Ivakhiv on Artmonks and Deliberate Creativity

Adrian Ivakhiv has a interesting post up discussing the relationship between a deliberate, monastic way of life and the inherent creativity of artistic modes of being. As someone who has been seeking to move more and more towards living “off the grid’ in recent years, the modes of life and worldly-perception Adrian describes is deeply appealing.

Below is an excerpt, but do read the entire post (here):

If Thoreau’s quest to “live deliberately [...] and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” were cross-bred with A. N. Whitehead’s insight that creativity is the driving core of all things in the universe, the “universal of universals,” then today’s “artmonks” are children not of Marx and Coca-Cola (as Godard once labeled the activists of the 1960s and Xiaoping Lin more recently called the Chinese artistic avant-garde), but children of Thoreau and Whitehead.

The monastic ideal has always been about living deliberately. And in a world that is rapidly outgrowing the secular-religious divide — becoming simultaneously post-secular, for those outgrowing the constraints of secularism, and post-religious, or at least post-traditional, for those no longer in obeisance to inherited religion — monasticism today is reinventing itself in interesting and creative ways. “Artmonks” are those who bring a mindful deliberation and dedication to the creative process, following it wherever it leads them. They are the monks of immanence, post-traditional devotees synthesizing the vita contemplativa with the vita activa in an age of Burning Man and the internet.

Adrian goes on to provide a list of people who seem to work from this context, and then briefly discusses C.S Peirce’s later thoughts about a sequence of emergence in aesthetic, ethical and logical experiences. Go check it out here

UPDATE: the following exchange took place in the comments on Adrian’s post:

MICHAEL: Beauty (aesthetics), Goodness (ethics) and Truth (eco-logics), by any other name… Although, what justification does Pierce give for positing a hierarchical order to these? I think these forces co-arise together in a world where the embodied mental, material (in an all inclusive sense), and the social co-occur simultaneously. An inventory of what is available within hominid experience suggests the ever-presence of all three.

ADRIAN: You’re probably right. I’m just trying to work through Peirce’s notion (which he only came to hold in his later years, it seems) that there is an order or sequence in their emergence. It’s not a hierarchy, but rather a priority and dependency, and it follows from the fact that meaning (thirdness) arises out of the mediation of relations (secondness, actuality), and that before there are relations between any two things, there are those two things prior to their being related or even actualized (firstness, virtuality). The aesthetic moment, at least in this reading of Peirce, comes at our encountering the thing in its firstness (or as close as we can get to that, since once we’ve encountered it, it’s already a second). That thing, of course, can already be its own second- and/or thirdness: e.g., if it’s another entity (human or otherwise), then it is already it’s own sign (3dness) and already related to and dependent on others (2dness). But in the relationship between me and it, my ability to make sense of it (logos, truth) is dependent on my encounter with and response to it (ethos, conduct) which is in turn dependent on the form it takes independent of me (aesthetikos, beauty).

So this is a kind of slice into the 1st-2nd-3rd sequence of emergence. But you are right that all three are always interacting in the holistic/composite flow of experience.

MICHAEL: I like the notion of emergent worlds/perspectives and the understanding of extended levels of activity taking on new relationships. ‘Firstness’, perhaps, being the primordial suchness from which all reality flows; ‘secondness’ being the differentiation (actualization) and emergence of coalescent assemblages; and ‘thirdness’ as recursive systems and ‘signification’ (all the way up to the symbolic). There are many ways to imagine the unfolding of cosmic contingency and Peirce’s seems as though it has its merits.