To think like the shoreline

One of the major problems in today’s culture also lies in the trivialization of aesthetics into a simple and reductive inquiry concerning beauty, suggestiveness, the purity of the moment, and all that other hippie nonsense.

If we look more closely, however, the beauty of aesthetics (understood philosophically, and therefore also etymologically as aisthesis, and not as #aesthetics under some post) becomes the study of the point of encounter between thought and sensibility, between meaning and sensation, between sense and perception, between judgment and world.

It is that part of thinking that, precisely in order to be thinking, cannot detach itself from experience, from practice; the part that scholars would call praxis in its Aristotelian sense: an activity that has no external end but coincides with the very experience of doing and feeling; thought that becomes gesture, theory that becomes touch, knowledge that happens through action.

Its terrain is closer to that of the sea than of the soil. To define it—meaning to enclose it—inevitably means losing a part of it, probably the most important one: its constitutive fluidity. To define it completely would mean blocking its disruptive innovative power, which, through its dynamism, rejects the a priori aimed at dominating and simplifying the surprise that reality inevitably imposes on the conscious and unconscious experience of each of us.

Aesthetics is therefore a point of encounter, and thus nothing but a way of relating to existence in an immanent and not a transcendent mode—one that delights in the unexpected and feeds on the contradictory limits of what we perceive. It is in wanting to exceed those limits, with full awareness of the impossibility of doing so, that one can authentically enjoy a kind of thinking that can—and must—call itself alive, in motion, always with an ear inclined (not prostrated) toward the contingent, toward the coming-into-being of things that escapes the eyes of rationality.

And beware: contradictory, in aesthetics, is not the opposite of coherent; but coherence risks becoming contradiction when it hardens into law, when it imposes itself as rule. In fact, rules anticipate, but creativity always escapes from where one least expects it.

Aesthetics, then, can only be a form of doing-knowing (poiein/gnosein), one that maintains its wild origin, in which theory and practice become a unity that is never fully attainable, never completely graspable with certainty by the hands and minds of any subject whatsoever. If it were graspable, it could only rise to the level of technique, thereby losing its most proper characteristic: wonder, what the Greeks called thauma.

If we, promoters of the possible and critics of the everyday, truly believe in the revolutionary power of culture, our thinking must want to be aesthetic, for it is this very idea of non-total control and non-domination of reality that wants to become the engine of our inquiry and our commitment to designing and actualizing another way of living.

Having said something so overblown, the questions are indeed more than one: I would say at least two are important to address within the space of this short and presumptuous reflection.

The first: how do we give form to ideas?

And—crucially—the second: who are the madmen, the idiots, who believe in such things? (Since today only such a person believes that the possible is truly possible and not merely a dream.)

Giving form to ideas (always in the sense of a thinking that recognizes itself as intrinsically weak, never capable of reaching the totality of its expectations and presuppositions) means recognizing their partiality and constitutive paradoxicality: saying something is killing it, because it freezes it, and thus extracts it from contact with the ontological flow of the whole.

It means separating any given thing from the countless and mutable relations with the environment to which everything is indebted; indeed, in a single judgment, how could all the perspectives that compose any phenomenon ever be contained?

To give form non-violently therefore means, above all, renouncing the idea of an endpoint, of a process that accomplishes itself once and for all, of reaching exhaustive and therefore simplifying knowledge.

And I think it is worth reiterating: aesthetic thought is that branch of thinking that seeks to distance itself from the absolute, privileging that continuous exchange with the real that, each time, surrounds us.

With this, we can reconnect to the second question.

The idiot is the one who knows how to move within his own powerlessness and who manages to transform it into an opportunity to complete himself with others—or, more correctly, with the Other.

He is the one who is secure in his own incompleteness, who genuinely knows that he does not know; who suffers this in its most intimate and bodily sense; who recognizes it and finds it in every fiber of his body; who breathes it each time he is about to spit out any judgment about the world.

And so, dear friends, if we truly intend to change even a little bit the rules of this sick game in which we are immersed, these reflections cannot be absent from the way we relate to one another.

And, since the aim is not merely to produce thoughts, we cannot allow ourselves to leave them as such: they would turn into pure masturbation.

Finding ways to give them a concrete and tangible form is the only challenge that—if a god exists—has been given to us.

Half-jokingly we might say that a certain history of humanity has (rightly or wrongly) been this very challenge, and that through it the most virtuous heights and the most degrading depths have been reached.

Perhaps someone needs to begin taking it seriously again; and who, if not the madmen and idiots who have no intention of legitimizing this world and the way it continues to be treated?

Disheveled spirits of every kind, we must consider ourselves capable of undertaking such a trial with strength and courage.

To think only—meaning to enclose oneself in a thousand castles made of pure theory—is, in the end, not to believe in thought itself and in its greatest, and therefore also most dangerous, faculty: transforming the existent.

And if we want to bring about real change, we cannot content ourselves with repeating such thoughts to one another: if we cannot give them consistency, we are simply fooling ourselves.

This also means, “plainly,” making them concrete in the way we organize our days: this is a battlefield we cannot abdicate, since much of the world’s evil also arises from the way it has been ordered, from the form and hierarchy through which relations between beings have been established.

Indeed, structuring them in a certain way allows us to save ourselves from the risk of losing certain impulses, and to ensure that almost by themselves these thoughts can emerge from a practice, from a concrete mutual relating; in doing so, we ensure that it is practice that becomes the generator and safeguard of a kind of thinking, of a theory that wants to question the logics of this world.

Earlier we spoke of the sea, but perhaps, to unfold this thought more clearly while remaining anchored to the conceptual and imaginary field of the liquid and the mutable, more than the sea we should speak of that ever-moving line that forms—and in fact is—the shoreline.

That boundary that knows no rest between sea and coast, shifted by the infinite co-implication of forces and opposites; a limit moved by the moon and its tides, by the rotation of the Earth and the gravity of the Sun, by earthquakes and storms, by soil erosion and climate warming, by our constructions and establishments of every kind.

This powerful way of signifying the line, this way of being confused with the whole, is a great opportunity for a kind of thinking that wants to coexist not only with opposites, but with the multiplicity of opposites; a thinking that maintains the partition intrinsic to the human ability to discern (to create compartments, to draw lines, to distinguish), but that expands it in a way not strictly logical and resolutive, not according to dichotomy nor according to the rules of language that seek to stabilize a real that gives itself only through its movement and transience.

Concerning the future—and its nature as plurality and co-involvement—any staticity that seeks being-defined, and thus being-distant and distinct (rather than continuously defining and redefining), is its greatest enemy.

Obviously these are only words: the shoreline is surely only a quick metaphor; the attempt, however, is to expose a way of being human that stops feeling so human (“human, all too human,” as a friend of ours said), that is, to show how many of our thoughts that we deem necessary are such only because of a certain way of being human, a way evident in relation to a certain history, a certain mode of production that imposes itself on nature and others, that takes the easiest, already beaten path instead of searching for a new one.

Well: our mad challenge, if we truly believed in ourselves and in humanity, should be that of building differently; building not on land, as we have always done, nor on the shoreline, as some have done, but on the sea—or better yet, with the sea, and perhaps even—metaphor permitting—like the sea.

Since it is from the sea that the richest and most differentiated architecture the universe could offer us was born: Life.

A kind of thinking and doing, then, that sees in difficulty and impediment its own material, its own strength: the weapon that allows improvement, forcing us never to be only ourselves, small and closed like shells, but to challenge that metaphysical “self” that proves to be nothing but a particularly sterile limit when faced with the extraordinary creativity of the living.

Thought is a bit larger when it does not remain solely in the solitude of one’s own head, but when it happens between us and the world; when it intertwines with that whole of which we are all made.

In this shared happening, in this thinking that belongs to no one yet passes through us, we can recognize its most vivid and most ours expression.

And perhaps, on this note, we can truly take our leave: knowing that thinking does not end here, but continues to move in the world, among us, like the sea along its restless line.

When we’ll learn to think like the shoreline, we will finally be able to build upon the sea.