Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

This book offers a triangular comparative analysis by evaluating three different religious approaches to emptiness. It reveals what emptiness or nothingness mean in different cultural and religious contexts. Further, it assesses each tradition’s emptiness concerning the emptiness of the believer, the emptiness of the world, and perhaps even the (temporary or permanent) emptiness of God. Chapters include perspectives on different religions and though being manifest in different ways within their respective traditions, the Hindi and Buddhist concept of śūnyatā, the Christian concept of divine kenosis, and the Ṣūfī concept of fanā’ share a common denominator: all three signify “emptiness”. Covered are both sprititual and “mundane” functions of this emptiness that the three religions address. This monograph appeals to students and researchers and reveals that the idea of an “empty” reality that is purified of superfluous fullness are philosophical concepts relevant for all domains of life.

This essay reflects on Chinese and American hyperrealism and its effect on the self-perceptions and cultural identities of both countries. Hyperreality is a condition whereby it is impossible to distinguish reality from fantasy. Such a condition is common in technologically advanced cultures where virtual reality has made possible the endless reproductions of fundamentally empty appearances. It is however also possible to speak of hyperreality in terms of “culture” or “civilization.” As a first example, China produces a hyperrealist version of its culture in ways that are peculiar to the Confucian treatment of history. As a second example, hyperrealism can be seen in American civilization, which has often been described by some as a materialized utopia excelling in simulations such as Disneyland or Las Vegas and that permeates through large parts of American life like an underlying structure. The mythical and pseudo-historical past upon which many Chinese philosophical discourses are built has arguably led to a quasi-virtual timelessness whose effects remain significant in China’s contemporary political life. At the same time, American civilization consists – viewed from a certain angle – in an aseptic, dishistoricized culture that authors such as Jean Baudrillard have described in terms of “hyperreality.”

I criticize the virtual line by establishing two kinds of virtual reality: the technical and the existential-aesthetic one. What is normally referred to as virtual reality is an interactive reality that offers an immersive artificial space that can be taken for real. This reality has no existential value. Existential-aesthetic virtual reality is not simply an imaginary, auto-simulating universe, but it is dependent on a complex ontology through which the real does not get lost but will rather be re-experienced. In Eastern art the virtual establishes a transcendental link between art and reality. Both virtual realities produce different virtual lines. The existential-aesthetic virtual reality comes closer to the reality of art, which transcends the real through the virtual, without enclosing the spectator in an act of perfect simulation. The idea of an “aesthetics of the virtual” is more prominent in East Asian aesthetics than in the West. Western art remains a matter of appearance (of a reality). This has had decisive effects on the development of lines in both cultures. The “experience” of a line drawn is not the experience of an object inserted into an abstract space. In calligraphy, concrete space has not been overcome but it subsists as an existential space in which lines can be drawn. The artistic lines produced in the East and West that have been analysed in this book are virtual in the above aesthetico-existential sense. Technico-virtual environments do not offer such oneiric speculations. The lines we encounter in a virtual environment are not “dreaming” because they are hinged in a mathematized space.

Charles Baudelaire saw life as a “broken line.” This chapter explains the aesthetic of four aestheticians, all of whom are born in the 1860s: Heinrich Wölfflin, Broder Christiansen, Alain, and Adolf Loos. According to Wölfflin, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, European painting underwent a shift from “draughtsmanly painting” to “painterly painting.” The German aesthetics specialist Broder Christiansen challenged Wölfflin’s binary scheme by elaborating on what Bergson was about to suggest at about the same time: that the line is not material but musical. This idea also corresponds with Wittgenstein’s concept of drawing as “understandingly following a musical phrase.” French philosopher Alain criticized the “geometrization of culture” of his time because straight lines increasingly replaced concrete decorative motives composed of complex curved lines. In the twentieth century, the line became the unmitigated manifestation of a geometrical spirit, standing either for tactile concreteness (Wölfflin), or abstract geometrization. Adolf Loos’ had a different approach: his aim was to discover another line underneath the ornamental lines, which would be less materialistic, remain cultural and not be merely mechanic. This, to him, was the line of style.

Kandinsky’s thoughts on the principle of the “innermost necessity” of lines converge with calligraphy. The lines of calligraphy concur with the principle of li (理). The Chinese vision of nature is always organic, which has far-reaching consequences for the nature of the line. Li is reminiscent of the rhizome. Closely related to li is the line of wen (文). Like li, wen is a manifestation of the internal order. In the Chinese tradition, wen is related to the invention of writing. In Zen Buddhism and Daoism, there is a distrust of straight lines that is at least as strong as it is in Bergson’s philosophy. The line, and even the surface, are submitted to different treatments in Eastern and Western traditions. In Euclidean geometry, the line becomes separated from its surface. No similar development took place in Eastern art because the starting point was entirely different. The “blank space” (kongbai) upon which lines are posed always had a metaphysical dimension. Much has been said in Chap. 4 about the curious idea of drawing as a sort of thinking. “Calligraphy as thinking” appears less curious.

Four-dimensional theories match Virtual Reality because here time and space are configured through mutable lines. Since the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, linearity has been submitted to a profound crisis. Mathematicians showed that there are not one but several geometries. This new, relativist conception of space perturbed a commonsensical idea of linearity. Henri Poincaré showed that geometrical axioms are (1) not self-evident truths, (2) cannot be empirically established, and (3) are not synthetic a priori intuitions. Space is no longer three dimensional, but the existence of a fourth dimension becomes possible. Minkowski and Einstein suggest time as a fourth dimension. In non-Euclidean geometry, any foundational space is abandoned, which has profound repercussions, not just on mathematics, but also on science, philosophy, and art. I show how modern artists integrated these thoughts into their works.

I concentrate on the most peculiar characteristic of the line, which is its ambiguous ontological status. Euclid suggests that “a line is a length without breadth.” However, are we able to observe anything that has no breadth? The differentiation between the visible and the intelligible, and the potential bridging of both, goes back to Plato. The process of the negation or the self-negation of lines culminates in the phenomenon of the virtual line. Virtual lines have no physical existence because they are neither actual nor potential. Some scholars hold that in Greek culture, lines and drawing are older than painting. The word “line” is derived from the Latin linea, which originally meant a thread made from flax. Gottfried Semper’s aesthetic theories depict art as the interplay of material and technique, foreshadowing later formalist and structuralist methods. Are lines—or at least certain type of lines—a typically Western business? Anthropologist Dorothy Lee wrote in the 1950s that the people of the Trobriand Islands codify, and probably apprehend reality nonlinearly, in contrast to our own lineal phrasing. The linear is more geometrical, scientific, efficient, and modern than the non-linear. Does this permit us to speak of a Western “linear vision”?

Japanese architect Tadao Ando designs houses with labyrinthine structures in which “walls become abstract and negated.” Like in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the perception of these lines is linked to movement. They are virtual “non-lines:” absolute (and not blurred) but constantly negating their own status of being. The Japanese conception of ma (間) has been said to be topologically identical to virtual reality. Ma is an invisible line represented by the “in between” of objects. It is linked to kire, the “aesthetic cut” through which a cut element continues to exist “negatively” as a kind of “non-being.” The installation of transparent lines as a spatial device is much more frequent in East Asia. Japanese shoji doors, the Japanese aboshigaki (網干垣), or the kabeshiro (壁代), all create transparent non-lines.

For Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the lines formed by tiles on the floor of a swimming pool are not material entities but dynamic phenomena. Paul Klee identifies lines as basic elements of drawing when explaining that a drawing is simply a “line going for a walk.” For Wassily Kandinsky, the point, which is the starting point of all human-made pictures, is immaterial, even as it can “speak,” which is a paradox. Henri Michaux attempts to overcome the alphabet by using expressive pictograms and what he calls in French “traits.” Klee, Kandinsky, and Michaux follow similar patterns. Movement can be painted neither as a linear displacement nor as a painterly blur. Dream is the only option. There is a French tradition of thinkers who are skeptical of—though at the same time fascinated by—lines. At its origin is Baudelaire. Mondrian is also associated with this tradition because he is interested in “negative lines.” The principal element in Mondrian’s neoplastic painting is “destruction.” I also examine the theories of Paul Valery and Henri Van de Velde.

Curved lines are better than straight lines, but still better than the curved line is the fractured line. The fractured line is a line that partially negates itself all while continuing to be a line. The uninterrupted, static, straight line needs to be avoided at all cost. Another way of expressing this is to say that the fractured line is “cooler” than the non-fractured line. Marshall McLuhan developed this original hot/cool approach to lines. I look at such hot/cool approaches in various areas of society. On the one hand, the line is hated, negated, and deconstructed into dots because it is too “hot” (this concerns lines in the form of parental links, guidelines, or social limits such as classes or époques). On the other hand, one feels that the transformation of the line into dots leads to a state of social, intellectual, and emotional disorientation.

Different branches of modern art, but also traditional East Asian art and calligraphy, have handled the self-negating process of the line in various ways. In Computer Assisted Design (CAD), lines are the result of geometrically configured, instantaneous computation. Can architecture deconstruct lines, and do modern tools favor such a deconstruction? Modern architecture did not overcome Euclidean geometry, but it rather used geometry to produce something that looks non-geometrical. Still some architecture plays with geometry and alters the perception of lines. Yves Klein’s “Air Architecture” realizes non lines with elements that have no clear limits such as air, wind, and fire. “X-ray architecture,” which I present, works with transparency. The Eames created, in their “Eames House,” a mysterious and blurred interior by installing a play of reflections. The Japanese architecture firm SANAA produces a layering of reflection on inside and outside walls. I discuss the work of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and John Hejduk. Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida have found other ways to distort and dislocate lines, and effacing traces of stability. The khora is central to this project.

The line most opposed to the technical virtual line is the line drawn in calligraphy. Chinese characters are not merely images but gestures linked to the movements of the body. Lines are “divested” (a word used by Michaux) because: (1) they are recognized as not being objects; (2) they are linked to vision (the image and I are linked through vision within a space we share), which undermines the object character of the line; (3) we are always moving while looking. The line is never here nor there because our gaze is never here nor there. Though the lines of the calligraphic character are highly “divested,” calligraphy avoids a fourth divestment that would deprive the line of its bodily dimension. Calligraphy always maintains its bodily dimension. One could conclude that this makes the calligraphic line more present, more affirmed, and the contrary of self-negated. However, the opposite is the case. I also apply the Daoist principle of wuwei to Mondrian (Mondrian was interested in Daoism).

In 2007, the artist collective “Tracey” published Drawing Now, suggesting that “drawing thinks/talks in a particular way.” “Drawing as thinking” transcends categories like subjectivity or imagination. Thinking, and not copying or imagining, decides what lines will land on the paper. In the Drawing Now project the idea is pushed to an extreme: it is not the “drawer” who thinks, but the drawing itself that is doing the thinking, which asks for a new conceptual description of the drawing process. Newman and de Zegher emancipate drawing from the human thinking process by reducing it to gestures. There is a “necessary thoughtlessness” in drawing. Drawing has its own way of thinking that the eye can follow. I find a similar concept in Chinese calligraphy.

Merleau-Ponty mentions Bergson, who, in La Pensée et le mouvant, states that the undulated line, though invisible and “not more here than there,” is nevertheless able to “provide the key to everything.” Still, Merleau-Ponty believes that neither Bergson nor his mentor Félix Ravaisson got to the core of the riddle of the line. In his Essai sur les données immédiates, Bergson describes the line as something that is created through our vision and perceived through succession. Bergson speaks not (in a Zenonian way) of a succession of points, but of a sort of animated line that is a dynamic succession of events and is therefore virtual. I offer a new analysis of Ravaisson and compare him with Mondrian. Western post-war philosophers have continued this “philosophy of lines.” Derrida’s “trace” is a virtual line, which exists before being (étant, Seiende) but constantly borders on the sense of Being (être, Sein) (Derrida, La Différance. In Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972: 23). In this sense, it is also a non-line constituted by the eternally differing process of différance. Similarly, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s rhizomes are linear, without being submitted to evolutionary, hierarchical, or geometrical orientations.

This article is divided into two parts. The first part demonstrates the importance of contingency in art. There is a strong link between contingency and creativity, and it is possible to say that in art this contingency-dependent creativity makes art more “real”. In this first part the “creative contingency” or art model will also transferred to the idea of the “art of life” as a mixture of ethics and aesthetics. The second part analyzes the capacity of algorithms to produce aesthetic expressions by following necessary rules and by excluding contingency. Is this cognitive model compatible with artistic creativity?

The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity, by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, analyzes and compares African American cool culture and the Japanese aesthetics of kawaii or cute and characterizes them as expressions set against oppressive homogenizations of a technocratic world. The Cool-Kawaii sheds light on the history and development of both cultures in three main ways: First, both emerge from similar historical conditions; second, both are in search of human dignity and liberation, and finally, both kawaii and African American cool establish a new kind of modernity able to transcend both traditionalism and anti-traditionalist modernity.

Over thirty years ago, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature declared the demise of epistemology and the arrival of a new post-Philosophical era. Rorty envisaged the intellectual activity of this predominantly literary culture as an unconstrained large-scale conversation that would flourish in an “ecstasy of spiritual freedom.” Having abandoned all systematic pretensions, edifying philosophers would add their voice to the conversation of mankind, fully aware of the radical incommensurability of the mortal vocabularies they employ. In an attempt to evaluate this radical proposal, the first part of this essay argues that some of Rorty’s most memorable utopian statements are far-fetched, rhetorical and often exaggerated to the point that they damage his broad humanistic vision. Building on this, the second part discusses the “missed potential” of Rorty’s excessively broad notion of a conversation of mankind and of the uncompromisingly anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist reorientation that he proposes.

This book shifts the focus from Critical Regionalism towards a broader concept of 'Transcultural Architecture' and defines Critical Regionalism as a subgroup of the latter. One of the benefits that this change of perspective brings about is that a large part of the political agenda of Critical Regionalism, which consists of resisting attitudes forged by typically Western experiences, is 'softened' and negotiated according to premises provided by local circumstances. At the book’s centre is an analysis of Reima and Raili Pietilä’s Sief Palace Area project in Kuwait. Further cases of modern architecture in China, Korea, and Saudi Arabia show that the critique, which holds that Critical Regionalism is a typical 'western' exercise, is not sound in all circumstances. Furthermore, the book proposes that a certain 'architectural rationality' can be contained in architecture itself - not imposed by outside parameters like aesthetics, comfort or even tradition.

This book offers a philosophical exploration of lines in art and culture, and traces their history from Antiquity onwards. Lines can be physical phenomena, cognitive responses to observed processes, or both at the same time. Based on this assumption, the book describes the “philosophy of lines” in art, architecture, and science. The book compares Western and Eastern traditions. It examines lines in the works of Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Henri Michaux, as well as in Chinese and Japanese art and calligraphy. Lines are not merely a matter of aesthetics but also reflect the psychological states of entire cultures. In the nineteenth century, non-Euclidean geometry sparked the phenomenon of the “self-negating line,” which influenced modern art; it also prepared the ground for virtual reality. Straight lines, distorted lines, blurred lines, hot and cold lines, dynamic lines, lines of force, virtual lines, and on and on, lines narrate the development of human civilization.