34 SOCIAL SCIENTIST
gaining its own quality, becoming bone or liver and, what is more, ova and sperm. Later, perhaps, we can decode their progression through simple mathematical formulae of logarithmic spirals.
Quality may be explained by quantity. And organs of function may perhaps thus be reproduced. But the nature of individuation in art from both the mechanical and organic viewpoints requires what would amount to an error, be it rational, anthromorphic, even aesthetic.
A work of art has to take from disorder to disorder (of the world from which its own particular order is created).
The most succinct statement of art's relationship to natural and social order is perhaps that it is unfettered by laws prescribed by Destiny or nature, that it transcends them. (Mammata's opening of the Kavyaprakash).
It is, perhaps, for this reason that art seems forever to fluctuate from the didactic to the sensate, sometimes'containing the one in the other, in fickle and yet versatile agitation, violating its own aesthetic norms, destroying the craft that makes its realisation possible, considering its states of equilibrium states of death. Forever, threatening death with life.
I should think that the spirit of modernity consists in this—and yet it's origins, as we have seen, lie in centuries of tradition; not in something fixed but as something fickle, versatile, trembling with its own desire to change, to disturb the state of entropy.
The particular fault in man freed his epistemological instinct from that fate that he considered organic to his being. The swollen foot of fate (Oedipus) did not impel him to a destructive knowledge. It was something rotten in the state, that he acted out his tragedy against, man against the disease engendered by him. At the cost of self-destruction, with the benefit of redeeming that spirit which was until then his fault.
It is not truth, with its axioms or its evidence, its homes alternating between the mental and the physical, its transformations and conclusions sanctified by religion or science, that by itself constitutes the content of art. It is the tension between the axiom and the evidence, the very process that produces the generative error, that makes our actions emanate from our being (itself not essential, static, axiomatic or evident) from moment to moment that forms the epistemology of beauty. It is the praxis of truth, not its descriptions, definitions, nor its realisations.
We may all disagree with a work of art, and yet acknowledge it as great; as providing us with insights every time we approach it -even if it be removed from us in space, time, ideology, established knowledge and its structures, the ethics of our life and times.
We may distance ourselves from the political logic and the consequences of Gandhi's action, but we can only go into raptures over its poetry.