Recently, Salon writer Steve Neumann has taken on Neil deGrasse Tyson on why he gets philosophy wrong, and how our time really needs poet-philosopher-scientists.

I loved that this idea has gotten some media attention, but I’d like to bring R.S. readers focus to the presently rich commentary that’s been going on in the underbelly of psychedelic culture, occult literature and esoteric scholarship on the importance of art and philosophy:

Now, the whole debate started with Neil deGrasse Tyson dismissing (via The Nerdist podcast) the relevance of philosophy to help us understand our world (and it isn’t the first time). Salon’s Steve Neumann, in return, debunks this argument pretty thoroughly, and suggests an alternative idea borrowed from Nietzsche called the “artistic Socrates,” or people who are both scientific and philosophical. One part scientist, two parts philosopher-poet.

This, Steve proposes, could help us combat the recent trend of philosophically and artistically impoverished scientism in popular culture:

The late poet Denise Levertov once said that it is only when the bitter truths of nature, and of our human nature, are mediated through the artistic imagination that our conscience and resolve can be activated. In other words, the aesthetic impulse engenders that synthesis of reason and emotion that enables us to muster the will to transcend the reality of those bitter truths. The individual who wants to resolve her ambivalence toward life must be equal parts scientist, philosopher and poet, cultivating a wholehearted, meditative disposition within herself. And what is needed in the public sphere is what Nietzsche called an “artistic Socrates,” someone in whom aesthetic feeling combined with the virtues of science “can reshape the disgust at the thought of the horrific or absurd aspects of life into notions with which it is possible to live.” Only this fusion of reason and imagination can reconcile our intellectual and emotional lives, giving us both claritas and gravitas – understanding and profundity. We need Socratic men and women today as adept at communicating the virtues of the aesthetic imagination as they are the powers of reason, being ultimately inspired to do the same as Socrates while he was awaiting his execution — and practice poetry.

Knowledge-Art

Nietzsche’s artistic-Socrates was further developed by William Irwin Thompson, a historian of consciousness who, arguably, embodies this poetic-scholar mutation in his term: “wissenkunkst,” or “knowledge-art.” Thompson writes:

As fiction and music are coming closer to reorganizing knowledge, scholarship is becoming closer to art. Our culture is changing, and so the genres of literature and history are changing as well. In an agricultural-warrior society, the genre is the epic, an Iliad. In an industrial-bourgeois society, the genre is the novel, a Moll Flanders. In our electronic, cybernetic society, the genre is Wissenkunst: the play of knowledge in a world of serious data-processors. The scholarly fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, or the reviews of non-existent books by Stanislaw Lem, are examples of new art forms of a society in which humanity live, not innocently in nature nor confidently in cities, but apocalyptically in a civilization cracking up to the universe. At such a moment as this the novelist becomes a prophet, the composer a magician, and the historian a bard, a voice recalling ancient identities.

The Artist as Shapeshifter, Oracle

Similarly, R.S. author J.F. Martel recently argued that “beauty will save the world,” in his upcoming Evolver Editions manifesto on art:

Art is neither a system for transmitting information nor a mode of self-expression. It does these things no better than any number of activities. Art is the seizure of a vision that exceeds language. It captures a slice of the Real and preserves it in an artifact. The work of art is fractal and open—an inexhaustible well of meaning and image overflowing the limits of the communicable. It is a way to the wilderness of the unconscious, the land of spirits and the dead. If great works of art are prophetic, it is because they disclose the forces that seethe behind the easy façade of ordinary time. I am not just thinking of the plays of Shakespeare and Sophocles here, but also of the poems of Emily Dickinson, the songs of Bob Dylan, the choreographies of Pina Bausch, the films of David Lynch. All of them are oracles. The shaman enters the priestly society of the ancient world and is called a prophet. She enters modern industrial society and is called an artist.

Similarly, J.F. quotes Deleuze on the artist as shapeshifter and seer:

“[He or she] has seen something in life that is too great, too unbearable also, and the mutual embrace of life with what threatens it.”

Salon’s Steve Neumann helped construct that bridge nicely by suggesting that the aesthetic impulse — that which Tyson actually admits and uses as the foundation of the new Cosmos series — is a philosophical impulse. The facts of the material universe don’t instill meaning, but beauty, aesthetic arrest — that creates meaning.

We don’t need scientistic naiveté colonizing intellectual culture.We need robust and creatively infused philosophers who recognize that scientism is merely one ideological position, and certainly one that undervalues the power of the Imagination, a sea with no discernible shore in sight. Most of all, scientism occludes dimensions of the human psyche and renders the soul unfinished.

We need to, in other words, make room for the invisible and unknowable in our practice. Art reminds us of that, connects us with it, and, arguably (ultimately) is capable of transforming us.

Art Is a Religion

19th century French Occultist, artist and Symbolist Joseph Peladan weighs in here on the value of aesthetic impression as sacred initiation in his Artistic-Esoteric manifesto:

“[This is] the absolute rejoinder to pedantic quibbles : we doubt Moses, but here is Michaelangelo; we misunderstand Jesus, but here is Leonardo; we secularize everything, but immutable, sacred Art continues its prayer.” “Art is the totality of the methods of realising Beauty.”

Entheodelic Storytelling

Underneath appearances, we are always-already within “mysterium tremendum et fascinans.” R.S. author Benton Rooks has recently been teasing apart pop cultural artifacts to unearth forms, and proto-forms, of this compulsion to encounter the sacred:

Entheodelic storytelling (a term I co-coined with Graham Hancock, Rak Razam, and Jeremy D. Johnson) is a new international transmedia paradigm led by many important scholars and artists interested in shamanism that recalls a time in which fables once served as specific symbolic reminders to initiates who were to undergo trials leading them to the spirit world. Within this framework, contemplative traditions and a multitude of spiritual paths are equally at home with the plant path. Entheodelic storytellers are also aware of the sensitive issues and dangers surrounding the appropriation of indigenous cultures—and neocolonialism in general—and therefore make a conscious act of deriving material for art from the pop-culture of the West, in addition to drawing upon the sacred wisdom of the ancients with proper due credit.

“To Think is to Follow the Witch’s Flight”

Lastly, we can revisit Deleuze for one final comment on the nature of philosophical thinking itself: Joshua Ramey, in The Hermetic Deleuze, writes that:

“prior to the development of distinct concepts, there is a dramatic encounter with a region or domain of potential sense, which Deleuze calls a “plan(e) of immanence. These planes are multiple, and can be laid out within color, in painting, in sounds, even in scientific functions or philosophical concepts. In this way, art, science and philosophy all have peculiar modes of thought… In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari write of the necessarily hazardous and heretical dimension of thought, evoking the surly and twilit legacy outlying realms of experience.”

All of that to say, before we get philosophy, we encounter the sidereal dream time. The untraceable horizons of heretical “drunkenness and excess.” These states of consciousness had a privileged place outside of the jealous arrest of “ratio” in Western consciousness, and today they survive through our artistic mediums, however little they may iridescently shine through:

“Precisely because the plane of immanence is pre philosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a sort of groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational, or reasonable. These measure belong to the order of reams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind. Even Descartes had his dream. To think is always to follow the witch’s flight.”

The point made, however, is that thought is intrinsically heretical. Philosophy begins on the witch’s flight. The human being is, herself or himself, an artistic-Socrates, a wissenkunst, an oracle and prophet in-the-making. All of us are capable of traversing worlds. All art is entheodelic in-potentia. This is our primordial nature. So do we dare face ourselves? Will we try to actualize it? It’s my hope and aspiration that you, and me, do the work to become what we are, and realize that in some degree with what we make in this world.

What do you think, R.S. readers?

Source: Salon.com