Ancsel Éva: Éthos, knowing, history (Budapest, 1996)
Part II - Chapter Three. Philosophy and art from the viewpoint of truth
on the other hand, the entire human world, the universe of human life can be discovered in its exemplary lighting. I might add: its truth-carrying universe. A truth that affects people totally differently than a tenet of a specialized science. Of works of art we can say that they ultimately exist in order that the truth taking place in them may have somewhere to exist and survive, and can be passed down in this manner. They exist so that there should be an existence, that there should be a world, which opens onto the concealed, not in order to fully unveil it, but to leave as much of it for mystery that is indispensable for it to be “the world” at all, one always awaiting to be newly discovered. Each work of art is an exceptional thing among other existing things. To the question what works of art ultimately do in our human world, what the purpose of statues is among our objects, what the role of music is in our lives, we can give an answer originating from Attila József, that works of art are worlds and are worlds-as-wholes. Thus they provide the opportunity for people living in contingent segments of reality, to participate in worlds. Works are worlds in which—differently from the real world—there is order and necessity, where even contingent occurrences take place of necessity. Art is a “real fact”, writes Attila József. An element of reality, which “eclipses” reality in its entirety from existence, just as the full moon eclipses the sun from before our eyes: “inspiration is the full eclipse of the reality of the world”.6 Why does the artist have to eclipse reality? In order that he can present us with a new world, a truth-carrying world. The work of art is a created world that treats the land and the plants, the sky and its stars, societal reality from inns to scrubbing brushes as material, in order that it should create for truth a medium more lasting than the corporeal clay, a theoretically immortal, lasting corpus. Shaping its materials into a world, a 6 József Attila Összes Művei (The Collected Works of Attila József), Akadémiai Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 1958, pp. 235-236. 207