Forewords to Drinking Lightning and Promethean Flames by Philip Rubinov Jacobson

Foreword to Drinking Lightning by Philip Rubinov Jacobson
written by Ken Wilber
 

Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multiple, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the Sublime, the Transcendent, the Beautiful, the Spiritual. Art is a window to God, an opening to the Goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamt of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of Spirit, through which the Sublime can reach down to us, and we up to It, and be transfigured and transformed in the process. Art, at its best, is the representation of your very own soul, a reminder of who and what you truly are, and therefore can become.
 

Philip Rubinov-Jacobson is a true artist, one in whom the Sublime is at work. But, as Phil explains in this book, the spiritual impulse—the artistic impulse—is at work in every act of creativity. Art can be a way to awaken that creative and spiritual process, and hone it to a fine degree. That is what Phil has done in his own life, and what he shows the reader how to do in the following pages.
 

This is a wonderful book, ripe with the wisdom of an artist in whom the creative fire is alive, touched by the Gods and Goddesses of a realm that the conventional mind too often fails to see, enraptured by the vision of a beauty too painful to pronounce. Art, as the eye of Spirit, is the royal road to your own soul, and this book is nothing less than a road map for that extraordinary adventure.
 

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Foreword to Promethean Flames by Philip Rubinov Jacobson
written by Michael Schwartz
 

Promethean Flames, the second in Philip Rubinov Jacobson’s trilogy of books on art and spirituality, is a groundbreaking theoretical and impassioned reflection on the highest calling of the visual arts.  Jacobson, a practicing painter and spiritual adept, picks up and develops the best of post-Romantic views on the spiritual in art while laying to the side all the non-sense that circulates today as commonsensical truth about art and artists.  This is not only a wise and compassionate book -- it is singular.
 

Seen from one angle, the book’s argument turns on a novel account of art’s history.  In this presentation there are two levels of being each with distinctive forms of historical time: (1) developments within the everyday gross-realm that, since the time of the Judaic tale of the Golden Calf, have periodically dulled the full glory of visual art (as with repeated iconoclasms); and (2) a stream of art-making drawing upon and expressing more subtle realms of being, this unfolding less unidirectional, more “cyclical,” and involving a trans-generational community of artist-shamans and –sages communicating with each other across the ages.  While visual artists necessarily participate explicitly in the first stream of art history, not all do so in the second.  And while the latter’s dimensions are deeper and more significant, gross-realm developments are more fundamental and as such condition the possibility and effectiveness of the making and reception of any art aspiring to express the transpersonal.
 

Continuing this account we see that beginning in the Renaissance, taking off with Romanticism, and flowering with Modernism, art has been called upon with a new directness to express and engage our ultimate concern with spirit.  This increased call for art to serve developmental and spiritual ends is one of the many dignities of post/modernity -- achieved, in the main, through the unprecedented growth through what Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, and Ken Wilber have called the “differentiation of value spheres”: the state, religion, the economy, science, and other domains becoming differentiated from one another, each developing distinct practices, methods, theories, languages, institutions, and enhanced capacities.  Art, once embedded in non-art contexts such as religion and politics, also became its own socio-cultural domain through the institutions of exhibition art, spectatorial performance music, and literature.  Coupled with (1) the rise in the overall stage development of the populous into more rational and post-rational waves, (2) the differentiation and de-centering of religious institutions from state apparatuses, and (3) declining belief in a pre-modern sky God, ultimate concern became refracted and dispersed throughout the various value-spheres: secular politics as the means of creating a more just society; scientific progress as a vehicle of human self-determination; art as a means for healing our souls and pointing us to spirit.  In sum, historical developments since the Renaissance have provided the conditions for growing number of artists to explore with depth and directness higher spiritual states.
 

For all its dignity, post/modernity has had its down side, largely due to the non-integration of the newly differentiated values spheres, leading to specific domains – in particular, the economy, administrative apparatuses, and scientific research aimed towards unending technological upgrades – growing disproportionately in relation to the others, acting as if they were the organizing whole, dominating and “colonizing” the other domains, collapsing healthy public spheres of rational-ethical reflection as well as marginalizing advanced art and aesthetic experience, the resultant imbalances and dissociations engendering pathological modes of historically-constituted experience that always already, behind our backs, invest our ways of life.
 

Attuned to these historical pathologies, early modern philosophers and theorists regularly turned to art and aesthetic experience as the means for re-harmonizing the form of experience.  Wilber, however, has argued astutely that art as a differentiated domain could no more accomplish this re-integration than any of the respective value spheres, as it too is only a part of the whole.  But what advanced art can do -- as we learn in this book -- is create worlds that show us what more integrated forms of life can look like.  Art, as embedded in a specific value domain and institutional matrices (and primarily engendering aesthetic inquiry as opposed to moral reflection or scientific research), cannot itself perform the integration; but art, in its showing us worlds that shine with the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, can model and inspire what more integrated forms of life might look like. Thus, not only is advanced art today called to point us to the direct experience of higher spiritual states and realms, but it can offer models of healthy, integrated ways of being in the world: the twin-challenge of integral art.
 

Jacobson is not only keenly attuned to and brilliantly articulate about the extraordinary possibilities for art today, he also sees clearly how art has by no means simply side-stepped post/modernity’s pathologies.  He distinguishes three principle modes of visual art: (1) postmodern exhibition art of the gallery and museum; (2) the spectacular displays of mass culture; and (3) a growing domain, on the margins and dispersed (so perhaps not quite yet a social sub-system), of integral art and artists.  (It is instructive in this regard to compare this tri-fold scheme to the three modern spheres of music discussed by Theodor Adorno is his remarkable 1938 essay “On the Fetish-Character of Music and the Regression of Listening.”)
 

Today the two predominant spheres of art -- that of the mainstream postmodern museum or gallery (advanced exhibition art) and that of a spectacular mass culture (the entertainment industry) – are both, in the author’s estimation, lacking in consistent expressions of depth, even much of the work in the leading New York galleries downright deadening, distracting, or worse.  In this light, the emerging sphere of integral art holds great promise while at the same time being in need of its own institutions – institutions not only for training integral artists but also to sustain forms of community (yet to be invented) that re-embed artists and audience in common world-spaces, overcoming the post/modern isolated-alienated artist making for a random and anonymous public.  A resource for such initiatives can be perhaps be found in some of the more fecund projects of early postmodernism, for instance in the art of Joseph Beuys, who richly explored the re-integration of art and life, artist and audience, soul and body, nature and culture, all woven as a complex and deeply compassionate gesture of bringing to light and initiating the healing process of the collective trauma that was the holocaust.
 

To be sure, becoming an integral artist is not easy, requiring sustained practice and commitment: an aesthetic-spiritual path of art-making that would do well, Jacobson persuades, for artists to train in higher states of being.  For it is through accessing these deepest states that true creativity more readily flows, empowering great art (as Schelling and Heidegger knew) to point back towards this creativity as the very source of manifestation.  Further, such creativity is inseparable from a profound sense of generosity – Jacobson calling integral artists to recollect that they are always already responsibility for All.  (We hear little in this book of post/modern declarations such as “self-expression” and “my artistic rights” – themes that, while important in their own way, all too easily decay in our post-Warholian age into the narcissism of celebrity.)  Likewise, Jacobson’s vision of integral art avoids the post/modern confounding of means and ends – where the means (tool, instrument, technique) comes to compete with and even displace in significance the ends (purpose, meaning, depth) which it is to serve – the creation of means even becoming its own end: as with the ever increasing obsession with technology.  Jacobson never for a moment slips into valorizing art for its own sake, but always keeps in view art’s service to Love.
 

Integral art can be an enormous gift to this waking-world of suffering sentient beings – such is the extraordinary lesson of Promethean Flames.
 

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