The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [45]
Stanwyck shakes her head in amazement and takes over by taking off the record playing in the background and putting on some conga music. Stanwyck’s point, in effect, is that these scholars should ignore their objective formulas and diagrams and instead feel the conga ‘from the inside.’ Once they start dancing, the professors learn quickly what the conga’s all about.
It’s the same with The Stones. The celebrity profiling I’ve been describing obscures not only the fact that The Stones are essentially a live band, but also the history of what a live performance means in human experience and human history. To recover some of that, I want to go back in time, before The Stones, before the conga, all the way back to ancient Greece. I’m not too concerned with historical accuracy. We will never know the objective truth about the past, but our lack of objective certainty is not necessary a bad thing. It frees us to experiment and see if any new perspectives and ideas emerge that may be valuable.
Live at Epidaurus
For the ancient Greeks, everything that exists was called the kosmos (‘order’, ‘world’, ‘universe’) and was understood to be aesthetikos—the Greek word from which our word ‘aesthetic’ is derived. ‘Aesthetikos’ meant ‘perceive’ and ‘perceptions’. There is a sense therefore that, for the ancient Greeks, the universe is made up of ‘perceptions.’ Think of some of the Olympian ‘smaller’ spiritual forces, such as nymphs (river spirits), Naiads (spring-dwellers), Nereids (sea-dwellers), and Dryads (tree spirits). They are alive and active and perceive the regions and things they inhabit. In a sense, they are those perceptions, much as the Olympian gods, like Athena (the goddess of wisdom and war) and Aphrodite (the goddess of love), exists as wisdom, anger, or love in nature. In some cases, the ancient Greeks perceived each powerful emotion—like anger, hate, or erotic love—to be an active ‘mass’ or ‘cloud’ moving according to its own inner logic across the landscape. When a cloud strikes us, it envelopes us, alters our perception of the world and then draws us forward, following its own logic and negating any plans we mere humans might have had.
For the Greeks, therefore, the phenomenological world they experienced was aesthetic, with physical and non-physical things alike being understood to exist in the world. There was no transcendent God, above and beyond His creation, as would become hallmarks of Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions. Everything that exists was in the world and everything that exists was an artistic, aesthetic expression of the world. Understanding and aesthetic experience, therefore, were not two different kinds of things. Thinking itself was understood to creatively shape meaning out of experience and bestow that meaning back into the world.
This is what makes The Rolling Stones theorists from my experimental point of view. The ancient Greek concept of theoria means a technique (techne means ‘to bring forth’) through which the aesthetic can perceive itself. Theoria should seem familiar to anyone who has seen The Stones play, given the two meanings it took in the ancient Greek world-view.
First, theoria meant the collective ritualistic dancing that took place in the large open-air Dionysian festivals every spring. (Dionysius was the god of wine and intoxication). Second, these festivals often produced a state of ek-stasis, or ‘standing outside oneself ’—ecstasy—which bestowed participants with an ability ‘to look on’ the world with the clarity of a God’s eye point of view. In theoria (‘to look on ‘), a clear head seems like a divine smile—a moment of grace.
The eruption of the ‘ek-stasis’ of ‘theoria’ disrupted routine ways of thinking and acting—at least for awhile.