Opinion 14: Vortica

By Felix Garner-Davis & Nina Nervegna

So landed on a vast deposit of shells and bones—

cephalopods, corals, echini, spinifera, teleosts, sharks

and ganoids. Tertiary cycads, fan-palms, fungi. Conifers.

Ocean floor and rifted land mass. Long geologic ages.

The course of some great river: pierced the foothills and

approached its sinking-place in the range.

The dead city lay around. Descended story by story into

the submerged part, impeded by local collapses. Star-

shaped open spaces. Signs of decadence.

Some electrical condition in the disturbed air to the

west.1

Like this charged, indistinct atmosphere, non-anthropocentrism generates energetic questions. In terms of design, they concern possibility and purpose. What can be done, and how? For whom, or what, and why? The answers, and indeed the likelihood of these questions being asked, depend on the frameworks used by those involved. Design is instantiated by different people, who understand the world in different ways. These are often more heuristic than systematic, indicated rather than explained, which entails an interesting (and surprisingly unassuming) kind of uncertainty. While ambiguities in design are almost characteristically valuable, it can be enriching to consult philosophy. We have found Arthur Schopenhauer especially instructive, insofar as we can understand him. It might be more accurate to specify that we have found even a patchy interpretation helpful. In any case, in the spirit of proposing that an existing philosophical system can elicit newly provocative design ideas, especially in relation to non-anthropocentrism, we hereby invoke—like some unruly Pokémon—Schopenhauer’s central work: The World as Will and Representation.

This behemoth was thrice published and revised in German between 1818 and 1859, prompting an acclaimed English translation by E.F.J. Payne in 1958, to which we are referring. Across two volumes, it offers a comprehensive account of Schopenhauer’s thought. Volume I comprises four books on epistemology, ontology, aesthetics and ethics, as well as an appended critique of Immanuel Kant, whose work was a crucial precursor. Volume II supplements each of these books with a series of additive essays. Perhaps reassuringly, we will not attempt a similarly encyclopaedic manoeuvre, though we trust that any ideas we outline even half-effectively will incentivise further reading. Some modes of design can require abnegation, and practising as a designer or advocate can involve a commitment to the possibility of transcendence—however brief—via aesthetic contemplation, and the world in which one exists can often seem grim, sometimes to the extent that design appears futile or foolish. Excepting the disciplinary specificity, these are some of the key themes in Schopenhauer’s work.

 These themes involve an underpinning metaphysic. Again, design is instantiated differently because designers understand the world in different ways, each way comprising a kind of framework, and we contend that non-anthropocentric approaches can be unfamiliar enough to require some extradisciplinary structure. If we are correct that, when pursued, they provoke energetic questions about possibility and purpose, are we also correct that the first of these questions might ask: What can be done, and how? Probably not. We might instead ask: What is? This is a step back. It is an elemental, metaphysical question. For Schopenhauer, hence the title of his central work, the world manifests in two ways: as Will, and as representation. The latter manifestation, representation, is diversified, and comprises an assortment of entities that can be considered appearances, ideas or objects. This is the world’s outer layer: the epithelium of all that is. Conversely, the former manifestation, Will, is unified, and comprises the world per se, as it is in itself. This is the inner core.

Schopenhauer’s fundamental configuration, here, is non-anthropocentric. The truth of the world, Will, is typically inaccessible to humans. Instead, excepting rare and brief instances of transcendental contemplation, we experience only objectifications—varied but artificial expressions—of our singular, real environment. Moreover, should we find ourselves lucky enough to interface with it, by meditating on a fork of lightning or a masterwork, we would find merely an empty revelation. There is Will, but there is no principle beyond: no divinity, and no apotheosis. Comprehension of Will provides knowledge of the world per se, but this knowledge comprises only the fact that the world, as Will, is a knowledgeless, blindly self-perpetuating force, endlessly striving for no reason. Additionally, regardless of whether we comprehend Will or not, we are only superficially separate from it. Like any other phenomena, such as trees or showers of rainfall, our bodies are merely representations of this unified, deeper power, however different and whole they seem. All things strive, for no reason other than continuation, and are therefore animated by the same essence. On glimpsing it through contemplation of nature or art, we notice that we feel its urge to self-perpetuate, as do trees and rain. We may then understand that we are this urge. It is a monolith, in truth, however representationally modified and diversely expressed it is through morphologies, movements, sounds and other ostensibly discrete phenomenal characteristics.

 Like any proposal about reality, these assertions are not only metaphysical but also epistemological. They investigate a fundamental circumstance, but also how knowledge of it is produced and conditioned. We see aesthetic and ethical ripples, too. If art is, as Schopenhauer suggests, one of the few classes of objectification with enough beauty and sublimity to permit temporary comprehension of Will, then it constitutes a rare portal into true reality and knowledge, however little this process might seem like conventional deliverance. While we never stop desiring, and therefore expressing a perpetual lack of fulfilment, the exposure to metaphysical truth we chance via aesthetic contemplation offers the promise of learning, especially that all things are one, and thus the promise of compassion, should we adopt it. For those inclined to nature and art, this system incentivises a non-anthropocentric ethic of unusually creative character, drawn not for its own sake but from a supreme principle. Compassion is recommended by existential monist truth, and it can be accessed and articulated via knowledge and aesthetics. We construe, contemplate, understand, empathise, make, suffer and repeat, hopefully prosecuting these steps more calmly each time.

Even so, why bother with the gloom? Let’s say the truth of life is Will, as Schopenhauer has it: meaningless, and somewhat harsh, but singular and all-encompassing, as well as comprehensively knowable. Is it gloomy, or in fact salutary? If this metaphysic offers us the possibility of fundamental knowledge, despite our shortcomings, and that knowledge is both aesthetically valenced and memorable, confirming beauty and sublimity as redemptive and all phenomena as interconnected articulations of the same substrate, then it is hardly frightening or bleak. It is almost soteriological. Relief is not impossible, just fleeting. It can be produced and reproduced by particular modes of contemplation and compassion. Moreover, honest recognition of truth—in the form of inexorable suffering and existential pointlessness—is not inadvisable, as it may seem. Instead, it is the door to the corridor in which one can begin a quest for solace. Along the way, with greater knowledge, and increasingly ascetic resignation to the artificiality of earthly phenomena, one might achieve equanimity. This strikes us as a distinctly more reasonable, flexible and inclusive—if also more confronting—line of thinking than many others.

In the end, there is little here about design, because there is little we want to programme. We recommend only that design should aspire beyond human concerns, and be predicated on a system of thought that recognises its universal implication and possibility. It has obviously expansive potential. If we understand the term “design” by way of its etymon, the Latin infinitive designare, we invoke the following behaviours: pointing, marking, tracing, outlining, describing, indicating, designating and choosing. A sense of modesty unfolds. These definitions suggest that design involves identification of particular qualities in an existing substrate, and probably some modification or composition, but not the process of subjective invention as which it is usually construed. What if we understood this substrate as Will? Would we therefore not only be making design for each other, but also—as it often seems—from each other, configuring particular commonalities? After all, we always treat distinction with some suspicion, however unevenly. Much is said about egotism and indifference in design fields. Practical efforts to remedy some of these qualities’ corrosive effects are necessary and admirable. Even so, what else—of a deeper, less personally inflected, more universal sort—is occurring when a designer turns their back on others? What about those to whom, or that to which, many backs are turned, including many modes of thinking? Are we interested in asking these questions, and more fundamental ones still, with reference to broader, existing systems of extradisciplinary thought? Or are we interested only in their shimmering, comparatively insubstantial outlines—and ultimately, absurdly, only in ourselves?

Fugitive moods, memories and impressions. Carried

through a series of rooms and corridors, in every state

of ruin or preservation. Taking false leads and retracing

the way. Sunless cliffs, hidden ocean.

The true bottom lay at a considerably lower depth,

deliberately closed and deserted. As if the coming of

the ice had been foreseen.

Let it be plain. Let the thing be stated: We were coming

to the circular place, a perfect hemisphere. The colossal

black front looming, constellated with lights.2

The point is         mist—Ormond, or… make ourselves small, slip bicycle loops sideward. Gulls drift. A hurt dog, crabwise step. Snake road. Ladders by the trig catch paint as it whitens, flecked palms opening to Gellibrand Shoal. The intervening sea, coral and curl of basalt; interstitial rock-slink autotrophs. We run. A wetness in the northerly carries damp judder, wheels crossing muck, bay and canal-mouth over Cribbes Bridge. Trucks bounce alike, blast Marine Parade to Webb Dock. The water trickles clear. In cloud, gantry cranes at Sandridge spool containers onto ships. Men fish. Dawn comes. Cold air.

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Citation:

1 Bella Li, passage one from “South,” on page eight, redroompoetry.org/poets/bella-li/south.

2 Li, passage four, on page eleven.

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Image credit:

Felix Garner-Davis & Nina Nervegna