Eight

Surrealism as Philosophy

The flora and fauna of surrealism are inadmissible.

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality . . . into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.

1st Manifesto

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low cease to be perceived as contradictions.

2nd Manifesto
ANDRÉ BRETON

PHILOSOPHY in the form of metaphysics has, of course, from its first recognizable examples been interested in what is, reality. Philosophers have disputed the general character of the real, and whether any candidate for the title of reality deserved it; but the dispute only confirms that the historical intention of metaphysics has aimed at something called reality, and its kinds, to such an extent that it goes without saying. Some philosophers have divided reality into kinds by some dialectical principle: negation, as in Being and Nonbeing; dependence, as in Substance and its modes; knowability, as in noumena and phenomena. These procedures have the advantage that they are completable; a dialectical division exhausts its universe of discourse. But they have the corresponding disadvantage of comprising within one leg of the division what on other grounds would proliferate into the endless. If Being and Nonbeing exhaust the universe of discourse, it is only because we have included under one or the other term an infinite positive diversity. While pencil and not-pencil together name whatever could be, not-pencil itself comprises an infinity of forms, now named only by what they are not. Dialectical divisions of such a sort are easily made; in an instant we succeed in saying something about everything, but the ease of such intellectual acts should warn us of their intrinsic poverty. A humbler but more promising ontology finds itself in an infinite sea of being, and now must look to see what there is, with no hope or aspiration of cataloguing it all. Here empiricism comes into its rights, as well as phenomenology; neither is interested in dialectical schemes of everything, but both are content to consult what we experience.

In contrast to dialectical or a priori schemata, the reversion to experience can acquaint us with what we could not have otherwise predicted, therefore with something fresh. But so far as I can see, the reversion to experience had had an extremely unfortunate result, in principle unnecessary and accidental, but unfortunate nonetheless. The reversion to the evidence of experience has, in practice, meant the return to sense perception as the fundamental mode of consciousness through which we can become acquainted with the real. The term “experience” itself has become virtually synonomous with sense perception, and correspondingly the secret prejudice makes itself known that the real in its honorific sense is what is experienceable by our senses. Now anyone can stipulate any word to mean anything he likes; there is no quarrel there. But if the “real” names the ancient aspiration of philosophy, the very heart of the philosophic enterprise, perhaps the term “real” should not be so quickly finished off with experience. The implicit closure of the eternal problem of reality by confining it to what is experienceable is the disastrous consequence of a hardly conscious assumption that “experience” of course means sense experience, rather than being the title for another mystery, consciousness itself.

The net effect of this prejudice in favor of sense perception is an informal metaphysics of the correlates of sensation, and an understanding that gets both its materials and its final goals from the world of sense perception, all now understood to be reality. Reality, once the name of a mystery, is now “understood” to be the perceptible; our so-called epistemologies are the epistemologies of how the perceptible is perceived and how it is to be understood. Dominating all this is a picture that only has to be sketched to exhibit its naiveté. There are things and their properties (or not: events); these events or things are bound together by causal laws, not necessarily known, but hoped for; all of this is capable of being grounded in publicly verifiable assertions. Common sense illustrates it informally; but empirical philosophers’ notions of science illustrate it even better. The whole enterprise, which began with high hopes and brave promises, ends in a depressing mess of common sense; the direct theme of philosophy now is the old world of things, more or less permanent, events usually thought of as motions, the laws that one hopes govern all these things and their events, and the whole world of such banalities, insofar and only insofar as it is publicly accessible. Now there can be no doubt at all that such a version of the old mystical term “reality” has its own clarity, its own logic, makes no demands on the imagination whatsoever, and is some sort or other of what anyone could know without much trouble at all. It is, therefore, eminently teachable; perhaps the only teachable version of truth. It even has answers to its problems! And it even conceives a philosophical problem as that which can with sufficient application or cleverness be solved!

What else is there? Well, since we are located on the plane not of dialectical, a priori, or abstract reason, but concrete or intuitive consciousness, that is, the immediate consciousness of a particular before it, we might begin to ask whether such consciousness of particular being is confined to sense perception or “experience” so understood. If we choose to remain in the domain of the particular and concrete, is our only acquaintance with it through sense perception? But of course we have forgotten imagination; and it is the surrealists who will not allow us to forget it. The empiricists of ontology say the imagination presents us with what is not real but “only” imaginary; hence it is of no help in our quest for the real. Such is the empirical response. And thus the issues are drawn.

Phenomenology always prided itself on its “presuppositionless” character; it would begin with whatever presented itself to consciousness without prejudging its essence or its mode of being. Each was to be taken just as it presented itself without a prejudice touching what it really must be. This seems like an excellent principle even though it was soon confined in practice to extensive and repetitive analyses of those old banalities of perception. Yet, can we not now bring into view another domain of objectivities, those which can only present themselves to the intuitive imagination, in a word, the “flora and fauna of surrealism.” If those flora and fauna were usually examined in the light of aesthetics, as instituting a new style or fashion in the arts, perhaps if we take them with more seriousness, they can offer us some decisive insights into metaphysics. Surrealism itself always had to defend itself against any exclusively aesthetic direction; and does not the very contrast, real-surreal itself insist upon the inherently philosophical ambitions of the movement?

A cursory overview of the surrealist domain shows us melting watches, fur teacups, giraffes with their manes blazing, boots that terminate in feet, flatirons with tacks on the bottom, machines that cannot work, landscapes that on second glance are human faces, portraits that equally are bowls of flowers, or chateaux at the bottom of wells, as well as the limitless variety of beings that are constructed analogically and exist therefore only in poetic metaphor: “seasons luminous like the interior of an apple from which a slice has been cut out”; “This morning the daughter of the mountain is holding on her knees an accordion of white bats”; “the earth blue like an orange”; the “sun which shines at night”; and so on.

If we now take a step backward and generalize, perhaps a few structural features of this domain might appear. These beings are inherently constructed by metaphor, and therefore exist solely for the imagination. They are therefore inherently analogical and nonliteral. If a Dali stated his ambition to paint picture postcards of his dreams, or Magritte and Ernst to offer precise and vivid images, experiencing these as literal views of funny objects would be to miss the point; they are surrealist only by virtue of their strangeness, of their appeal to the imagination rather than to the literal eye. They are metaphorical syntheses of elements which might exist independently; but synthesized together, they can be only for the imagination. Breton finally declared that everything could be analogized with everything else, and with that universal analogy the distinctions which individuate and separate this from that fall away and with them the significance of literal discourse.

Chance and coincidence serve to form another class of beings. The surrealists were always looking for and cherishing strange coincidences, holding themselves open and ready for astrological predictions, fortune-telling, premonitory dreams, and the rest. The surrealist flora and fauna are frequently beings with contradictory properties, pure ephemera that exist only in an absolute instability. These beings obviously generate themselves spontaneously and have only coincidental consequences; they are births without navel cords, with no natural children. Alfred Jarry laid its foundation in pataphysics, the science of what occurs by chance, practised by both Αrp and Duchamp.

They are rarely pretty. Most frequently they are obscene, offensive, horrid, and immoral; André Breton declared that no one exceeded him in bad taste. Some have seen in this only bravado or the desire to shock or a pathological streak of morbidity. But in a moment we shall look at precisely the function of the moral in defining that ontology of the real, which surrealism is opposing.

In addition to surrealist beings, there is also surrealist behavior. Some surrealists were given to sudden hysterical outbursts; hysteria was in fact much prized by Breton himself. Others passed an extraordinary amount of time in offensive public demonstrations and in simulating mental derangements: sleep-walking, disassociation, paranoia, automatism, Rimbaud’s “systematic derangement of all the senses,” black humor; and Péret was famous for his insults, crossing the streets of Paris to spit on priests, waiting in vain for them to turn the other cheek. For them the criminal, childish, insane, and primitive were cultivated as offering a new view out onto the possible.

Now our question returns: what has all this to do with metaphysics? Metaphysics, or now phenomenological ontology, has more or less been the phenomenology of rather ordinary things, the so-called real world. And, for all the variations of analysis, that world remains composed of substances, identifiable and continuant, with regular properties, engaging in causal relations that fall under scientific or phenomenological law, or that exemplify universal concepts and together compose a real world. The picture to be sure is altered with Sartre’s pour-soi and en-soi; with Heidegger’s Dasein, Zuhandensein and Vorhandensein, but even with these reorientations the world that was thematic was the old real world. If existential ontologists distinguish between clock time and lived time, lived time itself for all its differences has its own peculiar structure, is susceptible to analysis, and behaves as a sort of a priori. It is most definitely not surrealist time. If lived space is not physical or geometric space, it still has its own a priori structures, near-far, up-down, oriented around my project; surrealist space is something altogether different, since surrealism changes the project. If the existentialists insist upon the foundational role of being-in-the-world, such that it is the source of all meanings, surrealism suggests that the world is foundational also for meanings that are surreal to that reality. Surrealist flora and fauna therefore bear one reference to the old real world and are never pure abstractions or nonobjectivities. But the other reference carries them elsewhere into a domain of the marvelous, the nonsubstantial but ephemeral, the evanescent, the contradictory present in Breton’s conception of beauty as explosante-fixe. The surrealist interconnection is never the familiar causal one, nor the Heideggerian “for the sake of,” binding together equipment for the projects of Dasein. The Heideggerianpragmatic conception of beings as utilities for us has given way to the absolutely useless surrealist object. Everything here is coincidental. The flora and fauna do not exhibit universal categories; each is unique and, in its self-contradiction, not susceptible to conceptualization. If real things are those which are accessible to public observation, survey, or use, surreal things live solely in the domain of private imagination. If the entities of traditional or existential analysis compose finally a “world,” those of surrealism do not; here everything is discontinuous, dislocated, disoriented, nonadditive, and so not a world at all.

There are, then, remarkable differences between the ontology of surrealism and that of either ordinary empiricism and its extension into science, or existential-phenomenological analyses. If there are ontological differences, there are also moral differences. The favorite entities of the surrealist domain are immoral, obscene, offensive, or disagreeable. Its humor is black, with a marked preference for the cruel, evil, disruptive, shocking. Favorite authors are the Marquis de Sade, Lautréaumont, Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vaché, all of whom are as unacceptable to civil society as the flora and fauna of surrealism are to our habitual sense of reality. Breton in one moment declared the perfect surrealist act to be that of discharging a revolver at random in a crowd, a remark which the highly conscientious Breton spent much time later qualifying. In any event, what lies behind this predilection for the black and satanic side of the moral world? If we look at it simply as itself evil and intolerable, we may get good grades for personal morality, but we should, I think, miss its deeper meaning, which after all was never simply to institute a new set of social or personal ethics in which cruelty would be tolerated.

We are here talking now of a concrete morality, the morality, choices, and preferences we live in, rather than of an abstract definition of the good or duty. And obviously we are all more or less decent people. We wish both to be and to have to be on pain of exclusion from our own society. And so if there is for our realist ontology something like the real world, for our lived moral life there is a moral world held together by a mutual recognition of permissible or admirable behavior. And, if that moral world offers us a great and substantial good, at the same time it exacts a cost: a permanent blindness to what lies on the other side. And what lies on the other side is the radical freedom of Satan. In this mythology the question is whether the Fallen Angel did or did not see something hidden from Omniscience. The old surrealists always had a secret preference for the insights from the perspective of Satan; he alone was absolutely free, and surrealism is explicitly the cultivation of an absolute freedom. This freedom could be cultivated by experiencing the deliverances of subconscious desire, always obscene, or imaginatively committing atrocities (cold-blooded murders, acts of vampirism), promoting world catastrophes, committing suicide (of which there are an extraordinary number among the surrealists), delivering unprovoked insults, and so on. Once in practice they even went so far as to steal a waiter’s pocketbook, but were immediately overcome with remorse and returned it. Now surely the meaning in all this is to free our moral sentiments from the ultimacy of the good and right. Without that freedom both right and wrong lose their significance and become merely the accepted, the bourgeois. The absolute delight in the perspective of evil, total liberation, and revolt was cultivated not so much for its thrills as for its value as a means of attaining that ultimate point of consciousness where contradictories cease to be perceived as opposites. And so ultimate liberation of the spirit required that it liberate itself profoundly from the ultimacy of the “moral.” Something higher than the good was at stake, a daring of the absolutely ultimate. Nietzsche was not far away with his “beyond good and evil,” nor Kierkegaard with his “teleological suspension of the ethical.”

If surrealist ontology frees us from the horizon of the real, and surrealist ethics from that of the moral, these two aspects are surely not unrelated. It would not be difficult to demonstrate that for almost the entire history of metaphysics, the real and the good were derivative or convertible terms. Being and Value were the same, seen perhaps from different angles. For Plato, Being was the One; but that was the Good. For Aristotle, thought thinking thought was one conception of the highest being; it was also blessedness. For Christian theology, God was at one and the same time reality and holiness. The analogies in Spinoza and Leibniz and the major convictions of Western ontology through Hegel are not difficult to trace. In more recent or more empirical or “scientific” times, the pattern still holds. For the empirical temper what is real hovers around our practical control of things; the investigation of the real world in which we must willy-nilly live, at bottom, is within the horizon of the useful, just as both Heidegger and Dewey said. What we credit as real, therefore, bears a strict correlation with what we ultimately prize.

To whatever extent this is true, it is not surprising, then, that to take seriously the domain of the imagination, the surrealist domain, we must first radically change what we prize. Otherwise, what it offers presents itself as foolish, silly, irrelevant, useless, as indeed it all is judged from a morality bound to the useful, but as it is not, judged from its own perspective, absolute liberation.

Breton, pursuing absolute freedom along the route of beauty, accordingly had to redefine that old value. It was no longer the harmonious, the ordered, or the aesthetically pleasing; there is no beauty without the marvelous, and everything marvelous is beautiful, he said. And the marvelous? It was not the world of miracles, which Breton rejected, but what addressed that point of consciousness where opposites cease to be perceived as such. This in itself is already the supreme scandal to reason; but curiously enough it was the focus of another, more arcane tradition in philosophy, the philosophers of the “coincidentia oppositorum,” the Abgrund and Ungrund of an Ekhardt, the mystical nature philosophies of Boehme and Novalis, and finally Hegel, whose Absolute Mind was precisely such a synthesis of opposites, the supremely living and supremely creative and supremely free. If Hegel was also the supremely rational dialectician, it was only after he had thoroughly revamped the very idea of Reason. And Hegel was one of the few traditional philosophers the surrealists admired. If the self-contradiction is anathema to the logical because everything can be deduced from it, it is for that very reason accepted by philosophers looking for the absolute principle of creativity and freedom; to them it appears not as a logical monstrosity, but as the most fecund principle of all.

In spite of the inveterate hatred of the surrealists for anything smacking of religion, one could easily find religiousminded philosophers probing in the same domain. For both Kierkegaard and Chestov, Reason could only envisage the necessary, essential connections, analytic implications, and since freedom cannot exercise itself in a domain of the necessary, the belief in the rationally absurd was itself essential to the life of freedom. Either logic or freedom must cede; this itself was a moral or existential choice, and each choice had its corresponding ontologies. Chestov puts the matter bluntly: for God, either all things are possible or not. And Chestov means “all things” literally, such as obliterating the past, affirming the contradictory. Only if all things are possible for God can the believer in God remain free. But a God for whom all things are possible is isomorphic with that point of consciousness which ceases to perceive the contradictory character of contradictories. Such a point of consciousness is infinite in the strictly Hegelian sense: if the finite is what is limited by its other, or opposite, the infinite is the synthetic union of something with what limits it; incorporating its own limit, it is positively infinite.

But if Hegel sometimes disappears into the abstract, for the surrealists all this was a matter of actual experience. It was not so much a matter of defining the point, as existing here and now within it. They are not, therefore, theoreticians so much as men pursuing that point guided by the surrealist sensibility, perhaps most purely that of Breton himself.

In any event, what I do believe emerges from a consideration of surrealism and philosophy is a point of more general interest, namely, that what we have always and shall continue to deem “real,” the ancient and perpetual pursuit of philosophy, is itself a function of what each man radically chooses, that is, the face which value presents to him. Even in common discourse the “real” is seldom an indifferent matter of fact that can be ascertained by value-free procedures. It almost invariably connotes as well what is ultimately important. And with that connotation we have every right to inspect the notion of “importance” functioning, and every right in principle to bring it before our own freedom, for judgment. And conversely, if reality is made synonymous with mere fact, such that values are something else altogether, that distinction itself rests upon a prior option, which is an option or decision and not itself one more undismissable “fact.”

Ontology from this light ceases to be a species of general science or the neutral reading of facts available to anyone, which reading must inherently claim an interpersonal validity such that one is true and another false. Ontologies are in the last analysis interpretations of Being, which of itself is open to an infinity of interpretations. Which one we dwell with is a function of what we ultimately prize or choose. Ordinary morality discloses the world of ordinary morality with its corresponding ontology; it was therefore necessary for the surrealists to wrench the spirit free of that morality if any credit was to be paid to the ontological domain of the surreal. Between these two particular ontologies, or particular moralities, I think there is no superior criterion; there are only free options. One of these options that particularly appeals to me as the perfect surrealist act is that of seeing the real world itself as the strangest and most marvelous surrealist formation.