TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
TOP・UPDATES・FOUR PILLARS・CINEMA/TV・GAMES・MANGA/ANIME・MUSIC・WRITINGS・FAQ・LINKS
One of Plato's more curious ideas is called "anamnesis." I'll do my best to rehearse it in very simplified terms. A perennial philosophical problem emerged: How do we "learn" something completely new? How can we understand something totally alien to us? In the dialogue "Meno," the example of virtue is used. If we have no idea what virtue is, how could we ever know? We wouldn't even be able to distinguish virtue if we came across it, since we don't know any of its properties or features. It would be like asking us what a "gazzlefromp" or a "ASOJDAOSDOZXCMZLXCKI" is.
We might have expected Plato to make some elaborate account of how some form of knowledge gets transferred from the outer world to our inner one, but he actually doesn't. He thinks that it indeed seems impossible for us ever to know something completely new. So he goes with the only available alternative: no knowledge is ever new. In his account, the soul exists in a higher, non-material realm of forms before it "falls" down into the world of matter. In doing so, it abandons its knowledge which was infinite and perfect and forgets it. The soul becomes incarnated into matter and forgets must learn everything anew. Anew? No. It must REMEMBER everything. All knowledge is really just a REMEMBRANCE of the perfect knowledge that we had before our birth. Some accounts seem to describe a great number of lives that obscure it even more.
Do I buy it? I'm not sure, but one thing that I have been struck by as of late is how much the experience of great art feels less and less like a revelation of something totally new and more like a remembering and an uncovering of something that was there all along. It's strange and hard to describe. I'll try my best but this will probably come across like rambling.
Okay, let's start with an experiment I think most people can understand: having nostalgia for a place or time that you never directly experienced. For me, nothing makes me happier than images (and music, games, etc.) of Japan from the late 1990s or early 2000s. It feels like something that is deep in my heart and memory even if I only ever experienced Japan at this time indirectly. There are other examples that I'm sure people can relate to. 1980s Japan city pop aesthetic is certainly a whole industry of its own now (vaporwave destroyed 80s anime online, fuck that shit). Of course, most of the people obsessed with it probably weren't even born in the 1980s (I'm including myself in this category, so please don't think I'm being too judgmental). Some people feel this for America in the 1950s. Or Paris in the 1960s. Or perhaps even older periods. For me almost all great art has this kind of false familiarity when I am really moved by it.
Some people (probably the kind to be published by Zero Books) might argue that this is just a matter of media overexposure in the postmodern hyperreality of late-stage capitalism or whatever, where media representations (distortions?) of periods and places have become as dear to us or even more dear than our own personal memories and histories. Or some would say that there are reasons we latch onto them that are more material and historical. Maybe there's something in these periods we desperately want in our own current period. Perhaps it's no coincidence that no matter the era, the biggest difference to today seems to be the prevalence of "third spaces" like dance halls or arcades or shopping malls in the past where people actually met in person and had vibrant social lives.
These are good points but I'm not totally convinced by them. Whenever I am moved by a work of art, I often have a very strange feeling: I imagine that I have already experienced it, somehow. I dupe myself into thinking that somehow, some way, this film or poem or anime must have BEEN THERE when I was a kid. And when I say "when I was a kid," I'm referring to the time frame. Sometimes it feels like I experienced them as an adult even when I would have been a child back then. Everything I am moved by begins to feel like uncovering some repressed, hidden memory. It is very odd. It would make sense to feel this for something you only experienced second-hand, like a game you new about and were aware of as a kid but never played yourself. You could see fashioning a false memory about actually having played it even though you didn't. But this feeling happens even with works that I know there is simply no way I could have experienced when they came out, like books that weren't translated until recently for example.
Is it just a sign of how shitty the world is right now that I can only be moved by something by associating it with a time in the past when things weren't so hard? You might think it's just a form of comparison, where the only way I can compare the power of the artwork is to what the world was like when I was so young. As Schopenhauer puts it:
The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that when we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) IDEA of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty.
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Aesthetics" [1]
Maybe then I'm just associating great art with being young because everything felt magical when young? Or maybe part of this is just getting older and being more able to sort things according to "models" and being less shocked and surprised by things in any artistic field. I find this more pleasant than it sounds. It doesn't make things feel rote and predictable, it just makes them feel strangely comforting and calming even when they are surprising in their own way. Maybe it's just a change of affect as I get older. I guess that might be the case, because I do feel this much more often with older works of art that were actually released before the last decade at the very latest. It's not to say there haven't been great works made recently, but they feel very different, more like an expression of "now." When I write this out, it sounds so obvious as to make me feel retarded. "Oh, so old things feel more like they already existed and are an evocation of a previous time and new things feel like ane expression of the current era. What a fucking surprise!"
But I can't explain how vivid the feelings of "I must have somehow been exposed to this as a child" are when I watch something older. And sometimes I can even feel that way from something very recent if it feels ancient and eternal enough. And that makes me wonder about anamnesis and the power of artworks to awaken these kinds of things or at least fool us into it.
I think this especially because it happens outside of art too. Sometimes I will visit a landscape and have the feeling that it can't have been my first time (I experienced this in Japan sometimes). Sometimes it will be a way of thought or philosophy that I begin to understand and think that I must have been taught this before (Heidegger was like this). Sometimes it might even be a hobby of sorts. Recently I've started meditating again after a while and it feels not only like I'm tapping into something ancient and perennial, but that I have the feeling of remembering myself meditating during the years that I was a child even when I in fact didn't. I wonder if this is the start of what people describe as remembering past lives.
Maybe I'm just mystifying things for no reason here. But if art does indeed exist to tap into something grand and universally human, then perhaps it should make sense that all great art moves us by being somehow familiar.
1. Arthur Schopenhauer [trans. R.J. Hollingdale], Essays and Aphorisms, "On Aesthetics," Penguin Books, 1973, p. 160