The Art of Skepticism and the Skepticism of Art

Abstract

The world is woven all of dream and error And but one sureness in our truth may lie That when we hold to aught our thinking's mirror We know it not by knowing it thereby . . . We know the world is false, not what is true. Yet we think on. Fernando Pessoa At the beginning there was a call. After a while, somebody answered. However, this is not how it all began. It is rather supposed to have been like the Big Bang or like the utterance of a first word of creation which is, pace naive young earth creationism, not a mysterious event in time. But it does not matter where we start the story as long as we know that it all began in some determinable way or other. Mythology opens up a path to the absolute past, to the realm of the real unknown, the factor x of determination. It does so by managing concepts of time and creation in terms of genealogy. But mythology appears itself to be a factor x of human history, a part of the absolute past, an aught before the constitution of a purely logical space of reasons. In our times it does not seem to be part of the game of giving and asking for reasons to refer to mythological scenes in order to clarify our standpoint, our position in the world. It seems as if the world ceased to by a mystery, although the place of mind in nature as it came to be understood in modern science is certainly one of the best kept secrets of that nature which loves to hide. Reference to the miracle of mind tends to save our epistemological position in the overwhelmingly powerful totality of the disenchanted realm of nature. Against the suppression of mythology, its relegation to the offside of cognitively valuable discourse, in what follows I shall defend the outlines of an updated version of the romantic project of a new mythology. This might seem to be surprising, given that I am going to argue in favor of the depth of skepticism which is prima facie everything but a Romantic project. Yet, I do not mean to develop the contents of a new mythology on my own as I believe that we are always already trapped in a mythology in our era of the world-picture, in our Zeit des Weltbildes, as, we shall see, Heidegger or Wittgenstein might put it. Given that we are necessarily held captive by a culture that shapes our fundamental concepts of dealing with the world without itself being fully transparent to a given discursive stage setting, there is no need to develop the contents of a new mythology. I shall argue that skepticism affords us an insight into the finite nature of objective knowledge. In my view, this insight is realized by art and denied by epistemology, i.e., by the theoretical attitude towards the world, which tries to give an objective account of uberhaupt and its relation to the world. I shall defend the necessity of art and mythology against epistemology by allying with the skeptic. We cannot dispense with art as a means of conceptualizing our being-in-the-world even if artistic insights often come close to skepticism. I shall refer to the concept of scenic knowledge first used by the German philosopher Wolfram Hogrebe in his 2006 Gadamer Lectures at the University of Heidelberg in order to clarify this point.1 In the first part of my essay I shall establish a connection between skepticism and finitude. In the second part, I shall continue to elaborate on the interdependence of art and skepticism. I believe that skepticism is something like a conceptual art, an ability to use concepts in order to make us aware of the contingency of our world-picture or rather of the contingency of its hinges as I shall put it with Wittgenstein. Since art functions in a similar way by making us self-conscious of the contingency of our ways of experiencing the world, I also believe in a continuity of art and skepticism. In the end, I shall overtly join this alliance and shortly present two objections against my artistic, and to some degree Nietzschean view of the activity of philosophy. …