Phenomenological Papers II: Art & Self-Consciousness

This is the second essay in my series, The Phenomenological Papers, a series of three essays on similar topics. You can find the first essay here. Like the first, this is also an old essay that I have substantively revised, so much so, in fact, that the original is unrecognisable in it. This, and the next essay, will be on something I have long been preoccupied with: the experience of art. Not totally happy with the formulation, but I hope you enjoy.

The universal need for expression in art lies…in man’s rational impulse to exalt the inner and outer world into a spiritual consciousness for himself, as an object in which he recognises his own self. He satisfies the need of this spiritual freedom when he makes all that exists explicit for himself within, and in a corresponding way realises this his explicit self without, evoking thereby, in this reduplication of himself, what is in him into vision and into knowledge for his own mind and that of others.

– G.W.F. Hegel

I. There is always an apparent tension between our seemingly complex and infinitely extensive inner life and our ability to deliberately express it in such a way that we feel adequately represented in the world. At any given moment in our lives, it feels as though, even within the blink of an eye, a culmination of memories, thoughts, and emotions flood through us – arbitrating and adjudicating our action. We sometimes tend to see this ocean of subjectivity as something of our ‘true selves’ or as our true and complete feelings about things. Consequently, we have a fundamental desire to represent this in the world, especially to others, whose recognition we desire. We want to feel understood by those around us – to have our ‘private’ subjectivity recognised as legitimate in a world of objects.

What do I mean by ‘legitimate’ here? Something is legitimate to us, in this sense, if there is some external validation of its existence by other persons or by an object that is independent of us, not just ourselves or our own impression of things. For example, suppose that at night I see a bright light flash across the sky that is unlike anything I have seen before, but I’m the only one who saw it. In situations like these, we feel torn because no one else was there to validate or invalidate our perception of this flash, nor can it be integrated into our prior beliefs. “Am I crazy, what was that?” you might think. We desire an explanation of this phenomenon because we are certain that it happened, that we saw something, but uncertain why and wish to settle it through some process of external validation. There are a couple of ways this could go. There could be an external explanation or an internal explanation, and it could be validated either by persons, or by further objects.

An ‘external’ explanation of such a phenomenon is when something about the world (that is not us) explains it, like that a large malfunctioning, satellite had recently been launched and that’s what we had seen. This phenomenon would be validated for us through persons if we were told this by other people or, for example, by the news, and we accept their explanation. It would be validated for us through objects if, for example, we saw it clearly the next day in daylight, and could tell that it was a satellite and similar enough to what we saw that we can infer their identity. An ‘internal’ explanation of such a phenomenon is when it is something about us that explains it, like if there were something wrong with our eyes such that we would be prone to visual hallucinations of light. This would be validated for us through persons if, for example, an ophthalmologist examined our eyes and told us about some problem. It would be validated for us through objects if, for example, we looked in the mirror after seeing the flash and our eyes were bloodshot and lazy, leading us to infer something must be wrong with them.

(A simple example to keep this distinction in mind is to think of a depressed person. The much-touted “chemical imbalance” theory is an internal explanation whereas if someone is in a terrible environment (e.g., at work or home), that would be an external explanation for their depression. The person-object distinction only tracks the method by which we come to accept such an explanation, if indeed we accept it. Both methods, person and object, are ‘external’ in the former sense because we always experience persons and objects as external to us and it is only through the fact that they are external that they could provide validation at all. This is because we must perceive them to be independent of us.)

Now take this supposed ocean of subjectivity constitutive of ourselves – our complex and multifaceted inner sense. The differences between this and the light example are numerous. Our inner sense is ubiquitous, complex, and seemingly ineffable. It is ubiquitous because we cannot escape the constant, flowing, multiplicity of thought and memory streaming through us at any moment. This is because, insofar as we are conscious, insofar as we are living at all, we can also be explicitly aware of ourselves in this way. It is complex because our motives, beliefs and desires are often beyond even concentrated and deliberate introspection. Our own subjectivity is often opaque, even to ourselves. Finally, it appears ineffable because how we actually are seems impossible to express in words, or even deeds. For example, when someone goes through a personal tragedy, imagine what it would it take for them to fully explain what they are feeling. We are always attempting to do so but can never actually achieve it.

On the other hand, however, and this is the key point: the conditions for the external validation of our inner sense to us is exactly the same as the case of the flashing light. We still desire some person, or some object, to provide external validation for our own being. Otherwise, we are left thinking that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are mere subjective whimsy, something fundamentally cut off from the world. And this point should not be alien to you. Every time you explain what you are doing to someone else, every time you apologise to someone simply for feeling a certain way, that is our desire for the external validation of our inner sense manifesting itself. And it is not until we get such validation, that we reach a point where we experience ourselves as legitimate, that we ever satisfy our unquenching desire to feel at home in this world. When we do achieve this experiential legitimation of ourselves, I call it self-consciousness. This is what Hegel means, in the above quote, when he says that our spiritual freedom is only satisfied when the inner is made explicit for ourselves in objective expression.


II. Unfortunately, unlike simple questions of everyday validity, our modes of communicating this supposed inner sense are lacking. We are cursed as humans to try (and often fail) to wedge as much of that internal flux through a fundamentally limited medium of everyday expression. David Foster Wallace writes:

[It’s] as though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

Indeed, the desire to have our inner sense recognised is often greater than any other desire of the same epistemological kind (e.g., cases of light-flashings). Take someone in any kind of mental anguish, for example. We often read these people’s actions as a “cry for help”, or as some other manifestation of their anguish. And it is precisely these actions that are manifestations of this desire. However, the elaborate edifice of emotions and experiences that they think constitute their condition would be nigh impossible to reproduce in a few sentences or in everyday discussion. That is a project they will likely only undertake with those closest to them, who they can pile explanations upon from an unending number of angles, attempting to capture its breadth. Not only to adequately represent their inner sense to loved ones but also to make it seem a legitimate grievance worth recognising to those around them, who only have access to their surface, not their inner turmoil.

In this example, if successful, a kind of validation is gained through persons because someone else, something you experience as external and thus independent of you, successfully recognises what you believe to be true about yourself, about your own inner sense. However, in this essay I am not interested primarily in others. I am interested in the fact that you can actually acquire validation through objects too. Even the very process of talking about your inner sense is a process of objectifying yourself into some form of externally available expression, an object that could possibly validate our inner sense. That object is simply the thing you say about yourself. Thus, it is not only for the sake of other’s validating recognition of ourselves that we confide in others, but also for the sake of producing an object through which we recognise ourselves, through the object that is our speech. It is itself a manifestation of our desire for self-consciousness. This thought is often expressed through the popular idea of ‘venting’, the idea that merely by expressing our own inner sense we can somehow alleviate our own distress.

However, the weakness with our own expression being the object which is supposed to validate our inner sense, is that it is still something that comes from ourselves and could still therefore be the product of our own mere subjectivity, our own whimsy, rather than something genuinely external to us. Indeed, the practice of venting is often neither constructive, in that it offers no solutions, nor is totally honest about ourselves and our situation, because we often bend the truth in favour of a positive portrayal of ourselves. It becomes a flight of fancy. Thus, it cannot properly play the role of an object that provides external validation by itself because we know, implicitly or explicitly, that it merely comes from us, not from something existing independently of us. It can only play this role as a means of getting validation through others, but not by virtue of itself. It also means that if others are not able to look beyond our speech, beyond the surface, recognition through persons will not be possible either. I argued in the last essay in this series I argued that work (properly understood) was a way we could achieve this through objects, but is there another kind of object that can play this role?


III. Art is a special kind of object. What seems to me to be the unique thing that it has, that no other (inanimate) worldly entity has, is the potency of its expression. Now, I mean a very specific thing by this. Consider the following passage from Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World, where he describes the jungle:

There is one unvarying constant: everything in the jungle is at pains to strangle everything else in the battle for sunlight. It may be pitch-black at night, but nothing changes the overwhelming implacable present tense of the jungle. Bird sound and the shrill of crickets, as though a great locomotive had applied its emergency brakes and were screaming uncontrollably along the rails, for hours and hours, without stopping.

Now, I could have conveyed to you the fact that the jungle is made up of a chaotic cacophony of competing interests and constant noise by listing all of the organisms that live there and their function, and that would all be very interesting. Or I could simply point you to Herzog’s telling us that the jungle has an “overwhelming implacable present tense”, and that says everything I could ever want to say about it, and more. This is art’s potency.

You can see the same thing play out in other mediums. For example, in Vertigo, Midge’s impotent and somewhat pathetic externalisation of her desire for Scottie’s love through her painting (one of the most horrifying scenes in all of cinema), says a million things about her character that no amount of expository dialogue could have done better. Alternatively, one cannot help but be struck by the vibrant, shimmering beauty and clarity of vision in Van Gogh’s Cypresses. We cannot explain ourselves into the effect it has on us, we cannot simply look at a cypress tree, or a picture of one, and feel the same as we do when we marvel at this masterwork.

How I like to describe this potency is by saying that art is concentrated signification. Something is ‘significant’ to us if it means something to us. For example, the sentence “the sky is blue”, means to us that the thing we call the sky is so and so colour (blue). However, everything in experience means something to us in the sense I am thinking of. If I see that the door is open, it means that someone is (probably) home. If I see a car hurtling towards me, it means I am in danger. If I see that its raining, it means that I should not sit outside (if I don’t want to get wet). When we experience art, it means something to us in this way too. However, it differs in what I am calling, its concentration of meaning.

I say that art’s meaning is concentrated for two reasons. First, because art is rich with meaning in a way that ordinary objects, ordinary speech, and ordinary actions, are not. (‘Ordinary’ here just mean any non-artistic object.) It is rich because when the elements of a piece of art come together, they by far transcend the sum of those elements; their joint expression goes beyond any cumulative effect of those elements. The previous artistic examples are all cases of this. Herzog’s description of the jungle is obviously not analysable into a list of organisms that live in the jungle and what they do, nor some second-hand description of it, it is more than that. One way of thinking about this is that art can never adequately be summarised, either by its non-artistic elements or by descriptions meant to represent those elements.  Art-objects are unified and unable to be decomposed without loss.

For example, tell someone “The sky is blue” and they know all they need to know without looking at the sky. Such a sentence just is the sum of its parts, and these parts we understand. It is the simple transmission of information. Tell someone about your favourite novel all you want but you will never have them know what it is to read the book, without them actually reading the book. There is no simple transmission of information in this case because an art-object is a unity encounterable only through a particular spatiotemporal relationship with it. Merleau-Ponty summaries this idea as follows:

In a picture or a piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display of colours and sounds. Any analysis of Cézanne’s work, if I have not seen his pictures, leaves me with a choice between several possible Cézannes, and it is the sight of the pictures which provides me with the only existing Cézanne, and therein the analyses find their full meaning. The same is true of a poem or a novel…[they] are individuals, that is, beings in which the expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning, accessible only through direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation…[they are] a nexus of living meanings, not the law for a certain number of covariant terms.

The same is true of our encounter with other people. They are not a walking set of propositions, but a living unity. Ditto for art.

Second, the meaning of a work of art is concentrated because it is not something beyond the artwork itself. It is sufficient unto itself. In the previous examples, we saw that many objects have meaning for us as calls for action or inference about other parts of the world, or for future aims. For example, the open door or the car coming towards me. These ordinary objects, for the most part, point beyond themselves. Art, on the other hand, is revealed to us as a self-standing entity whose meaning is intrinsic to its existence, not some action or inference on our behalf. That is, the meaning of a work of art does not point us beyond itself, but to itself. (This is also true of people.)

Thus, an artwork, or creative entities more generally, are both a potent form of expression, understood as something having a special kind of richness for us, and being a special kind of individual whole that transcends its constituent elements, that can only be experienced in a proximal encounter with it.


IV. To tie the preceding points together, my thought is as follows. We saw: (1) that we desire some external validation of our inner sense, understood phenomenologically as encountering something that that exists independently of us and adequately represents our inner sense; (2) that the problem with ordinary objects playing this role was that they often lacked the expressive capacity to sufficiently represent it; and (3), that art-objects have a preternatural potency of expression, beyond that of ordinary objects. The natural conclusion here, I argue, is that art-objects can play the role of an object that legitimates our inner sense through its expressive potency, filling the gap left by ordinary expression. The hope is that some pieces of art are able to represent that complex and ineffable inner sense we carry about ourselves, or the human condition that we participate in, in such a way that they provide a legitimating encounter. Therefore, making art a valuable source of self-consciousness.

The idea is as follows. Given the right piece of art, the right qualities, and the relevant antecedent experiences relating ourselves to it, we can find ourselves in a position where it’s particular form of expression coincides completely with some part of us – some idea, experience, feeling, or complex emotional state. That is to say, we encounter an objective expression of that which was until then complex, ineffable, and private. Thus, in this encounter, we would gain a kind of perceptual knowledge of our own subjectivity through its reflection in art, which was until then mere abstract and undefined thought, now externally available in the world as an independent existent. It is knowledge specifically, and not a projection of our mere subjectivity, because we know that the object exists entirely independently of us, yet we still recognise our own subjectivity in it. Thus, it fulfils the conditions for a legitimating encounter as it affirms that which we thought we knew about ourselves through an external explanation, through something that is independent of us but also expressive of us.

I think such encounters are possible and actually happen, frequently. I can only attempt to prove such a conclusion with reference to my own experience (and others I have talked to about this), however I am nonetheless hoping it generalises.

Throughout my life, I have encountered art and had a distinct kind of experience that elicits a particular emotional-psychological response. It is a kind of titanic feeling that seems to lay bare a particular aspect of myself, for myself. It is precisely this feeling that provides a kind of phenomenological validation of my inner sense, self-consciousness. It provides such self-consciousness in the same way that the recognition by others, or my own projects do. This is only possible because of art’s potency, its ability to express meaning beyond that of a merely propositional character, to somehow capture the complex and ineffable. It is the reciprocal recognition of our inner sense, subjectivity, with art, an objective and external thing. In these moments, art has allowed me a moment of sublimating my desire for objective recognition, a moment in which the key is turned, and the door through which ordinary expression is usually squeezed through, is swung wide open. Let me try and give an example.

I find in poetry a fitting presentation here for this kind of art. Many great poems, only spanning a few lines, with little syntax to speak of, seem to profoundly capture something about our own experience, or about the human condition we participate in, intuitively, in a way that seems irreducible to any possible analysis of it. William Carlos Williams’ poem This Is Just To Say is an excellent example of this:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

There is nothing particularly notable at a ‘surface’ level about plums and the tender regret the narrator imparts, in so few words. Still, in this small feat, Williams catches such a specific and beautiful truth about relationships, the simple delights of life, and the ways in which we love each other. (It is part of my account that it is impossible to tell you what it expresses, just read it again if you want an analysis!) I almost invariably tear up a little each time I seriously read it as it expresses this so powerfully and wholly. That flux of incommunicable feelings flows through me, fusing itself with the poem’s reality, mirroring it almost perfectly. In reading it, I encounter and validate my own inner sense in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. The scene from Vertigo I mentioned earlier is another perfect example of this.

I hope this shows that the idea is not so unfamiliar. Indeed, I think it is not so different from the popular notion that we can “feel seen” by something. This idea gets at something very like what I am saying. While this is often said in silly or trivial situations, the recognition of oneself, the having of a validating encounter with the world is neither silly nor trivial. It is a valuable source of self-consciousness. The kind of art experience I am talking about is a much more potent form of this. It expresses that which you know, at least implicitly, about yourself, that could otherwise not have been said.

In fact, I would go as far to say that some of the greatest art is great in virtue of this possibility. While there is great art that functions as pure entertainment or spectacle, as an exploration of ideas, a formal or stylistic showcase, a moral statement, or as a monument of sublimity, I find that those artists whose work repeatedly beguiles us with images of our own subjectivity leaves the strongest impression on me. For example, I see Ingmar Bergman embarking on a project such as this. His films explore complex psychological themes and dynamics between subjects where sincere empathic engagement is rewarded by laying specific aspects of human mental life bare, through its expression of the human condition that we all participate in. On paper, this might not sound like such a good thing, especially if they express the parts of yourself you dislike or anguish over. But the catharsis of feeling seen and recognised at a deep subjective level by the art is incredibly therapeutic because it orients us in the right way towards our actual selves and thus our actual possibilities. (Otherwise, we are wont to retreat to a dishonest, but more easily acceptable, fantasy.) This is a good thing because, if I am right, it is just another form of self-consciousness.

For me, the power and pleasure of experiencing these art forms is that they are concrete externalisations of utterly familiar yet always inexpressible inner sense. This encounter with art effects the reconciliation of ourselves with the world, fulfilling our desire to validate ourselves as legitimate, objective, and self-conscious individuals in and amongst the world, not a mere psychic addition.


V. I have been writing so far as if there were this simple relationship between our inner sense, which stays the same, and our encounter with an artwork that expresses it. However, this is not exactly what is happening. This encounter is not mere confirmation for us, of some fact about ourselves. It is an instance of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is just knowledge of ourselves. However, as I note in the previous essay in this series (section VI), self-consciousness is not this simple relationship between our self, which stays the same, and our state of knowledge which seeks out this static self. This is because there is no distinction between ourselves and our state of knowledge. This means that a validating encounter with an art-object is not merely ourselves encountering something we recognise as genuinely expressive of ourselves. It means that such an encounter creates ourselves anew, as one who is more than what they were before, as one who further recognises what they are, their own possibilities, and thus, their freedom. In this sense, the art-encounter can be more than merely expressive of us, but constitutive of us.