91. Stability and change, art and sex

At several places in this blog I have argued that the self does not have a fixed, given identity (item 8) but is constituted in action in the world (item 40), and that ideas guide action but are also changed in it (26), as they are confronted with new challenges and opportunities in new contexts (31). I also argued that art is a way of world making and upsets established meanings and perspectives (80). Here I elaborate on the relation between art and identification, the constitution of the self.

I will refer to Eastern philosophy because there the idea of an identity in flux arises more than in Western philosophy.

We are dealing here with the ancient theme of stability and change. The self orders perception, assimilating it into existing mental frames that serve as a source of stability, of identity. This identity separates the self from the world, as a subject contemplating objects in the world, objectively, or so it claims. This is the Cartesian self. It breeds the scientist. Here we find a duality of subject and object, of self and the world. It projects the self as master of the world. In Eastern philosophy (e.g. Buddhism) it is a male principle: of structure, power, impact, and penetration.

But identity is identity on the move. When assimilation fails, is allowed to fail, there is a jolt to the self, with experience breaking and entering, disordering the mind and putting identity out of joint. This loss of self can be unnerving, frightening, alienating. But it can also be exhilarating, ecstatic, in denying the duality of self and the world. That is what Buddhism tried to achieve. In Eastern philosophy it is a female principle. In being penetrated the male becomes female.

I do not accept the Buddhist claim that in such an instant one sees ‘reality as it really is’. For that I am still too much of a Western philosopher, a Kantian, a Humean, sceptical of our knowledge claims. Nor do I believe that such breakthroughs are achieved primarily in meditation, in opening up to the inside of the self. That mostly fosters delusion, I think.

I see the opening up of the self as brought about by action in the world, stumbling in it. We are shocked, moved, in e-motion, outward motion, to see the world differently from how we did. Art can achieve this. It is the Dionysian in art (item 81). But we do not suddenly see reality as it is in itself. It remains imperfection on the move (item 19). We are shifted into a different self, and then dualism resumes, is re-established. We cannot permanently merge with the world, and identity re-emerges. After art we return to routine, but perhaps a different one.

Thus spiritual life is a marriage between the two: between ordering and disordering, stability and change, dualism and unity, between male and female, between science and art, in orgasmic tension and release.