Redtree Times

The Enlightenment— At the Principle Gallery

I felt before I thought…

–Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, 1782

I came across the short line above today from one of the leading lights and philosopher of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and it immediately stopped me. I first thought of something I sometimes speak about in my gallery talks, about how I try to not think when paint, how I want my reactions that take place on the canvas to be emotionally based.

I have always felt that thinking turns to cleverness in art. And while that is not a bad thing in itself, cleverness is a poor substitute for emotion. Cleverness is a contrivance while emotion is unadulteratedly real.

You feel what you feel.

It is the state in which a child lives. They purely react only to how and what they feel. But at a certain point, a change occurs and thinking enters the equation. We think about how we should react, about fitting in with those around us. We think about how our reaction will be perceived by others. We think of what is socially acceptable and what is not. The world becomes different in many ways. More self-conscious and less spontaneous.

Not a good formula for art.

When does that change occur? When do we go from that childlike state of first feeling things emotionally to one where we think about what we feel before allowing ourselves to react?

I don’t know exactly. It most likely differs for each of us. Some of us remain children throughout our lives. I wish I could say if that was a good or bad thing, but I can’t. I can think of examples where remaining a child is bad (the pure selfishness of children, for example) and others where it is a good thing. The sense of wonder and the feeling of newness one senses in most everything.

I guess what I am saying is that I am, in my work, hoping for that feeling of pure emotional reaction. Free of thought and all subjective criteria.

Sounds kind of lofty, doesn’t it? Kind of sounds like bullshit, right?

And maybe it is. After all, part of being a child is their pure belief in myths– Santa, the Easter Bunny, The Tooth Fairy, etc. Maybe we need to believe a little BS if it gets us to where we need to be.

Okay, enough for now. Wasn’t planning on writing this at all. It just fell out so I better read this before I click it into existence as I have a feeling there are all sorts of contradictions and failures of logic within it. But then again, maybe I won’t read it. Maybe it’s better to just let it fly without thinking it over too much.

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Below is the rest of Rousseau’s thought from his posthumously published autobiography. It says a lot about how reading as a child impacts our ability to feel emotionally. I think a lot of us can relate to that:

 I felt before I thought: this is the common lot of humanity. I experienced it more than others. I do not know what I did until I was five or six years old. I do not know how I learned to read; I only remember my earliest reading, and the effect it had upon me; from that time I date my uninterrupted self-consciousness. My mother had left some romances behind her, which my father and I began to read after supper. At first it was only a question of practising me in reading by the aid of amusing books; but soon the interest became so lively, that we used to read in turns without stopping, and spent whole nights in this occupation. We were unable to leave off until the volume was finished. Sometimes, my father, hearing the swallows begin to twitter in the early morning, would say, quite ashamed, ‘Let us go to bed; I am more of a child than yourself.’ In a short time I acquired, by this dangerous method, not only extreme facility in reading and understanding what I read, but a knowledge of the passions that was unique in a child of my age. I had no idea of things in themselves, although all the feelings of actual life were already known to me. I had conceived nothing, but felt everything. These confused emotions, which I felt one after the other, certainly did not warp the reasoning powers which I did not as yet possess; but they shaped them in me of a peculiar stamp, and gave me odd and romantic notions of human life, of which experience and reflection have never been able wholly to cure me.