Philosophical Silence and Spiritual Awe
Angelo Caranfa
In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at...the stillness of being. 1
What interests me...[is] that which best permits me to express my almost religious awe towards life. 2
"There exists a language of the intelligence, which has come down to us as the language of the word," declares René Huyghe. "Art, however, is a language of the spirit, of our feeling as well as our thinking nature, our nature as a whole in all its complexity." 3 This essay addresses the education of intelligence or the word in the philosophy of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), and the instruction of the spirit in the art of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), so as to clarify human existence in its wholeness or totality. Jaspers and Matisse reject the split between the word and the spirit, and instruct us that the way to completion or self-realization is through a life lived in silence and in spiritual awe. Without silence, according to Jaspers and Matisse, it is impossible to philosophize or create, and therefore to learn.
To integrate silence or solitude into human existence by weaving it into the whole approach to teaching the liberal arts or the humanities is the pedagogical concern of this essay. Its implications for students will be briefly discussed at the conclusion. But first, let me sketch the general movement of the basic ideas that the essay develops.
The theme that connects the narrative is that artistic-aesthetic education alone can lead students along the path to self-completion by integrating silence or solitude into their life of learning. Jaspers and Matisse instruct that silence or solitude is the very source of philosophical knowledge and of artistic creation. When the human mind comes face to face with the mystery of existence, explains Jaspers, silence or solitude is there to lead it to perceive or understand this mystery. This understanding is not a truth of intellectual [End Page 99] or rational knowledge, but a truth of the spirit, which is the knowledge of art or the aesthetic, as Matisse illustrates. Thus the relationship between art and philosophy is one of enrichment and of completion, not of poverty and dilution of knowledge. What allows us to grasp or understand the mystery of existence is love, according to Jaspers and Matisse.
Love, they claim, is born of the self's desire to complete itself, to root itself in a source outside itself, to overcome its limitations in pride, arrogance, selfishness, hatred, and deceit by submitting itself to humility, purity, sincerity, simplicity, truth, and a higher love: God's Love. Then, concludes Jaspers, the self rises above or beyond philosophical knowledge, just as God's love rises above all living beings, concludes Matisse, and it achieves wholeness in God's Love or Word or Spirit. But the Word of God can be heard only in silence, in peaceful contemplation and in emptiness of mind, so that both the senses and the soul can be absorbed totally and completely into the radiance and into the unspeakable Word of God. Thus Matisse uses light and colors in his art to express, reveal, make us see and hear God's voice in the world and in us. As Jaspers's philosophical transcending of question and answer is to lead us upward into the world of eternity, rooting ourselves, transcending ourselves, transforming ourselves, freeing ourselves, creating for ourselves an existence that is truly sublime, and therefore whole.
Jaspers's Aesthetic of the Silence of Being
Jaspers is not known for his contribution to philosophy of art. In fact, he does not discuss art or aesthetics per se. 4 Still, his aesthetics follows quite consistently and logically from his philosophy as outlined in Way to Wisdom. The desire to lead the philosophical life, says Jaspers, expresses itself through situations, thought or contemplation, or reflection, and through choices or inner actions. Jaspers maintains that the human self is "on-the-way" to self-completion, or self-awareness, or self-transcendence, which "make[s] this questionable life good, the world beautiful, and existence itself a fulfilment" (WW, 126). Interestingly enough, for Jaspers, the world of transcendence is not disclosed by philosophy, but by art. "Art," he writes, "make[s] Transcendence perceptible...in the form which arouses...faith." 5
As a way of making transcendence possible, art, explains Jaspers, performs four interrelated functions. One, it discovers true being. Two, it frees human consciousness, or it furthers the selfhood of the individual. Three, it communicates to us, in a world "cut adrift from a really vital tradition," 6 the way back to our historical self. Four, it transforms ordinary reality into intrinsic values. So, for example, in the music of Mozart, Jaspers discovers an "art which makes true being articulate." 7 Jaspers concludes that art does not reject "man's true nature as man, in favor of our immediate and crude present," but rather it treats transcendence as the ultimate foundation of [End Page 100] existence. 8 According to Jaspers, art alone makes possible the construction of "sublime moments. It is out of such moments and toward such moments that we live" (WW, 70).
Like art, continues Jaspers, philosophy is also concerned with the construction or experience of these "sublime moments," which reveal an existence transcending itself, returning to itself, as it were, after having gone astray in the activities of the world, after forgetting itself in a world devoid of meaning or purpose. Ultimately, what these "sublime moments" disclose to the philosopher, as to the artist, is an existence that has acquired order, harmony, unity; they give life its historical foundation, that collective memory without which existence would remain forever a "crude present," a nothing, without any ground or freedom. As Jaspers puts it: "For these moments give to the present both memory and future, they give my life cohesion and continuity" (WW, 125). Authentic or true being is not found apart from history, says Jaspers; rather, it is integrally tied to and continuous with our past. "By making history our own, we cast an anchor through history into eternity....Only when we exist entirely in this time of our historicity can we experience something of the eternal present" (WW, 109, 130).
To anchor existence in history is to be "on-the-way," to journey in time and beyond it; to seek the ground or source of our authentic or true self. This journey, explains Jaspers, "contains within it the possibility of deep satisfaction, and indeed, in exalted moments, of perfection. This perfection never resides in formulable knowledge...but in a historical consummation of man's essence in which being itself is revealed. To apprehend this reality in man's actual situation is the aim of philosophical endeavor" (WW, 12). As it is of artistic endeavor as well. But more than this: without art, Jaspers argues, philosophy cannot apprehend the human situation; "I read the symbols of being with the help of literature and art" (WW, 123). To read these symbols, Jaspers calls upon intuition, rather than rational knowledge: "intuition which fills [these symbols] in a manner each time historical." 9
Jaspers distinguishes three steps by which philosophy may serve as the basis for the experience of this "eternal present" in our lives: to journey within ourselves; to communicate with others; and to understand philosophy as the life of faith. 10 According to Jaspers, existence is not a matter of knowledge, of what we know; rather, it is a matter of living, of finding ourselves in situations, which are forever uncertain. This is to say that we cannot escape the world, and in this world, one thing is certain: the self and the world change. Now, if we want to know the world, we must ask certain basic questions: What is the world about? Where do I fit in the world? Such questions, insists Jaspers, place us on the way to wisdom through wonder (Plato, Aristotle), doubt (Descartes), and forsakeness (Pascal, Sartre). Wonder gives rise to doubt, in that we become aware of our lack of knowledge in answering these questions; doubt, in turn, gives rise to critical thinking, [End Page 101] to an examination of these questions and, thus, it is a means of investigation, of discovery. But as long as doubt is directed toward the outside world, we are simply engaged in what Jaspers calls scientific discovery or knowledge; we simply want to know how things in the world are related to each other. However, as soon as doubt is turned toward ourselves, or is internalized, then the situation changes, and the self plunges itself in what Jaspers calls "an inner upheaval" (WW, 24). From this inner turmoil, the philosophical journey begins.
With the self doubting itself, its foundation is shaken to the ground. The only thing that the self knows for certain is that it must die, it must suffer, it must struggle, it is subject to change, it experiences guilt and anguish; what it knows now is that it must remake its own existence from this shattered or meaningless existence. With doubt turned inwardly, the objective world is lived subjectively and, thus, scientific consciousness transforms itself into existential consciousness or philosophy. As fragmented, rootless, and forsaken, the self, continues Jaspers, must find its way back to wholeness; in short, we must redeem ourselves. Philosophy is a way toward this self-redemption. "Philosophical thought is inward action; it appeals to freedom; it is a summons to transcendence...[it] is the act of becoming conscious of genuine being — or is the thinking of a faith in man that must be infinitely elucidated — or is the way of man's self-assertion through thinking" (WW, 162-63). Through thinking, we simply call to mind words and actions that constitute us phenomenally or concretely; or, we simply remind ourselves of what we have done, have failed to do, must do. The fruit of this philosophical thinking, explains Jaspers, is not only the clarification of our situations, but it also makes possible "to touch upon the source of [our] freedom and through it upon being itself; [we] seek as it were to partake of creation" (WW, 123-24).
To possess ourselves inwardly, to partake of creation, and to touch the source of existence in freedom through philosophical reflection or thinking, is nothing, insists Jaspers, unless we proceed to the second step of our journey: "communication among men" (WW, 25). In communication alone our being is actualized; alone we are nothing, concludes Jaspers. "Only in communication is all other truth fulfilled, only in communication am I myself not merely living but fulfilling life" (WW, 26). 11
What do we communicate? For Jaspers, communication works upon, shapes, or guides three other sources of philosophical life: wonder, doubt, and forsakeness. What we communicate, then, is our existence lived in constant doubt, forever estranged from itself and the world, and forever in wonder. Thus what began as a paradox ends in a paradox: on the one hand, communication discloses the truth of our being; on the other hand, it also brings to light a self that is forever "on-the-way," and forever at a distance from the other and from the end it tries to achieve. Or, perhaps, we can [End Page 102] resolve the paradox by reformulating the problem: for Jaspers, there is no true or authentic or free self in the "Other," except for the one who communicates with the other the "I" that doubts, that is forsaken, and that is in a state of wonder. It is for this reason that Jaspers makes communication the aim of philosophy; "in communication," he writes, "all its other aims are ultimately rooted: awareness of being, illumination through love, attainment of peace" (WW, 27). 12
Consequently, philosophy demands communication if we want to reach self-awareness, peace, and enlightenment through love. Such communication, however, and ironically enough, will not result in the rational understanding of human existence, but rather it pushes existence beyond rational understanding. Hence the third step: transcendence through philosophy as faith. Jaspers maintains that only the "consummation of nonknowledge" (WW, 160) can lead us to the "primal source," to the authentic mystery of Being.
The voice of God lies in the self-awareness that dawns in the individual, when he is open to everything that comes to him from his tradition and environment [and communication]....There is a soaring energy in...listening to the whole of reality. A man's humanity depends on how deeply he gains guidance through this listening (WW, 68, 73).
In this listening, which is a sort of intuitive, rather than rational thinking, Jaspers believes that God speaks to us "directly" (WW, 47) in its very silence. 13 But this is the silence that exists, however, only through communication or speech: the speech that ceases to be at the limit of what can be said and thought, since it is impossible to apprehend and describe the inconceivable, the unthinkable, the unspeakable. No word or concept is appropriate to God as Source, or as Being, or as Silence: "God is" (WW, 46), insists Jaspers. "We do not encompass this reality in thinking the proposition; merely to think it leaves us empty....We apprehend its meaning only as we transcend, as we pass beyond the world of objects and through it discover authentic reality...that is, God" (WW, 47). Thus, for Jaspers, we do not apprehend or encompass God through any sort of mediation in symbol, or metaphor, or analogy, or image, or allegory, or dogma of faith, or thinking. Rather, we encompass or apprehend him through listening what "the whole world" says to us as we journey to the silence of our authentic being, where existence becomes truly sublime or divine, and where philosophical thinking transforms itself into what Jaspers calls radiance.
Here is a repose that can sustain us amid the inevitable unrest of our wanderings in the world. Here thought must dissolve into radiance. Where there is no further question, there is also no answer. In the philosophical transcending of question and answer we arrive at the limit, at the stillness of being (WW, 49). 14 [End Page 103]
So it is that, taking existence to its limit through the philosophical method of question and answer, and taking this philosophical thinking to its furthest limit, Jaspers ultimately identifies philosophy with faith, and transcendence as an aesthetic concept. It is a way of listening to, and of looking at, the world, not through the eyes of the philosopher, but through the eyes of the child. Jaspers writes:
A child cries out in wonderment. He is perplexed at the mystery of his I, this mystery that can be apprehended through nothing else.... The child still reacts spontaneously to the spontaneity of life; the child feels and sees and inquires into things which soon disappear from his vision. He forgets what for a moment was revealed to him and is surprised when grownups later tell him what he said and what questions he asked" (WW, 9, 11).
Without this childlike attitude, which alone permits the philosopher to forget all questions of existence, it would be impossible to achieve self-transcendence. Driven by nothing other than the desire to "want what I love to be" (WW, 62), the child, concludes Jaspers, is simply "seized with the wonder of existence" (WW, 10). The child passionately gives herself/himself unconditionally to her/his being or existence; everything about the child is as if rooted in the eternal Source or Foundation, in the silence of Being. The child's life is, according to Jaspers, a witness to moments of sublimity.
What good is existence, asks Jaspers, if it is not lived in wonder, as the child lives it, and if it is not oriented toward transcendence? Jaspers himself answers the question by comparing our life to the life of the butterfly.
We are creatures of this sort, and we are lost if we relinquish our orientation to the dry land. But we are not content to remain there. That is why our flutterings are so uncertain and perhaps so absurd to those who sit secure and content on dry land, and are intelligible only to those who have been seized by the same unrest. For them the world is a point of departure for that flight upon which everything depends, which each man must venture on his own though in common with other men, and which can never become the object of any doctrine (WW, 130-31).
What emerges from this analogy of the philosophical life to the flight of the butterfly — and from Jaspers's entire philosophy of thought, of inner action, of communication, of transcendence, and of faith that are its context — is an aesthetic view, or a view of art as a way of experiencing the world both rationally and intuitively. Art as viewed by Jaspers is analogous to the philosophical way of true or authentic self, of communion, of transcendence, and of integration — of bringing together the scattered and meaningless moments into some order or unity or harmony. As for the philosopher, so for the artist, this journey to self-transcendence cannot be viewed simply as the flight of reason; rather, it must also be seen as the flight of the [End Page 104] imagination or senses. The philosopher, as the artist, must penetrate concrete reality to arrive at the authentic mystery of being, which is ultimately revealed or apprehended through "intuition" (WW, 160).
Matisse's Aesthetic of Spiritual Awe
Jaspers's philosophical silence of Being finds it expression in Matisse's aesthetic of spiritual awe. The silence of existence out of which spiritual awe emerges is transformed into the creative love surrounding the birth of the work of art. To create, explains Matisse, is to express what we have deep within ourselves, what we feel in our encounter with the outside world. As the artist gradually incorporates and assimilates the external world within himself/herself by means of vision, he/she places himself/herself in a position where she/he can create his/her own forms by setting them to a new arrangement. The created work will then appear as possessing of the same resplendent beauty as the works of nature, and is imbued with the same feelings as those experienced by the artist. This creative act, concludes Matisse, requires an act of love, "a love capable of inspiring and sustaining that patient striving towards truth, that glowing warmth and that analytic profundity that accompany the birth of any work of art" (MA, 149).
By making love the origin of all creation, Matisse places himself in opposition to the so-called abstract painters of his day who maintained that the legitimate domain of art was thought or abstraction and the void or the nonexistent, instead of feeling and nature (MA, 147). The artist who possesses Nature, says Matisse, is the one who can create according to his/her own method or language.
He must identify himself with her rhythm, by efforts that prepare for the mastery by which he will later be able to express himself in his own language. The future painter must be able to foresee what is useful to his development — drawing or even sculpture — everything that will let him become one with Nature, identify himself with her, by penetrating the things — which is what I call Nature — that arouse his feelings (MA, 121).
To turn away from Nature and from sensations is to do away with "any criterion of observation and thus there is no longer any work of art" (MA, 147). As a criterion or standard in the logic of relationships of things to each other, love is that which makes things clear and well-defined, and which gives them what belongs to them, what unifies or relates them. "Rapport is the affinity between things, the common language; rapport is love, yes love" (MA, 147). At the same time, love refers the artist to a love outside himself/herself, to God's love. "Love is born of God and cannot rest other than in God, above all living beings. He who loves, flies, runs, and rejoices; he is free and nothing holds him back" (MA, 113). [End Page 105]
Love, continues Matisse, completes us and renders light that which weighs heavy on us, which burdens us; it frees us from earthly things, so as to place us on the way to Divine love, which stands above all things, and from which all goodness and all delight flow and proceed. Such a love drowns all presumption and pride, so that the artist can create through the virtues of sincerity and humility. Accordingly, Matisse insists on the absolute necessity to have perfect sincerity in the work, without which "the artist can only drift from one influence to another, forgetting to find the ground from which he must take his own individual characteristics" (MA, 127). The artist who creates from sincerity and humility of heart will create from his/her own source or ground. "I repeat once more: one must be sincere; the work of art only exists fully when it is charged with human emotion and is rendered with complete sincerity, and not by means of applying some pre-arranged program" (MA, 146).
A work of art, therefore, is nothing if it is not imbued with human emotion and if it is not rendered with sincerity and humility. That is why Matisse demands that the artist paint the world through the eyes of the child. According to Matisse, the child lives in a world of renewed freshness, innocence, and love, as though the child always sees things for the first time, and as though she/he is only concerned with immersing himself/herself into things. Similarly, the artist must be guided by this same childlike attitude toward things. "One must know how to maintain childhood's freshness upon contact with objects, to preserve its naivete. One must be a child all one's life even while a man, take one's strength from the existence of objects — and not have imagination cut off by the existence of objects" (MA, 145). If the artist renounces this freshness of vision, if she/he has the imagination cut off from objects, he/she impoverishes the work by creating from a style that is arbitrary and artificial, rather than a style that develops naturally and progressively. Such an artist, concludes Matisse, is concerned more with "trick of invention" (MA, 144) than with the truth of things, "which must be disengaged from the outward appearance of the object to be represented" (MA, 117).
By stressing the idea that the artist should paint the world through the eyes of the child, Matisse is not suggesting that instinctive observation should replace deliberate perception, nor does he advocate the removal of reason or thought from the creative process. What Matisse wishes to emphasize, instead, is that it is feeling that perceives or grasps the relationships of things; "Following this, reason takes charge, holds things in check" (MA, 152). If reason were engaged from the very beginning in the analysis of feelings, explains Matisse, very often it would "lead the emotion astray" (MA, 60). The artist must proceed without a theory, without a rational framework, without a logical structure of reason and understanding, writes Matisse to Bonnard in his letter of January 28, 1935. "In truth, a painter exists with a [End Page 106] palette in his hand and he does what he can. But let me tell you anyway... that theory is something rather sterilizing or impoverishing." 15 According to Matisse, the artist should never try to think while he/she creates, but only to feel; feeling alone renders the work fertile (MA, 66). The charm of the artist's creations, as of the child's, comes of their being foreign to the conscious mind; once the conscious mind intervenes, it renders them sterile, it ruins them, concludes Matisse. "When I take a walk in the garden I pick flower after flower, gathering them as I go, one after the other into the crook of my arm. Then I go into the house with the intention of painting them. After I have rearranged them in my own way, what a disappointment: all their charm is lost in this arrangement. What has happened? The unconscious grouping made when my taste led me from flower to flower, has been replaced by a conscious arrangement" (MA, 111).
It is thus from this "unconscious grouping" that the artist creates a unified or harmonious whole. But Matisse admits that this creation passes through a "certain analytic state" (MA, 58) when it is a question of directing or controlling this unconscious arrangement or process. Around this relationship between the unconscious and analysis the unity of the work develops. "The harmony of all the elements of the picture which have a part in the unity of feeling accompanied by working, imposes a spontaneous translation on the mind" (MA, 66). For Matisse, then, analysis or thought does not gain the upper hand over sensibility or feeling, nor sensitivity or the unconscious over thought. The two are one in each other, they fertilize and enrich each other. 16 Expression or feeling without analysis does not penetrate to the substance of things, to their ultimate meaning, and analysis without feeling is empty or deadly. Reflecting upon the relation of feeling and thought to the creation of the work or composition, Matisse writes:
What I am after, above all, is expression....The thought of a painter must not be considered as separate from his pictorial means, for the thought is worth no more than its expression by the means, which must be more complete...the deeper is his thought. I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have about life and my way of translating it....Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the diverse elements at the painter's command to express his feelings....For me all is in the conception. I must therefore have a clear vision of the whole from the very beginning (MA, 35-37).
When Matisse says that the entire creative process depends on "conception," he is not identifying himself with Plato's world of the mind or intelligence or idea; for him, intellectual painting does not exist, "it remains locked up in the intention of the painter and is never realized" (MA, 59). A work of art, as Matisse understands it, is not the result of a "preconceived idea" (MA, 143), but the translation or expression or interpretation of real or actual feelings that are cognitive in nature, in that they perceive or grasp [End Page 107] things as already organized or related or unified. "The unity realized in my picture, however complex it may be, is not difficult for me to obtain, because it comes to me naturally. I think only of rendering my emotion" (MA, 60). This rendering of emotion is accomplished by Matisse naturally or spontaneously, without any thought or reflection on how to proceed or execute. "I don't know where I am going," declares Matisse. "I rely on my subconscious self and the proof of this is that if I am disturbed during the process I can no longer find the thread of it again" (MA, 84). He goes on to say that no one tells him when he should begin and when he should finish the work. The only rule is that he follows his "inner feelings" as closely as possible and lets the "intellectual" part of his work assume a "secondary" (MA, 92) role. When the work represents the emotion or feeling precisely and completely, and when there is nothing more to be added, he considers the work finished. "There are no laws until the work is finished. One cannot make programs. Painting is a grave art: we have not yet all its spirit, all its reason; nor have we liberty, and that is what is needed most" (MA, 123).
The liberty to create is linked by Matisse to a certain way of looking at the world and interpreting its objects, as opposed to the imitation of the style of other artists. "When one imitates a master, the technique of the master strangles the imitator and forms about him a barrier which paralyses him" (MA, 126). The artist, according to Matisse, organizes the world of objects into signs, which are capable of transmitting a fresh conception of some aspect of nature or of our inner life. The signs that the artist uses are not determined in advance, as in writing, argues Matisse: "that would paralyze the freedom of my invention" (MA, 137). Instead, the use of signs is determined at the moment of execution, and for the purpose of achieving total pictorial harmony. Such a harmony, concludes Matisse, produces a pleasure similar to the pleasure we experience in a musical composition. It is a pleasure that results from a given arrangement of colors, which arrangement does not rest on any "scientific theory," but one which depends totally upon "instinct and feeling" (MA, 38). This pleasure addresses itself to the innermost part of the soul: it arouses feelings of tranquillity, serenity, calm, silent contemplation, and "repose of spirit" (MA, 42).
Repose of spirit! This is Matisse's goal, a goal from which he never retreated, but one on which depended during the many struggles he had to go through. When difficulties came his way, Matisse had sincerity, humility, love, solitude, and silence on his side, not to mention a canvas, colors, purity of means, and the desire to express himself totally in his work. "The work is the emanation, the projection of self. My drawings and my canvases are pieces of myself. Their totality constitutes Henri Matisse. The work represents, expresses, perpetuates. I could also say that my drawings and my canvases are my real children" (MA, 144). The artist's vocation, instructs [End Page 108] Matisse, when authentic or sincere, is not felt as the result of a choice, but as a response to God's call.
Matisse's art is conceived in that spirit, most especially his chapel at Vence. 17 Born out of friendship for the Sister who took care of him while in the hospital in Nice from 1942-1943, Matisse considers the chapel as the culmination of a lifelong effort revealing the different stages along his way. As he writes:
All my life I have been influenced by the opinion current at the time I first began to paint....The teachers at the Beaux-Arts used to say to their pupils, "Copy nature stupidly." Throughout my career I have reacted against this attitude to which I could not submit; and this struggle has been the source of the different stages along my route.... This Chapel is for me the culmination of a life of work, and the coming into flower of an enormous, sincere and difficult effort. This is not a work that I chose, but rather a work for which I was chosen by fate, towards the end of the course that I am still continuing according to my researches; the Chapel has afforded me the possibility of realizing them by uniting them (MA, 128).
Combining the effects of light and colors against a solid wall with black drawings on a white background, Matisse creates a pictorial harmony that is closely related to music, since it touches the viewer's innermost soul, compelling it to journey into God. "I want the chapel visitors to experience a lightening of the spirit. So that, even without being believers, they sense a milieu of spiritual elevation, where thought is clarified, where feeling itself is lightened" (MA, 140). No mortal entering the chapel and seeing depicted on the murals and on the stained-glass windows Saint Dominic, the Virgin Mary, and the Passion of Christ, could possibly not feel God's love or grace, which is the thought or idea that Matisse wants to clarify. He wants the spectator to reflect in silence on the love which God has for us, a love which cost him his only begotten Son, who, in order to redeem us from death, had himself to die such a tragic death as the death on the Cross. This is why Matisse makes the Passion of Christ central to his composition. Central, also because as creator, Matisse himself has experienced Christ's tragedy. Matisse concludes his explanation by saying that the spiritual meaning of the chapel is indisputable:
From a space of bright shadowless sunlight which envelops our spirit on the left, we find, passing to the right, the tile walls. They are the visual equivalent of a large open book where the white pages carry the signs explaining the musical part composed by the stained-glass windows....The ceramic tiles are the spiritual essential and explain the meaning of the monument. Thus they become...the focal point which should underline the peaceful contemplation that we should experience; and I believe this is a point that should be stressed" (MA, 130). [End Page 109]
If Matisse's point is kept in mind as the observer peacefully contemplates the spiritual significance of his conception, he/she will see it as a book on meditation to enrich one's own interior life, as Matisse himself enriched his. "I did the Chapel with the sole intention of expressing myself profoundly" (MA, 144). What Matisse discovered as he meditated on his deeper inner self, we should also discover: a translucent core or center, a source of life capable of transporting us beyond time and space, a knowledge that purifies, humbles, delights, and one which is sincerely the love of Wisdom. The deeper we go into ourselves, the more we should discover the spirit that moves us, that defines us; "Then you must present it with the greatest humility, completely white, pure, candid, your brain seeming empty in the spiritual state of a communicant approaching the Lord's Table" (MA, 112).
When we "present" our life with humility, sincerity, purity of heart, and emptiness of mind, we truly root existence in something permanent and eternal, in a source beyond the changeable, the material, and the visible, in a world of light beyond ordinary sunlight and of space beyond finite space. As is the life of the figures in the murals and in the stained-glass windows of the chapel at Vence. By underlining peaceful contemplation and spiritual elevation, Matisse desires to free the self, under the influence of God's love or spirit. Indeed, the spirit of God is everywhere in Matisse's art, but only for those who have eyes that listen. "If drawing [painting] belongs to the realm of the Spirit and color to that of the Senses, you must draw [paint] first to cultivate the Spirit and be able to lead color through the paths of the Spirit" (MA, 121).
Conclusion:
The Way To Wholeness
If learning focuses upon the path of the spirit, as we have discussed above, silence or solitude becomes an integral part of the student's life. By teaching solitude, students, as well as teachers, should learn to place themselves on the way to wholeness or self-transcendence. That is, they should learn to arrange or place their living experiences in a harmonious unity, which is not merely the result of analytical or logical thinking, but also of feeling, of the spirit. In other words, students, as teachers, learn to integrate what they learn into their own silent inner self, so that they personally identify themselves with it. Such identification enables students, as it enabled Jaspers and Matisse, to participate in the creation of their own emotional, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual life. 18 Jaspers and Matisse embarked on their respective journeys so that the ideas and the thoughts they had learned could be transformed into their own authentic thoughts or ideas by embracing solitude, or by walking alone with their own doubts. Throughout his life, Matisse searched for "a new language" by which he could communicate to others what he felt and thought. As did Jaspers. [End Page 110]
To participate in the creation of their own existence by constantly transforming it, this is what students learn, as do teachers, if instruction is based on solitude. As we have learned from Jaspers and Matisse, transformation is nothing but life in the making. It is life freeing itself from both outer and inner forces that impede its movement on the way to completion or wholeness. Bringing to mind Plato's imagery of the cave, as well as Jaspers's image of the butterfly, Matisse concretizes for us this life of self-liberation by invoking a similar image: "Derive happiness from yourself," writes Matisse. He continues:
Think that all those who have succeeded, as they look back on the difficulties of their start, exclaim with conviction, "Those were the good old days!" For most of them success = Prison, and the artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist must never be a prisoner of himself.... Find joy in the sky, in the trees, in the flowers. There are flowers everywhere for those who want to see them (MA, 113).
Our pedagogical problem is, it seems to me, to teach students, as ourselves, never to become prisoners; that is, never to let success imprison them, atrophy them, render them old, in fact, destroy them by the momentary pleasures that success brings. To learn from Jaspers and Matisse is to become aware that failure is the very initial impulse that places them on the way to a lasting joy. For only then the ethical and the spiritual self will emerge as it contemplates itself all alone and forsaken in the world. To see ourselves alone and forsaken is to become aware that existence is beyond rational explanations or interpretations: it is mystery, it is silence, it is faith. It is existence choosing to redeem itself, to place itself in communion with things, other human beings, and a higher Being by means of humility, sincerity, purity, simplicity, truth, and love. If students learn this, there will be no need for them to say, "Those were the good old days." This is because, struggle, failure, forsakeness, or simply "the difficulties of their start," will have been integrated into their present moment, thus rendering it forever a new day — a day of spontaneity, of serenity, of peace, of creativity, and of joy. It is the day when they truly come to celebrate the "eternal present," like the figures in Matisse's works, The Music and The Dance. Absorbed in music playing and in dancing, the figures bespeak enchantment, ecstasy, as though the moment transcends words, time, and space; indeed, as though they have attained "repose of spirit" in the very silence of Being.
Learning is about repose of spirit and stillness of being; it is a life of sheer joy, of ecstasy, of being seized with wonder, as the child is. 19 There is silence in every child, as there is spontaneity, simplicity, purity, humility, and love. And if education is to achieve the whole development of the human person, it must awaken or articulate, not imprison, this silent dimension in the students. "Proper education and proper teaching are based on the substance of silence," concludes Max Picard. "The silent substance in the child [End Page 111] [student] assimilates the foreign material, fuses it with the other contents of the mind, broadens the whole nature [emphasis mine] of the child [student], and extends its mental frontiers [as well as its sensual frontiers]." 20 But this is possible only if education becomes, at its core, artistic-aesthetic.
Angelo Caranfa is Instructor of Philosophy at
Notes
1. Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951). This work will be cited as WW in the text for all subsequent references.
2. "Notes of a Painter," in Jack D. Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). This work will be cited as MA in the text for all subsequent references.
3. René Huyghe, Art and the Spirit of Man (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1962), 11.
4. See Johannes Pfeiffer, "On Karl Jaspers's Interpretation of Art," in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul A. Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1957), 703-18.
5. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. E. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Anchor Books, 1957), 141.
6. Ibid., 138.
7. Ibid., 144.
8. Ibid., 142. A similar emphasis is found in José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).
9. H.D. Blackman, Six Existentialist Thinkers (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1959), 60.
10. Leonard Ehrlich, Karl Jaspers (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1975). The way Professor Ehrlich understands Jaspers's faith is, however, at least to this reader, hardly faith, since Jaspers argues that we can have no experience of God, except through the loving tension of existence. It seems to me that Jaspers's philosophy suffers from not enough faith, since he takes away from existence exactly this tension by annihilating, through his transcendence of questions and answers, and through his notion of nonknowledge or mysticism, the very ambiguity between freedom and grace, action and contemplation, existence and transcendence. The faith that Jaspers advances can be actualized only within the social or political sphere, and thus it is like the faith that Auguste Comte and Karl Marx articulate in their works.
11. Emmanuel Levinas, on the other hand, sees communication quite differently from the way Jaspers sees it. He argues against Jaspers, though indirectly, that he fails to "take seriously the radical reversal, from cognition to solidarity, that communication represents with respect to inward dialogue, to cognition of oneself, taken as trope of spirituality. [Jaspers seeks] for communication a full coverage insurance, and [he does] not ask if inward dialogue is not beholden to the solidarity that sustains communication"; Sean Hand, ed., The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 108.
12. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1958), uses the relationship "I-Thou" as a way by which people should communicate with each other. He stresses that true or authentic dialogue between individuals entails full acceptance of the "Thou" as "I," rather than as an abstract category or an "It." See also Martin Buber, The Knowledge of Man, ed. Maurice Friedman (New York: Harper and Row, 1965).
13. This places Jaspers in a paradoxical relationship with Martin Luther: on the one hand, Jaspers follows Luther in saying that God speaks to us directly; on the other hand, he goes against Luther in his emphasis on reason, which Luther calls whore. Like Luther, however, Jaspers strikes at, or goes against, the Catholic way of sacramental mediation and adherence to articles or dogma of faith, because, [End Page 112] in his own words, the Church as "world [rational] system...erroneously absolutized and universalized....Every world [rational] system is a segment taken out of the world....A critical approach to [theology] calls for the abandonment of world [rational] system" (WW, 76-77). An excellent development of this problem in Jaspers's philosophy is given by Paul Ricoeur, "The Relation of Jaspers's Philosophy to Religion," in Paul A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, 611-42.
14. Coming from a philosopher, it seems that this transcending of question and answer does away with all modes of knowledge with a single stroke of a pen. Moreover, if Jaspers applied this to his on-the-way, he would also dissolve his own philosophy; for, if I understand Jaspers correctly, to be on-the-way is to exist without question and answer, or simply in ignorance. But not even the child lives in such a state. "To argue that...children do not...philosophize," writes Jaspers, "is to overlook the fact that children often possess gifts which they lose as they grow up" (WW, 10). But shouldn't they? To me, the question of transcending the philosophical method is more clearly and more convincingly articulated by the French philosophers and literary figures, such as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Maurice Blondel, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Claudel, and Charles Pegy, to mention only a few, who retain the existential synthesis or harmony between the visible and the invisible, freedom and grace, action and contemplation, communication and silence that is lacking in Jaspers.
15. Henri Matisse, Letters Between Friends, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992).
16. Bernard Dorival comes to a different conclusion by saying that Matisse makes feeling the victim of intelligence in his method or art. See his "Henri Matisse ou le triomphe de l'intelligence," Actes du xxiie Congress international d'histoire de l'art, vol. 1 (Budapest: Akadèmiai Kiado, 1972), 45-57.
17. See Pierre Schneider, Matisse, trans. Michael Taylor and Bridget Romer (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), chap. 22.
18. For more on the ways in which this personal identification with what is learned is indispensable in the learning process, see Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); also, Michael Polanyi, The Study of Man (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 1969), 11-39. Basically, the argument that Polanyi makes is that what we know is brought about by the function of what he calls "tacit knowing" or "indwelling."
19. George B. Leonard, Education and Ecstasy (New York: Delcorte Press, 1968).
20. Max Picard, The World of Silence, trans.
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