On Emptiness (Book excerpt)
I believe myside bias in humans is one of our greatest flaws—the tendency to double down, to get defensive, to stubbornly refuse to change our minds when we are exposed to contradictory information. I’ve tried to avoid this as I progress through my “life course,” as scientists clinically put it. But along with reactance,[1] this phenomenon is one of the sad flaws of evolution that isn’t easily remedied, and in the political realm, for instance, it can have deleterious effects that wholly prevent people from grappling with reality.
People crave ascribing a deeper meaning to everything. To see symbols. To jam in context and integrate an experience, a sight, a smell, to the network of simulacra in their brains. But maybe it’s better to do the opposite, as Buddhism teaches in the concept of “emptiness” (Śūnyatā). To strip an experience of its context, its essence, its socially constructed value. Don’t see a tree and think, “That’s just a tree.” View it and behold the beauty of an entity that waves and shimmers with shades of green, striking brown.
Incidentally, as I’ve transitioned into the art world, I’m seeing the concept of emptiness has popped up repeatedly, though it’s not referred to as such. Two books I’m currently reading illustrate what I mean.
In Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See by Bianca Bosker, the author discusses plunging herself into the art world and emerging with a newfound way of seeing the world. In one situation, she describes an exercise in which her drawing partner describes a commonplace object to her, but as if they were an alien with no concept of what the object actually was. “…I felt like I was glimpsing the outlines of my filter of expectation,” she wrote, referring to a cognitive neuroscience concept in which our brains filter out a great deal of extraneous perceptual data to focus on what is important. Bosker cites a contact in the art world: “There’s something magical about looking at the world without identifying what you’re looking at. You see so, so, so much more.” Bosker concludes that, “The trick was to see things by unseeing them.”
In the same vein, authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross come close to describing “emptiness” in their book, Your Brain on Art, about neuroaesthetics, a new field looking at how the brain interprets art and its effects on our psyche, The authors describe the aftermath that can come from the awe and surprise of seeing art: it wakes you up in your everyday life. “Maybe you notice something mundane—a piece of trash on the sidewalk, or a building, or a parking meter, and you see it fresh,” they write. “You notice all that’s around you, and you notice it in a surprisingly new way.” Śūnyatā.
Another artist I’ve mentioned also understood the concept of emptiness: René Magritte. In his work La Trahison des Images [The Treachery of Images], which you’ve probably seen, he writes “Ceci n’est pas un pipe” [This is not a pipe] under the clearly painted image of a pipe. What does the work say? It might say that, applying the concept of emptiness, you are not looking at a pipe, you are looking at very thin layers of pigments on a flat, canvas surface. He’s breaking things down to their molecular, banal reality.
Obtain the book here.
[1] Essentially, doing the opposite of what you’re told to do in order to assert your independence.