“Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible” – Paul Klee
Why are we finite creatures of flesh and blood? Perhaps for the reason we have discovered: because we are not machines. The more time we spend among machines, the more we realise how strange it is to be a finite creature of flesh and blood. That we eat, that we hear, that we sleep. Animals also do these things. Yet are we not something other than this? We also despair; hope; love; long; hate; find joy. Qualities, like these, mark us out not only as finite creatures of flesh and blood, but spiritual beings. But is it not also our capacity to produce things, like art, that makes us human? No. Machines can produce art and machines are neither finite creatures of flesh and blood nor spiritual beings. But if machines can produce art, might we say that there is nothing spiritual about art? Of course not. There are few things more spiritual than art. The spirituality of art, then, cannot just be about a thing produced: the sculpture, the book, the painting. But what, then, is spiritual about art?
Let us consider a painter. When she stands before the canvas and paints, she does something a machine can never do. She devotes herself. What is it to devote ourselves? It is, etymologically speaking, to consecrate something. To set it aside for a sacred purpose. We are talking the language of sacrifice. Only finite creatures of flesh and blood that are spiritual can speak this language. There are few things more antithetical to the logic of machines than sacrifice. All modern technological devices are, strictly speaking, labour-saving devices. Less labour, more profit. If the machines could speak they would see all objects as utilities to be instrumentalised to generate capital. Yet the language of sacrifice is diametrically opposed to this. “We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something”, writes Roberto Calasso, “and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something”. It was gory animal sacrifice that first bound human beings to the divine, and the divine is absolutely antithetical to the utilitarian logic of the machines. It cannot be objectified, instrumentalised, or accumulated. But what is it, strictly, that the painter sets aside, that she consecrates? When she attends to something – as she might the painting – she devotes her energies to it and “absolutely unmixed attention”, says Simone Weil, “is a form of prayer”. If we are to remember, then, what is spiritual about art we must remember this. That to make art is an act of devotion and only finite creatures of flesh and blood that are spiritual, such as we, can devote themselves to anything.
This is all well and good for the painter, we might say, but what about the rest of us? First, I am tempted to ask whether we believe the devotion of our painter adds any discernible value to the world. It surely doesn’t. Not in any sense we could measure anyway. But all things we cherish, whether beauty, people, nature, are already beyond measure, are they not? A gratuitous gift. Like sacrifice itself, a needless offering. Yet were art only an act of devotion would it not be indistinguishable from prayer and so not, strictly, art at all? Let us consider the painting itself then. Imagine it hangs in a gallery. There are two ways we might approach it. Either as an object among objects, as a thing; perhaps a thing with financial value, a good investment. Or we might have a genuine encounter with its presence; it might, for instance, open up new territories of imagination in our minds and set us on the path toward our own becoming. This is equally true of our relationships with other people, is it not? We can objectify and instrumentalise the other, the way an app on a mobile device commands him to perform a function in the economy. Or we might encounter him in the fullness of his humanity. This is also a feeling of presence. “When I stand with another man, who is himself, and I am truly myself”, writes DH Lawrence, “then I am only aware of a presence, and of the strange reality of otherness”. Isn’t it this genuine encounter with the other the thing we feel most deprived of in the digital age? Could this not be equally said of our relationship with art? The mechanical reproduction of art, wrote Walter Benjamin, causes a “decay” to the “aura” of the original. In other words, a loss of its presence. Just as we feel this same loss of presence when the other is objectified and instrumentalised by machines. But machines also, as we have discussed, turn the natural world - minerals, plants, animals - into a resource to be instrumentalised and used. No wonder, then, that the world appears to us as an object inert, emptied of meaning, bereft of its presence. But the world did not always appear thus.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales wrote that “everything is full of gods”. Who in their right mind would say this now? In what possible way could we believe the world is full of gods? If, for Thales, the divine presence was absolutely immanent, and, if, today we feel an almost complete absence of this presence, then something surely has gone awry. But how? There are, evidently, ways to perceive reality the ancients possessed that we lack. Of which we have been deprived. Consider the perspective of Heidegger. The philosopher argues the meaning of technology is that which reveals. More specifically, the Greek word techne, he writes, means a “bringing-forth”. He gives the example of the manufacture of a silver chalice. The process of making reveals the lump of raw material to be a chalice consecrated for use in a religious ceremony. But modern technology, he argues, reveals in a different way. He gives the example of a hydro-electric plant. The river powers the turbines, electricity is generated. The plant, he says, “challenges” the river to produce electricity and so turns it into an object that “stands-in-reserve” to perform this function. Modern technology, as we have discussed, does this to all nature: plants, minerals, animals. Finite creatures of flesh and blood, such as we, are also turned into objects that “stand-in-reserve” to perform functions in the economy. This is the world as it is revealed to us by technology. Where a river – just like a forest or a person – is revealed to be no more than an object to be used. This alternative form of revealing surely began with the Enlightenment and the birth of scientific rational-utilitarianism. We will not elaborate on this here, but consider the fact that Hegel’s disparaging motto for the Enlightenment was “everything is useful’. It is perhaps unsurprising, then – for the reasons we have discussed – that this period led to the “death of God”. But the final revelation of the world as it is revealed by modern technology is surely still to come. When the making of art, not just its mechanical reproduction, is achieved by machines, then we might say a total eclipse of this presence is experienced. Or as Adorno writes, “those who run out of holy writ speak with mechanical tongues”.
But, then again, does art not also reveal? The Greek word poiesis – to make – once applied to the making of a chair or a chalice, just as it applied to the sculpting of a statue, or the composition of a poem. In other words, art and technology were more or less indistinguishable. The clue even lingers in the phrase “artificial intelligence”. Art reveals to us a different kind of reality, says Heidegger. Nature, according to the world as it is revealed by machines, is an object; a resource. But to the poet nature is vividly alive, god-like. This is the world as it is revealed to us by art, hence why art opposes the world as it is revealed to us by machines. The philosopher Charles Taylor might have been talking about all art when he said the work of the Romantics “brings us into contact with a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken”. It is art’s revealing of the lost presence of the world that makes it spiritual. But have we not already said that this presence is almost totally eclipsed? Heidegger’s later work was influenced by German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who speaks of the absence of the divine presence, while also anticipating its return. “Where danger lies”, wrote Hölderlin, “there grows the saving power”. The more the absence of the world’s presence is felt, the more we yearn for its return. This strange presence, then, latent within the shapes and rhythms of art, might yet ransom us from the world as it is finally revealed to us by machines. What it shall reveal we cannot yet know.