Art was initially a constructive method of representing forms, yet of course a statue is a thing-in-itself and can be symbolic as well as representational. I think Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason were analytical representations of experience and subjective epistemology-Sartre regarded his work as continuing Descartes’. That doesn’t mean that the analysis he produced, and that does incidentally share common features with sculpture and painting inasmuch as it represents real forms of existing things, processes etc., would have been the terminus of observations possible, nor that he would not have continued to describe and classify various recurrent patterns of social dialectic in the art of novels or in further philosophical works.
I wrote a poem after developing a philosophical idea in order to have a brief construction form to place it in. The idea was about lust as a universal human drive and its place in thermodynamics, cosmology and as original sin.
The Mountain of Lust
Beyond the spires and mist lay the great mountain
past the forest canopy in its silence of life dreams
where a path led upward
and visions of the emerald world
ran the course
Somewhere with beingness and corporeal actualization
a body of motion set to conquer
a foot ahead of another
always drawing onward
else the lust for summitting
be spent with sweat and mosquito bytes
Repeated a thousand million times
the words of the din corporation
demised those conditions asterisked
that were externalities to the monad at the top
where the largest was the smallest
pinpointed with a flagging poignancy of fulfillment
The mountain of lust set in majestic repose
drew the charged particles unto it
seeking to join their motivations onto its great parts
where yawning chasms barely able to remain awake
brought rope-swinging adventurers to life-risking
oscillations as metronymic pantomime
onward and upward 600 feet more
Waves of gravity lapped upon the world gently
sent from distant black holes
with millions of times the mass of the sun
consuming star clusters with burping gravitational changes
climbing the great mountain that lust overcome
without philosophic reflections
without the spirit of God.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 