Hillsborough, New Hampshire
“Even with this, however, we still have not come to the essential thing about smoking a pipe and about ritual life in general. It only comes into view when we reflect that we are dealing with an essentially aesthetic phenomenon. The assertion that pipe smoking and ritual gestures in general are aesthetic phenomena is risky primarily because it puts the question of art in an unfamiliar light. It’s not that we’re unfamiliar with emphasizing the ritual aspects of so-called artistic creation. In a certain sense, the romantic conception of art and any l’art pour l’art treats artistic activity as a kind of rite. What is unfamiliar about the assertion is not the claim that art is a kind of rite but just the opposite, the implication that ritual is a kind of art. This does not imply that there is a ritual form of being that expresses itself in specific gestures and in an artistically active life, among other things, as was the case in the romantic era or in l’art pour l’art. It rather implies that there is an aesthetic form of being, the artistic life, and that this life expresses itself in various gestures, including ritual ones. It is not art that is a kind of rite but a rite that is an art form. It is not that there is, for example, a Jewish art that expresses itself in literature or music but also in ritual, and a Jewish philosophy and ethics in addition, but just the opposite, the whole of Judaism, understood as a ritual form of life, is an art form among other ritual forms of life, and Jewish philosophy and ethics are aspects of this art form that threaten to obscure the essential thing, namely, the aesthetic dimension of Judaism. The assertion is unfamiliar and risky because art is usually understood to be a category of being within which such phenomena as rites, music, painting, and poetry come about. This is not the usual claim that the artistic life is a life-form along with the political life, the scientific life, or the religious life, or even that the artistic life is aligned under the religious one (Kierkegaard). It is rather the unfamiliar claim that religious life, inasmuch as one understands it to be a ritual life, is one kind of artistic life-form. This unfamiliar claim does not mean a sanctifying of the artistic life, but conversely, the desanctifying of ritual, for it was reached through the observation of profane pipe smoking.”—Vilém Flusser, Gestures