Art, Science and Philosophy as the Levels of Spirituality

This page is meant to be a brief introduction outlining the fundamental distinction that is so often overlooked by artists, scientists and philosophers themselves. As any distinction, it serves to understand the place of each level in the human culture, and hence its necessity for the integrity of the whole.

Experience ® Spirituality ® Praxis

This triad says that human spirituality (as a level of active reflection) grows from experience into praxis, and therefore it must manifest two opposite aspects, interfacing it with experience and practice, as well as an intermediate level, which unites the both poles being the most far from immediate interaction with reality. Thus, the hierarchy of spirituality implies the levels of art, science and philosophy.

Of course, these three components cannot be formed at once. Originally, spirituality is syncretic, with many different elements merged together. This primitive form of spirituality is related to religion. Saying “primitive” I do not mean that religion is simple — I merely indicate its place in the history of spirituality. Some religions may be simple, some not — up to most elaborate religious systems. Still, all of them are primitive, that is, preceding self-conscious spirituality as such. Religious attitude to some aspect of reality means lack of comprehension, and it is nothing else than a childish refusal to deal with things that cannot be grasped at once.

Also, spirituality's transformation into praxis implies a synthetic level, where art, science and philosophy become fused in universal creativity, directed to building the world anew.

Art, science and philosophy as the levels of spirituality do not imply any specialization. It is only in certain social conditions that these three ways of reflexion become separate occupations, and eventually professions. However, being a professional artist does not guarantee one's ability to creating true art, as well as being a philosopher does not make one wiser that the other people.

Art

The characteristic feature of art is that it “translates” experience into a spiritual form. This representation would suppress unnecessary details refining the universal content of any event — consequently, art is essentially abstraction, it cannot and should not imitate nature. The apparent similarity of realistic art to actual life still assumes that art is different from it, and artistic truth has nothing to do with imitation.

However, the way of abstraction from immediate experience that is characteristic of art is inseparable from experience itself. There are no specifically artistic activities, and any activity may become art when work requires more than ordinary skill. That is, perfection is the basic aesthetic category, distinguishing art from any other activity.

Now, the abstract nature of art becomes clearer: since no common experience can be perfect enough, activity has to be “refined” to achieve perfection and thus reveal its universal core. The idea of a perfect experience is the elementary construction block of any art, an artistic image.

Since art is grows “from within experience”, and any person should seek for an individual way to perfection, nobody can learn, or teach art. One may study the history of arts, the techniques of some artists, the traditional patterns of work — this cannot make one an artist. Aesthetic education is useful for general development, and thus enhances creativity, but it cannot suggest any recipes of extracting the eternal from the transient.

Science

When one has collected a number of primary ideas provided by art, one can build new ideas on the basis of the already known, without direct reference to experience. This level of spirituality is called science.

Scientific ideas are relatively more abstract, since they are related to reality through many intermediate stages. However, this also makes them more universal, and thus applicable to a wide range of apparently incomparable situations. Science abstracts itself from the subject itself, and this open way to universal propagation of scientific ideas, since everybody can be taught any science.

Still, scientific knowledge is as far from complete comprehension of the world as artistic imagination. Art and science are two complementary kinds of abstraction, they are equally necessary for spiritual integrity, though this integrity can only be achieved through the synthesis of the both.

Philosophy

Scientific ideas derived in a chain of formal conclusions are void unless they can be somehow imagined. On the other side, an artistic image cannot be comprehended without preliminary training, which associates one image with another thus making it similar to a scientific notion. In this way, art and science penetrate each other, and their unity forms one more level of spirituality called philosophy.

The two kinds of abstraction characterizing the distinction of Art and Science annihilate themselves in Philosophy, which is concrete. That is, the way of synthesis provided by Philosophy is abstraction from abstraction, the idea of application. Philosophy is governed by the necessity of finding possible applications for any abstraction, correlating it with reality. When abstractness of application itself is removed, philosophy grows into praxis.

Related categories

Every level of the hierarchy formed be art, science and philosophy implies its own hierarchy of categories. However, reflectivity makes these hierarchies similar to each other, so that one could consider a number of "parallel" triads:

For an analogy from programming, one could recall the basic triad of LISP operators: QUOTE, EVAL, APPLY.

The above table is far from presenting a well established scheme, but rather to give a hint to what could be expected in this direction. The categories have been listed at random, without any logical order, and their hierarchical relations are to be discussed elsewhere; without such an analysis, this table can only convey a preliminary idea of the difference between art, science and philosophy, which, however, may be enough for general orientation. It should also be stressed that no word of a natural or artificial language can convey the ideas behind philosophical categories - words do not exist outside their context, and they can mean quite different (and even opposite) things in different situations.

Within each level, one can find the reflection of all the three; thus, in philosophy, there are such clearly distinct directions of thought as aesthetics, logic and ethics, which are often considered as a triad of philosophical disciplines.

The universality of ideality

Human spirituality is the highest level of the ideality in general. Any reality in the world is the unity of the material and the ideal sides, and thus the ideal component is necessarily present in everything, though assuming different forms on different levels of reflexivity. The lowest, existential level of ideality is characterized by all-penetrating syncretism, and that is why most philosophies do not distinguish reality from matter, or reflection. On the level of life, a living thing becomes opposed to all the non-living things, and its ideality becomes analytical. The polarity of inanimate and living things is reflected in the idea of the soul.

Logically, there must be a synthetic level, where ideality will not stand against the rest of the world, while never being syncretically merged with it. This means that human activity, remaining individual, may acquire a universal significance, thus making a single person a representative of the whole world. This universal core of the ideal is spirituality as introduced above.

The universality inherent to spirituality leads to many important implications. First, not any behavior may be called human (that is, spiritual), but only such kinds of behavior that are universal in some respect. Consequently, it is unimportant for human activity, in which organic forms it will be implemented. In other words, the spirit is not bounded to the body, and not “contained” in it — rather, individual spirit is nothing but the individualized unity of the world.

The second point naturally follows: the play of imagination, forms or aspirations (which is commonly associated with art, science and philosophy) has nothing to do with spirituality while it only reflects something specific or individual; true spirituality begins when one's activity is to express an objective necessity, the unity of many partial wills. For instance, professional artists may be extremely skillful in designing new arrangements of forms — still, few of these combinations reflect the universal in human activity, thus becoming the instances of art. In the same way, the skills of a professional scientist or philosopher do not imply the ability to develop science or philosophy. Professional education gives one a collection of tools and techniques, but it cannot make one more spiritual.