2. The Eonic Effect:
Climbing
Mt. Improbable
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| 2.6.3 Art, Evolution And The Tragic Genre | ||||
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The historian William
MacNeill, in Keeping Together in Time
, considers the element of dance and song
in human evolution. But this process is right under our noses if we carefully do
some accounting of relative transforms in our eonic pattern. Most ‘song and
dance’ elements are well established in the human legacy and cease to show
relative transformation. We need to find one that is inside the eonic
mainline, what we will call an eonic emergent. We can see that the eonic pattern
is pervaded by spectacular cases of artistic flowering. Here is a prime case for
our distinctions made between what is potential at all times and what appears in
our macroevolutionary pattern. We can in fact isolate one spectacular
intermittent effect in the genre of Greek tragedy
(whose
‘song and dance’ elements are almost vestigial, as it passes into a literary
genre). Its relevance to our ‘evolution of freedom’ is direct. And the
suspicious similarity of the ‘tragic theme’ to the issues of religious evolution
should alert us to the importance of the issue. The potential to create art,
acts of purpose, and will, and the freedom to ‘screw up’, closely resemble each
other. This is a complex subject, but our remarks will be restricted to
periodization, and it also true that the example of the tragic genre, although
of special interest, is only one of a whole range.[i] As we move to create
a model we need to remind ourselves that aesthetic issues are a still more
complex domain beyond even the ethical ones we find lacking in causal thinking.
Later we will look at the philosopher Kant, and there find it no accident his
Newtonian musings split into three critiques, one each for the causal, ethical,
and aesthetic modes, with an ambiguous fourth as to the teleological. As a token
of the complexity of (eonic) evolution we can notice the issue of the evolution
of art embedded in our data. Note that, from a high-level view, seen in
retrospect, we can see that as the Axial interval switches on somewhere ca. –900
a whole series of literatures start coming into existence, accomplished by –400
at the latest. Nothing in this preempts later contributions, but the relative
effect is unmistakable, occurs simultaneously in five or more areas
independently, and shows feats never matched even today. Note especially the
sequence from the Iliad to Greek tragedy, which suddenly appears very
briefly. This kind of data is beyond analysis in current science, yet simple
periodization forces a paradox. We are approaching a crisis of analytical
concepts. The difficulty of the tragic genre makes its appearance ultra-rare,
and as it happens it sandbanks inside our pattern. Note how Greek drama
(comedy/tragedy) is confected out of ‘song and dance situations’, in tribal
traditions of dance and choral verse, and complex poetic lore. This point can be
exaggerated, but the data is sufficient to open a discussion (and even include
the quite different example of Judaic, and other, literature). In fact, that
lead up is not very much, and the genre simply appears like an apparition (as
far as we can make out), with the epic as a clear precursor. A similar effect is
visible in the Old Testament era before the exile, as a complex literature comes
into existence based in part on received texts, and new additions in the
immediate prior time frame. This case is interesting because its redactors
explicitly noticed a termination or cutoff in the emergence process, e.g. by
about –400, and created redactions of the material. Nietzsche puzzled over the
sudden cutoff in Greek tragedy. He cites the factor of rationalism, but isn’t
the issue the rapid falloff of ‘eonic determination’? We usually take the Old
Testament as a religious document, but fail to notice the almost exact
synchronous emergence of two literatures in Axial concert. We should note that
more primitive men often had a sense that their arts were not subject to
arbitrary volition. The question is highly complex. We need not just examples of
art, but an example of relative transformation sandbanked inside the eonic
effect. The genre of tragedy gives a good example, especially cogent because it
shows direct eonic correlation, appeared in a great flash in a short spree, and
then died out in the middle period, a strong hint of system action behind the
scenes. The problem is that this case is tough, it is beyond our powers of
analysis. Please note this thinking is self-referentially about the evolution of
freedom (man and his ‘fate’), and, further, the freedom to produce art, not the
evolutionary generation of art deterministically. This is both clearly visible
and beyond our powers of analysis by an order of magnitude. But there is no
contradiction here. Any agent with a large investment fund creates a field of
potential creative action not deterministically realized. In any case, we can
see that Greek tragedy as a social construct is in the mainline of the eonic
sequence
. This example is useful because we are
not distracted by the religious issues of the Old Testament. Directly comparable
examples are occurring in In general, let us
note that our ‘evolution of some kind’ seems able to leave great art in its
wake, as a matter of relative transformation, i.e. in the intermittent series
visible as the eonic effect
. Please note what we mean, the potential for art already exists
in man and occurs in every generation but at a relatively higher degree of
contingency, the random distribution of genius. Here we see our ‘evolution’
inducing a spectacular clustering period of the highest art, e.g. Greek Tragedy,
with or without the factor of genius, against (to some degree) the element of
contingency. Later periods can’t continue this because they don’t understand it. This ‘evolution’ doesn’t just generate art, it generates relative transforms seen in periods of higher, the highest, level of art. Yet human creativity is never violated. We know this only by periodization and careful accounting of time periods. Therefore this ‘evolution’ operates at some higher level than the highest level of art. The same could be said of philosophy or religion. Shall we go on? Darwinian stock is starting to collapse. We have several million years of coarse-grained observation of Darwinian evolution, and five thousand years of fine-grained observation of some other ‘evolution’. Are the two the same, or did one pass into the other, and if so, when? |
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