Nebula Rasa: Exploring the Diaphanous, #1.

“Diaphanous” (2024) (Author, AI-generated via Freepik.com)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. Two Suggestions about the Diaphanous

3. Historical Background

4. Cognitivism and Creativity: A Concise Overview

5. From Cognitivism to Propensity

6. The Work at Work, or, the Effective Present

7. The Diaphanous as Generative Stimulus

8. Conclusion

This essay was previously published in a slightly different form as (Paans, 2024a), except for the Introduction, which was written specifically for APP.

It will be published here in eight installments; this is the first.

You can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling to the bottom of the post and clicking on the Download tab.

1. Introduction

If there is one concept that Western philosophy has abhorred, it is ambiguity. The Socratic dialogue—that hallmark of Greek philosophy—is an attempt to confront ambiguity, and, if possible, to eliminate it. This line of thinking continued in the Middle Ages through a refined Scholastic tradition that aimed at constructing a coherent, broadly Aristotelian worldview in which ambiguity was eliminated. After all, God provided the light of Reason to understand the order of the cosmos. And understanding was often equated with the elimination of ambiguity and paradox.

This critical attitude informed also the Enlightenment, as mathematical truth was elevated as the pinnacle of human knowledge. For a time, complete elimination of ambiguity seemed within reach. It is the great merit of Immanuel Kant that he overturned this picture, and critically examined the limits of what sense and reason could hope to accomplish.

Yet, something of the hostility towards ambiguity remains in the sciences, and the Positivist ideal of absolute clarity about the structure of the universe only emphasizes this—admittedly ambitious—project. Ironically, the latest advances in the sciences have not eliminated ambiguity: they have magnified and intensified it. We have no science of quantum mechanics, no science of consciousness, and no science of creativity. We have physics, neuroscience, and the psychology of creativity, and these are at best attempts at explanations, but they are scratching the surface while inviting only more fundamental questions.

The good thing about philosophy becoming global is that we can freely explore the accomplishments of other traditions. For instance, Chinese philosophy has a rather different take on ambiguity; I am not even sure if they would describe it that way. If oneness or unity, or even definition are the hallmarks of Greek philosophy, then the multiple, the more-than-one, the neither-one-nor-the-other or the generative are hallmarks of Chinese philosophy.

This characteristic is especially visible within the Daoist tradition, which comes to us in writings that are paradoxical, playful, imitative, theatrical, open-ended, and by nature … ambiguous. The very idea of the Dao (way) is the prime example: it cannot be caught yet is everywhere; it cannot be found in the world, but still it can be practiced; it cannot be spoken, yet it can be understood; there are no exercises to learn the way, but you will recognize it when you find it. Ambiguity and multiplicity are the key terms of the tradition. Above all, there is something inherently processual about the Dao—it is a way, a journey, an unfolding. It suggests ceaseless movement and creation. Or, put differently, it is the play of communicating forces: settling and springing-up, becoming large and becoming small, being nowhere and everywhere. What settles takes on a more or less fixed form for the time being; what springs up suggests itself to the observer: it is the spark of novelty, or the moment in which one notices something that was “hidden in plain sight.”

For those familiar with Hegelian dialectics, this thought is not entirely new. Hegel introduced the idea of process into thought itself, rendering it as a sequence of moments. Unlike Hegel, however, Chinese thought does not seek to describe this process in determinate terms: it recognizes that it is there, and hints how it might function. Parables, anecdotes and stories are used as examples without the need for closure—that would be an ultimately un-Daoist thing to do. Or: it would show that one does not understand the Dao.

This essay, titled nebula rasa, is a philosophical short-circuit between the Western and Chinese aesthetic traditions when it comes to thinking about drawing. Where the Western mind often saw the drawing as a visual representation of an absent object, or later as a carrier of information, the Chinese mind discovered something else. The drawing surface is a place (or topos) rather than a surface (see, e.g., Paans 2024b). Moreover, it is the place where the new springs up and inserts itself into the world. It follows that in the process of creation, this space never remains the same for long: the Dao is everywhere, after all, and so everything changes.

To discover, then, is the modus operandi of the artist. But to discover, ambiguity, allusiveness and suggestion are necessarily involved. If there is a way in which we can grasp the Dao at all, it is in witnessing the change of the world—or its inhering in the “ten thousand things.”

In particular, the idea of the diaphanous—i.e., the translucent, opaque, or nebulous—plays a decisive role here. In the realm of the diaphanous, the more-than-one, the suggested, the allusive and the contour reside comfortably alongside and through one another. The diaphanous represents the space of ambiguity that, like the Dao, escapes determination but drives all creative processes.

We should move from the tabula rasa, the plane on which we write the world, to the nebula rasa, the interstitial realm of the in-between, the ambiguous, and the allusive. This shift represents also a move from conceptualism to non-conceptualism. Given its emphasis on clarity and definition, the Western mind heavily leans towards conceptualism. We disenchanted the world while presupposing that we did everyone a great service. But such disenchantment comes at a price, as the Romantics realized. What hides in the shadows (and the diaphanous, no less) is not merely superstition and folk wisdom. It is an imaginational dimension that is just as real as the objects and ideas we take for granted. The imaginary worlds conjured up by J.J.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert, the sunflowers of Van Gogh, the feeling of awe when seeing a redwood tree, the sense of dread when seeing a storm approaching—these affects are real. All art and design directly affect a range of emotive and bodily responses, from rage and anger on one hand, to sympathy and pity on the other.

The diaphanous and the nebulous invite in the non-conceptual and make us witness to the process of seeing concepts form, dissolve, change, and transform. This means that we have access to a cognitive domain that possess an infinite informational richness transcending our conceptual capabilities, and luckily so. It also means that this domain is continuously in play, inviting observers in and activating their feelings.

Unlike the reductionist, mechanistic approaches used in order to explain the nooks and crannies of our cognitive systems, the diaphanous opens up towards the organic. Quite literally, we witness the growth an idea, becoming part of its gestation and developmental trajectory. Despite all our knowledge about biology, we still have trouble conceiving of cognition in truly organicist terms—and how could it be otherwise, given the fact that the terminology that we routinely use has been thoroughly (thought)-shaped by the mechanist worldview? To think in organicist terms about creativity, we require a thoughtful exploration of the process of creation as it unfolds before our eyes.

Like the Dao, it is hard to pinpoint this process in determinate, let alone mechanistic, terms. We require precision in order to understand it, yet the language inherited from the Western mind will not provide us with the language and (anti)-concepts to achieve understanding. Therefore, this essay invokes the work of the French sinologist and philosopher François Jullien, who has fruitfully explored Chinese philosophy and has highlighted its differences with Western thought. Through this cross-tradition encounter, we might advance our understanding, simply by adopting an attitude of epistemic humility and willingness to leave the comfort zone of our own philosophical tradition—without, however, forgetting where we came from.

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