The casual philosopher (on some motifs in “The Philosopher and the Artist”)

Abstract

The article considers a number of motifs of the book The Philosopher and the Artist, which contains reflections of the philosopher Valery V. Savchuk on the work of the artist Vladimir Komelfo (Vladimir M. Fomichev) and reproductions of works by the famous St. Petersburg master. It is emphasized that this book can be regarded as the story of more than thirty years of competition between a critic-thinker and a painter-experimenter: in reality, it is about the confrontation of two types of perception, thinking, and expression. In this confrontation, the author shows, the competitors adopt each other's techniques: philosophy begins to paint and painting begins to philosophize. The very contest between the philosopher and the painter, the chronicle of which is presented in The Philosopher and the Painter, is nothing less than the difficult experience of such a friendship, in which a friend finds an unintentional opportunity to change himself in favor of the other without changing himself. Indeed, the reproductions of paintings and drawings used in the book by V.V. Savchuk, reflected in the philosopher's reasoning, can say much more than at the artist's personal exhibitions. And the experiments of art criticism, undertaken by the philosopher “on occasion”, contain more or less explicit attempts at true philosophical word-making, which is a distinctive feature of any original philosophy. It is emphasized that the practice of New Archaic philosophical thinking is relevant, the thinking which, supported by a graphic or pictorial arguments, does not appear as a plunge into the depths of being-language in order to grasp and discover the hidden absolute truth in it; rather, it appears as a kind of  glide across the surface of what exists here and now, as an invitation to travel along the windings of the visible.