The Sophistry

There is an intellectual ailment from being in an absurd world. One of its symptoms is a contradicting act that aims to find an underlying order and meaning in an indifferent world; It is chaotic and it is infeasible to impose order. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s attempt to reason the concrete or its refusal to it. This is foundational to its existence. Camus wrote: if the world had meaning there would be no art.

Art can seem like a promising attempt to escape the absurd. It may offer a comforting illusion of purpose and order in a world that is fundamentally absurd and indifferent. It is possible to serve the purpose of distraction or a way to impose a false sense of meaning on existence and become a means of escaping the Absurd. It could paint the world with meaning and purpose and form fundamentally fathomless reality in a familiar facade. It may shape and communicate ready-made answers in the form of absolute meaning.

But a lucid thought will not yield to the temptation of creating what is described as a deeper meaning when it is known to be illegitimate. When liberated from the quest of creating a refuge from the absurd cycle of existence, unravelling its mysteries or constructing order to it, art becomes a courageous attempt to face the absurd. It can be an authentic response to it. Art, when created in the face of absurdity, becomes a form of rebellion against a world that lacks inherent essence.
The artistic experience, thus, to the hero of the absurd, stands as a protest to the impossibility of deriving meaning from existence. It is a genuine and rebellious engagement with the challenges of existence. The artist is the hero of the absurd, a Sisyphus-like figure constantly rolling his stone up the mountain. Every attempt at making art is a trial, a symbolic encounter with an expression of the absurd world. The canvas is an allegory of the absurd and every confrontation with it becomes an opportunity to rebel. It’s a metaphor for his mountain and stone, a projection for his absurd reality, a symbolic battleground for an endless epic engagement with absurdity.

In every streak of paint, every movement of the stone, there lies an illusory allure. An impulse to find rhythm and harmony arises as he ascends. Compositions of shape and form appear in his experience. The canvas is adorned with texture and colour and starts speaking melancholically to him. The absurd hero does not succumb and refuses defeat. He goes on pushing his stone up the mountain. Earlier able to agonise his mind, now the unsteady stone atop the summit is precarious like an inverted pyramid. A tempting impulse emerges to claim victory over the unsettled stone. The forms and figures in the canvas float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light daydream to one-half awake. He makes them vanish when he awakens to his dream, lets go of the stone and relinquishes the illusion. The stone rolls down, and the canvas empties of meaning. He sits back and watches calmly and with a smile the stone and the mountain standing before him as indifferently as chess pawns in the middle of a game. His fate is clear. Descend he must for if he doesn’t the stone will triumph.

He strips colours and shapes of meaning to gain his freedom. He paints more, lured by temptation’s call, and the stone, with a relentless rhythm, steadily slides down the slope. The gods of fate laugh, but he hushes their rapture with profound silence. He paints more, he’s tempted to hold on but lets go, and the stone rapidly rolls, relentlessly racing back down. He descends with a smile on his face, for he knows well that the moment he asks for meaning he is chained, and the moment he questions his fate is his sentence to death. He keeps going, the stone keeps rolling. He lets go of it and looks down the mountain, the canvas, his work, the stone tumbling, the strokes of the brush. The allurement to abandon ardently arises. But he knows better and settles things with the stone only. Will it ever end? He knows the answer and becomes a rebellious god instead, and aggravates the absurdity by taking part in creating more, becoming a partner in the creation of the torment that is his stone. But there’s no fleeing his stone. It still stands superior. Creating or not creating, change nothing. The canvas, the stone and the mountain, the world, is as empty of meaning as ever. The stone is there, the mountain is there, and he keeps rolling. One must admire his rebellion.

Alas, the hero will cease and the encounter will end. The temptation triumphs when he surrenders to order. He falls into the lure of meaning. He stops pushing when the answer is more attractive than the question. He loved the top of the mountain more than the struggle of pushing the stone. His painting is now finished, static, devoid of life. He sits like a ghost, a spectator of a world where he was once a hero. He finally succumbed and loved the order more than rebellion. He lost to the gods of his fate for he sought meaning over eternal struggle. He hangs the painting, retires his freedom and announces his symbolic death.

The repetition of certain patterns of discourse and behaviours, initially irrational, normalizes illusory ideas that become ingrained and unquestionable. A set of signs replace the boundless malleable world and become regular phenomena, and illusory values become goals worthy of sacrifice. Even an illusory language emerges rendering the defiants speechless, excommunicated and demonized. When this becomes the order, the rational and sensible become the exception, the remainder. The simple, bare rational and sensible come to appear alien, absurd, extraordinary and are rejected absolutely, unfamiliar as if from another world. Rigidity (the illusion) becomes the Ordinary. Alterity becomes an illusion beyond the ordinary: beyond the illusory.

The order of the illusory occupies the horizon of the knowable and imaginable. It colonizes the world of dreams by seeping into the unconscious. Alterity is rendered reprehensible in a world in which what else is eclipsed by the opacity of what is, the real. Monotheistic realism: a theology of being that is in conflict with the variety of the human experience, the flux of reality and universes of imagination. The ontology of the absurd asks: what is, rather than what could be (imagined), and demands a fixed answer that flattens the manifold possibilities of the human condition.

Incidentally, the order of the illusory is particularly vulnerable to imagination for it is itself a fantasy. The fantasy that materialized once and for all, and claimed itself the sole one. The fantasy that knows its own illusion yet wears the guise of reality — a thin sheet that conjures within its own boundaries valleys of (rigid) dream and peaks of (strict) imagination serving its structures and reinforcing its illusions. Claiming totality while rejecting its own fragility. Dream and imagine as long as you dream this and imagine that. The absurd terrain. And what’s beyond it — authentic dreaming and imagination, become unthinkable and unknowable.

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Only the imaginative mind dares to wander beyond, to the edges of the human experience, to gaze upon the infinite, the else, the other. Yet, when the sole means to convey what is seen beyond is the forbidden language of poetry and art, those devoid of imagination remain blind, unable to grasp it. The free soul is depressed and alienated.

The game is enticing especially to the dullest of soles. To the mechanical spirit, the order of beyond the illusory presents itself as an unsettling realm, a multidimensional, organically growing, network of freedoms, deterring a retreat into the more familiar terrain, the rigid grid structure, in which navigation follows predetermined patterns. This retraction, inherently irrational in its contradiction to the limitless human spirit, paradoxically presents itself as the position of comfort.

The capability to even conceive of the ancient valorisation of temperance has dissipated: the detachment from dependencies, the incorruptible soul, the noble indifference, and the right to irresponsibility and human nature. A forgotten brave choice of refusal challenging the very framework of the current order of opinion Where pervasive cowardice towards genuine freedom prevails. The necessity arises to celebrate the virtues of refusal. There is a collective disdain for those who choose to morally detach, simplify, and cultivate their inner essence, to venture beyond the illusory where experience engages with the nothingness (no-thingness) lying in the bottom under veils of reality. An event destructive to the order of things. Forgotten, devalorized, demonised.

Ascetic rejection is an authentic response to the order of the illusory. A profane theory of the annihilation of the order. Profane nihilism in the order of the real. In its truest sense, rejection represents not a mere negation but the sublimation over the finite experience of the ordinary. Through this movement of renunciation, the individual negates the illusory forms of necessity and, in so doing, transcends the immediacy of conditioned existence. This negation and nihilism is not a retreat into emptiness but the exercise of a higher freedom in relation to no-thingness. The refusal of the absurd state of affairs as the experience is resistance that liberates the human condition of being and releases it to acquire a life-affirming power to be infinite in its expressions.

A rupture, a break, an intervention that shatters the continuity of submission and passive acquiescence to the monotonous sign-ruled reality. Art, not in the form that reinforces subjugation and surrender to the experiential coercion as (re)productions of the structure and its signs, but in the form of the else, the otherness or the alterity, is what it is to be, to be beyond. Art in its truest form is rejection and asceticism. Mystical, transcendental, sublimated, violent. Art as experience of multiplicity or infinity, as being infinite and infinite being. To go to the edge and come back with the else is where the violence of art lies; in its profanity — taking what belongs to the infinite, and desecrating it by placing it in the domain of the finite.

Art as experience starts with an imaginative transformation of what is into what is possible in the medium of the imaginary, projected over the domain of the physical. An experience of domain-shift in the repetitive, the normal, the rational. This is the metamorphosis of the perceived world: of language, morals and values, a stage necessary for emancipation, but also as the event that discontinues regularity and shatters signs and meanings. Here lies the liberation of the subject, for the regular itself had once been transformative before it was converted to a monotheistic realism of signs and meaning, and the experience of art is symbolic of violent atheism and the destruction of the monolith, the temple, and the (re)emergence and liberation of the obliterated idols.

Language is the domain in which the world takes shape. It arranges the formless and fixes movement, and gives the illusion of nearness to what can never be reached. But some truths remain dissonant with this arrangement, truths that disappear the moment they are named. Beyond the edge of words lies what cannot be spoken about, only approached by turning away from appearance, by descending into the silence beneath all form.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent *

For language is a picture of everything that is the case

*What isn’t the case resists taking form in the realm of words. And one must be silent about which one cannot speak, for silence betrays language in its denial of it (and of itself. The word silence itself is a glimpse of what may be the case where a set of letters cling to a concept from beyond, revealing a paradoxical relationship.) I cannot find a more perfect set of signs to communicate silence than the absence of signs, or nothingness (which both negate the meaning precisely when being used; it’s a delusion, and the absence of words is an absurd series of words.) That of which one cannot speak is precisely that about which one must be silent, for that which is outside the field of representation of consciousness, the latter isn’t unaware of it, but it has left tangible traces of it. It is denied in the moments when consciousness affirms itself through sign and sound. Therefore, words fail to describe that (which exceeds the totality of being).

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A set of letters could momentarily hold a concept of most sanctity until they fail to do so when meaning solidifies, ((for what are words but sets of signs that ground ideas into the order of the tangible?) Language is malleable but grounding, and it eventually creates an unreliable relationship with reality.) It is the domain of the earthly, and the attempt to signify that which is beyond signification is paradoxical. When a sound clings to a phenomenon, it immediately solidifies the spirit of the idea, making it repeatable and replicable. But that which does not have a spatio-temporal being will resist repeatability and replicability. What resides outside space and time has no other or counterparts, for multitude presupposes these dimensions. When the sign is attached to the sacred, it removes its being from the realm of sanctity to the domain of the profane: that is the first sin of language, when the first word was uttered, and there was somethingness rather than nothingness; an ailment marked by an obsessive preoccupation with carving names onto the plastic nature of existence; or a compulsive fixation on breaking down being into fragments and attaching sounds to them.

Metaphor also fails, for it is the game of relativity and comparison, and presupposes a centre of leverage that is shared by reality and what’s beyond it, a point grounded in human concepts which is what I am trying to leave behind when dealing with that (which exceeds the totality of being). One cannot talk about it; one can draw it into the clear field of consciousness only when one reverses thought’s usual direction. This is the realm which can’t be described with language, only as an interpretation of the collapse of experience when encountering silence and absence. This is God and Art, and between the two is the entire celestial existence and nothingness. A metaphysical triad consisting of the absolute beyond the totality of being, the violent encounter with this absolute and the space through which this confrontation occurs.

Language is resolute, but that which exceeds the totality of being never resolves; it revolves infinitely. The sign must change immediately as soon as it catches meaning, resonant and pointing without enclosure, because naming is discretion and solidification when applied to the absolute. This is echoed by the mathematical symbol that stood as an icon in the temple of infinity. It became operational and lost its position as a direction of worship. Beings which transcend the earthly can only be interpreted by independent cosmic signs that remain in constant flux: an ephemeral appearance pointing at the infinite, in an eternal silence that can only be found in the cave within, where language halts. The infinite depth is a test for bravery, a confrontation with the nothingness that lies at the bottom of it all, represented by the darkness. The darkness conceals hidden layers and deeper caves, unexplored, untouched. An empty fullness, so profound it escapes the language of the surface. This is the limit of reason, where language stalls and the self shatters. Descent does not serve understanding, but it dissolves cognition. It represents a novelty that is the essence of Art: it transcends the world, suspends the ethical and escapes language.

Upon descent, one must suspend the language of surface-bound morality. These are constructions built for cohesion, convenience, for the orchestration of the collective illusion. They are scaffolds of a domesticated reality. To enter the darkness, one must admit the nothingness and leave behind what belongs to the surface. Take off your sandals, Moses, for they are holding you back. An act of rejection and refusal of the way life ought to be lived. Because we are creatures of the surface, we are condemned to fear the cave, to get attached to our earthly appearance and attire, and the meaning that we consume. The act of descending to the cave is a perpetual beginning, the whiteness before birth. A movement beyond the world of phenomenon into the order of the phenomenological, where consciousness is being and being is nothingness, where experience is the meaning. Only this way art can be understood: as the final element of this triad, as the violent clash with the absence of the intelligible, and the courageous encounter with the absolute beyond. If language is unable to represent the aesthetic experience, at least it can be used as a catapult to cast us away from itself, over the threshold beyond which nothing more needs be said. The soul comes back from such an encounter with truths that are of a different nature than scientific truths: local, not universal, intuitive, not empirical, and incidental, not replicable or repeatable. Such truths are not religious either, but paradoxically are of a high form of religious experiences. These truths resemble nothing in their numinous expression and their temporal existence but music; anti-symbolic art adorned with numinous forms — not representing something intelligible, for that is the domain of language, but representing an irreducible encounter. In other words, when the gesture points at the infinite, the gesture is true and it is Art.

To finish, I should attempt to answer the question of Death. But there is no answer; only music and colour. That is why no one returns from death; the living can’t fathom it.

There is an intellectual ailment from being in an absurd world. One of its symptoms is a contradicting act that aims to find an underlying order and meaning in an indifferent world; It is chaotic and it is infeasible to impose order. The work of art is born of the intelligence's attempt to reason the concrete or its refusal to it. This is foundational to its existence. Camus wrote: if the world had meaning there would be no art. It can seem like a promising attempt to escape the absurd. It may offer a comforting illusion of purpose and order in a world that is fundamentally absurd and indifferent. It is possible to serve the purpose of distraction or a way to impose a false sense of meaning on existence and become a means of escaping the Absurd. It could paint the world with meaning and purpose and form fundamentally fathomless reality in a familiar facade. It may shape and communicate ready-made answers in the form of absolute meaning. But a lucid thought will not yield to the temptation of creating what is described as a deeper meaning when it is known to be illegitimate. When liberated from the quest of creating a refuge from the absurd cycle of existence, unravelling its mysteries or constructing order to it, art becomes a courageous attempt to face the absurd. It can be an authentic response to it. Art, when created in the face of absurdity, becomes a form of rebellion against a world that lacks inherent essence.

The artistic experience, thus, to the hero of the absurd, stands as a protest to the impossibility of deriving meaning from existence. It is a genuine and rebellious engagement with the challenges of existence. The artist is the hero of the absurd, a Sisyphus-like figure constantly rolling his stone up the mountain. Every attempt at making art is a trial, a symbolic encounter with an expression of the absurd world. The canvas is an allegory of the absurd and every confrontation with it becomes an opportunity to rebel. It’s a metaphor for his mountain and stone, a projection for his absurd reality, a symbolic battleground for an endless epic engagement with absurdity.

In every streak of paint, every movement of the stone, there lies an illusory allure. An impulse to find rhythm and harmony arises as he ascends. Compositions of shape and form appear in his experience. The canvas is adorned with texture and colour and starts speaking melancholically to him. The absurd hero does not succumb and refuses defeat. He goes on pushing his stone up the mountain. Earlier able to agonise his mind, now the unsteady stone atop the summit is precarious like an inverted pyramid. A tempting impulse emerges to claim victory over the unsettled stone. The forms and figures in the canvas float before him as a fleeting phenomenon, as a light daydream to one-half awake. He makes them vanish when he awakens to his dream, lets go of the stone and relinquishes the illusion. The stone rolls down, and the canvas empties of meaning. He sits back and watches calmly and with a smile the stone and the mountain standing before him as indifferently as chess pawns in the middle of a game. His fate is clear. Descend he must for if he doesn’t the stone will triumph.

He strips colours and shapes of meaning to gain his freedom. He paints more, lured by temptation's call, and the stone, with a relentless rhythm, steadily slides down the slope. The gods of fate laugh, but he hushes their rapture with profound silence. He paints more, he's tempted to hold on but lets go, and the stone rapidly rolls, relentlessly racing back down. He descends with a smile on his face, for he knows well that the moment he asks for meaning he is chained, and the moment he questions his fate is his sentence to death. He keeps going, the stone keeps rolling. He lets go of it and looks down the mountain, the canvas, his work, the stone tumbling, the strokes of the brush. The allurement to abandon ardently arises. But he knows better and settles things with the stone only. Will it ever end? He knows the answer and becomes a rebellious god instead, and aggravates the absurdity by taking part in creating more, becoming a partner in the creation of the torment that is his stone. But there’s no fleeing his stone. It still stands superior. Creating or not creating, change nothing. The canvas, the stone and the mountain, the world, is as empty of meaning as ever. The stone is there, the mountain is there, and he keeps rolling. One must admire his rebellion.

But alas, the hero will cease and the encounter will end. The temptation triumphs when he surrenders to order. He falls into the lure of meaning. He stops pushing when the answer is more attractive than the question. He loved the top of the mountain more than the struggle of pushing the stone. His painting is now finished, static, devoid of life. He sits like a ghost, a spectator of a world where he was once a hero. He finally succumbed and loved the order more than rebellion. He lost to the gods of his fate for he sought meaning over eternal struggle. He hangs the painting, retires his freedom and announces his symbolic death.