Anna Layman ~ Jacques Maritain ~ Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

"But the substance of man is obscure to himself. He knows not his soul, except in the fluid multiplicity of passing phenomena which emerge from it and are more or less clearly attained by reflective consciousness, but only increase the enigma, and leave him more ignorant of the essence of his Self. He knows not his own subjectivity. Or, if he knows it, it is formlessly, by feeling it as a kind of propitious and enveloping night. Melville, I think, was aware of that when he observed that “no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences.” Subjectivity as subjectivity is inconceptualizable; is an unknowable abyss. How, then, can it be revealed to the poet?
The poet does not know himself in the light of his own essence. Since man perceives himself only through a repercussion of his knowledge of the world of things, and remains empty to himself if he does not fill himself with the universe, the poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single wakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep. In other words, the primary requirement of poetry, which is the obscure knowing, by the poet, of his own subjectivity, is inseparable from, is one with another requirement- the grasping, by the poet, of the objective reality of the outer and inner world: not by means of concepts and conceptual knowledge, but by means of an obscure knowledge which I shall describe in a moment as knowledge through affective union." ~ (pg. 83)
I got reminded some of the discussions that occured in class when I read this. Bringing in some of the thoughts of Buber, 'I' is the subject. Then there is the 'other' (being and beings.) The 'other' is connected to "you" (the subject), and "it" (the object). The spirit is man's response to his 'you.'
But we do not know ourselves as 'you.' We experience things as 'it'. To understand the forms and figures around us, we must objectify them. How do we know ourselves? We percieve ourselves through our objective reality of the world. Art allows us to free ourselves from the objective reality of the world. It helps us to experience reality as we want to experience it, not as we have learned to experience it.