This post considers Stephen Dedalus’s notion of “esthetic arrest” from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joseph Campbell’s connection of this idea to the Hindu concept of “maya,” and the development of Joyce’s style in Finnegans Wake.

Near the end of Portrait, Stephen explains his theory to Lynch. Here’s the gist of what he means by esthetic arrest:

You see I use the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.

Lynch’s half-jokingly gives the counterexample that he once “wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?” Stephen replies,

But we are just now in a mental world […] The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really not esthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye. […] In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus of a naked statue, but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens, or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth, prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.

So basically, Stephen says that desire and loathing are reflex actions of a purely animal nature. Improper arts — such as pornography and didacticism (and Campbell adds advertising as a type of pornography) — are not really arts at all because they are just prompting those physical reflexes. But proper art, by using the correct kind of rhythm — by which Stephen means a harmony among all the parts of a work — arrests the mind and stops it. No more does the mind yearn to go toward or away from something, pulled by those animal reflexes. It is raised above them and participates in esthetic apprehension, which is the apprehension of beauty, which involves wholeness, harmony, and radiance (and Stephen borrows Latin terms for them from Thomas Aquinas). These include perceiving the esthetic object as one thing (wholeness or integritas), perceiving it as a collection of parts in proper relation (harmony or consonantia) and then finally perceiving the radiance or claritas, which Stephen defines as the “quidditas, the whatness of a thing.”

This last point will require some explication, and it’s worth quoting Stephen at length:

The connotation of the word [claritas], Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol [my italics here]. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.

This passage starts by contrasting Stephen’s understanding of claritas with what he once thought that Aquinas might have meant by it. Those earlier, and incorrect, understandings include the idea that claritas might be some otherworldly light (which is connected to the belief that the material world is a shadow or somehow lesser), or might be a divine purpose or a force of generalization.

But Stephen decides that claritas is none of those things. Instead, it is the perception of the “whatness” of a thing, which he defines as seeing the object as the thing that it is and not another thing.

To me, this primarily means ceasing to impose irrelevant stories upon it. Our minds are in a constant process of storytelling. Such storytelling constitutes our experience, but it can also greatly diminish and impede the quality of our experience. Too often, people are unable to fully experience their life directly because they are caught in their stories about it. Let’s use a trivial example: say that someone pours a glass of wine. Most people will see not just the wine but also their many, many stories about it: for example, they might be telling themselves that it’s unfortunate that they couldn’t afford a better wine, or telling themselves that it’s not as good a wine as that other guy is enjoying, or reminding themselves that their ex used to enjoy this wine (and the ex, they recall, was an idiot!), or whatever. The exact stories will depend upon the particular mind of the person in question.

Most people have difficulty disentangling the object from their thoughts and feelings about it. They look at the wine and experience a barrage of storytelling, without being consciously aware that their minds are constructing a bunch of unpleasant feelings for them. This state is the opposite of mindfulness: without a proper understanding and practice of mindfulness, people tend to be lost in thought without realizing that they’re lost in thought. People might not even be consciously aware of all their thoughts and feelings — they might just get a general sense of dissatisfaction. Such people look at the wine without really seeing the wine; they drink the wine without really tasting it; they pour and imbibe in the background of their attention, while they are lost in thoughts about their life, without really experiencing the moment.

Mindfulness teaches you that we are all constantly imposing our thoughts on reality, constantly distracting ourselves from our experience. But once you start seeing your thoughts as mere thoughts, you can start to distinguish the wine from the thoughts you overlay on top of it. The wine is the thing that it is, and not some other thing. It’s not, in any ultimate sense, to be compared to some other thing or deemed “better” or “worse” or “disappointing” or a reminder of X or whatever. Each of those thoughts/stories is arbitrary. While our minds can construct some kind of standard and, on that conditional and arbitrary basis, call one thing “better” than another, it makes no sense to speak of “better” or “worse” in absolute terms.

I’ll give another example to illustrate this point. Which is “better”: a desk or an ice cream cone? That question is absurd. Each is better at different things. If I need something to write on, the desk is better at that particular thing. If I need to cool myself down or increase my sugar intake, the ice cream cone is much better at that. But it makes no sense to speak, in the abstract, about one thing being “better” than another. Each thing is just what it is, and is, in and of itself, a wondrous manifestation of the universe.

The same is true of various wines. I could pick a standard by which to compare two wines, and I could declare one better — in that particular category — but absent a standard that I impose on them, it makes no sense to talk of better or worse. Each wine just is what it is and is not what it is not.

Through mindfulness, we can identify and temporarily relinquish the mind’s tendency toward storytelling, toward comparing and preferring and creating connections — and, after we just drop it all, we can truly enjoy the object before us, free from the mental prisons in which we encase it. We appreciate it for being simply what it is, we experience its whatness.

As Joyce puts it in Ulysses, “Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods.” Absolutely any object can be selected and regarded as a piece of art, as a subject of aesthetic comprehension that can “arrest” the mind in this way (and “tease us out of thought,” writes Keats of the Grecian Urn) and bring us not to some other world but a state of eternity in this world.

Now, of course, I’ve also argued that the very idea of “thing-ness” is constructed by our minds as well. This is another sense of “storytelling.” [You can read more about this here, especially my reference to Nietzsche] In regarding an object aesthetically, I think we should first recognize that it is not the stories we tell about it. Then, we can recognize that the object’s status as a single, whole thing (its integritas) is itself a kind of story that we impose upon the flux of Becoming (for a fascinating discussion of this, see Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, section 5 of “‘Reason’ in Philosophy”). Ultimately, these insights also undo the idea that the self is a single thing that is somehow separate from the flux around us. All of reality is necessary, and none of it is ultimately separate. As I put it in the post I linked to in this paragraph, “making contact with the ‘inner light’ of things involves comprehending the necessity of all things and and their dependence on all other things for their existence.” How’s that for claritas?

It is no coincidence that Stephen refers to Shelley’s image of the fading coal here in Portrait and does so again in Ulysses when speculating about the mystical relationship of Father and Son, which I have argued represent, respectively, the flux of the universe and the artistic creations made on the back of that flux (both formal works of art and informal creations of “things” and “self image” in everyday life).

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I first encountered Joyce’s idea of esthetic arrest in reading Joseph Campbell, who discussed it in some of his lectures that are excerpted in A Joseph Campbell Companion. In one such discussion of Joyce, Campbell connects the distinction between improper and proper art to the difference between the “projecting power” and “revealing power” of the Hindu concept of “maya” (or illusion).

Briefly, Hindu philosophy considers manifest reality to be an illusion that masks a divine essence. The “projecting power” of maya is the creation of these illusionary impressions and ideas that conceal divine reality from us. Meanwhile, Campbell says that it is the “function of art and scripture, ritual and meditation, to make known” the “revealing power,” in which the illusion lets the divine light through. Campbell compares the projecting power to white light being broken by a prism, the divine dividing into a multitude of manifest forms that hide the ultimate reality; he likens the revealing power to putting the various colors on a wheel and spinning them to get white light again.

Though he doesn’t cite Finnegans Wake there specifically, I feel confident he got that image from the end of the Wake, the competition between St. Patrick and the Druid (as well as the image of rainbows in Finnegans Wake).

The idea of the divine becoming divided into manifestation does not need to be interpreted in a supernatural or “woo woo” way. One can interpret it as consistent with the notion that the flux of reality is clothed by our minds in the idea that there exist separate “things,” and further with the notion that we tell ourselves various stories about these “things.” I would quibble with the idea that the flux is “ultimate reality” — just because unity and division are different ways of looking at the same thing, and one is not “more real” than the other. But either way, the point is that no one has to accept unevidenced beliefs to accept this framework.

Later, Campbell links these powers of maya to Joyce’s kinds of art (improper vs. proper) with an interesting example. I find myself in disagreement with the way it’s phrased here, or rather with one obvious way Campbell’s words could be misinterpreted here. Let me quote part of it first:

One application of the artist’s craft is in doing something like making a turkey dinner, another is in creating art that is of no use whatsoever except esthetically. When I use the word “art,” it has to do with “divinely superfluous beauty” and esthetic arrest. There’s no esthetic arrest in eating a turkey. That’s life in action, doing what it has to do, namely eating something that’s been killed, putting it into your system. It’s totally different from esthetic arrest and recognizing the radiance. Are you going to look at the object or eat it? Eating the object is related to desire and loathing.

The distinction between the two has to do with whether it is the projecting power of maya or the revealing power that is present when you look at the object. It’s very important to make a clear distinction between the two. If you’re concerned with prospering or failing with the object, eating or not eating it, your perspective involves desire and loathing, the temptations of the Buddha, the projecting power of maya.

Initially, I was going to write that I entirely disagree with Campbell’s implication that one cannot have an experience of esthetic arrest (or enlightenment) while eating food or otherwise fulfilling one’s desires. He seems to be saying that enlightenment is “over there,” in contemplation and meditation and withdrawal from the world, and is separate from the everyday world of wanting things and working to get them and enjoying them.

But upon reading it more closely in context, I actually don’t think he means that. Immediately he goes on to say that esthetic arrest is connected to a “change in focus,” and that esthetic arrest enables you to see, in the words of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, that “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” From the point of view of “esthetic stasis,” he says shortly,

you’ll understand about withdrawing fear and desire for what happens, and about samsara being nirvana, the still point in the midst of the turning world. That’s all there is to it. The world becomes a display of things from which you are disengaged, and yet, voluntarily, you can become engaged: “joyous participation in the sorrows of the world.” It is very different from being compulsively linked.

[samara means the “cycle of birth and death,” the rough equivalent of maya in some Buddhist traditions; nirvana means enlightenment and the escape from the cycle]

So, reading this over, I don’t think at all that Campbell means that enlightenment can only be had when restraining desire. He means that there’s a difference between, on the one hand, being “compulsively linked” to our desires — which is to live while being caught in the thoughts of success or failure or measuring yourself against some similarly arbitrary goal — and, on the other, being free to enjoy things for what they are without the imposition of our stories upon things (or, rather, without being distracted by those stories).

This world is Heaven, the Kingdom of the Father. This world, with all of its cycles of generations and desires, is nirvana/enlightenment. Freedom from the cycles of birth and death is found within the cycles of birth and death. Eating that turkey dinner is enlightenment. You just have to learn to see it the correct way.

We in the West sometimes learn versions of Eastern philosophies like Buddhism that aren’t necessarily complete understandings of the whole tradition — partially due to translation issues, partially because some of the views in those systems are alien to us, and partially because it’s easy to oversimplify things. As a child, I certainly learned that Buddhism teaches that suffering comes from desire (that is, from the fact that we want things) and that the solution to suffering is to stop desiring, which basically amounts to an ascetic resignation from life. And perhaps there are indeed practicing Buddhists who believe exactly this. On this interpretation, Buddhism is all about giving up desire, which means, in an ideal practice, moving to a cave, eating bland food, and spending your whole life staring at a wall.

I don’t hold to that interpretation at all. I think it’s a mistranslation or misapplication to condemn desire in the simple sense of wanting things. My interpretation of Buddhism is not that it teaches us to stop wanting things but to stop grasping for permanence and to stop imagining that any object or achievement is an end in itself. I once put it this way, while I was holding a glass of wine: “Buddhism isn’t really about giving up desire, in the way we’d normally understand those words. It’s about not being attached to desire or its outcomes. See, I can look at this wine and want to drink it and enjoy it. And I can do it without needing the pleasure to be permanent or thinking it will solve all my problems or make me permanently happy.”

To add to this, using Campbell’s language above, I can also enjoy it and my desire for it without being “compulsively linked” to my desire, without being automatically caught in the thought that drinking the wine is an end in itself, and/or is of supreme importance. If something prevents me from drinking it, I’m not going to be crushed. In the same way, I can experience unpleasant things, and want to ease the unpleasantness and take steps to do so, without needing to be permanently free of it, without thinking the unpleasantness is a calamity. I can enjoy things — seeking pleasure and avoiding displeasure, within reason, recognizing that both are necessary and unavoidable on some level — without being attached to a particular outcome. Elsewhere, Campbell describes this joyful participation in the sorrows of the world as a kind of “play.” Follow your bliss, do the things that make you happy, work for the changes you want to see in the world…but do it playfully, unattached to thoughts of success or failure. So yes, if it fulfills you, work to make the world a better place, go out and protest against injustice, fight to change unfair systems, etc. But do it all with a sense of play, with an understanding that, regardless of whether you succeed or fail by some arbitrary criteria, everything is already radiance — everything is what it is, a wondrous manifestation of the flux of Becoming.

In esthetic arrest, Campbell puts it, “the world (beheld without judgement of its relevance to the well-being of the observer) is recognized as a revelation sufficient in itself.” This world, in all of its imperfections, is enough.

Another way to put all of this is, cultivate the apathy of the stars.

One way to think of everything that I’ve been writing about here is that art can induce an experience that is equivalent to, or at least akin to and conducive to, what is called enlightenment or selflessness in spiritual traditions. We can conceive all of this in a dualistic way — where aesthetic experience and spirituality is thought of as separate from the world and its desires — or in a nondualistic way — where such experience can be seen as a way of shifting our view into one of accepting the world as a sufficient experience.

I suspect that the young James Joyce started out with views closer to a dualistic interpretation and, over time, came into a nondualistic one, which ultimately blossomed into expression as Finnegans Wake. His lectures in Portrait read to me like someone satirizing his younger self: before my recent re-read of Portrait, I had forgotten how often Stephen’s serious statements or theories are undercut by a joke. For example: “But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and Aquinas can do?” Or when Stephen talks about “press[ing] out” an “image of beauty” “from the gross earth or what it brings forth,” he and Lynch walk along a tree-lined towpath and a “smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the course of Stephen’s thought.” He’s got this sort of dualistic view that separates the “gross earth” from art, but the narrator tips us off that the earthy smells around him are a counterexample.

The questions Stephen poses for himself suggest a dualistic approach, one that can’t yet fully accept as art the material world, the gross things it brings forth, and its desires: “Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see it? […] Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work of art?”

He’s a young man who’s still figuring out what he thinks. When we see him again in Ulysses, he’s getting closer to grasping the importance of the flux of the material world, especially in Chapters 3 and 9, and a major catalyst for his further artistic growth is his meeting with Leopold Bloom. In fact, I wonder if I should go back and read Ulysses 16-17 as the climax of Stephen’s growth in these novels.

For James Joyce — the real-life Stephen Dedalus — the fulfillment of his artistic growth is Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, which embrace the messy materiality of the world. The Wake especially explores the turning of generations, the turning of life and death and life again, the cycles of fall and rise in each of us and across history, the cycles of desire and frustration and more desire, and it communicates powerful lessons. Looking back over this blog, I’m impressed by how I put it in this post:

the same cycle that is unsatisfying when seen from one perspective can be infinitely satisfying if we accept that everything in it is impermanent; if we accept that there are no eternal things, or stable “things” at all; if we stop insisting that things in it “have to” be a certain way for us to be happy ; if we stop insisting that certain things “shouldn’t be” (since every part of reality depends on the rest of it); if we start embracing the nature of things as change, without grasping onto part of it and trying to insist that it never change or go.

I’m reminded of what Blake wrote:

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise

All is impermanent. Everything flies away. Enjoy it while it’s here, and kiss it as it flies. Art can help us get into this mindset, and this mindset can help us produce more art.