XXXIII: Essay by Being-unto-Becoming

The Art of Teaching No-thing

By 

Rajan Sien

Rajan is a self-taught aspiring philosopher.

He currently works as an engineer in India.

Find his other works on:

@minute_perplexions

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A work of art is never didactic; a work that yearns to teach us about something is always a bore. Yet, an artwork can be the highest form of teaching one can receive. A teacher is not someone who is responsible to bequeath wisdom to posterity. A teacher is simply someone who teaches us how to think. A teacher’s actual offerings are not thoughts but Thinking itself. As Heidegger puts it, “teaching therefore does not mean anything else than to let the other learn” (Heidegger 275). But how can one teach someone how to learn without providing them with set patterns of thinking used to solve a given problem? Doesn't every task of learning involve an act of recognition of such patterns? How can we claim to properly think for ourselves, independent of our upbringing and biases if all we have been taught is to follow our teacher’s thoughts and let those dictate where our thinking leads. With what confidence do we say that we are taught to think authentically? The possibility of challenging the teaching given to us must therefore be the most important premise of any lesson. A teacher that teaches from the authority of a book or their position as a teacher is, therefore, a pseudo-teacher. This is exactly why antiquity has chronicled the instances of a pupil arguing with a teacher with such ecstasy. Famously, Raphael paints Aristotle arguing with Plato at the center of his Athens fresco. It would be a grave error to associate this valuation with western thinking, as if it’s the progeny of the unique dialectical tradition that starts with Socrates. The legendary thinker from India, Sankara, has folk-tales recounting him as a godly figure, equipped with a mythical level of intelligence. However, his rise to prominence is attributed to an instance of him incessantly arguing a position against his ‘guru’. A teacher is first and foremost a learner, because they must allow themselves to mould their pupils into learners that surpass them.

We call art the highest form of a teacher because it doesn’t have any form of thinking or pattern of recognition to impart whatsoever. Yet, good works of art (and only those are our concern here), force us to think, and this thinking is never of a derivative form: it is thinking in its purest essence. These works announce or uncover a crisis of thought by making us witness to a unique situation or sensation, where our understanding of the world fails, and the only way for us to absorb its unformed and manifold contents is to build this understanding anew. It doesn't submit to the limitation of the kind of teaching that wishes to emulate past scenarios, as its pedagogical apparatus doesn’t involve any rigid forms of thinking or patterns, but merely the intensity of emotions it accosts us with. It engenders thinking in its purest form—in an ocean of feelings we are forced to produce little islands of thought. 

‘The School of Athens’, Raphael, c.1509–11. Stanza della Segnatura, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

If we really do want to submit to this position, we must ask ourselves two related questions–how can art (or anything for that matter) be considered contentless in the way described above and how such a lack of content is ontologically possible? Any work of art is a thing and a thing to be devoid of all content is a meaningless proposition. Nevertheless, to not distinguish works of art from other things is unfaithful to our unique experience of art versus the everyday objects we encounter in our daily life. In the essay The Origin of The Work of Art, Heidegger distinguishes a thing-ness of an equipment, which disappears into the work it’s put to use at, with the thing-ness of an artwork. An equipment is never thought of as a separate thing during its usage. Yet, we are able to recognize which equipment can assist in which work. Recognition, then, in its most primordial origins, is a result of contemplating the existence of this equipment and its features that make it useful to us. This thinking for the very first time may occur when a failure or hindrance in the work is encountered. Otherwise, it remains in its invisibility, oblivious to its user. An artwork, on the other hand, is rather strange in the sense that its thing-ness is only useful in it being a subject of trade, transportation, or the act of fixing it on a wall, but its essence lies in the beyond of the “that” of the work. Heidegger describes it as an “openness” where a free space is opened up in the experience of art (Heidegger 174). There is no recognition in art; the content of a thing of art is “open” which means it cannot be subsumed within an object of recognition. Even if there is content within any artform which can be easily recognized as something we have encountered before, it fails to truly be an art unless this object of recognition is not overflowing with a certain surplus–some sensations offered to us never fit into any recognised object or concept. Even the verisimilitudes of an art never renders it mundane, because even in its realism what speaks to us is the un-formed and un-recognized–something that perhaps surrounds us everyday and yet we never encounter it. Nobody saw poverty for the first time in The Bicycle Thief, and yet the intensity of the moment when a father has to be arrested in front of his child teaches us something about poverty that we never learned before.  

But that which is not recognisable lives a mystical existence; its ontological status is precarious. It is not eternal like the forms of recognition Plato supposes we are born with and which help us think and learn. A sensation that is formless and evanescent is that which is always becoming but never is, and why should we not turn to that which is but never becomes–that which seems to have a faithful existence? As Timaeus begins his exposition of his cosmogony in Plato's dialogue named after his character, this distinction between two kinds of things is the groundwork that is laid out for us to begin understanding the origin of the cosmos. That which genuinely exists, is changeless and eternal. That which comes to be and goes away is an irrational sensation (Timaeus 27d-28a). The cosmos as sensed by us was created by an Intellect based on a model that is eternal, yet the cosmos as we experience it appears to be ever-changing. The creator or God is perfect and therefore made a perfect universe based on a perfect and unchanging model. There is no doubt that this model functions as Forms of recognition that Plato bases his epistemology on in his other dialogues like Republic or Phaedo. Teaching for him, thus, comes from realizing that all true knowledge is never unchanging and begins with uncovering these eternal Forms that are imbued in our souls. To learn is to know what is around us–what is real and what is an illusion (simulacrum). How did we never consider this simple definition at the start of our investigation into the concept of teaching and learning? Recognition appears to be the only correct and reliable way to learn and teach. What is around us is the cosmos that we perceive, but knowledge lies in knowing that it is merely a copy of a perfect model. This renders teaching to be defined as a task of liberation from the illusions our senses trick us into. 

Recognition appears to be faithful to learning, but it still fails to properly teach. Recognition fails to deliver us true learning, because everything that can be or has been recognized can now be falsified based on this epistemology. Why should we even be trusting any recognition at all, since all recognition contains some quality that is sensed? What is the quality of red without the sensation of redness? Surely, either sensations have some degree of truth in it, or everything that relies on sensation, including the act of recognition, is illusory. This is the concept of maya that Indian philosopher Sankara elucidates as he interprets ancient Indian scriptures called Vedas. If the world of perception is a deceit, then nothing stops Sankara to go one step further than Plato and conceptualize a God that is contentless and unqualified (nirgun) and claim that He alone truly is, and everything else is an illusion. Senses can never be involved in the knowledge of this God, which is why God is not an illusion. Only monism can account for an unqualified nothingness since existence of any quality naturally leads to a pluralism. A single perfect model of Plato can never explain how it can give rise to multiple copies (which Aristotle evades by the introduction of a metaphysical entity which is formless matter, an invention lying at the inception of scientific thinking). For Sankara, liberation comes with losing our self-hood and our perception of the world around us, since they both are illusory. Moksha, or liberation, is to realize that there are no organs of God and we are always-already dissolved into this unqualified cosmos. The unchanging entity called Brahman alone is real, and everything else is non-being and cannot be said to have a real existence. Sankara sees no reason to keep the distinction between the Creator and the cosmos, and the model of techne employed by Plato in Timaeus is irrelevant to him. We should ask, then, what stops Plato from theorizing such a cosmology? 

That Timaeus is the most peculiar Platonic text, is not missed by anyone who has studied Plato's other dialogues. Unlike them, there is no dialectical exchange present, no argument and no questioning the presuppositions. This text merely records a speech which Socrates is seemingly happy to sit and passively listen to, and this speech recites a mythos, where logos cannot be applied. Curiously, however, Timaeus begins with Critias narrating a story he remembers his grandfather telling him about a festival called Apaturia (Timaeus 21b). This festival celebrates the victory of an Athenian warrior called Melanthus over a Boeotian warrior called Xanthus. Melanthus, during the fight, distracts Xanthus by screaming that he is cheated because there is someone behind his opponent who is helping him. As Xanthus looks back, Melanthus seizes the opportunity to give him a fatal blow and wins the duel for Athens. Therefore, at the origins of this festival lies a wicked deception. What is the significance of this story? Is Plato playing a trick on us? 

The saddest predicament of any theology is how God is always beholden to the theologian instead. A man looks at a revelation and tries to make sense of it, and in this process God becomes an object to study, whose forensics is at the behest of a man. God drowns in his own analysis. If God is real, he must be living a sad existence, because his powers are limited to how the world interprets his existence–an existence that has to be proven and defended by a man himself in situations ranging from a dinner table to presidential campaigns. Timaeus is an attempt to explain how a Creator spawned a universe that is perfect, and yet his explanations for various features of the universe are extremely convoluted involving gymnastics of geometry and invention of demi-gods that undertake the task of creating imperfect humans. He himself admits, during his speech, that this story is merely “likely” (Timaeus 29d). This dialogue has come to be interpreted by many as a parody because there are elements that Socrates, as we know him from Plato's other dialogues, would scoff at; his praises for the speech appear sarcastic in various moments when they appear in the text.

Sankara too, at the end of the day, is supposedly carrying out an exegesis and his project can be described as merely achieving the correct interpretation of the Vedas: the four sacred texts which appears to carry out some theological discourses, especially at the the last parts of each book called the Upanishads. Sankara's intellectual rival, Ramanuja, who roughly starts his teachings a couple centuries later, rejects his interpretation as he cannot grasp how anything can be unqualified, including God. To find something unqualified, for him, is to find it qualified in some other way. Even the scriptures use words or characters, and so even divine revelation cannot be unqualified on the account of the fact that we read and understand these scriptures, or at the very least see the markings on them, or simply hear the sound of their recital–all of these refer to various qualities (Dasgupta 166). Sankara has thus, for Ramanuja, posited that the revelation of the unqualified relies on qualified scriptures which would mean that the unqualified is qualified, and is thus impossible. Illusions cannot precede real knowledge, as Sankara tries to theorize it with his interpretation of maya being unreal. The whole world of perception cannot be called an illusion, since illusion can only occur after real knowledge has been achieved. One cannot mistake a rope for a snake, without knowing what a snake is. Maya cannot be non-being, because nothing cannot be, otherwise it wouldn't have to be thought of in the first place (similar to Parmenides). Perhaps, this is why Plato shrewdly still sticks to the model of techne. Universe is produced, since qualifications are done when things come into existence--techne in Greek refers to make things come into existence. The qualified manifestation of this God is what Ramanuja wants his followers to focus on. Similar to Spinoza, we merely see a finite form of God in the shape of Krishna, Rama and other deities etc, due to us being limited beings. Unfortunately, his own argument regarding the snake and the rope should have disallowed him from positing any God at all, since now an unknowable God is manifesting as something knowable and qualified–an analogical thinking he accused Sankara of illegitimately making use of–an analogical proposition is only possible when both terms involved are known. This famous argument of Duns Scotus for the Univocity of Being against Aquinas applies to Indian theology as well. 

What is the value of such a teaching? What does one learn here? If everything is relegated to nothingness, there is no value of any creation. On the other hand, the immanence posited by the likes of Spinoza, Ramanuja, and Parmenides seem to have no model based on which any valuation can be done. If there is no objective model for becoming, how does one select what to become or what to create? Plato’s trick can now be seen clearly. Just as the origin of the festival of Apaturia begins with a shrewd deception, so should the origin of cosmos. This deception is at the level of the Model which while remaining transcendent to everything we perceive, yet manages to shape our perception. Plato has cunningly smuggled transcendence inside immanence, in order to make teaching possible. Plato teaches us how to select the best copy from a plurality of copies based on a value one can attach itself to each of these copies by the use of forms. These forms allow us to make important decisions in the world of perception–what does a good Statesman look like or what does a good Republic look like? Whatever his pupil becomes, there must be a value in this becoming and this value can be measured with respect to a model. Plato does this to make teaching possible, in the way that parents sometimes lie to their children to protect them from the harsh realities of the world. 

But what is the model of teaching itself? This is the question we began this entire discourse with. How can Plato answer this question? Is there an ideal model for a teacher? Of course! It must be Socrates. But what makes Socrates an ideal teacher? Surprisingly, Plato is not satisfied in using a transcendent form of teaching to answer that, because to teach such a model of teaching can only be a cyclical ordeal. Whatever model of teaching is taught has to be done while presupposing what ideal teaching is. Teaching refers to teaching itself in this case and no learning can occur. For this investigation, Plato must take the negative route. He asks: who is a true Sophist, that which is not a true teacher but merely pretends to be one? As the Eleatic Stranger demolishes both monism and pluralism in The Sophist (reasons for both of which we just discussed), in order to define what a Sophist is, he discovers that a simulacrum (an illusion) is not just a simple copy of a form. It is a copy that pretends to be real so well that one cannot distinguish it from its ideal copy. A Sophist is so good at his art, that he is indistinguishable from Socrates himself! If a sophist can always emulate Socrates, then how can we call him an ideal teacher? It can only be done one way–as soon as the sophist becomes Socrates, Socrates evades from himself and becomes another. Socrates becomes a new Socrates, unrecognizable to a Sophist. This is why ideal teaching is when the teacher allows himself to evade recognition and learn, and teaches this learning to his pupils. True learning is to teach how to become unrecognizable. To teach is to teach how to reject the recognisable learnings of a tradition. “I know that I know nothing”; Socrates is always ready to challenge everything he has learned and he is not beholden to any tradition, which is why he is not a Sophist and a Sophist can never become him. Socrates doesn’t like being called the wisest man, because he knows wisdom is a corrupt enterprise. While Plato doesn't realize it himself, he has proven that true teaching can, on the contrary to his teachings, never be eternal or changeless, but always remain in becoming.

To teach and to learn, one must empty themselves of their history and alliances one is thrown into upon birth–find their God or tradition in their contentless-ness and rejoice in it. This calls for a radical detachment. There is no bigger irony that the land of Buddha finds it hard to practice this detachment. Both Sankara and Ramanuja couldn’t detach themselves from the Vedas, and could never learn beyond a point. Ramanuja, is still limited to believing in a God due to his dogmatic reverence to Vedas, yet has famously written an argument for the impossibility of ever finding a proof of God. Any proof must require a qualification and qualification is only possible with some perception, but the God of Vedas is beyond any human perception (limited by the senses). He is very clear in admitting that God is real only because scriptures say so and His transcendent grace, and not because of any reasoning (Dasgupta 189). On the other hand, Sankara’s Nirgun God deceives him as well, since to put a name to nothingness is to fall into duality–this is precisely the argument used by the Eleatic Stranger in The Sophist against monism (Sophist 244d). This is why Nagarjuna, the famous Buddhist philosopher, warns us from positing such a concept by saying that emptiness must also be empty and therefore cannot be confused with “annihilation”(Kalupahana 254).

A Thangka of Shakyamuni Buddha, Tibet, 19th Century. 

A westerner uses the same word ‘enlightenment’ for an intellectual movement specific to a post-Renaissance western thought and the mystical attainment of riddance of suffering from a south asian sage. Perhaps, this is just a coincidence, but a telling one nonetheless. The deleterious racism and colonialism which is entrenched in the history of Enlightenment must not deter us from uncovering the true potential of this concept. Its essence involves the rejection of any revelation over an immanent critique. Of course, it would be positivist to claim that’s all the western Enlightenment consisted of. Nevertheless, a supremacy of thinking over revelation is implied here. If Buddhist scholarship uses the term enlightenment, it is used in a more proper sense than Kant, for instance, ever did. Even science only truly begins with a concept of inertia, where an object is self-contained and has a property independent of anything else. This is because science forgets the question of Being or Cosmos itself and enlightenment becomes idealism. Buddhism evades this by realizing there is no property of any being that is independent of other beings. Everything is connected with everything by the concept of causality, leaving no object as something in-itself and only as an abstraction of the cosmos. Therefore objects are truly created and produced (techne). The Self, Souls, Gods etc are merely creations for Buddha, creations he rejects in order to get rid of suffering. Therefore, to learn is to understand that objects are a creation, and to decide which creations are to be created–this is the domain of aesthetics. This is why we called art a teacher because only art allows us to create new objects, everything else is merely recognition. 

The teacher can only teach thinking itself when they have themselves learned to think, and a learner can only learn if the learning imbibes the learning of thinking. Therefore, a teacher becomes a learner as much as the learner becomes a teacher. True learning is teaching and true teaching is learning. Teaching is the teaching of teaching, and learning is the learning of learning. Political scientists use the word ‘unlearning’ to refer to how a human being is liberated from a socio-political structure. But even unlearning requires learning, which has to be taught as learning itself. In Indian philosophical literature, one may find Sankara being called Sankaracharya and Ramanuja as Ramanujacharya. This suffix ‘acharya’ refers to a teacher, as a mark of utmost respect. Ironically, the respect of a teacher can only be given to teaching as such–the teaching of thinking, and not thoughts. When we revere a teacher, we revere their teachings. But it’s precisely the teachings which must not be revered in the light of our discussion of what teaching is. A learner can therefore never truly revere the teacher, if they have truly learned. The teachings must be subjected to violence, not reverence, as a manifestation of the teaching which has only taught us how to think. When a teacher has sites of pilgrimage attached to them, or a community is built around the teacher’s teachings, it’s the antithesis of teaching. 

If Buddha had not given up on worldly desires, he would have chortled at this confrontation between these Vedantees (people who study the Upanishads like Sankara and Ramanuja). This is why Buddha is called the ultimate teacher in the Buddhist tradition. It’s not because he was able to impart a lot of wisdom. On the contrary, before he began sermonizing, he first emptied himself of every wisdom; the first thing he taught his pupils was to practice this emptiness! Traditions are borne when traditions are forgotten or rejected—this is what Nietzsche’s Zarathustra has in common with the Buddha—they both begin with the death of their history, tradition and God.

We started by saying that art is the ultimate pedagogical medium available to human beings. This is because the content of art is never something always-already and is yet characterized by an emptiness. If we are to say something at all about this emptiness without being defeatist about theorizing it as such, we must start with that which is able to present this emptiness in a certain positivity of presence. This very function is given the name of art. An art would cease to be an art if it did not have the excess that leads one into the darkness that composes its tapestry–why a work of art is never didactic. Everything represented in a work of art bothers us so wickedly that we are forced to look beyond what is represented. Everything is offered to us in a sort of a cunning betrayal. “A Starry Night” ambushes us with its strokes in order to either feel an awe or feel melancholy (if one learns about Van Gogh’s life). This is how we instinctively differentiate between a normal painting of a starry sky (perhaps made by a child in kindergarten) and a piece of art such as this (we struggle to theorize whether there is an objective standard to differentiate these two, but we still know the distinction exists). It is true that all works of art contain representations, but only to leave them at their wake and point to the ontological excess that these representations float on. Even in a realist artwork, one is able to see that our reality inevitably leads our daily perception to this excess. Therefore, an art is never about some-thing that first needs to be unlearned. It is that unlearning itself where a thing disintegrates to cast a nebulous excess upon us. 

Every thinker has battled to understand this excess from Kant’s thing-in-itself to Buddha’s Shunyata. This excess is an excess in the sense that it’s productive, but at the same time so beyond everything related to our understanding as such, that it is considered a void. Such is the paradoxical nature of that which grounds everything. This ground is an un-ground and at the same time it’s fertile. Hegel’s Nothing, Badiou’s multiplicity, Sankara’s Nirgun, Lacan’s object petit a, are all examples of the sundry formulations of this void. One can summarize the history of philosophy as the strife between the enigmatic and empty nature of this void and its ability to produce the world as we know it. It is in the very nature of the void to produce differences and similarities both: pluralism and categorization are both pointing to the fact of production. This is exactly why Plato never gives up on his concept of techne as the basis for his cosmogony--he is too clever to not realize that production is at the foundation of everything. His fault is that he really doesn't need to have a distinction between the Creator and its production. The cosmos itself is productive and it presents itself to us. The cosmos is presencing and presencing is all that the cosmos is. To ask how the cosmos was created is meaningless--cosmos is creation itself. Those who ask how can there be something created out of nothing, to defend the concept of God, have merely misunderstood the nature of cosmos, and their question is devoid of any meaning. Perhaps, this is the significance of the story of Apaturia that opens up the dialogue of Timaeus. Plato wants us to know that any cosmogony is underpinned by an act of deception, and at the provenance of this question of how the Universe came into being lies a betrayal where cosmos has become separate from creation. Plato indeed plays a trick on us, but he does it to teach us.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1969, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of The Mark Rothko Foundation, Inc., 1986.43.275 © 2023 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko. 

Art, therefore, is not anthropomorphic either as it is creation unto itself which encompassess the entirety of Nature. This excess accosts us in a way that we can never deny it as a simple nothingness. A man is not unfamiliar with a feeling of awe as he stares into the vastness of an ocean, or the magnitude of a mountain range. Even a Rothko has too much content to offer us and all of it is in the excess of the rectangles he constructs and the color we suppose it to have housed. Kant called these experiences ‘Sublime’ in his later work Critique of Judgement, but gave only Nature the ability to manifest it. His definition of Nature didn’t include man, who was excluded from this realm–his prowess as expressed by his free will being thrown at the side of the noumenal world. This was an unfortunate logical conclusion of his early philosophy, though, which Kant was too old to repudiate when he wrote his last critique. The artist finds a way to produce and gets involved in Nature or God in a way that no theologian can ever do–a theologian lives in agony trying to find God while an artist revels in his own godliness. He becomes one with the cosmos as he produces. When learning truly becomes learning and teaching truly becomes teaching, it creates and becomes and finds its place in the production that is the cosmos. 

References

Dasgupta, Surendranath. A History of Indian Philosophy. vol. 3, Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.

Heidegger, Martin. Basic writings : from Being and time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964). 

Edited by David Farrell Krell, HarperCollins, 1993.

Kalupahana, David J. Mūlamadhyamakakārikā of Nāgārjuna: The Philosophy of the Middle 

Way. Edited by David J. Kalupahana, translated by David J. Kalupahana, Motilal Banarsidass, 1991.