As we saw, the painter, according to Klee, feels himself to be a
"piece of nature, within the domain of nature." We find the same theme in Roger Caillois' Generalized Aesthetics,11.l apropos of the experience of beauty:
Natural structures constitute both the initial and the final reference point of all imaginable beauty, although beauty is human appreciation.
Since man himself belongs to nature, the circle can easily be closed, and the feeling man has of beauty merely reflects his condition as a living being and integral part of the universe. It does not follow from this that nature is the model of art, but rather that art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution.
The artistic process shares with the creative process of nature the characteristic of rendering things visible, causing them to appear. Merleau-Ponty laid great stress on this idea:21 "Art no longer imitates visible things; it makes things visible. 22 It is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Paintings show how things become things and how the world becomes a world . . . . how mountains become, in our view, mountains." Painting makes us feel the presence of things: the fact that "things arc here.'' "When CCzannc strives after depth,"
continues Mcrleau-Ponty, "what he's really seeking is the combustion of being."
The experience of modern art thus allows us to glimpse - in a way that is, in the last analysis, philosophical - the miracle of perception itself, which opens up the world to us. Yet we can only perceive this miracle by reflecting on perception, and converting our attention. In this way, we can change our relationship to the world, and when we do so, we arc astonished by it. We break off "our familiarity with the world, and this break can teach us nothing other than the unmotivated surging f
-
orth of the world ." 2·1 At such
moments, it is as if we were seeing the world nppcnr before our eyes for the first t ime.
The Sage and the World
257
4 Spectator Novus
There is nothing new in what we have said so far. Our reason for recalling it was in order to define the area of our experience in which there might be possible a relationship to the world bearing some resemblance to that which existed between the ancient sage and the cosmos: the world, that is, of perception. We are now in a position to show that, since ancient times, there have existed exercises by means of which philosophers have tried to transform their perception of the world, in a way analogous to Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological reduction, or to the conversion of attention spoken of by Bergson. Obviously, the philosophical discourses by which Bergson, Merleau
Ponty, and the philosophers of antiquity express or justify the procedure which leads to the transformation of perception are very different from one another, just as the discussions of Klee or CCzanne about painting are not to be confused with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Be that as it may, Mcrleau-Ponty was deeply conscious of the sense in which, above and beyond differences of discourse, the experiences of Klee or CCzanne coincided with his own. One could say the same about the similar experience which can be glimpsed behind certain quite striking texts from antiquity.
For example, let us consider this passage from one of Seneca's Leuers lo Luci/ius: "As for me, I usually spend a great deal of time in the contemplation of wisdom. I look at it with the same stupefaction with which, on other occasions, I look at the world; this world that I quite often feel as though I were seeing for the first time [ 1amquam spectatt1r novus ]. " 24 If Seneca speaks of stupefaction, it is because he sometimes finds that he discovers the world all of a sudden, "as though [he] were seeing it for the first time." At such moments, he becomes conscious of the transformation taking place in his perception of the world. Normally, he had not been in the habit of seeing the world, and consequently was not astonished by it. Now, all of a sudden, he is stupefied, because he sees the world with new eyes.
The Epicurean Lucretius was familiar with the same experience as the Stoic Seneca. In book 2 of his On the Ntiture of Things,- he announces that he is going to proclaim a new teaching: "A truth wondrously new is struggling to fall upon your ears, and a new face of things to reveal itself." Indeed, it is not surprising if this new teaching strikes the imagination: Lucretius is about to assert the existence of infinite space, and, within this infinite space, of a plurality of worlds. In order to prepare his reader for this novelty, Lucretius introduces some considerations about mankind's psychological reactions to novelties. On the one hand, he says, we find that which is new difficult to believe; whatever disturbs our mental habits seems to us a priori false and inadmissible. Once we have admitted it, however, the same force of habit which mudt• 1 hc novelty surprising and paradoxical subsequently makes it
258
Themes
seem banal, and our admiration gradually diminishes. Lucretius then describes how the world would look to us if we saw it for the first time: First of all, the bright, clear colour of the sky, and all it holds within it, the stars that wander here and there, and the moon and the radiance of the sun with its brilliant light; all these, if now they had been seen for the first time by mortals, if, unexpectedly, they were in a moment placed before their eyes, what story could be told more marvelous than these things, or what that the nations would less dare to believe beforehand? Nothing, I believe; so worthy of wonder would this sight have been. Yet think how no one now, wearied with satiety of seeing, deigns to gaze up at the shining quarters of the sky!25
These texts are extremely important for our purpose. They show that, already in antiquity, people were not conscious of living in the world. They had no time to look at the world, and philosophers strongly sensed the paradox and scandal of the human condition: man lives in the world without perceiving the world. Bergson correctly grasped the reason for this situation, when he distinguished between habitual, utilitarian perception, necessary for life, and the detached, disinterested perception of the artist or philosopher.
What separates us from the world is thus not the irrepresentable character of the scientific universe - the world we live in is, after all, that of lived perception - and neither is it contemporary doubts about the rational character of the world: Lucretius had already denied this rationality. People in antiquity were unfamiliar with modern science, and did not live in an industrial, technological society; yet the ancients didn't look at the world any more than we usually do. Such is the human condition. In order to live, mankind must "humanize" the world; in other words transform it, by action as well as by his perception, into an ensemble of "things" useful for life.