The Metaphysics of Creativity
The body is that with which I WRITE both verbal and nonverbal TEXTS. I create them, utilizing forces most often unconscious. Where the TEXTS are deep and profound , I touch upon GROUNDS that normally remain INACCESSIBLE. Accessing the distant and deep and putting the accessed into words and symbols constitute an act of CREATIVITY, an act that makes me a genius in the eyes of the ordinary. But only when I appropriate the TEXTS thus produced , only when I UNDERSTAND them that I really incorporate them as part of myself.
My UNDERSTANDING gets transformed and through that I get transformed too. I am NO MORE the person I was. Understanding the texts I produced is actually understanding myself, concretizing the POSSIBILITIES that I am ;SEEING myself as the one who has actualized some possibilities that hitherto were simply floating, if at all. That which I actualize, is actually transforming the mere possibilities that float like the formless clouds in the sky into concrete objects in the world---- poetry, scriptures, novels, monuments, institutions etc., and these tell me what I am really capable of. The purely caattiyam , the possible becomes a 'mey', a truth, a reality.They become, through my agency PORUL- a thing of the world, a thing that is real and no more simply an idea.
In thus realizing some possibilities as my own now, I also learn that they reveal to me my Being- in- the -World which is always an issue with me , a painful issue for the philosophic mind. My productions, things that acquire a reality solely because of me, TELL something about me, to me as well as to the world that acquaints itself with my textual productions. It becomes then part of the History, of a tradition. They give substance and shape to a tradition.
But what my texts tell can be understood only painfully, the deeper the text, the more SYMBOLIC it is the more difficult the process of understanding. And more PERMANENCE for the text! The metaphysical understanding, the most profound understanding of Human Existence, is NOT easy to appropriate and therefore always those who venture are very few. Not only that . Only the most profoundly DISTURBED by an uneasiness born of recognition of ignorance within, would venture into it as a way of acquiring a cure for their existential anguish, mental disturbance, philosophical uneasiness of a profound kind.
A man quite happy and contended with ordinary gifts of life cannot be a metaphysical genius.
Self-understanding cannot issue forth in detached and empty meditations. When metaphysical thinking is NOT prompted by deep understanding-related disturbances, that makes the person withdraw from the world, sit in solitude and wonder, there can be only a show of meditation but not real meditation. In genuine meditation, there is an attempt to UNDERSTAND texts, produced by oneself or otherwise, not the shallow chatter-like texts but those that are metaphysically enigmatic and challenging.
The first step is to SEE one's own productions -- both verbal and nonverbal-- as TEXTS, and for this one has to lift up oneself from the naivety of everyday involvement, the existential involvement that drowns one in the mundane and earthly; the sensorial that entertains but does not inform. And this is NOT that easy. For the average person there must be sensorial stimulations of all kinds and all the times. He cannot stand the senses being numb and dull . Only those who can do this effortlessly can be genuinely meditative, access the hitherto unaccessed depths and through that become genuinely creative.
The detaching of oneself from the imprisonment of everyday experience, the natural, and as expounded by Tirumoolar, is a precondition for gaining a profound understanding, clear and certain, i.e. the axiomatic TRUTHS, the pirimaaNaas of Meykandar. The pre interrogative naive understanding is confused, cloudy and full of painful uncertainties. In contrast to this the post TEXT interrogative explorations that really accesses Depths are clear, certain and well founded so that BELIEVE in them remains unsubverted.
In the West, Descartes begins such TEXT-interrogations, the founding of metaphysics as the most profound Hermeneutic Science. However because he was NOT clear and subsequent western history of Cartesian Meditations obscured further the Hermeneutical orientations, the whole of Metaphysics becomes trivialized and empty of existential import. Even the heroic attempts of Husserl to rescue the tradition of Cartesian meditations through phenomenology ended up at a dead end because of the ABSENCE of hermeneutic orientation.
This is where the Tamil philosophical tradition becomes something vital for world civilization, a tradition that has not been given the place it rightly deserves . For at least from the days of Tolkaappiyam (3rd cent B.C) despite being assailed by the positivisms of Buddhism, Jainism and idealisms of Vedanta, it remained steadfastly Hermeneutical whenever it asserted its originality. All the greatest books in Tamil philosophy: Tholkaappiyam, ThirukkuRaL, Thirumanthiram, Thiruvaymozi, Sivanjanaabotham Sicanjana Siddhiyar etc. more or less retain this hermeneutic orientation; the most rigorous and profound being undoubtedly the Sivanjanabotham of Meykandar.
India became Tamilised at first through Nyaya that was a development of Tolkaapiyam and later by Bakthi movement that gave rise to different schools of Vedanta but now not acknowledged by the historians of Indian Philosophy who appear not to be able to see beyond the Vedas and Vedantas.
( 20-2-1998 )