Time and History: East and West

Sept. 28- Oct. 1, 2000
Holiday Inn Select Executive Center
Columbia, Missouri, USA

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The Creative Flash: A Comparative Study of the Imagination
Dr. Jason M. Wirth
Department of Philosophy, Oglethorpe University (Atlanta, GA, USA)
 

ABSTRACT:

Lightning steers all things. - Heraclitus, Diels fragment 64

This paper will be a comparative study of the aesthetic imagination in which I bring the great Japanese comparativist (Buddhism and Western thinking) philosopher Nishida Kitaro as well as the Soto Zen master Suzuki Shunryu into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche. I will argue for a non-dual (otherwise than subject and object, creator creating the created) approach to artistic creation. Creation does not presuppose an agent who inaugurates and completes a creative act that results in a work of art. Furthermore, in attempting to think beyond this subject-object duality, creation by implication furthermore refuses the mind-body dualism in which the agency of mind (the artistic imaginary) guides the now docile body through the creative process. Creation is the non-dual movement of the holistic body (the mind and body are inseparable and never My distinct from one another) as, to use Nishida's phrase, "activity without agency." Creation is not the unfolding of a matrix already at work. Stictu sensu, it is not a deed (i.e., something done by a doer).

After a brief treatment of Chuang Tzu's extraordinary discussion of the master butcher whose expertise rests on the fact that the ox is "never in front" of him, my paper turns toward a careful study of two of Nishida's major works, namely, An Inquiry into the Good and Art and Morality. I shall try to develop Nishida's complex connection between pure experience, intuition, aesthetic production, and the Good. For Nishida, the imagination stands in relationship to a good beyond the manifest such that the aesthetic intuition is the emergence of art beyond agency and from the inscrutable depths of experience. Nishida provides numerous examples of this, including Zen calligraphy and ink painting as well as German philosophy, literature and music. "Just as ordinary perception is considered merely passive, so is intellectual intuition considered a state of passive contemplation; however a true intellectual intuition is the unifying activity in pure experience. It is a grasp of life, like having the knack of an art or, more profoundly, the aesthetic spirit. For example, when inspiration arises in a painter and the brush moves spontaneously, a unifying reality is operating behind the complex activity. Its transitions are not unconscious, for they are the development and completion of a single thing" (Inquiry, 32). And: "Each of the artist's exquisite brush strokes expresses the true meaning of the whole" (Inquiry, 33). Art, for Nishida, has the unity of a lightning flash that holds together - as no longer simply two - darkness and light, difference and identity, in a single experience or moment. Art, indeed thinking itself, is what Nishida later called "the complementarity of opposites."

I shall then develop this argument further by connecting it to a brief discussion of Suzuki's Buddhist discourse on what he calls variously the empty mind, or the clear mind, or no mind, or thinking as the "dark sky". "When you know everything, you are like a dark sky. Sometimes a flashing "I come through the dark sky. After it passes, you forget all about it, and there is nothing left but the dark sky. The sky is never surprised when all of a sudden a thunderbolt breaks through. And when the lightning does flash, a wonderful sight may be seen. When we have emptiness we are always prepared for watching the flashing" (Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, 84).

I will conclude by re-casting my discussion of the aesthetic character of thinking by turning toward Friedrich Nietzsche. A non-systematic thinker par excellence and a philosopher who blurred the lines between art and philosophy, Nietzsche provided no a priori structure for the construction and birthing of his thoughts. Rather they came from nowhere, from nothing, as it were, as if lightning bolts, dancing on their own terms, emerged "from the outside, from above or below, like events or thunderbolts."
 

Panel VIII- Buddhism Mind/Body Creativity
Saturday, 9/30/00 * 1:15- 3:15 p.m. * Windsor II

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