What is Art? Technically, and correctly, Art, for The Numinous Way, is a nexion – a connexion between the causal and the acausal; a causal embodiment of some-thing acausal. What is embodied, and becomes a work of Art, is the numinous and some aspect of acausality, and empathy is one means for a human being to embody, to know, the numinous and acausality. By embody is meant to presence (acausality) in the causal.
Since empathy is only and ever personal, it logically follows that what might be called aesthetic judgement is personal as well, and that there cannot be any abstract, or formal, criteria or theory to judge or to reference what is often termed aesthetic value, beyond the obvious ones of numinosity and acausality. It is this combination of numinosity and acausality presenced in a particular causal manner that may be said to distinguish Art.
More prosaically, and less technically, Art is that works or those works, and/or that activity, that not only represents or expresses (or tries to express) in some way (gives some manufactured/created physical practical form or a collocation of forms to) the numinous, but which also has or presents to us (that is, presences in our causal, phenomenal world) some aspect of acausality.
Art can thereby be some conventional static formful and human-manufactured thing – such as a painting, a poem, a piece of music; or it can be a collocation of human-manufactured forms, such as a film, where images, moving and static, are combined with music and words and express a narrative or a story. By static is meant given a containing or limiting causal form or structure – for example, a conventional musical composition has a beginning and an end, and is scored to be played by some particular instrument or instruments and/or by the human voice (and so on), and is therefore possessed of a particular causal structure, and represents a particular causal presencing, and one which can thus be “faithfully interpreted/performed” according to what are considered to be the wishes of the composer, or given some new “interpretation” in the manner that, for example, the plays of Shakespeare often are, by some human being.
But Art can also, importantly, be some-thing living, changing, and not manufactured or directly presenced by us; that is, Art, a work of Art, can be the life, or some aspect of the life of, a human being, or some aspect of Nature that lives, that is presenced or becomes presenced to us, in a specific moment or moments of causal Time in a particular causal location (causal Space).
Thus, we might justifiably ask: what, and technically, is numinous? And what, technically, is acausality?
Technically, the numinous is what predisposes us not to commit ὕβρις – that is, what continues or maintains or manifests ἁρμονίη and thus καλλός; the natural balance – sans abstractions – that enables us to know and appreciate, and which uncovers, Φύσις and λόγος, and τὸ καλόν, the virtuous beauty known to us mortals as personal honour [2].
What is numinous is a presencing of acausal energy, in the causal – or ψυχή unfolding in the causal – and this is evident to us in what is beautiful (καλός), and what is imbued with the sublime, that is, with an appreciation of beyond-the-causal and thus beyond our own mortal lives: part of which, and anciently, would have been called the gods, or God, and/or to which we might assign the term Nature, as a living, changing, being, the matrix of Life, working on our planet, Earth, in a specific way and manifest in a diversity of living species.
Beauty – καλλός – is thus what or that which presences, embodies, or manifests, ἁρμονίη.
Technically, acausality [3] is that aspect of the Cosmos, of Reality, evident in acausal being – which we can apprehend in terms of an acausal Space and an acausal Time (an acausal continuum), as opposed to causal being, apprehended by us in terms of a causal Space and a causal Time (a causal continuum), with this causal continuum being the phenomenal world we know and experience by means of our physical senses.
David Myatt
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( Extract from Pre-Socratic Philosophy, The Numinous Way, and Aesthetics )
Notes:
[2] Personal honour – manifest in a Code of Honour – is a practical means of maintaining balance within the individual; a means whereby ὕβρις may be avoided. Thus the importance, in The Numinous Way, of both empathy and personal honour – refer, for instance, to An Overview of The Numinous Way of Life.
[3] See, for instance, Life and The Nature of the Acausal.
