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who needs a world view? raymond geuss, pg 36

The thing Krigler said that made by far the deepest impression on me was actually something I merely overheard him say when he was speaking with another pupil in the school, a friend of mine who liked to draw. This friend was asking him what he should do if he wanted to become an artist. Krigler was very keen, I knew, on nonrepresentational and non-figurative forms of art. He said to my friend that there was, of course, a discipline involved in art; there were techniques one had to learn, exercises one could do, forms of manual dexterity one had to master, ways of training the eye, established principles of composition. One had to spend the time required to acquire these, or at any rate most of them, but the most important thing if one wanted to become an artist was to set aside half an hour or forty-five minutes a day. During that period, one should ignore completely and forget all the exercises and principles and things one might have learned, and simply take a sheet of paper and draw, even if what one drew was just a squiggle. There was no requirement that what one produced had to be good at all, and certainly no requirement that one must think or judge that it was any good, after one had finished it—in fact, rather the reverse, in that if one was developing one’s powers, one’s judgment should concomitantly become ever more fastidious and one should become more and more dissatisfied. Nevertheless, at the end of every day one should be able to pick up a sheet of paper and say: “So. THIS is what-I-do-on-a-day-like-this.” The only way to explain further what “a-day-like-this” meant was to show

who needs a world view? raymond geuss, pg 37

the drawing. This has always struck me as one of the purest descriptions of the creative urge I have ever encountered. I have written out what Krigler said in a nonstandard way to try to capture the stress of his voice and his intentions. The full stop after “So” meant, I take it, that my friend should stand back at the end of the day and be prepared, when he looked at his drawing, to be surprised. Nietzsche once claimed that in Homer “Achilles” was best understood as shorthand for an impersonal verbal expression, not as the “name” of a “subject.” As it were: “It is now achillesing here” on the model of “it is now raining here”; the purported personal subject was a retrospective invention (hinzugedichtet), added for moralising reasons.36 But for Krigler, when my friend, the beginning artist, looked at the work, the focus was to be on the object that came into existence, the drawing, not on himself as the subject who produced it or indeed on the action out of which it arose. The parallel would be if I were to look at the Cam after a heavy rain and say: “So. THIS is the-Cam-on-a-day-like-this.” The artist was the channel through which some impersonal energy passed which discharges itself in the real object of attention, the drawing. What Krigler did not say was that when my friend looked at the drawing, he would come to, or should be trying to come to, know himself better, or attain greater understanding of who exactly he was. The formula was not: “So. I did-this-on-such-a-day.” One could, if one wished, turn this into an exercise in attempting to get self knowledge, but that was a different project, and one that would distort what should be going on here.

June 27, 2025 at 9:19 PM

willow·Jun 27, 2025