I’ve got art on my mind a lot nowadays. I think it tends to happen when one hangs out with artists. More specifically, artists who are heavily involved in their faith communities. Naturally enough, immersing myself with people of a certain mentality will cause me to become interested in how they see the world.
A professor of mine who I regard as a mentor remarked that when we do not have the language to name something, we lose the ability to see it. The world becomes a much more complex place when one learns about the atom. Music becomes fascinatingly more complicated when things such a “pitch” and “timbre” are introduced to the mix.
In an analogous fashion, I think that the arts teach us how to see.
But see what?
I recently got off the phone with someone who sees themselves as a former person of faith. We had been talking for a bit. Rather, they talked, I listened. Every so often, I would drop a question in for clarification.
In the closing moments of the conversation, they cleared their throat and remarked, “You know, I can intellectually grasp the concept of God or some ultimate force in the universe. And yet, my experience would suggest something else entirely; I mean, I don’t feel like it’s true experientially.”
We talked for a little longer before we hung up. As I placed my cell phone on a shelf, I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose.
I was surprised, to be honest. Usually, I would rail against the tendencies for Christianity to become an emotional, fun-fueled experience with little to no theological reflection, leaving many people prone to abandoning the faith after they found their version wanting in academia. Here, it seemed, my counterpart was experiencing the exact opposite phenomenon.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche made a related observation regarding the power of art in one of his many works. He once wrote that he loved art because “we [need it] so that we might not perish by the truth.” For Nietzsche, humanity needed art to create a lie around itself regarding its place and purpose in the universe. Namely, it needed something – a story, an image of significance – onto which it might latch as a manner of hanging on in a bizarre and otherwise unfeeling world. Art, or rather the arts, in Nietzsche’s mind, created for humans an ideal and a lens through which to engage the world that offered some comfort.
Another thinker, Plato, understood the power of the arts as well. In planning his republic of words, Plato stated that the arts were so influential on a person that it was the state’s prerogative to censor art to maintain a good society. Unlike Nietzsche, Plato asserted that art could be more than just a beautiful lie – possibly because he was a premodern thinker while Nietzsche was a postmodern one – but a way to cultivate virtues which meant something in the grand scope of things. Since virtuous citizens make up a good state, a state ought to educate their citizens. It did so by exposing them to good material and shielding them from that which it deems bad.
In both thinkers’ minds, art is a means to an end. It has the capacity to manipulate, inform, and form its observers, regardless of whether it has any bearing on the truth of how things are. It trains and reinforces a frame through which we might see.
I suppose it could also apply to the sciences (e.g., heliocentric versus geocentric models of the solar system) and to education as a whole. However, I’m more interested in narratives which lie generally within the arts.
The thing is, both Nietzsche and Plato understood that there is art that misleads us – whether for our benefit or detriment is up to the thinkers to decide. And yet, we buy into it anyways for one reason or another.
Oftentimes, I think it’s because we are pursuing some form of a Good that we don’t take time to reflect. Are our priorities on our Goods are properly aligned? Do we prefer the proper thing over all else at the moment? Sometimes, it’s that we don’t prefer something as much as we ought. Yet, we cling to certain narratives because they justify something for us.
For me, it’s a sense of security and meaning. However, should it be something else?
Talking to my friend reminded me of this fact as well. I left the conversation wondering whether I cling to a narrative of Christianity because it keeps me from perishing by the truth.
And yet, simultaneously, I wonder how, if the framework of Christianity is the closest thing to getting at what is, we can best experience that which we claim to believe?
I think the arts paint a good picture of what is expected of us, depending on what road one decides to travel down.
You know, moving down any path that art paints for us might just be considered faith.
Whether we choose to move that way in the first place is up to you.
From Silence 