EUPHIDAS – European Philosophical Databases Systems

Logical and Esthetical Experience

with Stefan Lupascu

Stefan Munteanu

Abstract. Stefan Lupascu is a French thinker of Romanian origin who tried to find a solution for the crisis of Epistemology by a new method of approaching philosophy to science. This article aimes at highlighting his original outlok.

Starting from the belief that sub-stratum of existence is energy, characterized by interacting antagonist dynamism, Stafan Lupascu suggest that the dynamic logic of contradiction – which enlarges the possibility of understanding, including the artistic creation – should be accepted instead of classical logic.

Consequently, according to Lupascu’s logic, crisis is the perfect background for art. Therefore, art’s message is a traffic one. Comic is a degraded art and not a triumph of ethics over aesthetics. An artist’s ethics is that of the most intense contradiction, of the ontologic efectiveness towards sufferance or joy.

Stefan Lupascu’s work (1900-1988) a French thinker of Romanian origin, is a complex philosophical system focused on the dynamic logic of contradiction. It is about a theoretical daresome creation meant to offer a solution to the epistemological contemporary crises, towards a new and original approach of the philosophy as a science. Further on Stefan Lupascu aims even an essential change of the human capacity to understand the reality. Having the new logic as a basis, without being classical, he places the whole explanation about the surrounding environment in other terms.

The philosopher is convinced that the basis of existence is the energy characterised by antagonistic dynamisms, mutually balanced, and so the actualisation of one implies the action of the other and the other-way-around. Through this dialectic, theorised under the name of antagonistic principle, the energy becomes systematised within the material. In other words the material is perceived as “energetic systematiser”. The idea is that depending on the stage of the balance of the two energetic dynamisms (between symmetric and asymmetric), three private directions of the energetic systematise are identified, respective: a) physical material, having a tendency towards homogeneity and identification; b) the biological material, directed to heterogeneity and diversity and c) psychic material, affectivity within which the two dynamisms stay balanced (an estate of an equal potentiality and actualisation between one and another).

To better understand the three materials, dominated by specific causes, we need, in Stefan Lupascu’s opinion, three different logics, all of them based upon the science of contradiction. And thus, after mankind searched thousands of years for order and peace within a logic of non-contradiction, Stefan Lupascu is disposing the change of this structure, offering contradiction in order to save eternity. It is true that Stefan Lupascu does not reject the classical logic but he includes it into the dynamic logic of the contradiction. For him, the classical logic “does not apply but with approximation to the macrophysical systems from which it is derived”[i].

The three types of energy as material systematisations are characterised not only through causes, respectively specific logic, but through conclusions, respectively different cybernetics. The central idea is that in the case of the antagonistic cause, inherent to each event, the cause determines not only an actualisation, an efficiency but also a potentiality, that is why a finality; thus parallel to the causal chain of actualisations, there also exists a causal chain of potentialisations. And while the actualisations, or the efficient causes collapse in unconscious, the potentialisations or the teleological causes, make up the conscience. In the case of the human, because he is the centre of the three types of the material-energy, the antagonistic cause, viewed under the dimension of the three logics, creates three ethics or three energetic behaviours: the macrophysics ethics (of the mixed energy); the biological ethics (of the heterogenious energy) and the neuropsychic ethics (of the energy of equilibrium or of the “T”estate).

This means that for the understanding of the logic of the aesthetic, proposed by Stefan Lupascu, we must take into consideration the affectivity estate. The explanation comes from the fact that, apart from the three constituent phenomena of the three materials, that are sustaining each-other in a good relationship by being reported to something, the affection estates are to themselves sufficiently. And so without being relational, the affection does not become but it is an ontological existence, it is the extra-temporal and the extra-spatial embodiment, being both subject and object, but neither of them in fact. Affection invades all psychic, under the conditions that psychic is understood as a constitutive part of any substance existing in the world, a contradictorial energy which gives proportion.

In this way, Stefan Lupascu writes that: “everything is a proportion, everything is a relationship of what existence means. In exchange, and this is extremely important and mysterious – everything that appears and disappears as affectivity estates, a certain pleasure, a certain pain, these are not balanced but to themselves: they are not in relationship, they simply exist and they are enough to themselves”[ii].

In this direction, to a great extent, the affectivity proves the existence of the three ethics. More over, starting from the affectivity one may explain the pathology estates of the neuropsychic, for example schizophrenia, neurotics or melancholia may be explained. And thus, the ethics, the one that must decide between “yes” or “no”, is a research of the contradiction. That is why, while becoming a science, ethics may be created without having its basis on affection.

It is not the same with the aesthetics, where the affectivity is indispensable. Because affectivity is the engine, it is the springs for any crises estate, being just necessary there for the artistic experience. That is why, Stefan Lupascu thinks that: “ the logic of aesthetics must develop, must be turned around towards a contrary direction of the logic of ethics; contrary to a rational or irrational, in other words, opposed to a process of contradiction” [iii].

The esthetical experience implies contemplation and so, a desire to avoid action. This is the starting point of the process of knowing the knowledge. As an example, Stefan Lupascu says that drawing a reindeer means the perception of the conscience not of the reindeer, but of the conscience of a reindeer. This is the resulting idea that any artistically event is a perception of knowledge, a conscience of the conscience. The idea is that the working of art must not be absolutely understood as being neither objective nor subjective. In other words the working of art is considered to be more esthetical “being lesser subjective and lesser objective at the same time, or, more precisely, simultaneously half-subjective and half-objective, meaning less unreal and less real or further on, half real and, at the same time, half unreal. And this is in fact fiction” [iv].

It is necessary, then, to overpass the current opinions concerning the understanding of “the concept” and recognising it as an essential synthesis of the psychic world. Because, in Stefan Lupascu’s opinion, inside the concept, we must discover not only an abstract scheme, but a concentration of all the perceived achievings having as final target the human brains. The core of the concept must not be neglected for the sake of the exterior. Because Stefan Lupascu says that the concept “is the essence, and it might be said, even the whole essence of psychic at the highest rate of its energetically existence”[v].

Such an aspect is the one of the artist, which is the house of “the conscience” and of the unconscious, respectively of “the understanding of the knowledge and unknown”. In other words the artist expresses a maximum estate of tension, emerging from the co-existence of the half-potentialising and half-actualising estate, together with their effects, too. Because the artist is a creator, “he must go down within the depths of the soul, unless he wants to get, against his will, to the reproducer spying him all the time, temping him from all sides of the art phenomenon”[vi].

The great pressure undertaken by the psyches upon man has its place within the idea, within the creative force of the concept. From images, the basically information and the extensive ones continue their way upwards towards the concept, in which they find themselves dialectically re-united, the homogeneity and the heterogeneity, and thus making a thing being identical and non-identical in the same time. It result the idea that the springs of the perception of the world, and of human conscience also, is the interaction between the practical effort of individual and reality. The fruit of this interaction is the creative imagination, specific to the psychic.

But Stefan Lupascu makes us aware of the fact that “there is no stronger phenomenon, more fertile and at the same time more dangerous, but that of the creative imagination specific to the psychic”[vii].

It is true that, being in a continuous transformations, new dynamic phenomena appear constantly inside the physical material and inside the biological material. Different from physical and biological material, inside the physic material “the actualisations and potentialisations are stopped half-way of their path inside an equal antagonism and a contradiction that creates – once with the controlled field – a kind of liberty of what we might call the contradictorial determination”[viii]. We find out, thus, that creative imagination is “a world inhabited by dreams, but that they are different in many ways from the dreams of a simple sleep, a world of things and beings extremely light and changeable from a spatial and temporal point of view, within which the subject and the object relax, making the unconscious and the conscience weaker within a mixture of subjectivity and objectivity of a thin texture, being fluid and gauzy, large and untouchable in present, past and future, promoting new horizons emerging within by themselves but which require mental efforts, a sustained attention being sufficient to themselves within an unstable and false polymorphism at the same time, as opposed to the classical logic”[ix].

The liberty of spirit is the effect of mutual restraining of the systematically dynamism, waiting for the possibilities to be actualised and potentialised. Thus we may explain that the psychos is fragile and has the vocation to be responsible for the whole human activity.

This is the basis on which the logic of aesthetics rests, which “steps from non-contradictory to contradictory”. The aesthetics experience is defined by an escape from the action and contemplation, meaning putting an end to the development of one or another of the two antagonistically dimensions, throughout a contrary becoming. This estate means the starting point of the process of understanding the knowledge.

Even from this short presentation of the logical structure of art it may result some characteristics of the logic of the aesthetic fact. It results, first of all, the fact that the art is “a desire towards liberty (of indifference), towards unconditional”. It results, secondly, that the art has “a characteristic emptied of any interest”, meaning “an aimless finality” in Immanuel Kant’s opinion. Thirdly, it is about the characteristic of the aesthetic fact of being “a knot of possible ones”. Finally, a forth consequence of the logic of the aesthetics is that the history of art rests upon the becoming of knowledge. Being the source of understanding the knowledge, “the art is less possible, the more the understanding is more developed”. Because, as it is known, in Stefan Lupascu’s concept, the understanding fights against the understanding of knowledge.

Consequently, according to Stefan Lupascu’s logic, the estate of crises is the most adequate atmosphere for art. That is why the message of art is tragic, and the comic is deteriorated art, a triumph of the ethic upon the aesthetic. The artist is expected to wake up the affection.

This is a proof that the extremely logically formalised Stefan Lupascu’s philosophy, does not lose sight of man. And that is why, proposing an original concept, we think that this philosophy hardly starts its life.

NOTES