Knowing Backwards

Faith, Uncertainty, and Personhood

Philip Guston, Reverse, 1979. oil on canvas; 60 × 52½ in. (152.4 × 133.4 cm). Private collection

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously spoke about our inability to know the future—not simply because we’re limited, but because we are choosing moment to moment what that future will be and become—our choice is determinative. To a limited extent we decide what reality is and will be. But we can only truly know the past and the present—and even then our knowledge is so utterly conditional that certainty is ruled out. We can only know backwards and conditionally—always subject to revision. This is true for science as well as the arts and humanities, and perhaps crucially, in all our relationships.

Our knowledge of one another is built on trust, not verifiable hard knowledge. Surprisingly quantum physics shows us that this is also true in our apprehension of the physical universe: we can only know conditionally and relationally—and depend upon trust in each other and in our instruments to report faithfully. Moreover it tells us that our gaze actually alters the course of subatomic particles; our presence causes the elemental building blocks of reality to fluctuate and shift under our very eyes. Turn away and these same particles resume their previous action as though they were performing for us or moving to meet our gaze: that gaze influences the thing we look toward. Consequently truth feels to us elusive and highly conditional, and our knowledge largely confined to what has already happened. We literally live in the past even when we’re fully present. Our senses deliver past data to us because time is in constant flux—always moving ahead. Again, we can only “know backward” but must live forward, Kierkegaard’s intuition tells us.

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My painting mentor, the late American painter Philip Guston (b. 1913, Montreal / d. 1980, Woodstock, NY), radically changed direction in his late work—moving from a successful career as one of the founding figures of Abstract Expressionism into what had become a no man’s land: the human figure and narrative—albeit in a demotic, cartoonish fashion. He left behind the uber-sophistication of late modernism with its formalism and focus on pure visual experience—distillation of color, form, texture, and pictorial space without reference to the things around us, to the human body or any form of storytelling. He famously quipped, “I got sick of all that ‘purity’. I wanted to tell stories again.” I mention Guston’s late-career turn-around because he courageously entered into uncertain territory and found himself violating the “rules” of abstraction which had become the reigning way of painting in the late 50s and throughout the 60s (apart from movements like Pop Art which sampled existing commercial imagery employing it for sardonic or critical purposes). Guston was playing for keeps and dead serious—utterly sincere in his return to the figure and a larger cultural story.

But that terra incognita of his return to the figure and narrative became for Guston a refuge from the emptiness of an imageless art. “I see no reason to celebrate the loss of the known image” he said. And the last year of his life found him returning again and again to the art studio as subject, the proving ground and place of humiliation, loss, reversal, hope, and a kind of painterly redemption in and through his embrace of a brutally honest imagery—all about his own mortality and the inexorable passage of time and decay. (Hence his near obsession with T. S. Eliot’s magnum opus, Four Quartets—an epic poem about time, mortality, faith, hope, and return: “…to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”¹)

Guston was as irresistibly drawn toward Eliot’s hope declared in Four Quartets as he was to Piero della Francesca’s embrace of sacred story in the Legend of the True Cross murals in Arezzo, Italy. Phil longed for a Story worth telling that might reveal a means of redemption, but he refused any readymade or glib religious answers. He died just after the massive retrospective of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art—a show that revealed a painter at the top of his form in the last decade of his life—producing dozens of monumental canvases rich with apocalyptic imagery and painterly honesty. That late work has been inspiration to generations of painters since.

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So, Guston’s commitment to truth-telling is a fine example to all us artists, but the search for a summative, unified theory remains a distant possibility—leaving us with the question, “Is truth entirely subjective / perspectival?” The postmodern posture of “your truth / my truth” can be both a form of humility and a defense-mechanism against feeling judged by others—and it seems to grow in the same soil as modern physics. You have your perspective and I have mine and our individual gaze alters the course of “the facts”. Don’t tell me what to think of myself and my “world” we seem to say. But of course, understanding that truth is largely subjectively understood does nothing to prove that there is no universal truth—simply that it is not accessible as yet to us. This may have special relevance for our current political climate.

What might be a wholesome posture in this fiercely partisan moment in US history is an embrace of the idea that though “the truth is out there”, we don’t own and operate it. We contribute our own piece of the puzzle, but the whole picture is not in view (at least not yet) and that full image belongs to no one culture or religion but to God alone. With this attitude we might be better able contribute to each other, talk to each other, deliberate and debate each other, but not roast each other alive over our disagreements and our conjectures. Purists often resist this posture of compromise and tolerance, but without it our republic will fail—and to my way of thinking our own insight into the nature of things will be blocked.

Knowing backwards is all that we can actually do—the rest is uncertainty, and this posture involves a basic humbleness—what might be called epistemic humility: a humble posture with regard to our knowledge. And again, our backward gaze is itself conditional as modern science has taught us: what seemed to be a very solid and predicable universe has, in recent times, been replaced by a conjectured “multiverse” full of very mysterious qualities such as quantum entanglement (in which particles, once in close relationship remain so even if separated by millions of lightyears) and wave function collapse (in which multiple indeterminate possibilities “collapse” into a single quantifiable datum upon observation). Essentially modern physics begins to behave like poetry, trafficking in metaphor, ambiguities, and paradox.

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Christian Wiman’s recent article in Harpers (“The Tune of Things”) is one of the best discussions of this intersection of physics, consciousness, poetry, and faith that I have read in a long time. Many physicists and cosmologists have been moving in this direction for some time—and the reliable old models that science depended upon for gauging the shape of reality have been set aside in favor of more serviceable poetical expressions. As an artist that squares with the perspective I’ve had since I was a child. I’ve always intuited that reality is responsive to my gaze — not static like some dead certainty, but reciprocal like a relationship or a conversation—full of contingency and surprise.

For me, as a painter, this is a welcome (if sometimes bewildering) state of affairs. Knowing that we cannot know things exclusively as things but must also approach all of Reality as Being or as beings confirms my deepest intuition about it: Reality is conscious being, not inanimate object. This has sometimes been reified into a form of what theologians call the “doctrine pure immanence”—that God exists only as “everything” or in and through everything, but not separately. This is not exactly pantheism but something close to it. On the other hand panentheism is the idea that God is both transcendent and immanent—both greater than reality but interpenetrating reality.

Despite the fact that I’d advocate a deeply respectful, relational approach to nature, the notion that we can know God in an identical manner to how we know the universe seems to me to be hubris. There is a line-in-the-sand drawn by the finger of God saying essentially, “You cannot pass!” like Gandalf shouts to the dark force from below. Our knowledge of God, like our knowledge of one another, is dependent upon what God wishes to disclose and reveal. That line cannot be crossed any more than we can know our friend past what she is willing to share.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite passages in the Bible, where Jesus tells the accusers of the woman caught in adultery that the first stone should be thrown by the man without sin. After which he bent down and wrote in the dirt (or sand) something we’ll never know. Was he simply drawing a line there or listing the sins of the accusers? We do not know, but one by one all the accusers left, leaving the woman safe from their hypocrisy and from violence. “Where are your accusers?” Jesus asked her. “There are none, Lord.” “Neither do I condemn you, go and sin no more.”

That line in the sand says at least one thing: you are not the judge because your knowledge is incomplete. God alone knows forward.

We can only know backward and attempt to live forward.

Philip Guston, The Line, 1978. Oil on canvas. 71 × 73 1/4 in. (180.3 × 186.1 cm). Promised gift to the MET by the artist’s daughter, Musa Meyer, The Estate of Philip Guston, all rights reserved.

1. The full final stanza of “Little Gidding” (final of the four poems comprising Four Quartets) reads:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.