the Chinese and all the other people, well, they will be the future armies of the good Christians against the evil Muslims. What else could they be doing? Having understood the tectonic shift at work in the world economy his dualism had to find a satisfying outcome. And voila the Chinese are enrolled as soldiers of his wars.



What amazes me most is the arrogance that underlies such thinking and how easily it makes him forget about the fact that the Chinese civilization has a history of over 5000 years. Any sensical being would think that to keep alive so long it must certainly have something that works in term of its view of reality; is it not? Some very powerfull axioms about reality have indeed withstood the long haul in China. For one's own sake would it not be worth to take a peak at those?



Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power

My last 4 paintings

I write much about the meaning and societal sense of visual arts but how does my painting relate to my writings? Take a peak at my last 4 paintings they foreshadow the content of my next post.

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 24" x 30" (61 x 76.5 cm)

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 20" x 24" (50.5 x 61 cm)

Acrylic on paper glued on hard wooden panel. Size: 17" x 22" (43 x 56 cm)

Acrylic on canvas. Size: 36" x 24" (92 x 61 cm)

Technorati tags: art, modern art, art theory, visual art, worldviews, society, power