How To Be An Agnostic
and confusion that actually characterises our attempts to
grapple with what’s true. Hence, this kind of art looks shallow,
or it has a message that one gets at a glance, and it doesn’t take
you any further. It can’t see beyond the smallness of its own
self- confi dent horizons. Comte’s art was like that.
Good art, though, does something different. It reveals truths.
It shows, not tells. It makes ‘raids on the unspeakable’, as
Thomas Merton put it. It’s art that knows it’s not the truth itself,
but is attempting to point to that which is beyond it. It does not
sit in judgement allowing only what it counts as convincing,
like Thomas Jefferson did with Christianity, but allows itself to
be judged in the creative process too. It acts like a window, or an
icon. In so doing, it becomes genuinely creative, not just repro-
ductive. The insight is implicit in the Greek for truth, Heidegger
observed: aletheia, which means disclosed or unveiled.
Other philosophers have picked up on the theme. Wittgens-
tein, for example, made a parallel distinction. Facts, he noted,
can be said. They can be captured in the propositions we utter.
But everything else must be shown, or glimpsed, or pointed
towards. It’s obvious when you think about it. If I tell you
that the sun set last night in Greenwich at 7.36 p.m. I express
everything that needs to be said about that fact. But if I want to
convey the glorious sunset that occurred at 7.36 p.m., as I gazed
westward across an orange Thames towards London, I must
resort to less direct methods – metaphors and descriptions that
always narrow the experience, so that eventually I fi nd myself
resorting to exclamations like ‘You know!’ or ‘I wish you’d been
there.’
Think of the large canvases of colour painted by Mark Rothko.
He was self-consciously working in the period described by
Nietzsche as following the death of God, and diagnosed the
fundamental problem as the draining of religious symbolism’s
former power to liberate our spiritual energies. He was address-
ing what Jung had discerned too. His abstract blocks of purple,
red and black don’t represent anything, instead functioning as
aesthetic midwives to spiritual sensibilities. They are large, since