The Brooklyn Rail

“If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.”— Lao Tzu

“Work hard in silence, let your success be your noise.”— Anonymous

“Democracy… is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder; and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.”— Plato

Among the many formulations over history about the human soul, Plato’s occupies a prominent and challenging position. He famously proposed a tripartite soul, with each part located in a different region of the body. The logos, located in our head, is related to reason, and is often perceived as a regulating organism of the other parts. The thymos, placed near the chest region, is related to our spirit. And the eros, situated in the stomach, is related to our desires. Plato continued his tripartite conception in his chariot allegory, in which the charioteer has two winged horses with which he shares the work of destiny. One of the winged horses is a noble white one, associated with boldness, courage, and heroism, while the other is a dark one that yields to concupiscence, bodily desires, and lust. The charioteer himself, as the driver of the chariot, must manage the unending conflict between the two horses in order to reach the ultimate destiny of directing the chariot to the heights of heaven and beyond. If we lose the concept of thymos, it is like the charioteer forgetting that he has the white horse and letting the dark one dominate, or forgetting that he has the dark horse and losing bodily desires. And of course in either case, without the charioteer’s control and mediation, the whole journey would surely be derailed.

Friedrich Nietzsche, who also formulated a three-part metamorphosis of the spirit/soul, was especially cognizant of the need to not only balance these different elements within us, but also to keep ourselves from being in thrall to the dragon called “thou-shalt,”—which is a response to society’s idea of sin—and instead find hope in “thou mayest,” which leads to choice and freedom. For Nietzsche the free spirit must be able to transform itself into a child in order to create a new world all over again, look at things anew, have everything appear as fresh as if seen for the first time. It’s from this kind of fresh perception of the world that artists are able to reinvent the world in their art. The deep curiosity that drives the creative instinct leads me to recall Pablo Picasso’s famous remark: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after he grows up.”

Thinking of Plato’s tripartite soul, consisting of Reason, Spirit, and Desire, leads me to ponder the differences that lie between how initially liberal Christianity was influenced by classical liberalism, which prompted the separation of church and state, freedom of religion in the public sphere, expanded suffrage, and broad-based education, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s own tripartite, namely the cultivation of community, self-sacrifice, and a robust conception of the good. In de Tocqueville’s vision of democracy in America, based on his observation of American society and culture and psychological mannerisms, he proposed providing political freedom by giving greater emphasis to mores (referring to the customs, norms, and behaviors that are acceptable to a society or social group), and on how to focus attention on the common good. For de Tocqueville, political freedom not only can, but must, form an alliance with religion if the two are to function harmoniously together. In contemplating the importance of religion to a democracy, I can’t help but think of Paul Gauguin’s most magnificent painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1897–98). Even though we may consider these questions to be vague, and therefore impossible to answer in a concrete way, we recognize that the very fact that we can ask such essential and elemental questions, is far more important than providing pre-fabricated answers to them. Gauguin, by representing three stages of existence from birth to death, which we can see embodied as our eyes move across the picture, evokes—as with the eyes of a child—a vivid sense of the wonder and mystery and uncertainties of the human condition.

Our life experiences depend upon our constant struggles for gaining truer understanding of both the freedom from something, and the freedom to something. And these require our innermost capacity to reach great heights without fear of failure. Although such destinations may appear to be elusive, we find our refuges, our consolations so to speak, in the force and deep resonances of works of art, which at their best bring together all three aspects of what Plato saw in the human soul. As Hippolyte Taine put it: “Beneath every work of literature there is a philosophy. Beneath every work of art is an idea of nature and of life.”

If artists have the freedom to create in the most willful and open-minded manner, it also means that they have, in their both specific and general alchemy, the capacity to understand and value the contemporaneity of their work. Just as they perceive their art to be profoundly related to all that came from the past, they’re also capable of absorbing all the complex issues of their own time and of turning them into mediated images, each in his or her own way expressing their intrinsic values as human beings responding to complex wonders of the human condition. Artists stand as a bulwark against the global rise of the politics of resentment, which undermines liberal democracy by failing to tolerate divergent views. In their works, artists create fertile grounds in which human freedom can thrive, rooted always in the individual rather than in institutions, churches, or national states. While each artist may undertake their journey differently in relation to their awareness of Plato’s chariot allegory and Nietzsche’s metamorphoses of the spirit—they, as their own masters, are driven to make their work from inner necessity, a condition that embraces both feeling and thought, held together by the embracing unity of freedom. And yet, at the same time that each work of art is a creation of the artist’s individual impulses, guided by their own idiosyncratic ideals of truth, a sense of the kind of broad awareness that contains openness to self-correction is also inherently implied in the creation of any work of art. It is in this balance between inner necessity and social awareness that the artist’s freedom can be useful to the survival of liberal democracy.

Onward, upward, in solidarity, with love, courage, and cosmic optimism, as ever,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to the phenomenal lives and works of our beloved and legendary friends, including Paul Auster (1947–2024), Frank Stella (1936–2024), David Shapiro (1947–2024), and Joe Zucker (1941–2024). Just as Paul and David have significantly contributed their highly inventive yet deeply personal writings to our literary world, Frank and Joe have profoundly changed what and how we perceive their art in respect to process, form and matter, hence elevating visual culture to monumental counter-frictions against any kind of oppression. I’d like to send our deepest condolences to Siri Hustvedt, Sophie Auster, Harriet Stella, Lindsay Stamm, Britta Le Va, the immediate members of their families, and respective friends and admirers across the world. I’d like to thank our brilliant editor of the poetry section for seventeen years Anselm Berrigan, for his unmatched contribution to our living organism, especially when Anselm famously hosted the weekly reading on our NSE for eighty-nine episodes, making our art of joining through poetry evermore prescient and accessible. Lastly, I’d like to welcome Erica Hunt, who will succeed Anselm to inaugurate our new year-long rotating editorship.