The Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), founder of the scuola metafisica, or metaphysical school of painting, is quoted as having said, “Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction.” The great power of de Chirico’s art comes from his ability to render these two aspects of reality simultaneously.
Take his Mystery and Melancholy of a Street (1914). Amid the Renaissance architecture of a sun-drenched public plaza, we see the vaguely menacing silhouette of a little girl at play and the shadow of a large, unseen figure tucked away behind the darkened edifice of a building of impossible proportions. If you were to take away the sunlight and classical architecture, the painting might be maudlin. Disperse the shadows, and the work would be leached of its ominous weight. What de Chirico shows us is that the world is really only complete within this tension between the manifest and the hidden. Perhaps, he suggests, one can’t really exist without the other.
This is why de Chirico is the perfect figure to introduce Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears, a newly translated book of essays by the Hungarian literary critic and scholar Laszlo Foldenyi. A professor of art theory at the University of Theater, Film, and Television in Budapest and a member of the German Academy, Foldenyi is among the handful of contemporary European cultural critics focused on cultivating among their readers a feeling for the metaphysical foundations of reality. Working in a similar vein as the Italian publisher Roberto Calasso, Foldenyi asserts that humans are by nature spiritual creatures. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we crave the wholeness that comes with spiritual awareness.
Western culture since the Enlightenment, Foldenyi claims, has tried to cast out de Chirico’s “ghostly and metaphysical” shadows in favor of the light of earthly reason, seeking the total annihilation of melancholy, anxiety, terror, and even unbridled joy. But, he warns, these things inevitably come sneaking back to us. Reality isn’t nearly as susceptible to our control as we think it is. As Foldenyi writes in the introduction, we don’t possess the world but are rather “nested within a series of connections which greatly surpass [us]. … We cannot exist without metaphysics.” And similar to de Chirico’s paintings, the effect of which depends on the balance between light and shadow, Foldenyi argues that human reason cannot exist on its own, inattentive to the irreducible mystery at the heart of existence.
Foldenyi’s essays explore what he calls “atheistic religiosities.” What he means is that “even if someone is not a believer in God, every human being undergoes certain recurrent experiences during which human life is revealed as deeply embedded in a series of profound coherencies” that can “reliably be designated metaphysical.” One of his most resonant examples is abject fear, which he argues sharpens our sense of the spiritual dimensions of life by forcing us to feel our essential powerlessness. It is experiences such as these (terror, boredom, and pain) that Foldenyi claims have been minimized and misunderstood in the modern world.
This is, essentially, a book about outcasts and the exiled. It argues on behalf of experiences that struggle to be articulated in a society bent on eliminating any emotions that could “endanger its optimism.” Foldenyi echoes other contemporary cultural critics, most notably the German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, in arguing that we suffer from an excess of positivity that severs us from the full range of human experience. In trying to save ourselves from any pain or negativity, we also miss out on the meaning they allow us to access. For instance, the desacralization of the human body, its reduction “to material, to its bones, muscles, guts, flesh, blood, skin,” prevents us from experiencing our bodies spiritually. We might tell ourselves that this reduction is a sort of freedom — that unlike the superstitious people of the past, we are liberated to use our bodies as we see fit, whether for pleasure or for health. But, Foldenyi warns, the cost of this freedom is meaningless, fragmented nihilism.
The strongest essay in the collection shares the blistering title of the book. It is a work of intellectual speculation: Guessing that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, while exiled in Siberia, must have read G.W.F. Hegel’s lectures on history, in which Hegel pronounced that Siberia (as well as Africa) lay outside of historical significance, Foldenyi imaginatively recreates Dostoyevsky’s reaction. Already in physical exile, Dostoyevsky might have felt intellectually exiled by Hegel’s words. He might have felt compelled to rage against the “secularized concept of history” popularized by Hegel and other leading thinkers of the 19th century, which “suggests suffering — here, in this earthly existence — might be eliminated.” In what Foldenyi sees as Hegel’s delusional rush to systematize history into something we can understand, some of the most vital human experiences, including terror, love, redemption, and divine wisdom, must be passed over in silence. Hegel, Foldenyi writes, “obeys one of the fundamental laws of modern civilization: to eliminate suffering from life, accomplishing this even at the price of the most appalling suffering. Hegel does not try to comprehend the Africa … within his own soul.”
For the most part, Foldenyi’s essays are sensitive and affecting, with the tone matching the subject. He does occasionally swerve into a hectoring, polemical mode, which feels a bit akin to an exasperated rant. You could never “convince” anyone of these deep truths. At best, you can only hope to make the reader slightly more sensitive to them. As the Grateful Dead sang, “You ain’t gonna learn what you don’t want to know.” But even at his most didactic, Foldenyi always eventually finds his way back to the profound. Then, his ranting seems like a response to a frustrated desire for us to collectively rediscover the wholeness of the world together. And it quickens the reader’s pulse because it’s within these vacillations between the social treatise and the spiritual diatribe that Foldenyi’s essays become art.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
