Since emotions, rather than sense data, are lived experiences, only a human being can awaken an authentic emotion in another human being. This assertion, which might once have seemed self-evident, has today become a radical stance in the face of a cultural horizon dominated by mechanical reproductions, generative algorithms, and hyperrealistic simulations. Thus, art emerges as the last frontier of the human: that irreducible domain where every imitation dissolves into its own falsehood, and every substitute conceals the truth of being.
In The Principles of Art (1938), R. G. Collingwood distinguishes true art from inferior forms such as craft, magic, or entertainment. For him, “art does not consist in the discharge of emotion nor in the contagion of emotions. To express is to clarify a confused emotion through its form” (Collingwood, 1938). This means that authentic art is neither communication nor mere stimulation, but a process through which emotion, in finding its form, becomes conscious of itself. Unlike the insensate replication of external forms—the hallmark of the sciences of the artificial—the human expressive process does not begin from a fully formed emotion.
The artist discovers what he or she feels in the act of creation itself; it is in that creative action that affect is shaped. Art is, therefore, an act of affective self-knowledge, inseparable from consciousness, reflexivity, and embodiment. No machine can genuinely express what it has never lived; no neural network can incarnate the intimate vibration of a beating heart, nor the tremor of a hand hesitating before drawing a definitive line.
For this very reason, any work produced by artificial systems—even if capable of deceiving the senses—is, at best, an exercise in Platonic mimesis: a copy of a copy. And as Plato reminded us, mimesis is not knowledge but semblance: images that depart from truth as the shadows in the cave depart from the light of the sun (Republic, II. 514a–520a). This mistrust of the visible that fascinates but does not illuminate is not unique to Plato.
The Islamic worldview expresses it with singular intensity in the figure of the Dajjal, the apocalyptic symbol of the supreme seduction of the illusory: he who creates an entire world of convincing illusion, wherein the false is lived as true. In this sense, Dajjal is not merely an eschatological figure, but also a cultural archetype pointing to the danger of a civilisation that confuses the simulated with the real. Jean Baudrillard, from a different philosophical standpoint, radicalised this intuition: in contemporary hyperreality, the simulacrum does not merely conceal the real; it replaces it (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1994).
The Dajjal’s single eye may be reinterpreted as a metaphor for a reduced, monocular vision incapable of perceiving ontological depth. The result is a gaze that no longer requires reality, for it has created an autonomous world of signs referring only to themselves. In this realm, the veil covering reality is not a mere concealment: it is a total replacement. Yet the word veil retains its etymological sense of threshold, a place where the desire to see and the impossibility of apprehending the absolute intertwine. Art lives precisely from this tension. Its essence is to veil in order to reveal, to conceal in order to intensify, to transform formless passion into sensible form.
Heraclitus expressed this in his physis kryptesthai philei: “nature loves to hide.” And Heidegger, reading Heraclitus, held that all truth involves a process of concealment (Heidegger, Early Greek thinking, 1975). In this sense, artistic truth is not conceptual adequation (adaequatio rei et intellectus), but symbolic revelation—an appearing that does not close off mystery, but preserves it and makes it habitable.
The work of art does not merely represent what has been or what is: it announces what is yet to be revealed. It is not a “second nature” in the Aristotelian sense, but a veiled physis: a nature that gives itself in its concealment, a truth that offers itself at the limit. Here we may better understand Michelangelo’s claim that “every block of marble already contains the statue, waiting to be freed.”
Yet beyond mere allegory, this idea challenges Platonic dualism: form does not reside in a separate ideal world, but lies latent within matter itself, as though the marble were Khora—the formless receptacle of the Timaeus, the matrix of all possibilities (Plato, Timaeus, trans., 2008). Schelling, centuries later, would call this the “indifference”: an abyss holding together contradictory possibilities, only one of which becomes actualised through the creative act (Schelling, First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, 2004).
Thus, Michelangelo’s Pietà is not merely the result of the artist’s technical mastery: it is an ontological event, the irruption of a singular form from the formless depth of matter. The same tension manifested in the Renaissance with the invention of perspective. More than a technical achievement, it was a visual affirmation of subjective interiority. In contrast with earlier art forms that subordinated the sensible to the essential, perspectivism affirmed the ontological significance of situated experience: the world was no longer the unfolding of an immutable idea, but a habitable space from an embodied point of view.
The Incarnation of the Logos in the Christian tradition radicalises this shift: the supreme principle does not remain in transcendent distance but manifests in flesh and death. Hegel saw in this a revelation concerning human subjectivity: a void of self-relating negativity, analogous to the Khora, determined only in relation to the other (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 1977). Transcendence is consummated in immanence, and the finite subject becomes the locus of cosmic revelation. Perspectival art and the Cartesian cogito share this displacement: both grant founding status to inner consciousness. Yet while strict rationalism tends to isolate the subject, art keeps open the bridge between the intimate and the universal, preserving the creative tension between form and its absence.
Here emerges a fundamental difference from other metaphysical systems. While Advaita Vedānta identifies the self and the absolute in a homogeneous unity, Christian–Western metaphysics conceives unity as the integration of difference. A symphony is the very embodiment of this notion: a rich polyphony of distinct voices that intertwine without dissolving, each preserving its unique timbre within the embrace of a shared and harmonious whole.
Human subjectivity—this “less than nothing”—is no illusion: it is an indispensable part of the universal symphony. Modern technification, however, has broken this balance. According to Heidegger, modernity enframes the world as Vorhandenheit: a calculable, available stock, severed from the organic flow of being (Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, 1977).
Mechanistic materialism denies the vitality of matter and perpetuates a pathological domination over the feminine–formless, over the fertile chaos from which form arises. This rupture with the originary abyss not only impoverishes our relation to the world but also deprives us of aesthetic experience as an act of reconciliation.
To overcome this alienation requires reconciliation with the Khora as the matrix of all possibility. Art embodies this task: from Michelangelo’s stony passion to Johann Sebastian Bach’s oratorical passion, the creator summons forms from the abyss without annihilating their difference.
Every aesthetic act reiterates the cosmic drama of creation: integrating dissonance into a harmonic unity that does not negate singular voices. For this reason, art is a return to the authentic: a bridge between form and formless, transcendence and immanence. The modern subject, heir to the Renaissance turn and the Christological event, is the place where cosmos and abyss meet. In the face of technocratic alienation, art reminds us that true unity does not exclude difference, but embraces it in a cosmic symphony where every note is necessary and none is lost.
In this regard, Nishida Kitarō’s notion of Nothingness, not as static absence but as dynamic–creative emptiness and ontological place from which all existence arises and resolves, converges with the European thinkers mentioned, adding a further dimension that enriches the thematisation of Nothingness and complements the Heideggerian interpretation of Being (Sein) as meaning (Sinn) bound to temporality—that horizon which marks the limits of our being-in-the-world (Nishida, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, 1987).
Incorporating, under the influence of the prematurely deceased German philosopher Emil Lask, the idea of the pre-objective predicate (述語, jutsugo) into his “logic of place,” Nishida develops a form of apprehension prior to objectification and conceptualisation, without establishing a clear distinction between subject and object (Nishida, 1987).
This non-dual unity is, for Nishida, the ground of all subsequent knowledge and the matrix of meaning. In that place (場所, basho), Nothingness (無, mu) functions as the foundational space of beings—a metaphysical space where dynamic and causal relations between individual consciousness and the objective environment intertwine, shaping an interaction between subject and object that points to reality as a dynamic totality open to unity and the coexistence of apparent opposites.
This has notable cognitive relevance, for it questions and transcends conventional categories of knowledge and perception, calling into question the subject–object duality and venturing the dynamic and relational nature of a reality composed of absolutely contradictory identities. It is not difficult to perceive here the trace of Nietzsche, with his claim that, unable to escape time, we must problematise our desire to evade it and find a way of being-in-time such that time no longer feels like a burden (Nietzsche, The Birth of tragedy and the Case of Wagner, 1968).
But moving towards the void does not mean turning one’s back on Nothingness; on the contrary, it compels us to enter into the heart of nihilism and open it to what lies beyond.
Not even Heidegger dared to leap from nihility to “absolute Nothingness in the authentic sense”, which is no longer the threatening negation of Being, but being-as-not-being. For Heidegger, to enter into the essence of nihilism is to “withdraw” to the place where Being and Nothingness gather together (Heidegger, Pathmarks, 1998).
Nishida, for his part, in transforming relative nothingness into absolute nothingness, understood—consonant with German philosophy—that the essence of nihilism is not nihilistic: the essence of Nothingness belongs to Being. Therefore, nihilism, as a determination of Being, belongs to metaphysics, and we must regard the abysmal Nothingness as an ontological dimension underlying existence and deeper than the distinction between Being and Nothingness (Nishida, 1987).
Thus, Nishida underscores the reciprocity between self and world, affirming that each reflects the other, and that meaning arises from their mutual interaction: authentic self-awareness cannot develop in isolation, for it is through interaction with the external world and with other people that we define and redefine our identity in a continuous cycle of mutual influence. In this sphere, each subject is a microcosm with a unique perspective, reflecting a multifaceted vision of reality; conscious acts, always framed within a spatio-temporal context, contribute to the formation of our consciousness and of the surrounding reality, operating dialectically.
Hence, the self’s self-determination—through its traits, judgements, and intentions—reinforces an identity in constant change and adaptation, one that is continuously reconceptualised through experiences and actions, reflecting the dynamic nature of the world. In sum, art emerges as the space in which this dynamic of unity and difference, of Being and Nothingness, of subject and world, finds its most authentic and transcendent expression—uniting individual experience with the cosmic totality in a continuous becoming.
As Roger Scruton observed, artistic contemplation is not escape but redemption: not for its utility, but for its sheer presence. Beauty does not annul the tension of existence; it transfigures it (Scruton, Beauty, 2009). Heidegger’s aletheia resonates here: truth appears in the sensible form that orders chaos and makes it a world (Heidegger, 1975). Nietzsche, from another angle, deepens this idea: art does not relieve pain, it intensifies it to make it habitable (Nietzsche, 1968).
In this, he distances himself radically from Schopenhauer’s notion of art as vital analgesia—that is, as a temporary suspension of the suffering inherent in the will to live. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic contemplation is a moment of stillness in which the individual, provisionally freed from desire, experiences a truce from the torment of existence (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, 1969).
Nietzsche, by contrast, rejects the idea that art should function as an ontological sedative: for him, the work is not a refuge from suffering, but a symbolic space in which suffering is transfigured into form and affirmed as inseparable from life itself. Art does not mirror the world; it produces it. It neither represents nor replicates what is given, but founds new ways of inhabiting it. It precedes concept, morality, and theory: an originary gesture, the symbolic matrix of meaning. Its value lies not in transparency, but in its capacity to condense the ineffable into sensible form, to coexist with mystery without trivialising it artificially.
In an age saturated with technical artifice, art endures as the last redoubt of the human. It is the space where mystery is not suppressed but given form; where the veil does not conceal to deceive, but preserves to reveal. It may well be the only place where truth—like the Pietà nested in the marble—still awaits, intact, to be set free.
