Man's Body in Relation to The Rest of Creation

Extract

Modern man seems to have lost his faith in nature. This is part of a more complicated loss of faith in himself. For the artist, anyway, nature is largely only an extension of himself, and it is primarily the artist who finds nature has become a sort of enemy. In outlining a possible new theory of our relationship with nature, we are attempting to integrate in our own work that nature which we too, as modern men, find antipathetic to our consciousness. I would like to explain more exactly what I mean by nature. This is not the nature which is looked for in empirical experience, but rather that a priori intuition of creation which we experience because of our subjective sense of our ontological contingency. A scientist, viewing what he calls facts, apprehends the causality of things, but cannot from that deduce an eternal source from which all things emanate, a source essentially different from its own emanations. For the artist, on the other hand, everything has its still centre, a centre which is somehow the very voiding of all that he perceives, an inner principle, one might say, of naughting, which is yet the most cogent affirmation which he knows of all that he sensually experiences. So we see at the very crux of our concept of nature there is a paradox, a paradox which leads the artist to distrust his own empiricism, because for him nature can never be wholly revealed. The most essential part of nature lies hidden in that which is beyond concept, and only enters into the artist’s own concepts as a certain mystery, a certain secret, or ‘shakti’, which accepts his own works as a temple for its presence, through an ineffable condescension beyond the power of the artist to understand.