Can't recall a philosophical term-- please help?

There is a specific terminology in poetry (or art in general) that I absolutely cannot remember.
I can't remember who coined the phrase or else I might have been able to search for it.

Essentially, it is a phrase that entails the necessity of the artist being enveloped in the lifestyles/culture of the times, the necessity of being a part of current events as opposed to isolation. It is a phrase that means: inhabiting the significance of the world around you for artistic betterment.

I wish I could remember who coined the phrase or the terminology itself.

Can anyone please help me? I'm dying to chase this down.

I don't know or I don't remember. But it seems to be far more than philosophical. It would be impossible the other way around. Good one to keep in touch with.

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Originally Posted by cafolini

I don't know or I don't remember. But it seems to be far more than philosophical. It would be impossible the other way around. Good one to keep in touch with.

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I've been meditating on it and I think it might be from either Rimbaud or one of the Symbolists. I need to remember because I need the term to satisfy my ceaseless thinking.

Zeitgeist came to mind, but it doesn't cover the whole of your definition, particularly around the goal of artistic betterment. This will now plague my mind until there is an answer! It sounds a bit Hegelian....

Accidental post!

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Originally Posted by chrisvia

Zeitgeist came to mind, but it doesn't cover the whole of your definition, particularly around the goal of artistic betterment. This will now plague my mind until there is an answer! It sounds a bit Hegelian....

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Ballpark, but no dice... I scoured Baudelaire's works of art criticism and couldn't locate it there last night. I'm almost certain it is from the latter 19th century or very early 20th century. Not much help, I realize.

"cultural milieu"?

For artistic betterment or artistic inspiration? Rimbaud had a method, "le dereglement de tous les sens" (a rational disordering of all the senses) which he used for poetic inspiration to become a poet and to attain enlightenment, i.e., to become the "Supreme Savant." "Every form of love, of suffering, of madness he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him keeping only their quintessences." "Alchemie du verbe" is another of his ideas about finding a new "language."

Hegel has the idea of an "organic" community preserving individual freedom because it is rationally organized. So maybe "organic" artist would capture the idea of an artist in tune with his community, who tries to bring about "organic" change, tries to make it more rational, tries to make it more free, tries to make it better.

Could you be thinking of "negative capability"?

Also, in a preface written for a later edition of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison alludes to the "hyperconsciousness" perfected by Henry James, a concept very much concerned with the artist's relating to the world around him. Here's how Ellison explains it:

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"By imposing meaning upon on disparate American experience the novelist seeks to create forms in which acts, scenes, and characters speak for more than their immediate selves, and in the enterprise the very nature of language is on his side."

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(Emphasis mine.)

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Originally Posted by AuntShecky

Could you be thinking of "negative capability"?

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I can't see that.

Negative capability is Keat's way of describing the romantic poet's receptiveness to the world as a natural marvel, a reception beyond theory, a transcendental state of wonder. "The necessity of the artist being enveloped in the lifestyles/culture of the times" seems far more prosaic...

What about Heidegger's "thrown" - everyone, including the artist, is thrown into an existing culture and can't escape being influenced by that culture.

What's the opposite of alienation? What about "embedded"? Or "engaged"?

It also sounds a bit Marxist.

Other terms that might be near: "social realist", "concrete", "situationist", "structuralist",...

I think more context is needed! Where did you see the term used? Oops.. sorry... just read your bit about Rimbaud. Why not "realism"?

What do you mean by "artistic betterment"? Is this an internal feeling of the artist, or better production of art in society, or what?