Sculpture, hard, like music, soft, precedes language, the one in its own order and the other in the order of things; the one participates in the little energies, the other in the high ones.
Since statues remain indefinitely in silence, the monotheisms of speech and writing move away from them as they do from the underworld, expel them and command their sectarians to hate idols, to break them. Thus language takes over their place of origin. Likewise you will not find, in history or the tradition, any general philosophical treatise on sculpture or statues. Language does not speak about silence.
The voyage to the underworld or toward the center of the earth, into the silent abode of the dead, on the contrary brings the wanderer of good will—let’s call “good will” the one that doesn’t exclude anything—into the presence of these stones: Lot’s wife as a pillar of salt, Sisyphus’s rock, Rodin’s massive gates, Empedocles’s sandals as bombs, the collet attached to the ring that Gyges found on the corpse; these rocks, certainly, but also a few shades: Eurydice’s shade leaves the pale phantoms whose whispering preserves and remakes history in Ulysses’s and Aeneas’s museums. At wandering’s end, the hard and the soft. But more hard than soft, this latter vanishing more and more in the calm and silence of the black box.
There is a silent meditation place where all paths join together, mix and merge as in the center of a star. Philosophy has traveled every road: its only method is the summation of voyages.
With Empedocles of Agrigentum, from the origin of science, it sought science’s foundations. With the Orpheus of the archaic legend and the quasi-contemporary Rodin, it sought beauty, inspiration and the work in the mass and the noise of things, sought raw and black experience, the softness that disappears, woman cloud, or hard appearance, woman stiffness. With Lot and his family, or Mary Magdalene, it conversed with archangels in the evening and aspired from the dawn only to holiness, in the midst of a hundred disasters. Simple and forgetful of all knowledge, it descended into the fissure with the shepherd, calling lost lambs and chasing after treasure. Approached the vicinity of the dead. What good is philosophy, if it doesn’t open every adventure without forbidding a single one, science, educated ignorance, naivety, beauty, intoxication with God?
Lost for a long time, serenely without hope, ascetically continuing its wandering but in hope, it stumbles—oh, wondrous surprise—across a place that every method shares in common.
Pillar, rock, bomb, collet, all bear the common noun “statues” or the proper noun “Hestia.” These two designations are so alike you can’t tell them apart. Together they signify immobility, fixity or invariance, stability. The term “wandering” finds its reference. Here, in this place designated by these nouns and these things, in this fixed and stable point, every tribulation is tied together as in the center of a star; from here they spread as though from a common source.
So the history of philosophy has never produced a general treatise on sculpture? In wanting to make up for this lack, in itself remarkable and never remarked, the itinerary of aesthetics brings us to the feet of statues. But they sit in session or enthroned most often at the far end of temples where they are adored by idolaters who are scorned as superstitious. The itinerary of the history of religion meets with and highlights this term of abuse, in itself remarkable and so akin to the statue that it contributes to breaking or overturning. The goddess who repeats the same term is called Hestia. She who remains.1 The research of aesthetics merges with the religious route.
In archaic Rome, a Vestal was sometimes stoned and buried alive, a virgin priestess of Vesta, the Latin equivalent for the Greek goddess Hestia. We find the corpse of the Vestal beneath the ground at the end of the nocturnal voyage.
Now philosophy has created a noun that’s part of Hestia’s constellation. Epistemology. It talks about the episteme, which we translate with the word “knowledge,” but which, through its origin and root, says invariance and stability again.2 Everything happens as though science was resting, standing or erected on an immutable pedestal. Well founded. Or as though it gave itself invariance as a rule. This foundation, the fixed point in this matter, echoes Hestia’s statue. Two Greek words, very related, of the same family, signify: the one science and the other the funerary cippus, put up vertically. Here the two first routes, aesthetics and religion, join or flow into the philosophy of knowledge. Here, in this triply immobile place. From which the elements come.
In search of foundations and hurling himself for that reason into one of Etna’s chimneys, Empedocles, a physicist, merges with Orpheus, a musician in pursuit of beauty, who launched himself for that reason into the underworld, and both melt with Lot who left at dawn beneath the rain of fire in search of God.
A multiple voyager, most often lost, Hermes, wandering, finds Hestia, the immobile one, his lifelong consort and melts with her, a hermaphrodite or androgyne. The lover meets the beloved. Piously, fuses with the divinity. Can no longer, actively, do without beauty. Knows, finally, the foundations of knowledge. In the same act, at the same place, the end of the wanderings.