CHAPTER
V
A CREATIVE AESTHETIC METHODOLOGY AND
As
an illustration of the above methodological perspecive, let us see how it would
approach the analyses of two major questions related to value: 1) the relation
of value to historicity, and 2) the genesis of values in the blending of ambits.
As examples, we shall analyze the intellectual value of meaning and the
cognitive value of the symbol.
HISTORY AS A FIELD OF ENLIGHTENMENT FOR VALUES
Historicity
implies: 1) temporal discourse, 2) opening
diverse possibilities for creative action, 3) society's assumption of
some of these possibilities, and 4) future projections on the basis of the
fields of possibilities opened by the past.
The
fundamental category of historicity is not the mere fact, but the event; the
subject of history is not the individual, but society. Historical activity
depends not only upon one's personal powers, but also upon the fields of
possibilities which, as integrated in society, one receives from the past,
creatively increases and transmits to future societies.67
Taking
on these fields of possibilities implies two distinct, but related forms of
temporality. The schema "temporal-intemporal" is inadequate for
understanding historicity because to be historical is not reduced to being
changing or becoming. If change is historical, far more than mere alteration, it
is creative and overflows with all kinds of possibilities. To perdure is not
merely to withstand time and oppose all manner of change; more positively it
implies exercising creativity in the possibilities offered through time. Because
human duration implies a creative change, one can avoid misunderstanding the
contrast between change and permanence as a "dilemma."
The
best defense against historical relativism is a well articulated theory of
historicity which does not conceive values as non-temporal entities which, in a
way that cannot quite be imagined, soars above the temporal process and each
human action. Instead, values as supra-temporal entities are at once different
from, and intimate to, the realities which participate in them, and which they
in turn endow with their full meaning. With too hazy or rigid a concept of
permanence and change, one is unable to elaborate a theory of value which has
due solidity and flexibility and is plausible and suggestive for our times.
Viewed
at the ludic level, history is a huge field of play which at times of high
creativity can be a field for the establishment and enlightenment of values.68
In a relational methodology there is no risk of misunderstanding this founding
activity as a mode of absolute
creation for, though in their diverse forms values are made incarnate and
clarified throughout history, they surpass the temporal process and found fields
of possibilities which make up the webb of history. In history, values are
objectivized in the sense of taking on expressive form, but they are not
objectified or reduced to merely objective elements by being submitted to the
empiric conditions of space and time.
Diverse
modes of temporality are integrated within historical discourse. This makes it
possible to give due importance to the historical and the transcendent, to
whatever displays a singular mode of validity and perdurance as it emerges in
the thread of history.
Within
a ludic-creative conception of historicity, both the absolute nature and the
historical condition of truth and value are compatible. The fact that certain
truths and values are perennial does not imply that they elude history, for
precisely because they are rich objects of knowledge they demand proportionate
human commitment throughout the flow of time.
The
subject of historicity requires a high level of anthropological and metaphysical
meditation if it is not to lead to the superficial extreme of relativism. This
requires in metaphysics that the sense of the real (ratio
realitatis)
be enlarged sufficiently to view historicity, not as common change which dis-
solves the substance of the real, but as a webb of events realized through
taking on possibilities. Relativism should be avoided at all cost because it
subjects one to each changing situation and impedes one's realization of
immutable truth. But one attains knowledge of immutable truth through history,
that is, through multiple acts of creativity carried out through time by taking
up the sheaf of possibilities to which different human generations have given
birth.
As
historicity and truth are articulated jointly and fruitfully through creativity,
enlarging this field would broaden philosophical experience, for to the same
measure in which people can create they and the limits of their cognitive
capacity are extended.
THE GENESIS OF VALUES IN THE BLENDING OF AMBITS
Various
contemporary thinkers are inclined to interpret axiological phenomena
relationally in order to avoid the difficulties which derive from a style of
thought that adheres to rigid, opaque, monolithic categories. Some employ the
category of encounter as the most fitting for articulating the understanding of
such interactional phenomena as the emergence of beauty, friendship and "religatio"
to the divine. Undoubtedly, grasping human aesthetic and religious values
demands a flexible but intense style of thought; and to a certain extent this is
demanded and encouraged by analysis of the phenomenon of encounter. Yet this
does not seem a sufficient methodology for an integral study of values because
the encounter between people does not suffice as a model event, inasmuch as some
realities, though not strictly personal, are ambital and give rise to a very
fruitful ludic blending. Because relational modes of reality are founded in
them, they transfigure the categories of immediacy and distance.
Besides
offering all the advantages of the category of encounter, that of ambit, when
linked to the similar categories of play, creativity, presence and analectic
relationship, opens a wider horizon of possibilities for understanding relevant
phenomena and events.
The Ethical Value of Friendship
A
ludic-ambital methodology enables one to clarify friendship as a value which
people simultaneously participate in and found. Without their creative activity
friendship cannot be born, although it does not originate as the fruit of human
activity. When two people live the experience of falling in love, they gradually
discover this phenomenon, and found a concrete loving relationship. One may give
oneself to an experience either of amorous ecstasy or of erotic vertigo with
total freedom and lucidity. These characteristics of one's action give one
self-confidence and often lead to feeling oneself the master of one's acts, as
if one were giving birth to the phenomenon of love or eroticism for the first
time. This is a serious error, for in fact one is governed either by the logic
of ecstasy or by that of vertigo which discretely and efficiently inspire
different human attitudes.
The Intellectual Value of Meaning
As
the complexity of the notion of meaning is analogous to that of value, a
ludic-ambital methodology can help jointly to clarify both concepts. Meaning is
born in the blending of ambits precisely because that is where value is founded.
"Meaning expresses the direction which value stamps on our existence. Value
founds meaning and not vice-versa."69 Let us look schematically
at the bond between meaning and value.
The
scope of the term "meaning" is far wider than that of
"significance." An action may entail very precise and even outstanding
significance and still not have meaning because it is not integrated within an
overall value horizon. Action endowed with significance may acquire positive or
negative meanings in different contexts. Thus, negative meaning is had by any
action not related to attaining a model type of existence; positive meaning is
displayed by actions which collaborate in founding forms of existence that imply
fulfillment. When we speak of the "meaning of human life" we refer to
a positive form of meaning.
To
have meaning is to be installed within a process of fulfillment, which is
achieved through ecstatic immersion in valuable realities that invite one to
co-found ambits of creative interchange. One's authentic environment is thus
made up of realities which in some way are endowed with a certain appeal. If one
responds to such an appeal, a dialogical experience of participation and
encounter takes place. In this genre of experience meaning appears as something
real--not the static reality of objects, but the flexible and dynamic reality of
relational ambits. When one sets about the task of founding valuable modes of
encounter, one discovers that which gives rise to unity and experiences one's
existence as taking on undreamed-of quality and depth. This enigmatic depth
implies a proportional measure of value and meaning.
Listening
to a word spoken in love as an appeal to an encounter which must be responded to
in generosity is the indispensable starting-point for the birth of the meaning
of life. This, in turn, will be the fruit of ceaseless and varied participation
approaching the original creative power of the word as an ambit or capacity to
respond to appeals. One lives within the word as in a field of enlightenment:
"words are dwelling-places," wrote Cayrol with foresight. For to
express a thought through the word is not to alienate it, but to involve it in a
fertile climate of spiritual community which should carry it to its fullness of
meaning. To insert a thought into the field of play of language implies both
renouncing any elementary form of individualistic possession and a will to
collaborate with the powers of fulfillment which pulse in the heart of
community.
One
experiences integral meaning when one actively enters the field of play of the
word which brings an infinitely rich message and founds an encounter with the
Absolute. If one has this experience at least once during one's life this is
opened to an horizon of meaning which constantly invites one to surpass all that
is precarious and fully to unfold one's natural possibili-ties.
Through
the inner logic of reality, meaning is coupled to fulfillment and value and,
more originally, to a creative appeal of the environment. The counterpole to an
existence full of meaning and value is one that is absurd--a disarticulated,
existential crumbling that results from a lack of creativity and
consequent inability to found worthy relationships with one's surrounding
realities.70
The
philosophy of language is cultivated by currents of thought interested in
reviving the reductionist spirit and in restricting as much as possible a
person's ability to speak meaningfully on ethical, metaphysical and religious
subjects. Application of the theory of creativity to cognitive questions enables
us to confront this minimizing campaign in the only efficient manner, namely, by
articulating a rigorous methodology which enables one to move securely in the
ambiguous world of such super-objective realities as language, love, encounter,
meaning, beauty and symbol.
THE
COGNITIVE VALUE OF THE SYMBOL
The
concept of symbol is currently employed in order to enlarge the possibilities of
human knowledge beyond the restricted field of "objective" realities.
Though praiseworthy as a goal no solid basis is provided for the commonly
asserted power of the symbol to refer back to other realities. Symbols are
almost always described in suggestive terms, but their contours are imprecise
and more akin to pseudo-Romantic day-dreaming than to rigorous philosophical
analysis. This lack of precision is serious for, since the experience of
positivist reductionism, it has become necessary to speak of the most complex
human events in a realistic, well-articulated and precise way, despite the
conditions of ambiguity typical of super-objective, ambital, dialogical and
ludic realities and events.71
The
symbol arises when value is founded through an intermingling of ambits; this
interactional dynamism founds the symbol's capacity to refer to other realities.
Symbolism is not a quality which adheres statically or objectively to a reality;
instead, a reality becomes symbolic and refers to other realities when it acts
as a living vehicle for an interactive event between the field of reality made
up by said entities and the human being who relates to them. When a host regales
his guests by pouring wine, the wine becomes "ludified" and
ambitalized. It becomes a gift, a ludic, relational reality which emerges from
an ambit of hard strife with the land and plants and goes towards an ambit of
community founded upon love. Between these two interlinked ambits the wine is a
sensitive incarnation of a meta-sensitive blending. This activity of positive
mediation couples the two worlds of work and friendship; in doing so it refers
back to both which it makes present in the area opened by the mediating reality,
which thereby takes on symbolic power.72
In
this context, it would be highly instructive to analyze the twin nature of the
image when it is not reduced to a mere superficial figure and deprived of its
innate expressive power. It has this power as a place of encounter for the
diverse levels of reality which it integrates, thereby making possible their
respective fields of interplay.73 If the symbol arises in the
interaction of ambits and if the person always is appealed to by ambital
realities to found new ambits and to turn life into a huge field of play, one
can understand why the human being is surrounded by symbols of which he or she
is the co-founder, and sees the symbolic aspect of reality flower at the most
intensely creative moments of existence. As the human person is an open reality
who pervasively transcends him/herself, it is perfectly logical that the person
should be defined as a "symbolical being."
Through
this creative openness to symbols one is manifest as a speaker, homo
loquens,
for since symbols arise in the interaction of ambits they are shaped in the
matrix of language. This is the living vehicle for the foundation of ambits and
their interaction, and it is in this ludic blending that symbol is born. The
symbolic power of the phenomenon of encounter endows language, as a creative
ambital event, with its capacity to give birth to meaning.
It
is extremely important to analyze the origin of those relationships we call
symbolic, such as that which mediates between the dove and peace. In contrast to
a "sign," as a form of relationship artificially established by
humans, some authors postulate as characteristic of symbolic relationships the
fact that they arise naturally by virtue of a certain likeness or contiguity.
This characterization is without doubt insufficient, for the luminosity of the
symbol requires a certain blending of ambits. In order for the dove to be a
symbol of peace two ambits of meaning must be related: the ambit of harmony,
serenity and good will among men, and the ambit of the dove's co-existence with
the beings of its environment. When these ambits are blended, one sees the
figure of the dove illuminated in symbolic splendor. Its figure becomes
transparent in a manner similar to the technical means in musical interpretation
and becomes a place of manifestation of peace. As a place for the presence of
something profound and valuable which transcends it, the figure becomes
an image of which symbolism is a typical dynamic-relational quality.
When
two people embrace, two personal ambits are intermingled in an open attitude.
The gesture of opening one's arms to offer one's body to the person approaching
creates an ambit of trustful gift of self. By founding a field of interpersonal
harmony the embrace symbolizes friendship. One could consider in a similar way
the gesture of holding out one's hand: extending one's open, empty, bare and
defenseless right hand-- the one used for defense and attack--establishes an
ambit of willingness for encounter.
In
F. Fellini's La
Strada,
the image of the road takes on a symbolic value expressing an uprooted,
stateless existence. The two protagonists, Zampano and Gelsomina, return time
and again to the road, which becomes the point of union of their wandering
paths. Yet the road is not a place of being, but one of transit: the ambits of
two rootless lives are intermingled on the road. Thus, the ever-changing,
incomplete image of the road takes on the symbolic value of a defenseless life.
Symbolism
then is based upon one's openness74 which is
understood as creating ambits: both one's own personal being and the webb
of ambits founded among beings. Symbolism is an event governed by the
"appeal-response" schema.
FEATURES
OF VALUES
Within
this study it is not possible to do a detailed analysis of the different
features displayed by values. That task has already been carried out quite
exhaustively by such contemporary authors as M. Scheler, N. Hartmann, L. Lavelle,
D. von Hildebrand, R. Le Senne, A. Forest,75 J. Xirau, L. Cencillo,
G. Bastide.76 However, using a ludic-ambital methodology, one can
give a precise account of such features and thus avoid the one-sidedness,
extremism and misunderstandings found only too frequently in theories of values
which lack proportion between the refinement of their style of thought and the
complexity of their object. I will underline merely a few basic features of
values in order to show that from the methodological perspective of this paper
one can achieve in depth suggestive insight regarding the characteristics of
values.
Values
are difficult to characterize precisely because of their "inobjective"
condition; as unable to be delimited or situated, they have great flexibility,
subtlety and ambiguity. Though value cannot be delimited and located
unequivocally, as occurs with mathematical entities and thing-like beings, daily
experience shows us in diverse manners and contexts how fully real and endowed
with a peculiar effectivity value is. Rather than trying to define it precisely,
one should narrow down the field in
which it manifests itself and makes its presence felt. Let us do this
schematically.
1.
Value suggests relevance, importance, dignity, excellence, the power to shape
and the capacity for ludic impulse. Through value, realities stand out from the
normal level of "objective" realities and are distinguished from what
is "auxiliary." They shine forth and manifest an inner meaning in
contrast to the "neutral" mass of undifferentiated realities. In a
similar way, value endows certain human acts with the rank of events and
elevates them above ordinary facts which do not make history.
2.
Value is offered to man not as a mere object of contemplation and analysis, but
as demanding admiration, reception and fulfillment. Value appeals to man to
collaborate with it and to make the possible real. Once incarnate in a concrete
reality or event, value bears witness to itself, to its inner decision to be and
to the play it can offer in the webb of events of which human existence is
woven. Value is the ludic aspect of being as a field of play or
"ambit," something worthwhile doing. When the ideal figure of our
personal being is being sketched, being and value are two different and
complementary moments of that reality.
3.
As something to be accomplished which is possible and relevant, value is both a
measure and goal for being. If it is to be justified and have integral meaning,
the real must be measured by value, toward which it tends and according to which
it is shaped. Anything contributing to the realization of this value
configuration of our personal being in turn acquires value. Realities which by
themselves are neutral or indifferent to value may become charged with meaning
and valuable if they are actively inserted into a creative field of play. By
entering into play a reality or fact makes itself valuable by revealing the
ludic virtualities it entails and offering them to people. Values are made
possible in the light which springs from ludic events. For this reason values
always are linked to life in the spirit; this is a life of creative
interrelation, and hence of participation, love and authentic language.
4.
The term "value" comes from the Latin "valere," to be
strong, to be in good form or to have possibilities of vital play. To evaluate a
reality or event means to insert it into a web of forces and lines of meaning,
to make them enter into play as one does with land that is idle or a talent that
has not been used.
5.
The act of evaluation is one of participation
in the genesis of the valued reality or event. In order to evaluate people we
must leave aside an attitude of mere external consideration in order to
participate in their fields of play and view them in their original state as
capable of taking initiatives for which they feel responsible.77 In
this light, a person not only has value, but is valuable. This perspective
implies a con-version or leap forward from the objectivist to the ludic level,
from the attitude of manipulation of objects to that of co-founding
ambits.
On
account of its relational--not relativistic--nature, value occurs only in
people, and not in things. The value of things depends upon their natural powers
being assumed into the human creative processes. A person gives birth to values
by treating the realities of one's environment as ambits, playing with them and
drawing them into "intimacy."
6.
As this demands participation, value is revealed only to those who make creative
decisions and will to achieve the great goals of life by turning obstacles and
drawbacks into possibilities. This transfiguring impulse means an outright yes
to life, a radical confidence in the meaning of reality. Value is offered not as
the fruit of exercising one's natural powers, such as those of the senses, but
as the result of collaboration between one's powers and tendencies and the
fields of possibilities offered by the environment. Values arise in the dynamic
confluence of nature and liberty; they are neither purely natural nor totally
artificial, but have a relational, ambital, ludic and dialogical nature. The
values displayed by a person measure one's degree of insertion in reality and,
consequently, of one's perfection as a person.
7.
This ambivalent nature of value is a guarantee both of
realism and of super-objectivity. Being rooted in reality, value cannot
be reduced to a mere projection of human desires. Further, reality is not rigid
and opaque; it gives of itself and is open to the human capacity to found ambits
of encounter to enrich its virtualities. As the fruit of this enrichment is
value, its nature is strictly real, albeit relational for "any true life is
encounter."78
Confusion
between the fact of being the indispensable pole of a relational process with
being the cause of the result of that process leads one to think that the human
person is the origin, source and measure of value--and consequently that one can
submit values to one's own, arbitrary ends and purposes. This
"humanistic" perspective is surpassed by the experience that in order
to orient themselves towards fulfillment humans must adjust their activity to
diverse values as ideals, and sacrifice to them a myriad of private desires and
immediate gains. Value is at one and the same time both a gift and something
merited. The desire to perfect one's own liberty and autonomy becomes the will
actively and receptively to give oneself to realities which transcend oneself,
for they differ for each individual and affect many people in different times
and places. They may become also one's inner voice--the impulse and goal of
one's acts. This combined transcendence and intimacy of values is made manifest
dramatically when one feels disillusioned by the concrete circumstances which
surround one. To become disillusioned, one has to contrast reality with the
"ideal," that is, with a value which demands fulfillment.
Once
the relational nature of value has been clarified, one should not consider
things and facts as "supports" for values. This objectivist
perspective disorients investigations of the mode of origin and being of values
because it implies some well-delimited entities reposing statically upon others.
10.
Through their creative activity, values appear to persons both as normative
entities insofar as they demand fulfillment and channel one's action, and as
super-objective entities because they surpass empirical time and place. If
objective realities be taken a-critically as a model of reality, one ends by
crudely opposing the ideal and the real without any clarification whatsoever. As
a result, because they are considered inobjective and more akin to the ideal
than to the objective, values are coupled to the unreal. Hence there is need to
differentiate diverse modes of objectivity and reality.
At
first it is disheartening to specify what ontological status should be
attributed to those realities born within a relationship to which they are
superior and independent. They can be grasped only within this relationship, but
are the principles of its fulfillment; they are different from us, but urge that
we assimilate them as the stimulus of our acts; to a great extent they depend on
our capacity for play and clarification, but are not "created" by us.
At moments of withdrawal we recognize them and are awed by them both as
transcendental and as relational. When we adapt our mind to the logic of
creative events, our initial disappointment becomes enthusiasm, because with
unsuspected strength we feel a peculiar adjustment between our highest
aspirations and the complex and ambiguous instances we call values.
The
serene enthusiasm which derives from active immersion in the valuable is
characteristic of the different modes of ecstasy in which value and the
individual's intimate ego are integrated ludically; this is far removed from any
fusion, impersonal causal dependence or alienating servility. In ecstatic
experience values enable the person to vibrate intimately with the transcendent
in which one's highest personal possibilities unfold.
11.
The ludic-ambital concept of the relationship between person and value enables
one to specify precisely the nexus between values and the different forms of
desire, melancholy and anxiety, tendencies, drives and preferences. What is
decisive is the realization that desire is not the arbiter of value. What
is valuable-desireable exerts great magnetism over human activity. It acts as an
ideal that is never totally attainable, but which raises one to higher levels of
fulfillment and endows one with the energy to raise oneself thereto. Desire
reveals value through the feeling of nostalgia in persons who realize that they
are in a field of reality which they still do not know and which has not been
assimilated because they have not yet entered into play with it. Through
reflection people need to free themselves from fascination with an object,
assume the distance required for perspective and learn to distinguish between
the desirable and the desired, between what will enable them to perfect their
personal being and what will merely pander to their instinctive tendencies.
Desire
is the first indicator of what is valuable because it urges persons to step
beyond themselves. If what is desired does
not lead to fulfillment through ecstasy, the step beyond oneself is
false: it will be an experience of alienation through vertigo. If what is
desired offers possibilities for interplay, the person does not go out of
oneself, but is raised to a higher self-realization in the experience of
ecstasy, by which one achieves one's total identity.
The
desirable par
excellence
is the being that uncompromisingly promotes human possibilities; this is the
ultimate radical Good, the Supreme Being, the Absolute. To desire values is to
desire this absolute foundation of all value.79 There is implied here
an eternal anxiety due to the ever unsatisfied character of the search for those
values which most approach the essence of value. This ambivalence of concrete
values, at once relative and absolute, founds the person's search and
constitutes the foundation of astonishment, admiration and the loving search for
wisdom that is philo-sophy. Such an intensive direct search rejects any
relativistic or non-relational conception of value.
CREATIVITY
AND THE BIRTH OF VALUE
From the above analysis of the characteristics of values it can be
inferred that values are never offered to people statically as objects, but are
born as modes of committed relationship are constituted. This creative
commitment is one or another form of ecstatic experience. Vertigo, on the
contrary, annuls one's capacity to enter into play, that is, to integrate
personally into the world of realities whose values offer ludic possibilities.
Giving
in to experiences of vertigo leads to an annulment of values and a consequent
qualitative neutralization of human existence. Contemporary literature of the
absurd shows how reality is viewed as absurd when creativity has been destroyed.
It is not the high risk from nuclear energy that brings man tragically to the
absurd; rather it is giving in to vertigo that
annuls the fields of play in which the meaning of things, persons and
events is born. Vertigo makes people cling to that which fascinates, but does
not unite; it deprives them of their ambit or nourishing bond to the real and
radically narrows the source of authentic culture.
The
theory of values must be realistic but not objectivist, personalist but not
subjectivist, relational but not relativist, committed but not sentimentalist,
experiential but not empiricist or experimentalist, flexible but not without
backbone, ludic but not arbitrary, developmental but not evasive.
It
would be extremely fruitful for philosophical research to
ascertain whether any contemporary axiological orientation fulfills these
conditions of the philosophy of value. Without doubt in phenomenology, in
dialogical and personalist philosophy and in the existential movement values
have been treated in accord with the "non-objectivist" style of
thought postulated in this paper. But in the current climate of fascination with
objectivist language and the systematic disqualification of the suggestive
language of ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics, it is essential to articulate
philosophy with care so as to attain maximum rigor within the ambiguous nature
of the subjects being treated.80
The
attacks of neo-positivism and analytic philosophy should be warded off through
the elaboration of a methodology rigorously adjusted to the demands of
super-objective realities. If one wishes to discover values and properly found
their study in a devalued world which makes a virtue out of need and exalts as
heroic giving oneself to the absurd, one's attitude should be neither dreamily
optimistic nor fatally pessimistic, but simply realistic. That is, it should be
adjusted to the conditions of reality and independent of ideological dictates or
prejudices of any kind.
This cannot be achieved from the outside, but only through the experience of value. Any experience of ecstatic participation implies a blending of ambits or creative adjustment between persons and the real. Value attracts persons, appealing to them to participate in the co-creative task of shaping their personality and drawing them toward fulfillment. Given the bond between human fulfillment and happiness, value is the medium in which the person becomes happy: hence the disinterested and generous nature of the doctrine of life as directed to personal well being (eudemonism). Values should not be considered objectively as a means for achieving one's individual interests, however noble these may be. Values are fields of fulfillment for a human, just as music is the musician's field of fulfillment. They are both the starting-point and the goal of life's most personal and creative activity.81