If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.
The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.
The Art Monastery Project is “an international community of artists dedicated to applying the disciplined, contemplative, sustainable monastic way of living to the creative process.” Local chapters of the International Otherhood of Artmonks, which describes itself as a “secular (dis)order of creative, contemplative activists,” now number in the hundreds of members. As Nathan Rosquist defines them, artmonks live “at the intersection of three worlds”: spirit (contemplation), ethics (activism), and art (creativity).*
Rosquist asks “Can you name any” artmonks, and then lists Theophane the Monk and Leonard Cohen (okay, Zen Buddhist) alongside Charles Baudelaire, Gary Snyder, and Sunn o))) (at which point the list has gotten really eclectic!).
Some others who’ve pursued their creative visions down whatever spiritual rabbitholes they led them include Joseph Beuys, Yves Klein, Marina Abramović, Stan Brakhage, Genesis P. Orridge, David Tibet, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, John Cage, Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison, Richard Long, Betsy Damon, Mary Beth Edelson, Vito Acconci, outsider artists like Henry Darger and Ferdinand Cheval, and on and on and on.
(*If it were up to me, I would spin Rosquist’s triad only slightly differently, so as to follow a Peircian understanding of the “normative sciences” of aesthetics, a “first,” which pursues beauty, or the “admirable in itself”; ethics, a “second,” which pursues right action and conduct in relation to others, therefore activism; and logic, or ecologic, a “third,” which pursues habits of thought by which an understanding develops of how things fit together. Each flows out of, and depends on, its previous — logic on the ethical, ethics on the aesthetic, with the aesthetic grounding them all, and all three in action constituting creativity. Come to think of it, some philosophers ought to qualify as well, Peirce among them.)
[…] grid for a week, but I really look forward to giving this more attention when I get back: ”artmonks: children of Thoreau & Whitehead,” a post by Adrian Ivakhiv. If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately […] and not, when […]
Beauty (aesthetics), Goodness (ethics) and Truth (eco-logics), by any other name…
Although, what justification is there for positing a hierarchical order to these? I think they co-arise together in a world where the embodied mental, material (in an all inclusive sense), and the social co-occur simultaneously. An inventory of what is available within hominid experience suggests the ever-presence of all three.
Michael – You’re probably right. I’m just trying to work through Peirce’s notion (which he only came to hold in his later years, it seems) that there is an order or sequence in their emergence. It’s not a hierarchy, but rather a priority and dependency, and it follows from the fact that meaning (thirdness) arises out of the mediation of relations (secondness, actuality), and that before there are relations between any two things, there are those two things prior to their being related or even actualized (firstness, virtuality). The aesthetic moment, at least in this reading of Peirce, comes at our encountering the thing in its firstness (or as close as we can get to that, since once we’ve encountered it, it’s already a second). That thing, of course, can already be its own second- and/or thirdness: e.g., if it’s another entity (human or otherwise), then it is already it’s own sign (3dness) and already related to and dependent on others (2dness). But in the relationship between me and it, my ability to make sense of it (logos, truth) is dependent on my encounter with and response to it (ethos, conduct) which is in turn dependent on the form it takes independent of me (aesthetikos, beauty).
So this is a kind of slice into the 1st-2nd-3rd sequence of emergence. But you are right that all three are always interacting in the holistic/composite flow of experience.
Very interesting! I have little exposure to these aspects of Peirce’s work, but obviously could benefit from some follow-up study.
I like the notion of emergent worlds/perspectives and the understanding of extended levels of activity taking on new relationships. ‘Firstness’, perhaps, being the primordial suchness from which all reality flows; ‘secondness’ being the differentiation (actualization) and emergence of coalescent assemblages; and ‘thirdness’ as recursive systems and ‘signification’ (all the way up to the symbolic).
There are many ways imagine the unfolding of cosmic contingency and Peirce’s seems as though it would have its merits.
PS- Maybe we’ll get into it more with the Integral Ecology reading group but I see some resonances here with Wilber’s spectrum model of evolution and the enactive perspective-taking promoted by Hargens and Zimmerman as well.
The Wilber resonances don’t surprise me… He has occasionally made some positive comments about Peirce (and about Whitehead, too), and he’s a voracious reader. I guess we’ll find out more about those similarities & differences when we get to the Hargens/Zimmerman reading. Thanks for the reminder about it.