Michael Schwartz

Critical theorists and social commentators agree that modernity and postmodernity suffer from historical pathologies of world  disenchantment. What might be done? Drawing on John Sallis’  phenomenology of the elemental and Tibetan Buddhist  teachings on elemental practices, this paper investigates the imagination in its doubling as imaginal in generating a symbolics of the self, world, and other that is always already enchanted; an aesthetics of existence where the world itself shows forth like a work of art replete with exorbitant logics.

My inquiry is to what extent contemporary continental and comparative philosophy might be unwittingly internalizing some of the limits inherent in wider socio-cultural views of ontology on the one hand, and on the hand might be in reactivity rather than criticality to aspects of the culture at-large – resulting in a squandering of resources for re-enchantment.

Essay from book catalog of 2015 international art echibition. While it was Jean Gebser, in his magisterial mid twentieth-century study The Ever-Present Origin, who perhaps first used the term integral in a systematic manner to characterize certain kinds of art, integral art as a category comes in the main from contemporary integral theory as seeded by the American writer Ken Wilber. Springing from Wilber's work, there has been over the past two decades a growing international and multidisciplinary network that is impacting many activity-domains-from business, leadership, economic theory, and sustainability studies to comparative religion, transformational practice, developmental psychology, consultation processes, and meta-theorizing. Many of the artworks in the current exhibition have been made by artists familiar with integral theory. The argument of this essay however is that it does not follow that knowing integral theory is a necessary precondition for artworks that are integral. Nor that knowing integral theory guarantees that one shall make integral artworks. What matters is the art itself and its constellation of aesthetic elements and qualities. To ascertain what is distinctive about integral artworks, it is instructive to consider currents and conditions of Western art. 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 ultimate concern.

A short script read at the fourth international symposium on critical realism and integral theory in dialog.  To wit, at some point the question whether or not Integral Theory (IT) commits the epistemic fallacy becomes tired on the one hand and on the other assumes too much of a Critical Realist (CR) defining of anything that might be called authentic dialogue. More interesting is how issues constellated around the epistemic fallacy might get clarified, questioned, reframed, and perhaps even redefined through a process of open inquiry. For in the end what matters is the validity and force of insights that animate creative transformative praxis oriented towards the well-being of each and all. In that spirit, I open up what is perhaps a re-evaluating of the sense and scope of the epistemic fallacy, in exploring five themes: (1) the relation between philosophical and scientific ontology, (2) the status of events, (3) actualization of the actual, (4) the nature of nature, and (5) knowing and being per metaReality. These are presented in haste and are less intended to be definitive statements or positions than to stimulate group reflection at the symposium.

This paper is prolegomena to art’s transdisciplinarity, a project ontologically motivated through inquiry into the transcendental conditions of art. It opens with the question: “what does the socio-cultural world need to be like for art to have emerged and endured as a human activity and product?” A answer to this question, as retrodictive explanation (proper to critical realist social theory ), is that art emerges as response to the tetra-arising matrix of certain type of psychic, bodily, cultural, and systemic tensions and contradictions – this matrix always already dialectical in the Bhaskerian sense. The motivation for this project comes from seeing how the various disciplines engaging art today have respective strengths and weaknesses, being only partially open to one another other for inspiration and insight.  As such, (1) the tropology of the social field; (2) philosophy of art and aesthetics; (3) art history; and (4) art criticism-evaluation are the four metadisciplinary matrices that vertically and non-hierarchically constellate as art's transciplinarity.

(Draft - forthcoming essay in Journal of Critical Realism.) This essay emerges out of the dialogue and exchange between critical realism and integral theory. It is a contribution to and within critical realist discourse, philosophically underlaboring for the senses of the good and goodness with a metaReality schema, arguing for, in performing the necessity of, the intimate intertwining of transcendental and phenomenological methods. One implication of the study is the recontextualizing of the singular philosophical status of the axiology of freedom. The essay also philosophically interprets the notion of perspectives (from integral theory) as elementals (proper to Sallisian phenomenology), developing a view of meta-perspectives along with two modes of transcendentals of the metaReal.

Presentation at 2015 Annual Meeting of the Comparative and Continental Philosophy Circle, University of Iceland. In honor of the late Roy Bhaskar and a planned symposium on dialectics, Subsequently published in Integral Leadership Review 15:1 April-June 2015.

This is a 2007 plenary paper that points out the unprecedented ubiquity in the world today of modes of art.  In response to this situation, the paper offers an (expanded) constellated field of philosophical  and theoretical concepts within which to engage works of art: (1) art as world-disclosive; (2), media distinctions; (3) the senses of aesthetics ; (4) the twofoldness; of world and work (5), mimesis and drives; (6) the post/modern differentiation of value spheres; (7) critical theory and its moments of modernist, anti-modernist, and postmodernist evaluations of the differentiated value spheres of art; and (8) global system networks of communication that circulate artworks. The intent is for this conceptual constellation to enhance our discerning and engaging the bewildering array of occasions of art today.

This is a draft of a book chapter from "On the True Sense of Art: A Critical Companion to the Transfigurements of John Sallis," eds. Jason M. Wirth, Michael Schwartz, and David Jones, which will appear this fall on Northwestern University Press. The chapter unpacks Sallis's innovative notion of the elemental and impact on his views on art, art matrices (displacing the notion of art-media), and  the enactment of philosophical art criticism. The paper moves to deploy these terms, with critical modifications, towards instances in the history of Western painting, including disclosing the elemental geo-radiance of an early Monet; and concludes with an extended reading of an early Raphael altarpiece as a Eucharistic symbolization of the mystery of the Trinity, which exceeds any ontotheologics of God.

In the wake of Guy DeBord’s The Society of the Spectacle, life is said to have become "spectacular." Experiences parade by like a series of images devoid of depths, sliding surfaces that nonetheless glisten and shine, crystallized in ubiquitous cultural products and activities as the pervasive aesthetic of our time. This surface sheen, alluring and entrancing, is beauty gone sick—beauty so dissociated from the true and the good that glossy surfaces signify not much more than their own seductiveness. Yet certain modes of contemporary art reveal that this postmodern aesthetic is not a curse but an opportunity, that when reworked can serve in a redemptive manner. Sick Beauty, in its feverous intensity, becomes the way of Great Health.

The theme for the evening is the influence of 3D technology on visual art. I find myself concerned with prior questions of what technology is and what kinds of relationships might art and technology have. In that I light I want to play with the evening's stated theme and investigate some examples of 2D mass cultural technologies, like TV and video, and how artists have actively transfigured such mainstream technologies towards expressive ends exceeding anything like " influence, " including transforming such 2D visual technologies into 3D art media. Part of my concern is that we take seriously that art matters – hence the title of this talk.