ONE ART STUDENT, as an art college senior, had already landed a job based on his excellent portfolio, which included both illustration and digital work. He also had adopted a motto: Carpe Diem—the Roman poet Horace’s Latin phrase for “seize the day.”
In general terms, this is modern-day existentialism, a generic attitude based on a highly complex series of developments in Western philosophy. Interestingly, it was first suggested by religious thinkers, foremost the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, and later the French Catholic thinker Gabriel Marcel, who coined the term “existentialism.”
Better known, perhaps, is how this idea was taken up, and popularized, by a range of secular thinkers, especially the Frenchman Jean Paul Sartre after the Second World War. Indeed, existentialism, in thought, literature, and art was the predominant trend in Europe for the next two decades, in heated competition with postwar Marxism for the loyalty of youth.
Through the sieve of time, high-flown existentialism has now be consigned to the library shelves, but its soul has permeated the individualism of modern-day artists more than any other formal philosophy. The alternatives might be Judeo-Christianity and Marxism, or, also the post-modern outlook called “critical theory.” As to the latter, most college art student must learn critical theory as part of their curriculum but, nevertheless, everyman existentialism still seems to reign.
For one thing, it is simple and fairly all purpose. The general tenant is that, in a world that cannot be explained rationally, and indeed is full of absurdities, one must chose and live by that choice. It’s not exactly nihilism, but it does forego any hope of social progress or salvation of a religious kind. And that is why it may suit so many artists, who by nature must daily chose their creative act, live inside themselves, and find ways to live with a world that does not offer them easy success.
The religious origins are interesting, looking back to Kierkegaard’s 1843 work, Either/Or. There, he contrasted the aesthetic (art) and the ethical (society) as irreconcilable, yet neither offered the individual a solution to the human dilemma. Faced with this, Kierkegaard present “faith”—a leap of faith—as a third stage, which required an individual to choose to live, beyond all hope or reason.
The secular existentialists, many of them novelists as well as philosophers, argued that the necessity of choice and action was the only alternative in the face of an “absurd” godless world. Human nobleness was confirmed only in making choices and acting on them (called “good faith”). It was ignoble to hide behind a worldview or rational system of thought (“bad faith).
The evidence for existentialism as dominant among modern Western artists is both positive and negative. For the first, the artists is expected to be a loner, a singular person acting on a private creative vision. Presumably, that “leap of faith” keeps the artist going.
As negative evidence, very few artists are advocates of traditional theologies such as Christianity or ideologies such as Marxism, for example, although post-modern ideas—i.e., that all reality is a social construction based on power narratives—have become popular to artists who learn about them in college. In this case, self-conscious post-modernist artists say their art is deconstructing those oppressive narratives of the past (take so-called “feminist art,” for example).
In the wide array of artists, however, such an agenda does not appear, since making choices about the creative act, even in a world that promises no reward for the act, is a purely existential assertion.
When I was in college, before post-modernism was popular, I read Kierkegaard’s early work, Either/Or. It had resonance, thanks to his dialectical approach. He spoke of three stages in life. First was the aesthetic (art), second the ethical (society), but in the futility of reconciling these subjective and objective, internal and external, impulses, the only escape was the third stage, which as a Christian he called “faith.” A confident leap into the unknown.
Although that Christian element has almost entirely faded from popular existentialism, replaced by ideas of individual “authenticity,” individualism, and choice, there still is a kind abandon or “leaping” for something in secular existentialism.
I would say that’s what is happening with most artists: artists leap for a non-rational meaning in the creative act, an act that reaffirms their existence in a very confusing world. This is not to deny that many artists are well read, and have taken up philosophical positions. I once met an art professor who was a committed Trotskyite—the Marxian commitment to world revolution, rather than “revolution in one country” as Leon Trotsky’s Soviet rivals, like Stalin, expounded.
There are also many artists of Jewish, Christian, or Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) persuasions who see their work as reflecting God as Creator, and thus the creative act is a kind of worship. The times, however, are so secular, and art colleges so avant-garde, that such an outlook has been rejected as old-fashioned, even recalcitrant.
And so it is that an artist might revive a thought from ancient Rome: Carpe Diem, “seize the day.” Not the past, or the future.