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The Fun Arts

Turning to the arts marks a major transition in the philosophy of living, a shift from receptivity to activity, from realization and appreciation to making and doing.  Truth is already there for discovery and contemplation; and appreciating beauty in nature is mainly receptive.  Art, however, is activity.  Only when the artist acts, lifts up brush or pen or instrument or voice or foot, does the artist's receptivity give birth to art.  Of course this separation is too simple: we make truth our own through action, and we behold works of art.  Nevertheless, human action creates what we behold in the arts.

A full and happy life involves the arts--not only the fine arts but also the "fun arts," the arts of play, including gardening, crafts, humor, and sports.  Participating in a broad range of arts refreshes and uplifts.  Beauty conducts the school of feeling, and this chapter gives a vision of the arts of play as beauty activities.  They cultivate qualities of feeling and acting valuable in any realm.  The chapter culminates with a meditation on attitude, an exercise for cultivating a positive attitude in the face of a challenging situation.

Gardening

For mortals who come from dust and return to dust, working with the soil is as basic an occupation as we can have.  Since the agricultural revolution in human history, we rely for survival on the food we grow.  As fine as a field of grain can look, however, it is grown for food, not for its pleasing appearance.  In gardening, beauty may be the primary goal.  Within the realm of beauty, gardening forms the first bridge between the beauties of nature and those of the arts.

Painters know how much better a landscape can look with a few adjustments, and landscape architects know how to embellish a place with flowers and ground cover and shrubs and trees.  Added to practical benefits such as erosion control and provision of shade are aesthetic benefits.

What a difference plants make indoors or outdoors!  The look of a neighborhood or a campus is strikingly improved by planting or a rock garden.  The difference in the main plaza at Kent State University is tangible.  When I first saw it, the area was a flat plain of concrete.  Now there are traces of hills, curving brick paths embedded in concrete, and half a dozen garden areas, oases of loveliness from early spring to late fall for those taking a meal outside or walking between buildings.  Even those who take no notice must be positively affected.  Though some philosophers of art look down upon embellishment as trivial or deceptive, adding a touch of beauty makes a very positive difference.

The great botanical gardens of the world are worth a pilgrimage.  Sometimes, like many zoological gardens, they represent biospheres of Africa, Asia, and the Americas.  Sometimes they represent various cultural styles.  Japanese gardens are popular today, even as French formal gardens and English gardens, influenced by the natural spontaneity of Chinese gardens, have been popular in the past.  Most of all, botanical gardens provide wonderful places to walk and special places to sit and enjoy hills and rocks and water and sand and trees and flowers.  Gardens can also lead beyond themselves.  For example, the main prospect overlooking the showy Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, leads the eye up to a sublime spectacle of surrounding wilderness.

            Gardening cultivates the self as well as the soil.  Cooperating with nature's rhythms of growth induces patience and peacefulness.  Northern California prisoners who had never grown anything in their lives gained new self-respect by raising herbs to sell to gourmet restaurants.  Sunshine and soil and caring for something and the satisfaction of enjoying the results all teach a remarkable lesson: though we may not directly produce growth, we may deliberately cultivate the factors of growth.

Gardens teach a simple but important lesson in the art of living:

            Natural beauty is not only something to look for in the wild; it is also a value to be cultivated.

Crafts

            The crafts, or practical arts, such as weaving and pottery, bridge a gap in our culture and our lives.  C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures argued that our civilization suffers from being split into one culture centered on science and another culture with contrasting values centered on the humanities and the arts.  In theory, there should be no split.  Think, first, of the intimate connection between science and technology, second, of the blend of technology and crafts in the ancient world, and, third, of the close association of crafts and fine arts.  We find a continuum, not alienation.  Nevertheless, today technological developments have lead us to a point where we no longer comprehend most of the tools we rely on every day.  As a result, doing even a bit of work on one's own home, for example, restores a sense of being an active and responsible dweller on this earth.  Crafts help inspire us to gain better control of the forces unleashed by the current technology binge.

Quilts can be as beautiful as fine abstract expressionist paintings.  The originality in Hagiko's ceramics, in the vases she has made for her flower arrangements, and in the sweaters she knits, compares with the originality of artworks in museums.

If every product of labor were seen as artificial and thus cut it off from nature, how should we classify a beaver dam?  Crafts teach the continuity between the natural and the artificial.  Crafts work with natural materials to construct useful and attractive things for daily life.  Of course, the term "natural materials" is redundant, since all materials come from nature.  It takes imagination to sense the presence of nature in a sidewalk or road; but doing so makes you feel more at home. 

I am not defending the paving over of forests.  My thoughts here take a different tack.  We do well to recall, first, that whatever tools and materials we use come from nature.  Second, whenever we manipulate material things, we can exercise some kind of art.  Crafts illustrate two principles of beauty:

1.  There is a beauty inherent in anything excellently done.  The thing looks good to those who see the craftsmanship.

2.  Adding beauty to our dwellings and places of worship and artifacts and activities shows how they can fittingly take on a heightened aesthetic function.

Let's take this point to the limit.  Personal grooming, the way we dress and drive and do "trivial" things, maintaining a nicely ordered living space and work space--all contribute to the art of living.

Crafts transmute tradition into character.  The cultivation of crafts develops skill; and learning to do something well greatly bolsters self-respect.  Character owes much to the factors of tradition, schooling, long practice, cultivating talent beyond immediate self-expression, learning that art takes more than following rules, and acquiring a discriminating judgment of excellence in accord with standards that experienced judges apply.  In these ways, crafts bridge the beauty and goodness realms of life.

Humor

Life's pressures, self-serious striving for growth, religion's demand for supreme loyalty, unexpected shocks--all these call for humor to balance excesses, season daily life, take ourselves less seriously, and lubricate interactions.  Humor has the right of way in the human mind.  When two messages are competing for our attention, we listen more sympathetically to the one packaged with humor.  Humor is a most effective way to communicate insight.  Lao Tzu said, "He who feels pricked must once have been a bubble."  The prophet Mohammed said, "If anyone calls his brother a fool, the accusation is true of one of them."  Those who can laugh at themselves deflate self-righteousness.  Think of what humor has done for Jewish culture, despite all the Jews have been through.

Humor need not be vulgar, blasphemous, or abusive in order to be hearty.  There are direct and indirect ways to cultivate humor.  For an example of a direct approach, recall the example of the man with cancer who thought that humor might help him heal and was successful with daily doses of funny movies, joke books, and the like.  The direct route to increasing the humor in one's life obviously has much to recommend it.  Laughing--with no humorous stimulus whatsoever--is recommended as a tonic for health.

An indirect approach to cultivating a sense of humor notes that anxiety blocks humor.  To release anxiety, turn methodically to the future, to the present, and to the past.  Turning to future concerns, consider that things work out; all things work together for good.  Turning to present concerns, recognize anxiety for what it is and simply leave it by the side of the road.  Use faith instead. Turning to the past, take time to recall times of needlessly anxiety.  Going to the doctor for a shot, taking an exam, approaching an interview--we sear our minds with so much fear and anxiety!  Looking back, we can smile.  There is also leverage in looking back on the past of the human race, on what humankind have survived and what we have accomplished.  This technique is not designed to discredit the use of history to mobilize indignation over past injustice and resolve for change.  That is the study of what we have not yet accomplished.  There is, however, another use of history.  Even though our present world civilization is so incomplete, there are achievements to recall.  Think of the emergence of science, philosophy, religion, the arts, fine patterns of government in legislative, executive, and judicial branches, and the beginnings of international law.  Where civilization enjoys those blessings, the struggles of living without them are over.  Contemplating past achievements relaxes the mind.  Occasionally it is possible to sense the sustaining hand of Providence, to note how this disappointment led to that opportunity, how this disaster opened that door.  The result of such meditations is a new lightness.  It is said that even the Gods smile.

            Whatever approaches to humor we may use, a helpful thought remains.

            Humor deflates tension and helps us take ourselves less seriously.

Play and recreation

Play enjoys extra freedom since its goals are not ultimate, and the boundaries that define its special space and time are easily entered into and departed from when the game is over.  Play need not be lax, though, because it may engage our full energies.  Neither is play chaotic.  Though the degree of constraint varies, a game is a rule-governed activity.  The twelve-year-olds who know that the rules of a game can be changed nevertheless realize that the players must agree on a proposed change.

The play of a fulfilled person expresses a sense of security in a friendly universe.  The exertion of play is wholehearted but not compulsive, self-forgetting but not escapist.  Even when what to do has been decided, there is still a choice of how to do it.  Play symbolizes our freedom to engage ourselves in a personal way regardless of other forces.

Play can become so all-encompassing that the dancer, for example, no longer experiences the effort of dancing the dance.  Instead, the dance dances the dancer.  Spontaneity from beyond the conscious mind takes over.  Because of the complexity of the human person--the mind being bounded by subconscious and superconscious sources of energy and inspiration--and because of the need for a sane approach to spiritual communion, it is worth questioning such ecstasies, not to dismiss them, but to dwell in the question long enough for discernment to have a chance to arise.

Our culture struggles with a distorted form of play.  Materialism and aggression increase when winning matters most and brings huge financial rewards.  In the vacuum created by recent setbacks to the realization of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, the extreme wing of postmodernism promoted a distorted form of play.  It subverts sincerity, trivializes values, and ironically detaches from every concern other than the player's own sovereign preference.  A cynical, aggressive style seems to show power, independence, and superiority to convention.  False heroes of self-assertive play fascinate those who see mere conformity as their only alternative.

Why is play so important?  Playing among animals mimics and prepares for serious adult activities, but animals also seem to participate in play as an activity enjoyable for its own sake.  Humans need to balance work and play, not only for the recreational value.  The balance is like the Chinese yin-yang symbol, in which each field contains an element from its opposite.  For example, an attitude of good humor graces the performance of any job, while there is a serious aspect to competitive sports.  Healthy play and recreation is a necessary part of daily life.  Many people say that three days after they return from a vacation, half the recreational value has disappeared, and after three weeks it's as though they had never left at all.  We need ways to import the values of vacation into the ordinary routine.

Play and recreation express choice.  We play because we choose to do so.  The experience of the joy of choice in recreation offers an opportunity for another step in the philosophy of living.  We can learn to enjoy the exercise of a fundamental human word: "I will."  How much of our lives do we live under silent protest?  So much of life is dominated by a "have-to."  We have to work, have to handle various responsibilities, have to deal with whatever problems we may have inherited genetically and grown up in culturally.  Added to our condition are moral and religious demands.  Times of recreation, however, can yield a deeper and more positive attitude.  From a non-religious perspective this can mean to love one's fate or to revel in the bright shining of human science, art, and ethics before cosmic doom destroys us all forever.  From a religious perspective this means embracing the Creator's will, taking up one's specific situation, and walking forward.  To choose your life does not mean assuming a strait-jacket.  It rather makes you want to do your best, to be artistic with the seemingly limited possibilities at hand.

 Sport as sustenance and symbol

            One experiment put people with mental health problems into three groups.  One group had office psychotherapy.  A second group went regularly for jogging.  A third group went jogging with a therapist.  The group that only went jogging did much better than the group that got only psychotherapy, and those that went jogging with a therapist did only a little better than those only that went jogging.  For many people, especially when so many people work sitting down most of the day, exercise and sports have become an essential component in sustaining health, sanity, and happiness.

            Sports not only engage us in fun and therapeutic exercise.  Sports show models of excellence as talented athletes with years of training exert supreme effort.  I remember ice skating once, shortly before the Winter Olympics, when the stars of the local skating club came on the ice.  They needed the time to practice, even though it was public skating time, so they joined the rest of us one afternoon.  Everybody's skating picked up under the inspiration of the couples who were jumping and twirling, but the most charming of all was the patient grace of Janet Lynn, slowly and repeatedly tracing figure eights on the ice (for school figures were then part of the competition).  In a few weeks she would win a gold medal in women's figure skating.  Essential to her greatness was devoting full attention to the simplest elements of her art.

One evening I came across a group of young men practicing karate.  They all seemed strenuous and deadly serious and heavy and forceful except one whose leaps and kicks were so graceful as to seem effortless.

The sweetness of success goes beyond coming in first and beyond any monetary rewards.  Winners speak of teamwork and of personal growth in the face of challenge.  It is encouraging when such peak performers as Wayne Gretzky, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan show themselves good-humored, humble, and gentle.

A meditation on attitude

Some of our finest moments of contemplation yield inspired attitudes that we can hardly put into words.  They invest action with a new quality of striving.  An attitude is our response as a whole personality to life as a whole.  A philosophy of living culminates, in a way, in a choice of attitude.  Growing individuals develop an appetite for challenges.  Many successful business people speak of an aggressive, problem-solving attitude as a key factor in their success.  Athletes and those in the performing arts characteristically exhibit the fully mobilized energy needed in other areas of life.

            Life brings a somewhat predictable series of challenges, each of which gives us an opportunity to respond.  We can choose a progressive attitude or a non-progressive attitude.  Each progressive attitude gives us a strength or virtue that prepares us ideally for the next challenge.  Here is one series of such challenges set forth by psychologist Erik Erikson,.  In response to the experiences of the first year of life, trust should come to predominate over distrust.  During the second and third years, the issue is whether autonomy, confidence in one's ability to assert oneself, will prevail over shame (being exposed before one is ready, revealing a vulnerability or deficiency felt to be intrinsic to the self).  At age 4-5, the issue is initiative (manifested differently by boys and girls) versus guilt (a reprimand may be overpowering in the child's mind).  Next, in later childhood, one is challenged to acquire the virtue of industry: the "I can" attitude, a sense of competence about doing and learning and making a contribution, rather than developing a sense of inferiority by despairing of one's skills and status.  Then, during the teenage years, one must struggle with a sense of identity versus role confusion.  When identity is firm, one is able to commit oneself in fidelity to a friendship, a religion, a community.  Next, sustained intimacy implies mutuality in sexual satisfaction and the virtue of love.  The crisis of middle age is between generativity versus stagnation.  Is one willing to invest oneself caring for the next generation (in child rearing and contribution to society) or will one be captured by self-centeredness?  In later adult life one faces the challenge of ego integrity versus despair.  After triumphs and disappointments, there arises a new love of self as part of a world order grounded in spiritual depth.  The final virtue is wisdom, which refreshes courage, renews earlier visions of wholeness, and whose fearlessness toward death encourages children.  Note that positive attitudes are not one-and-for-all achievements, since negative attitudes such as mistrust persist to some degree and become components in the dynamism of the positive attitudes.

Cultivating positive attitudes for dealing with challenges may be misunderstood in three ways.  First, there is a popular philosophy that I call goalism.  You are invited to identify your goal--no matter what it may be.  Then you are trained in the rational technique of organizing your life for total pursuit of the goal.  The effectiveness of such organization and motivation, at least over the short term, sells countless seminars and self-help books.  Because most people are inefficient in organizing their lives and mediocre in motivation, they benefit from such training.  Usually the goal, however, is not to maximize not truth, beauty, and goodness but to maximize some material quantity such as money or career advancement.  Moral and spiritual concerns are mentioned, if at all, as a reassuring constraint, but not as primary.  When people maximize anything less than truth, beauty, and goodness, however, value is sacrificed.

A second misunderstanding of vigorous striving is theological.  Human effort expends energies of mind, body, and spirit that we mobilize but do not originate.  Faith, in particular, is a gift.  It is well for theology to insist that cosmically effective action must begin with and abide in the grace of God.  I saw a gifted and accomplished friend harm his sanity by misusing his capacity for heroic action.  He failed to recognize when he needed to return to the humble, child-like attitude of spiritual receptivity.  Carried to an extreme, however, this theology leads to passivity.  Fear of presumption and spiritual pride may conceal spiritual lethargy.  Faith begins in child-like receptivity, but faith is supposed to grow into the hearty exercise of the powers of the full-grown adult.  Human efforts do not bring salvation, but those who have tasted salvation find much to be done.

A third misunderstanding of the vigorous attitude alleges that it involves straining.  Fanatical zeal concentrates so much on its cause that it sacrifices the qualities that make the cause worthwhile.  Spiritual striving, however, fits with a calm and happy approach, full of good cheer.

An exercise

Superb attitudes develop in response to specific types of challenge.  Here is a thoroughness exercise to help cultivate such attitudes.  A challenge may seem overwhelming unless we can break it down into aspects we can cope with effectively.

1.  Consider uncertainty an element in the situation you are facing.  List the aspects of uncertainty.  Think through your response to the alternate possibilities in the situation.  Think of the most outstanding response to uncertainty you can conceive.  Now give yourself time to feast upon uncertainty (or however you would express your ideal response).

Let the attitude come to mind.  You are not forcing, but cooperating with the inner spirit.  You are not in a hurry.  You do not have to create or construct this attitude.  You are not pushing a button, manipulating your psyche, with an instant technology for success whatever your goal may be.

At times you can call forth the better attitude on the spur of the moment, when your energetic will can effectively command the lower self, when taking time for meditation would be mere problem avoidance.  But sometimes we have time to process in thoroughness.  Today's thorough process prepares tomorrow's decisive victory.

2.  Is there some disappointment about the situation you are facing?  Write it down.  Contrast a mediocre human response to disappointment with the grandest response you can conceive.  Take time to let that better attitude prevail in your mind.

3.  Are you facing apparent defeat?  If so, acknowledge it lucidly.  Remember that the apparent defeats of the earth life are not to be confused with eternal failure.  Can you develop an enthusiasm for responding to this situation?

4.  Are you facing difficulties that challenge you to mobilize your energies vigorously?  List them, and invigorate your response.

5.  Does the sheer immensity of the challenge feel overwhelming?  If so, write down how that is so.  Draw on your best resources to conceive of the ideal attitude of response and take the meditative time to mobilize your courage, or your concentration and patience, or whatever response you find to be ideal.

6.  Are you dealing with something inexplicable that challenges your faith?  Acknowledge it; write it down.  Then ask for and receive and exercise a sturdy and unassailable faith.

Someone might object that this exercise distorts the personality.  A critic could say that we already have enough workaholic, excessively aggressive, vigilant, and domineering people in the society, and these meditations only make the problem worse.  True, the meditations do not provide a full theory of values or a full ideal of character, and they are capable of being pressed into the service of vulgar ambitions.  In their proper use, however, they give leverage against such pitfalls, since the sensitive individual will use these very pitfalls as challenges to focus on in this exercise.  The person who has trouble giving others a fair chance or sustaining a calm and cheerful attitude is precisely the person who may benefit most from vigorously pursuing such a goal.  There is a qualification, however, about the kind of calm and cheer resulting from this high-mobilization approach.  This calm is free of lethargy and problem-avoidance.  Expressed in prepositions, an effective philosophy of living shows us a perspective of the above and beyond even as it orients us to the into and through.

The beauty of life emerging in meditation inspires attitudes that apply to every activity.  A progressive attitude brings a peace that is neither escapist nor anesthetizing.  It is not just the well-born but the wise who agree with the Psalmist, "The lines are fallen to me in pleasant places; yes, I have a goodly heritage."  Everyone has one or more gifts and also some weakness or tendency toward evil in his or her heritage.  To find the overarching positive affirmation, contemplate the weave of the facts of a mixed genetic and cultural heritage with the priceless threads of blessing.  It is in partnership with God that there is triumph over evil.  From that perspective, an appetite for challenges is not an artificial product of wishful thinking, but confidence born of faith and insight.

Conclusion

            A philosophy of living that aims to include beauty does well to embraces the arts in a broad sense.  Enjoyable on their own account, they are part of the fullness of life, and their lessons extend to other activities as well.  Does this mean we have to have a garden every summer, take up some craft, and join some sport?  Not necessarily.  But every child needs activities in each area, and we balance and enrich our lives by including them.  The art of living, as we have surveyed it thus far, includes the following.

·       Cultivating natural beauty

·       Developing skill

·       Embellishing our surroundings

·       Enjoying humor

·       Participating in sports

·       Mobilizing a vigorous response to challenges

These diverse activities reinforce each other.  We can cultivate a good-humored attitude in all of them, develop skill in all of them, and exercise dynamic attitudes in everything we do.  Recreational activity from gardening to sports balances work and study.  A life of truth, beauty, and goodness enhance our health, sanity, and happiness.  Clearly the foregoing activities and attitudes play a major role in bringing home these blessings. 

The Fine Arts 

            During the years when I gave guitar lessons, I would not just tell students dogmatically where to put their fingers for certain chords.  I would also give a bit of music theory, so they could see how chords are built.  Then they could find their own alternative ways of forming a given chord.  After a few weeks I would ask them to bring in a composition of their own.  Most students were shocked with the assignment and told me that they couldn't compose anything themselves.  I insisted, and the following week they would walk in proudly with a piece of their own.  Then I would raise a couple of objections to parts of it and tell them to make it better.  In shock, they would say that they couldn't possibly do such a thing.  I insisted, and the next week they would come in with an improved song.  I taught hundreds of students, many of whom had doubts about their ability, but fewer than one percent proved unable to make any significant progress with this instrument.  I saw understanding and discipline promote creativity.

            If the first message about the fine arts in a philosophy of living is, "Let's all participate," the second message is "Let's seek out the blessings of what others have created." 

The fine arts provide a school of feeling.  They uplift the human spirit.  The lightness of Zen, for example, is found in a painting that shows three men laughing arm in arm.  The story behind the scene is that one monk went into the wilderness to contemplate, solemnly vowing never to leave the area within a short radius of his cave.  Two monks went respectfully to see him and engaged him in conversation.  Walking along, having a wonderful time, they suddenly realized that the vow had been broken, and they all laughed heartily.

This chapter probes what's fine about the fine arts and draws lessons from them about the art of living.

What's fine about fine art?

Imagine that two friends are visiting an art gallery having some rooms with masterpieces centuries old and other rooms with contemporary works arranged on the floor.  First, imagine that you are the one who walks with calm pleasure through the first rooms, pausing to appreciate qualities and details of several of the works.  You are put off, however, by the later rooms, where you see things put on the floor to amuse or shock you, to draw your attention to some unwelcome phenomenon, and to disrupt your expectations of fine art.

            You responds with the familiar question, "Is this art?" which leads to the general question:  "What is art?"  The general question sounds ordinary enough, but in fact the purpose to be met by an answer to it may not be immediately obvious.  The purpose is to guide your response to a wide variety of works.  On the basis of your grounding in the cultural tradition of fine art, you feel uneasy about some contemporary works you see.  The uneasiness may be the artist's first victory.  You hesitate for a moment, wondering whether to take time to let the work try to take you any further.  May you simply dismiss works you find offensive?  What about paintings made by gorillas or things that are "readymades" (such as the urinal that Duchamps notoriously exhibited as a challenge to the "art world")?  You know that the public has sometimes rejected the work of very important artists.  Often it takes time to get in touch with what the artist is really up to.  Sometimes the initial unpleasantness is worked into a nice artistic whole by the end.  There may be some nice surprises ahead.  Nevertheless, you have to be selective about what works we are going to take time with.  If nothing strikes you initially as appealing, you at least need to see some resemblance between the work before you and other works you have previously come to like.  Nevertheless much of what you see strikes you as impulsive, violent, indulgent, sensuous, vulgar, lacking in craft, rebellious, and adolescent.  It revives your worry about moral decline in the society.

            Alternatively, you may identify with the second viewer.  You find the earlier rooms boring, stuffy, artificial, elitist, outdated, and irrelevant.  The energy and honesty of the contemporary exhibit satisfies your sense of what art should really be about today.  You want not only landscapes but city-scapes, and works that portray not the nobility of the great but the humanity of commonplace folk.

            We want to be careful in critique.  We do not want to let facts about social class or historical period obscure our common humanity with the artist or the artist's unique personality.  Nevertheless, some works, past and present, deserve sharp critique from conservatives or radicals.  How can you respond to such works? 

Even in the presence of ugliness, you can add beauty by the quality of your own soulful response.

How shall we expand the compass of work we appreciate?  Look for links between the familiar and the new.  Look up close at the work of a Renaissance master with a reputation for realism such as Titian and see his painting the play of light on some article of clothing, and you have a sample of abstract art, a bridge to contemporary abstract art.  Similarities makes the differences more striking.  The older painting of a portrait has a context of meaning that is absent in the contemporary work.  It is more instructive to compare the changing goals of portrait painting over the centuries.  Earlier portraits emphasized the nobility and humanity of a personality with definite character traits, faithfully represented.  Later artists might call every term in the preceding sentence into question.  The past century has challenged every assumption and affirmation, sometimes making new discoveries, sometimes betraying older insights, and sometimes both at once.

            Can we develop "definitions" of art and fine art in ways that help clarify the promise of the better works, old and new?  To be sure, the many functions of art make it hard to formulate a theory of art and hard to evaluate what's new and different.  The cheap way to resolve the tension accepts everything.  Abandon any normative idea of art altogether, any idea of art as oriented to supreme values.  Anything goes.  Another evasion refuses to engage in theory at all.  However, if you have some favorite works, they have features that attract you, features that could be expressed.  You may be operating with an implicit theory without realizing or examining it.

As in so many areas, the kind of answer with good sense starts with a great deal of openness and supports movement toward high ideals.  Thus I am content to let art be a broad category with fuzzy edges.  I support the wide appeal of museums that show craft and fine art, popular culture and high culture into the same building.  It's not only needed for financial reasons; all sides of culture benefit by rubbing shoulders.  Some artists--I'm thinking of Plato, Shakespeare, and Charles Ives--strengthen their high-brow works by incorporating low-brow moments in them.

Despite the lack of sharp boundaries, however, even art in the broad sense is more or less affected by the ideals of fine art--beautiful art (the terms in French and German mean the same: les beaux arts, die schönen Kunste).  The tradition of fine art sustains an unspoken contract between artist and audience.  The artist in presenting a work implicitly pledges at least the following:

Take time with this work of art, and in return you will find some enjoyment, some insight, some invigoration of your moral energies. 

This work uses perceivable materials to touch the emotions, stimulate the intellect, and uplift the soul.

Some artists and aesthetic theories emphasize nature and qualities of sense perception; some emphasize human concerns, social, psychological, and intellectual; while others strive to symbolize, directly or indirectly, the Creator and spiritual experience.  These three emphases blend in all possible proportions.  Thus a work art can be beautiful on three levels:

1.  The beauties of the senses.

            2.  The beauties of the intellectual and human concern.

            3.  The beauties of the spiritual and religious life.

A work of fine art in the fullest sense touches all three dimensions.  The demand that fine art speak to all dimensions including the spirit is of course a necessary condition, not a sufficient condition of fine art.  Notoriously, religious motives have operated to dampen creativity as well as to release it.  Religious but intellectually vapid art also fails to qualify as fine art.

Great art dissolves dogma.  Religious art presents truth without doctrine.  A parable, for example, speaks to many kinds of listeners at once, engaging the mind without risking a merely intellectual reception.

Some artworks have an anti-religious edge, while others stand up staunchly for human values in a secular context.  What is it that opens the door to the spiritual in art?  Does art need to invoke the spiritual by name?  The present age is inoculated against propaganda.  The grace of art need not make its spiritual character explicit to be felt.  And some works express what Hagiko calls "human dignity radiant in moral choice," even though the artist may not yet have decided regarding God.  At the very least the artist must be unconsciously attuned with spirit and must go beyond exposing corruption to indicate a higher alternative.

Artists who believe that religious traditions have been exhausted have sometimes tried to create a type of art that might be called, for example, post-Christian or post-Buddhist.  The works aim to show values that in no way depend on anything transcendent.  It is a question how persuasive such works can be if they create a character whose vigor explodes the confines of the moral or amoral universe of the story (for example, Nietzsche's Zarathustra or the woman of Akutagawa's Rashoomon).  Arguably, such works tap spiritual energy in the service of post-religious ideologies.

Expanding our category of beauty

In the wake of world war, ideals of harmony in music and meter in poetry and beauty in painting came to repel many twentieth-century artists, composers, and writers.  WW I shattered cultural optimism and cultural pride.  Faith turned to disillusionment.  The harmonies of past art felt inadequate to present needs.  Theodor Adorno asked, "How can there be poetry after Auschwitz?"  Beauty seemed the prisoner of polite tradition, too tame to tackle the "ugly" truths and ethical issues.  To some extent, their vision and faith foundered.  The twentieth century, however, is a chapter in the demand for a wider concept of beauty.

            How shall we expand a concept of beauty so to liberate it from a particular, changing fashion?  When beauty gets narrowly tied to highly specific norms, then other aesthetic qualities will be put alongside it.  For example, eighteenth century European thinkers contrasted the sublime with the beautiful.  The beautiful had come to be identified with modest scale, obvious symmetry, classic proportions--friendly to the desire for sensory pleasure and intelligibility.  Beauty became domestic.  The sublime, by contrast, embraced the wilder scenes, large-scale conflicts, moments of horror, confrontations at the limit of our finite powers.  The sublime got a monopoly on the cosmic scale.

            The first move to make in restoring an adequate concept of beauty is to broaden it so as to include the sublime.  Beauty should not be captured by any one limited model or sentiment.  Beauty embraces cosmic as well as domestic dimensions and hints at the cosmic significance of the domestic and the domestic significance of the cosmos.

            A suitably broad concept of beauty recognizes the beauty of goodness even when immediate attractiveness is necessarily absent.  The humanistic and critical mission of art balances art that evokes joy and love and a friendly universe.  Artists, prophets, and social activists have a mission to challenge superficiality and onesidedness by evoking legitimate "negative" emotions.  An adequate concept of beauty must not exclude righteous indignation, for example.  While anger and rage are implicitly murderous, righteous indignation protects victims and gives wrongdoers a chance to wake up and change.  There is ethical beauty in Bertholt Brecht's play, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, which portrays a Chicago gangster whose rise obviously parallels that of Adolf Hitler.  This powerful critical drama manifests qualities on a humanistic level that are beautiful in the broad sense of beauty--not only because of the wit, incisiveness, and excellence of Brecht's craft, but for another reason.  The prophets of old performed many functions: they would encourage and comfort; they would teach about God and proclaim moral standards and messages of hope; and they would also warn and criticize.  It may take humankind a thousand years to respond sufficiently to the horrors of the Nazi period so that eventually, thanks to divine and human responses, the good brought forth in response to those horrors will outweigh the evil.  The beauty of such an historical process is awesome to imagine.  And works such as those of Brecht play a role in that response.

            Actually, varieties of beauty deserve attention, such as grace and charm.  It would be a shame to concentrate on beauty in such a narrow way as to impoverish our sensibilities.  We mark the beauty of truth in the clarity of a thought, the incisiveness of an argument.  And we feel the beauty of goodness as nobility or grandeur.

To broaden the concept of beauty, however, raises the worry that beauty might become so broad as to become empty, merely a word that means "I like it" or "It gives me a good feeling."  Such a result would betray the very concept of beauty--to indicates a value that is real, that others can recognize and share.  As Abraham Heschel pointed out (following Kant), the sublime beauty of the night sky is not just a personal preference; we would regard someone as aesthetically blind who failed to respond to it.

The stirring in our hearts when watching the star-studded sky is something no language can declare.  What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey but that which lies with our reach but beyond our grasp; . . . not what is beyond our range in time and space but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable. . . .  In the face of nature's grandeur and mystery we must respond with awe. . . .  The validity and requiredness of awe enjoy a degree of certainty that is not even surpassed by the axiomatic certainty of geometry.

My answer to the concern about an excessively broad concept of beauty is to trust: if we continue to pursue beauty in nature, in the arts, in various intellectual and social endeavors, and above all in the spirit, our concept of beauty will become increasingly rich and full and dynamic, not empty and abstract and flat.  If beauty is first and foremost a living quality of divinity, then we will not lose ourselves in abstraction by pursuing beauty in diverse areas.

Levels of beauty

The next step in expanding the concept of beauty acknowledges beauty beyond the level of the senses.  Think of the different areas of experience in which you find beauty and consider whether you find that some rank higher than others.  In the most famous presentation of this idea, in Plato's Symposium, Socrates speaks of steps on a ladder.  At the top is the life-transforming insight into eternal, unchanging, and divine beauty, the source of beauty.  Whatever beauty anything else has comes by sharing somehow in eternal and divine beauty.  Thus we must properly remember the distinction between what is beauty from what has beauty.  A young person takes the first step on the ladder of beauty by becoming erotically passionate about the physical beauty of the one he loves.  Then he becomes passionate about other bodies as well.  Then, if he is truly interested in pursuing beauty itself, beauty in its essence, he takes the next step and realizes that the beauty of one body is akin to the beauty of another body.  As a consequence the extreme emotion about any one body subsides.  The next step on the ladder recognizes the beauty of soul, of character, seeing it as a higher beauty than the beauty of the body.  One will be able to love someone with a beautiful soul even if the person has an ugly body.  Three more steps are mentioned: the beauty of excellent customs and laws, the beauty of what we know in scientific and philosophic knowledge.  The heights of intellectual thinking carry the soul to its nearest approach to insight into divine beauty.  An adequate concept of personality has much to add to Plato's understanding of divine beauty and to his ranking of the beauty of soul.  For the moment, however, the point I want to emphasize is that there is beauty beyond the visible.  Let us look for beauty not only in cosmology, but also in the way philosophy harmonizes tensions, in sublime souls who overcome great obstacles, and in divinity itself.

A move toward beauty beyond that of the senses can be made within the visual arts, too.  Classical French painter Nicolas Poussin practiced austerity in the use of color in order to concentrate on the form of his compositions.  One particular style of Zen gardening induces immediate visual nausea in the viewer, as though principles of the mind's visual preferences have been discovered and violated in order to repel the attention from the visible world and trigger enlightenment.  To be sure, it can overburden the arts to demand that they represent invisible beauties.  Nevertheless, in every age, creativity finds new ways.  Some romantic painters expressed their feeling of the divine presence in nature by laying a white glaze underneath their forest greens, earthen browns, and atmospheric rosy pinks to bestow on the painted landscape a concealed luminosity that was rarely if ever directly visible. 

Norms and limits

People turn to the arts for value, opening themselves, ready to be taken to places they have never been before, ready for their notions of truth, beauty, and goodness to be expanded.  But the artwork must do more than merely shock us, however elegantly it might do so.  It must make some connection with what the audience can identify with, some appreciable bond with values we care about.  Such at least is the commitment at the base of the tradition of fine art.

If we are going to interpret the fine arts, then, as arts of beauty in the rich sense we are developing here, then it won't do merely to follow a standard classification of painting, sculpture, theatre, music, and literature as fine arts.  If talk of beauty is to be meaningful, it must exclude something.  If "beauty" becomes an indifferent sea into which every river empties, it loses its dynamic and dialogic vitality.  Shakespeare plays include scenes with vulgar comedy that add to the beauty of the work, partly thanks to the wit and insight of the comic moments, and partly by their links with a larger whole.  Where humor is merely abusive, however, it shall not, I propose, be regarded as beautiful broadly speaking.  Where the horrible is included in a work whose purpose is merely to shock, it is the antithesis of beauty, even in a broad sense.  However, when the horrible plays a role as an element in a work that ultimately deepens human tenderness, work as a whole may be beautiful.  A fine novel, then, may include a narrative of corruption and degradation, but it must offer a glimpse of something better, some beacon indicating a better way.

If the high mission of the arts is to lead the soul into an expanded awareness of value, the arts need not be solely occupied with this high goal.  Not every painting, musical composition, or poem needs to be justified in these terms.  Art can be just for fun.  To be sure, there is no sharp division between works of art that give entertainment, pleasure, and laughter, and works that lead to spiritual insight and cosmic contemplation.  Art reveals vivid values, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, whose enjoyment and contemplation disciplines our inmost being.  The standards of fine art imply a criticism only of works that, on the whole, assail its standards, simply attacking the senses or reason or religion.

Let us look frankly for a moment at some implications of this ideal of fine art.  Much art that is not fine art makes no higher appeal but does not attack supreme values either.  While we politically tolerate art that rebels against norms of nobility, we spiritually do well to be lucid about its character.  It is often difficult to judge whether a particular work in fact assails high values.  Consider, for example, a work that grossly abuses a symbol sacred to some religious tradition, the cross for example.  I will not class such a work as fine art, even though some theologians may defend the painting as a corrective to making the symbol into an idol.  It is more important to raise the critical question than to pretend to sharp judgment in answering the question in particular cases.  One objection to this standard is that it could be repressively used to enforce a frightful orthodoxy.  But the liberty of the spirit that animates supreme values is incompatible with using political force to suppress certain kinds of art.  Values become real by being freely chosen.

            Feodor Dostoevsky's 1864 novel, Notes from Underground, illustrates fine art at the limit.  Although the novel focuses mainly on a lost soul's decline, it gives a clear glimpse of a better alternative.  The main character, whom we know only as "the underground man," is a lucid skeptic, unable to find any stable basis for thinking or making decisions and acting.  He presents himself as one with the courage to follow up certain insights that are true of all of us but which we cover up.  We are all too conscious, divorced from real life, living artificially out of books, ill at ease with our individuality and our bodies.  We have seen beyond the naive and dogmatic simplicism of the "man of action" who acts directly and spontaneously only because he fails to see the problems at the basis of his own thinking and deciding and acting.  Though the underground man has had moments of emotional involvement with "the sublime and the beautiful," he cannot sustain loyalty to those ideals in action and rejects them.  He is cynical about hypocritical and sentimental idealism about the good and the beautiful.  Someone can make great speeches about these values and life in laziness and drunkenness.  Dostoevsky surely uses his brilliant skeptic to make some keen criticisms of contemporary European civilization.  The first part of the novel presents (in a first-person account) his intellectual plight at the age of forty, and the second part goes back to the pivotal time in his life at age twenty-four where he spoiled his chances.

            As a young man, the underground man would dream of the sublime and the beautiful.  He would imagine devoting himself in a fantastic love, performing heroic deeds, and embracing mankind.  But he could never get himself to do anything to actualize these lofty ideals.  Every effort failed, and this unloved orphan was drowning in his self-image as a coward.  On one fateful escapade with three superficial friends, our protagonist goes to a house of prostitution and, having taken his pleasure and fallen asleep, awakes at two in the morning to engage the young woman in a rousing passionate moral and ethical discourse exhorting her to save herself from this degradation and to enter a life of nobility and true love.  As he leaves, he invites her to visit him--which she does.  She comes to offer him her love; and he rejects it in a most ugly way.  She refuses the money that he puts in her hand, runs out the door, and is lost to his sight in a snowstorm.  While the underground man cannot see any alternative between the naiveté of the "direct man" and the skeptical trap of the underground, she shows a third way: she knows evil, and therefore is not naive; but she is capable of decision and action: she can love and can withdraw her love when it is trampled upon.

            One religious thread of meaning in the novel defends Jesus' promise, "Seek and you will find," in the face of a counterexample: a man who seeks and does not find.  When the underground man says, "There is something I am seeking that I cannot find" the reader is invited to interpret the novel this way, given that the author is a Christian whose novels wrestle with tough challenges to faith.

            Just one step beyond the limit of fine art in the rich sense we are elaborating here is Joseph Conrad's 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness.  He barely manages to suggest a possibility beyond what is visible in his characters, each of whom represents evil in a different guise.  It is a story, told as a first-person recollection, of an English sailor, Marlowe, who sailed to the African Congo to track down an extraordinary man named Kurtz, who, filled with the fullness of European civilization, joined a commercial enterprise to ship ivory back home.  Kurtz, lucid, eloquent, gifted, idealistic, is seduced by his own charisma over the African savages to become a god to them--thinking initially that he will thereby bring them much good--and he ends by killing the blacks who rebel against his local cult.

In addition to the abyss of evil in Kurtz, Conrad portrays the evil of complacency, ignorant of the deep and dark potentials of the self, the triviality of the Europeans whose chatter is so vacant of experience and honesty and life.  We see the evil of imperialistic capitalism in the organized European desire for African ivory, adorned either with rhetoric about improving the savage races or with the cold calculation about the untimeliness of violence as a business strategy.  There is the evil of illusion, in the sincere, open, trusting, woman who waited in Europe for Kurtz's return, not suspecting the utter moral collapse of his soul.  There is the evil of the Russian adventurer who sees everything that Kurtz does and glorifies, excuses, rationalizes all, taken in by the noble discourse and the particular kind of grandeur of Kurtz's self-assertion.  There is the evil of backwardness of the African blacks who suffer so much, endure so much, believe so much, obey so much, and express so little.  (There is a debate about how much Conrad describes racism and about how much he betrays racist attitudes in his own descriptions.)  And there is the protagonist, Marlowe who tells the story of his journey in search of Kurtz, of finding him and being with him during the last days of his life, and then of returning to Europe with a strange continuing fascination with and loyalty to this Kurtz.

            Conrad, through Marlowe, makes us aware of the dangers of the journey to self-knowledge of the potential evil of the human heart of darkness.  Early in his journey, Marlowe is a figure of genuine virtue, utterly lucid about the cruelty of the rapacity of European commercial relations with the blacks, utterly free of any belief that progress or higher values are somehow being served by such exploitation, utterly without material motive in taking command of a steamship bound into the interior.  Marlowe progressively discovers Kurtz's evil with the objective eye that only a virtuous person can have.   But at a crucial moment, in the midst of conversation with a business manager whose only concern about Kurtz's misbehavior is that it is poor business strategy, and who is determined that a proper report be prepared--at this moment Marlow relates, "It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to Kurtz for relief--positively for relief.  'Nevertheless I think Mr. Kurtz is a remarkable man,' I said."  He corrects himself: "I had turned to the wilderness, really, not to Mr. Kurtz...." (124-25)

Marlowe sustains this appreciation of Kurtz, and his appreciation grows.  The lucidity of Kurtz, to see so clearly the horror of his evil and to persist in it with a kind of courage unto his own death, becomes a kind of moral victory, a purity, to which Marlowe becomes loyal.  Marlowe lies to protect Kurtz's reputation for excellence with Kurtz's European fiancee.  Is the white lie justifiable as a consolation for a near-widow who can only be wounded by the truth?  The matter does not arise as an ethical issue, because Marlowe's defensive action is so psychically determined by the trend of his loyalty.

            Put most schematically, the danger for Kurtz in going into the heart of African darkness was that long before he realized it his idealism was being invaded by a growing intoxication with his cultic and murderous power.  The danger for Marlowe in trying to search out Kurtz's moral disaster of soul, was that he himself became permanently fascinated with and strangely loyal to this character.  The danger to the reader is that the reader's discovery of evil and fascination with evil may be passively received and permitted to grow.  Conrad warns us to take distance from that passive fascination by remarking, both at the beginning and at the end, how Marlowe, the story-teller, resembles a Buddha.  The symbol of the Buddha in this story seems to symbolize lucidity and passivity.  Only in that subtle challenge to the reader's forces of positive response and determination does Conrad nudge us through the steamy, gloomy inner and outer world that Marlowe narrates.  That portrait is drawn so compellingly, that for most readers, the story would function as a gravitational pull not merely toward recognizing evil in the human heart, but also toward a languid paralysis of one's own ability to resist one's own tendency to evil.

Heart of Darkness takes effort by the reader to break the spell of the fascination of evil.  Conrad has plainly set up the effort but does not portray a goodness alternative in the novel, and for that reason it falls outside the high mission that is essential to fine art.  The slightest effort of a keen reader or teacher or commentator can bring the work into the circuit of fine art, however, and for this reason it is foolish to be dogmatic about drawing a sharp line of inclusion and exclusion.  Working toward clarity on the issues matters more than precision in drawing boundaries.

The experience of great art

Genuine works of fine art move us to feel more fully human.  They activate perceptual, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and personal dimensions.  We may have been touched by something that we can identify in the work--the music performed by the soloist in a concert, or the main character in a theater production or film--but the peak experience is not only that we have beheld greatness presented to us.  Our focus is not primarily on the gifts of the composer or writer or performers or the artistry of the production.  Even the quality of unity of the artwork itself, which promises a comparable experience to all who attune to it, is not the ultimate goal of our artistic experience.  The peak experience is not even that we are inspired to live henceforth in a better way.

Participating in a great work of art gives a taste of living on a higher plane.

Without suffering confusion as to our own identity, we have experienced a remarkable kind of unity.  Did the artist manage to find some extraordinary inspiration and convey it to us in the work?  Did the players catch the same inspiration and convey it to us in their performance?  Were we particularly receptive to a kindred inspiration from within?  Under the sway of the work we do not pose these questions.  Under the spell of the work we feel a oneness with humanity.  We become more human through the feelings that last for a while and through symbols and thoughts that endure.

Something has occurred beyond the manipulation of emotion.  Emotion was present, but emotion was a vehicle, not the destination.  We might be able to state the main thought that we take from the work, but the work does not reduce to that thought.  Under the immediate impact of the work, the work of art brings such a fusion of perceiving and feeling and thinking that we are not even minded to distill a thought from it all.  Looking back, however, we can inquire what emotions were aroused, what thought highlighted, and how the work carried us toward realization.

Walking out of a ballet, how can we shuffle and slump?  Walking out of the theatre, how can we mutter and mumble?  Walking through an architectural masterpiece, how can we be indifferent to environmental space?  The arts remind us of our capacities, and they strip away the prosaic, taken-for-granted mundanity of the world.

Talk of ideals calls for a reminder about relativity, about the legitimate differences between people who approach a work very differently.  Yes, a great work of art calls for a certain response.  Yes, it may take years to gain the maturity required to appreciate a masterpiece.  Yes, there are ideals about understanding the craft of the work and ideals of comprehending the high feelings and thoughts of the work.  Nevertheless, the existence of ideals does not imply that everyone's interpretation should be the same.  One person's most illumined response to a work will differ from another's.  Personalities are unique, personality types differ, and cultural backgrounds all offer diverse windows on appreciation.

Great art produced The Suppliant Maidens, a drama of Aeschylus, a fifth-century BCE Greek tragedian who portrayed the truth of human relationships by adapting traditional Greek myth.  The play dramatizes the struggle of the king of Argos who is faced with a request for protection from fifty Egyptian women fleeing from men who want to force them into marriage.  They arrive on the island of Argos and their spokesman argues for asylum.  The king, reluctant to risk war to protect these strangers and unwilling to act without the support of the city council, debates the decision.  He is persuaded to help the maidens by discovering kinship between them and the Argives.  An elaborate and non-literally-intended genealogy of gods and goddesses shows the king that the dark-skinned maidens and the Greeks are actually descended from the same divinity, Zeus.  The king then, acknowledging familial ties, extends the protection of justice to the women.

The poet shaped his materials, the emotions of the desperate women and the king torn by conflict, into a work expressing the universal insight enacted in the king's final decision.  Ancient Greek racism was pierced by the spiritual genius of the dramatist who reasoned to the kinship of black and white.  Aeschylus gave a graphic demonstration of the truth of the family of God without reducing truth to doctrine, beauty to sensationalism, or goodness to moralizing.  The dramatist molded his traditional mythic materials in order to present a genealogy that combined a playful aspect with an appeal to the intellect--without some thinking, the Argive men (and the Athenian audience) were not going to acknowledge their kinship with dark Egyptian women.

The charm of Sonnet 105 by Shakespeare awakens the intellect.

Let not my love be call'd idolatry,

Nor my beloved as an idol show,

Since all alike my songs and praises be

To one, of one, still such, and ever so.

Kind is my love to-day, to-morrow kind,

Still constant in a wondrous excellence,

Therefore my verse, to constancy confin'd,

One thing expressing, leaves out difference.

"Fair," "kind," and "true" is all my argument,

"Fair," "kind," and "true" varying to other words,

And in this change is my invention spent,

Three themes in one, which wondrous scope affords.

The poet (or, more properly, the implied speaker) is responding to the charge of idolatry.  Someone has accused him of giving to his beloved the kind of devotion that belongs properly only to God.  An idol, however, is an inconstant object manifesting inferior qualities, gratifying lesser impulses.  The beloved, by contrast, manifests constancy and a unity whose quality is expressed in terms of beauty, goodness, and truth.

As with Persian mystical poetry, there is a question whether the beloved is God in disguise.  Certainly qualities of divinity are attributed to the beloved, although it seems clear that the manifestation of these qualities is a human manifestation.  To use fair rather than beautiful may connote the attractiveness of outward appearance.  To be kind is a manifestation of goodness, but not goodness itself.  And true in this context implies fidelity and trustworthiness rather than the fullness of truth that one might associate with God.

If the beloved is indeed a human being, then the question arises whether the poem affirms love as a substitute for religion.  The poet appropriates the theological theme of three in one to speak of the excellence of the beloved.  Nevertheless there is no trace of antagonism toward religion here.  The poet does seem to attribute immortality to the beloved (and not, as in other Shakespeare sonnets, the immortality of being cherished within an enduring work of art).  Nevertheless, the poet does not go so far as to imply that the beloved is perfect.  The poem remains an expression of love for a human being, an expression of how wonderful a human personality can appear when the lover cherishes the best in a genuinely fine person.  The poem is consistent with religious philosophy and draws its conceptual life from it.

Each of these lines of reasoning supports an interpretation but does not compel it.  Art restrains the theological impulse, thereby reaching a wider audience, speaking to a wider range of beliefs and uncertainties in the reader, satisfying the fullness of the human beings that we are.

In the midst of a cultural debate about which art was higher--music with its capacity to express feelings beyond words, or poetry with its ability to speak to the mind beyond the audible mathematics of emotion--Ludwig van Beethoven combined music and poetry in his Ninth Symphony.  In 1792 the composer read Friedrich Schiller's poem, "Ode to Joy," and determined to set it to music.  In 1824, after losing his hearing and after persisting through near-suicidal depression by loyalty to his sense of destiny as a composer, his conviction that he had a certain work to do, Beethoven took up the project in his final symphony.  His intensity has made him an example of artistic concentration, obliterating obstacles in his path.

The first movement begins with quiet stirrings, indefinite sounds, a reservoir of barely distinguished potentials.  Then the main theme enters, a descending arpeggio moving rather fast in a minor key.  A mood of sternness and driving action dominates, relieved by breaths of tenderness and lightness.  Stability and flexibility are manifest in the beginning, whose tensions propel what follows.

The second movement is quite fast, driving vigorously towards its destination, heroic and happy, in a major key.  Now the mood is sunny, strenuous and persistent at moments, often playful, full of vitality, with echos of the dignity of the previous movement and pre-echoes of the lyricism to follow.

The third movement, slow, achingly beautiful, combines sweetness and heaviness.  Its unhurried penetration of sadness, the clarion beams of orchestral brightness, and an irresistible, swelling warmth transport the listener to a meadow of satisfaction.

At the outset of the fourth movement, serenity gives way to tension.  The themes of the first three movements are quoted in fragmentary form; some synthesis is brewing.  In the tradition of German dialectic, hints of previous moments are given and negated in the progress to a higher moment.  A voice breaks in upon the orchestra: "Not these tones."  The call goes forth for better music.  Neither the tragic-majestic nor the galloping heroic nor the enveloping lyrical moods is adequate to what the poet and musician have in mind.  Then comes the chorus with the words from Schiller's poem, including the following lines:

Joy, beautiful spark of God,

Daughter of Elysium,

. . . Your miracle reunites what custom has strictly divided;

All men become brothers

Where your gentle wing tarries.

. . . .

Brothers, above the starry dome of heaven

A loving Father must dwell.

The major key is established, and the melody is rhythmically and harmonically simple.  Cycles of songful affirmation energetically proclaim the joy of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  The orchestra at times imitates a local town band and then expands to maximum fullness.  Art has not descended to propaganda, but music has reached down to touch our verbal minds.

In 1989 the Berlin Wall separating West Berlin from the formerly communist east zone is torn down, and Leonard Bernstein flies to the city to conduct an international orchestra in the Ninth Symphony in a concert broadcast live in over 20 countries.  A political party in re-unified Germany uses the same music as its theme.  The opening ceremony of the 1998 Winter Olympic Games in Nagano, Japan, concludes with the Ninth Symphony conducted all over the world by Seiji Ozawa, whose orchestra in Japan is linked by satellite with orchestras and choruses in Australia, China, Germany, South Africa, and the United States.

 The symphony proclaims what something deep within us craves to hear. Art of course need not explicitly point to the theme of the universal family in order to qualify as spiritual.  Nevertheless, it is not surprising to find this theme surfacing in a masterpiece, since art that makes us more human links a particular cultural situation to universal truth.

The art of living

What can we learn from the arts about the art of living?  The artist as creator plans and designs the work in thought.  Why should we not design our lives as though they were, in a broad sense, works of art?  For all that that constraints us, we can choose our ultimate ends and shape our path as an enjoyable exercise of freedom.  The artist as performer models an elevated doing.  Why should we not put more of ourselves into what we do?  The artist as teacher presents familiar things in a new light, and by interpreting the work we gain insight into our world.  The arts show us the beauties of nature and unmask the faces of evil in society.  The arts bring new sensitivity to our material emotions and feelings of soul.  The arts teach us to perceive, feel, speak, move, and act more nobly.

Some lives have an aimless, meandering, homogeneous quality, fringed with frayed threads of projects started with little motivation.  For others life is fragmented by tensions between overcommitments to work and family, study and play, self and others.  By contrast, a work of art and an integrated life show unity.

            I want to highlight four main points here in the art of living.  Obviously a much longer list could be made from drawing on various areas touched on in this book.  Think of the ideas you would add to make up your own list.

1.  Keep an adventuresome attitude in all your voyages in truth, beauty, and goodness.

            What does artistic living mean regarding truth, for example?  It means avoiding rigid and dogmatic thinking and extreme skepticism.  There is an art in telling the truth effectively to the level of your audience.  Regarding beauty, all the suggestions from the beauty chapters could be included here.  Regarding goodness, there is an art to composing the varied duties of life.  The art of action looks beyond the ruts of blind habit and cynicism.

2.  Do smaller projects with a sense of how they fit into a larger whole.

Think of an action as having its place in a wider sequence, like a note in a musical phrase.  Think of how a phrase is part of a melody, a melody part of a movement, a movement part of a larger work.  In artistic living an action fits into the symphony of your life as a whole.  The unity required for artistic living involves a purpose that pervades your many activities.  Whether a course of action stretches over minutes or years, the subordinate goals of action do not distract, tear, or disrupt the supreme purpose.  Spiritual purpose can dominate and integrate in a sustaining way the complex of material motives and intellectual ideas that come into play in various courses of action.

Artistic living does not imply never getting distracted from your immediate project.  When making dinner, you can respond graciously to a child's interruption.  Staying in touch with your overarching project--child-rearing (or being a responsible and responsive family member or living divinely)--helps you relax a lesser project (dinner) in the face of an overriding need.

Add beauty to your world.  When someone asked about the importance of dressing nicely, my grandmother remarked, "Other people have to look at you."  When our fifteen-year-old son Ben spontaneously did a fabulous clean-up job on our living room in preparation for his parents' party, he set the stage for a marvelous evening.  Planting a garden uplifts the neighborhood.  Adding an artistic touch to our work raises the spirits of our co-workers.

3.  Go at "seven-eighths" speed.

You never need to be rushed.  A high-school coach once told a runner to run around the track as fast as he could.  The athlete ran his fastest and came in with a very respectable time.  The coach then told him to relax a bit, to go at seven-eighths of his full speed.  The athlete set off again, keeping the advice in mind and came in with an even better time.  Often leaving a little space of relaxation--avoiding the temptation to overstudy, overteach, overdo, overdirect--enables learning and teaching and doing to achieve more than would otherwise be possible.  The seven-eighths approach leaves room for serendipity, for constructive initiative from others, for the spirit.  Jessica Somers Driver's book Speak for Yourself advises readers to take a moment of receptivity upon entering a room to sense the tone of what is already going on.  She taught students preparing to speak to listen discerningly for the idea and to value it so fully that its expression would become spontaneous.  Ordinary texts in public speaking teach students how to decorate their main points artificially with illustrations, statistics, and so on.  Her way permits the artistry proper to the idea to emerge.  Only a person not in a hurry can be genuinely expressive.  Artistic living mobilizes our energies without becoming compulsive.

The limit of the seven-eighths metaphor for artistic living becomes evident by comparison with another technique of training for runners, a Swedish invention called a fartlek.  During some stretches the runner exerts maximum effort.  The runner does not mechanically circle a track but heads out over fields and hills, going faster or slower according to the feel of the terrain and the rhythms of the flow of energy.  During the course of a day, a year, a lifetime there are rhythms of rising and falling energy; and artistic living works with such rhythms.

The limit of the fartlek metaphor for artistic living is that it connotes an image of spontaneity that conceals the hard work and the ordinariness of so much of life.  A runner may choose whether to run up a particular hill or jog around its base, but life has a way of setting unavoidable mountains in our path.  The image of dolphins playing, jumping gracefully out of the water in a counterpoint of cascades, does symbolize the lightness of divinely cooperative problem solving.  Nevertheless, one thinks of Einstein's remark, "If people knew how hard I work, they wouldn't think I'm a genius."  It is no failure of art to persist in ordinary, difficult, and trying methods.  And artistic action focuses with full intensity on the task immediately in hand.

One of the myths of artistic living is that you should never have to deal with sustained periods of tension.  Conflict is essential to progress, and conflict may even last for years so long as (1) the tension results from your attempt to maximize goodness in a situation where important values cannot be actualized simultaneously and (2) the tension gets resolved.  Nevertheless, when conflict persists just because you are not making the decision to be loyal to genuine priorities, then the tension is needless and harmful to the poise you need for spiritual cooperation.

4.  Enjoy cooperating.

Life is more like jazz improvisation with a group than solo performance of music fully determined in advance.  The tune establishes the basic melody and harmonic progression, though each person has a chance to solo and can play around the melody.  The tune functions as pattern, not constraint, a place to begin and end together, but a door that opens, not a wall that confines.  Jazz musicians listen to, and play off of, each other, responding to how the song develops in the present.  They know how to play supportively in the background without needing to dominate or compete for attention.  As one pianist said, "When I'm accompanying, my job is to make the other person sound great!"  Perhaps interpersonal sensitivity is a secret of great solo performance.  A pianist with a music performance Ph.D. from Yale played the Mozart Sonata and Fantasia.  Before he began the audience was told that his performance would respond to the quality of our listening.  When he began, audience attention was flabby, and he played in a sentimental style.  As people sensed the interaction they started paying close attention, and only then did he move into the high gear of the art proper to his chosen piece.  The best singers I know enjoy a musical freedom that comes from having left ego needs behind.

One of the pitfalls of attempting to live artistically is narcissism.  However, being alive to the universal society of creative artists, our art helps others' art flourish.  Self-respect is elevated and narcisissm left behind by relating to the universal Artist.  Our greatest creation, after all, is not any visible product.  Each person is the co-creator of his or her own soul.  The emerging self is shaped, decision by decision, in partnership with the divine spirit.  When that partnership is open and cooperative, the soul thrives.  Living as the junior partner on such a team bolsters self-respect and leaves vanity in the dust.

One day, on the way to my noontime swim, desiring to experience artistic living beyond merely adding exercise to my schedule, hoping to move beyond my customary experience in the pool, I happened to recall Jesus' words, "Abide in me and I in you."  At that moment I found mutual spiritual abiding as the summit of the art of living.  Naturalistic, humanistic, and other religious thinkers may of course reinterpret.  To me, however, Jesus' life of unifying the divine and the human seems the greatest art of all.  The art of living the will of God is heightened by the fact that concrete and unmistakable revelations of the will of God are rare.  That art involves throwing oneself wholeheartedly into the game of life, trusting that one's path will be progressively illuminated by further revelations of truth, beauty, and goodness, and trusting that the incompleteness of what one is able to do is being completed by others, seen and unseen.

Artists of the future

            "But artists today just don't have those ideals," someone will object.  My aim is not to describe or generalize about the aims of today's artists, though I have met many who do have higher aims and who do realize, as does actress and theatre professor Anna Deavere Smith, the crucial importance of the spiritual: "That's where the power is," she said.  According to Smith, most people involved in theatre don't want to hear that message.  The power and success of her one-person stage performances, however, is undeniable.  She presents a series of characters, whose poetic moments of conversation she has captured on tape, and whose intonations and gestures she has learned to imitate.  She is convinced that we all have the capacity for poetic expression and that it takes vigorous interaction to bring out that level of expression.  Where racial conflicts have exploded in America, for example in Crown Heights in Brooklyn or in Los Angeles, she interviews people on all sides of the conflict.  The compassion with which she brings forth the humor and agony and alienation and humanity of all her characters is a living testimony to the brotherhood of man.

            The life of a progressive artist advances continually.  When asked which of his buildings was his favorite, architect Frank Lloyd Wright replied, "My next one."  Nobel Prize winning novelist William Faulkner described his novels as all failures in his attempts to tell a story of the human heart.  The life of a progressive artist expresses that striving that animates the work.  We do well to see the work in terms of the artist's purpose, not just as a finished product, waiting for analysis like a patient on a table.

            Our previous look at history and the future set forth hope for a spiritual renaissance.  Artists have a role to play in that spiritual renaissance.  The artists who unite truth, beauty, and goodness in their own lives will have the basis for bringing forth art for that better age.  Art is action involving the entire personality and the expression of the soul.  Lacking that consecration, technique may be impressive, gifts may be noteworthy.  You can teach truth, elicit beautiful feeling, and contribute to good projects.  But a certain quality of soul and the vitality of expression will be missing.  The artists of the future, the ones at the forefront of the spiritual renaissance, will unify divine and human values in their art of living and will undertake art in its fullest mission.  As the planetary challenges grow, so does our need for art. 

Conclusion

            A woman took her young son to a concert by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the renowned Polish pianist.  At intermission, they wandered in the concert hall, and the boy became separated from his mother.  Opening one door after another, the boy found himself on stage facing a piano, where he sat down and began to play "Twinkle, twinkle, little star."  As the curtain opened, the boy, unaware, continued to play, as the pianist returned to the stage.  Paderewski whispered in the child's ear, "Just keep playing," and began to improvise a left hand accompaniment in the bass.  Then he reached around the child and with his right hand added an accompaniment in the treble.  The audience, of course, was entranced.  The story symbolizes living in beauty.  If we play our tune consistently and well, divinity complements what we do.

            This chapter has done a few things.  First, it characterized fine art as engaging the human being on all levels.  The vividness of art arouses the emotions; art's intellectual appeal awakens the mind, and values of art touch the soul.  Indeed, truth appeals more in songs than in sermons.  This is true of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and it is true in popular culture, too.  As the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates, an all black and Hispanic team that year, were on their way to their World Series championship, fans started singing and dancing "We Are Family."  In 1999 a Mexican band, "Mariachi Sol de America," and a New York Yiddish folk music group, Klesma, performed together in Los Angeles, each band presenting some of its own music, and cooperating on a worker's song sung in Yiddish and Spanish, "Alle Bruder, Somos Hermanos, We are Brothers."

We then considered the art of living.  It mobilizes all the powers of the personality.  It involves spiritual teamwork, intelligent choice of method in reaching clear goals, variety, and unification of contrasts.  Any activity has its art, including maintaining order in one's room or office.  To select and arrange and express scientific data well is an art.  To make household cleaning tasks into aerobic exercises is artistic.  To concentrate on the physics of athletic performance facilitates art in the broad sense of a skill or craft.  Handling multiple duties stimulates the art of adjusting different demands.

Finally, we imagined great ages of art in the future arising in the work of artists who unity truth, beauty, and goodness in their own lives.

 Living Beauty

            The study of beauty is the discipline of feeling.  If the first lesson in feeling is to receive and return the love of God, the second lesson is to look for the creative touch in the creation and to participate in the arts.

            From a religious perspective, beauty is above all a quality of the divine.  The beauty of the spirit balances everlasting stability with the dynamism of change.  We find the beauty of God in the depths of need and the heights of fulfillment.  The love of God is apex of feeling.  The ways of God are the greatest beauty, unifying the contrasts of the extremes of the divine and the human, the eternal and the mortal, the infinite and the finite.

Beauty is thus a way God reaches out, making himself in some measure experienceable and comprehensible.  And beauty is a quality we creatures can share by the way we live.  Beauty pervades nature, and beauty is a quality that we can bring into our artifacts and activities.  Walking in beauty, living beauty, is living divinely.  Thus talk of living beauty is deliberately ambiguous.  It refers first to the vitality of divine beauty.  It refers second to the human capacity to live that divine value.  Beauty gathers, coordinates, integrates, and unifies.  Experiencing beauty on any "level" connects us with the full spectrum of beauty, from the creative Source to the brain's response.

In the cycle of beauty, God starts the phase of "descent."  In the phase of "ascent," we explore beauty in nature and the arts and develop artistic living.  Just as divine truth illumines facts and meanings, divine beauty graces perceptual scenes and daily activities.  Ascending in our focus, we begin to suspect that our ascent is a response to a descent, that human striving is an affair of partnership, that our evolution is at the same time a satisfying experience for the divine Parent.

            Walking in beauty, you respond to the love that comes your way.  Love is a gift, and by letting love reach you, by ceasing to resist, by letting yourself feel good in its embrace, you receive what is most beautiful of all.  Love is a dynamic communion, a reciprocal exchange, a back and forth that is always new.  You cannot give love to yourself, but you can open the door.

            Linking beauty with truth and goodness heals personal and cultural fragmentation.  Beauty is the sugar in the cereal of life, but we often want too much.  Moreover, there is a tendency I call "aestheticism."  It begins in skepticism about truth, believing that science is totally revisable, philosophy mere opinion, and religion illusion.  It continues with skepticism about goodness, believing that morality is merely a cultural system of control.  Having rejected truth and goodness, aestheticism seeks refuge in beauty.  However, beauty is not so cheaply won, and aestheticism ends by rejecting beauty.  Pursuing sensory pleasure in isolation from truth and goodness destroys beauty's wholesome satisfaction.  Laughing at higher values, the music and art and poetry of rebellion and self-assertion finally denounce beauty as the superficial, artificial, and outdated fashion of oppressive elites.  I believe that many of these critics would respond positively if they knew people living the values we have been considering.

We met beauty in Part I as the beauty of truth.  We meet in Part III as the beauty of goodness.  Beauty links truth and goodness.  How?  Realizing the truth of your situation indicates what would be good to do.  Appreciating the truth of the personalities involved releases the love that takes goodness beyond moralism into spontaneous service.