In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity.
A philosopher would answer that it depends on how we define our terms. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’. It is more interesting to him because it denotes what artists, poets and philosophers are (or should be) seeking. Ecstatic truth isn’t a label you slap onto accurate statements but an unrepeatable event that comes with the full force of revelation. It is new each time it occurs. There is something weird in it, something that evokes the mystery of existence.
Herzog’s two kinds of truth aren’t exactly opposed. Each depends on the other. In a parallel universe where facts are impossible to articulate – a universe too chaotic or unstable to allow for coherent statements – ecstatic truth would likewise be impossible to express
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