The Most Comprehensive and Accurate Definition of Art Is That It Is a Virtue Or Habit

Act and Art 1

Chapter Ten

Act and Art.

The most comprehensive and accurate definition of art is that it is a virtue or habit of the reflexive mind ordered transitively to the making of a work whose perception pleases, satisfies and gives joy in knowledge. Art makes a work for the joy of the whole self. Artists of integrity are they who create something essentially delightful and their work differs from all others because they are enamoured of beauty and seek to express it in all conceivable forms.

The word beauty has become so debased in common currency as to have lost almost all accurate significance. Popularly it is identified with prettiness and trifling romantic sentimentalities. Beauty tells of reality in relation to all the self’s faculties, both cognitive and appetitive together. Knowledge deals with truth, and truth’s goodness is food for the will to love and possess. Beauty is the name for truth’s known good in aseistic evolution and is experienced in the act-art of contemplation.

Human beings are makers of things, not through force of circumstances but by nature and by choice. It is quite valid to say that the art of any period may safely be taken as an index of the mental health of the community in which it flourishes and a measure of its contact with reality.

There is a lot of sickness in the art and entertainment world and it is getting worse. In much current retrogressive pop culture, the unreal and the disordered are worshipped as idols, and irrational undisciplined appetites and emotions pursue the cult of spontaneous degeneration and artistic anarchy.

Never has the I-me-mine father of lies found such a virgin field in which to sow seeds of self-deception and psychosomatic disorder. We are reaping the harvest of a species of cultural autism which worships and serves no otherself, no “you”, only the guilty inflated void of self-abusing rebellious “me and mine”. All true artistic creative activity should be a form of self-revelation, not however of the innate inadequacy of a sham-shamed disordered “I am”, but rather the wholesome vitality and integrity of a saviour “ThouArt”. It is the work of a self trying to give its self’s being a more becoming existence through identification with some thing other. The other alone can give existential reality to all that the essentially creative self seeks to become.

Only when the human self is devoted to the transitive objectivity and the increased existential reality of its otherself, its “Thou” in Art-form, may lasting work be done. The motivating reality of this otherself thing serves as a disciplining and sustaining force and for the genuine artist, it is both his or her goal and salvation as well.

The real complementary not-self does not exist in the self’s “me”, but only in its other “you”. Any real objective theory of art must take cognizance of this self-other nature of the relation of the artificer and the artifact. Some modern philosophies of art merely emphasize the subjective, self-only-expressioning aspects of this pre-eminent human activity and betray their invalid premises by their culturally regressive and tasteless fruits.

The most formidable of all deceptions in art is autistic emotion- alism. For the autistic emotionalist, creative imagination becomes identified with emotional spontaneity. For them, art is the expression of emotion, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is not the reality in itself of the work of art but what one feels about it that makes for aesthetic creative activity and its appreciation. While the classical artist worked with eyes on the true objective Thou-Art of its transitive otherself and strove to reveal it, moody romantics turned their inward reflexive eye narcissistically on themselves and their own personal emotions.

Autistic emotionalism is an invalid theory of art. That does not mean that artists who profess its tenets cannot create true works of art. It only means that such works were made in spite of the theory. The normal healthy mind will always break through false ideas and touch reality, at least on occasions. The trouble is that it is becoming increasingly difficult now for artists, musicians and poets to make that necessary contact as long as the self-appointed high priests and-or priestesses of modern culture in today’s teaching academies despoil art and literature by obscuring the splendour of reality with the smokescreens of emotion, free expression and the irrational pursuit of novelty for mere novelty’s sake. Transitive Thou-Art reality is ignored or even derided and would-be artists are encouraged to meaninglessly express their spontaneous reflexive “I-Am” feelings with words, paint, movement, sound or in any other down-trodden medium they can innovatingly manipulate .

The first point to be insisted on is that a general emotion does not exist in itself and hence cannot be expressed at all as such. The second point is to question, how can one say that a Gothic Cathedral, a Shakespearian play, a Velasquez portrait or a Beethoven symphony are in any sense mere expressions of emotion? Emotional activity is not distinctively human. Animals experience emotions. If they still have some kind of tail, dogs will wag them with delight in the perception of the reality of a master’s presence. Animals have brains and their cerebral computers can reason in a fashion, maintaining a consistent, though seeming impersonal contact with the real world.

On the other hand, psychotic artists with pseudo-randomness, not only abandon all animal rationality but deliberately distort whatever sensible reality remains as they paw their chaotic feelings on canvas or some other trodden on medium. The irony of the situation is that a self-styled sophisticated intelligentsia not only applauds this blatant debasement of true art but is prepared to pay fortunes to possess such lunatic offal. In any of the more enlightened cultures of the past, such aberrations from healthy reality would have been treated as the work of the insane. If unbridled emotional spontaneity were the sole valid yardstick of artistic activity, then the deafening stunts and lurid excesses of today’s way-out Rock Bands must be rated as the greatest cultural achievements in human history.

Once stimulated, emotions will run of their own accord and with positive feedback grow out of all proportion to the object which aroused them. Everything goes wrong if a conjoined effect, a mere ancillary, be taken as an end in itself, and the true end, the splendour of reality be conceived but as a means of producing such an effect.

Emotion will indeed arouse emotion, but in causing that effect the higher cognitive and volitional faculties of the psyche will have no part. Neither can such emotion outlast the mere physical excitation which produced it. Lasting and valid emotion may only be aroused by the contemplation of some object which satisfies the whole human self in mind and will. Personal experience there must be in art, but the thing experienced is the first and last concern of the genuine artist, not his or her feelings about it. Purely emotional motivation is not specifically human and there is no objective or convincing test for the genuineness of an emotional reaction. Autistic emotionalism thus introduced a subjective and quite arbitrary criterion of what constitutes a work of art, a criterion moreover, which is itself unstable, for a person’s moods change from moment to moment. Psychical emotion, analogously to thermodynamics’ physical motion, is subject to a species of psychodynamical entropy.

One cannot debate rationally with today’s exponents of irrational modern art since, professedly, they have no standards other than that of emotional impact. For them, anything goes and if their being outrageous is the yardstick of their activity then we can expect the anarchical state of much sick pop art to get worse before the hen-bird’s spirit once more moves both over and in the chaos-void and breathes new life into its re-creation.

The preoccupation of the virgin self reflexively with its own sterility and void not-self, perverts the nature of both mind and will and robs them of their objective other. The effective result is a disuse of the higher faculties of the psyche and the concentration of the self on mere sensation. All values go by the board, beauty becomes just a less-than-animal fun-feeling and artistic genius is prostituted and degenerates into mercenary stunts..

There is confusion in many peoples’ minds about the relation between reality and emotional reaction. In ordinary life the notion that one was coterminous with the other would be repudiated at once. Why it should be considered as supremely valid in aesthetics surpasses all comprehension. When a man genuinely loves a woman he does not seek primarily for his own personal pleasure in his devotion. When a man concentrates, not on his beloved, but on the emotional excitement he derives from loving her, that is not love but lust. Her self becomes the occasion of gratifying his own self-love at her expense. In much contemporary culture, creative expressions of such self-gratification become, by some strange illation, works of art.

It is not suggested that the perception and the expression of the beautiful is unaccompanied by emotional reactions. The fact of beauty is apprehended by the whole self, by the mind and senses at once, and its exultation is evident in every tone of the voice and every stroke of the hand. Emotion is revealed in colour and rhythm, but it is not the reality. Whatever reality emotion may possess, it is a dependent reality. It exists in and with the sentient subject, by the very same existence as that of the subject, and has reality only in the actual process of being felt. Apart from the moment of experience it does not exist and hence cannot be contemplated as a true object of a known becoming. Emotions possess no permanent element of becomingness of their own. They are resultants of consciousness and they can no more subsist independently of their causes than the grin of the Cheshire Cat could exist of itself. The artist who attempts to concentrate his or her faculties on blind emotion leads art into the bogs of unreality and the ditches of despair. When anything goes, everything goes.

The essence of emotion, as movement, is to change and hence its impermanence robs it of value. More important still, it cannot be directly expressed in the same way that words express concepts. Novel statements may be made about it and certain associated images may be used to suggest it as, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed”, but this poignant, though pathetic metaphor is not the real direct or factual expression of an emotion. Rather, it describes only the emotional state of mind of its author. Furthermore it is not communicable, since no two emotional reactions are ever the same. Felicitous diction and the rhythmic and musical elements in a poem will naturally arouse emotion in the reader who may easily be deluded into thinking that he or she feels as the poet did when the latter wrote. If poets were really and truly to make the expression of emotion the end of their art, they would necessarily have to compose spontaneously. They would be false to themselves were they then to reglaze and recarpenter their magic casements when their feelings had evaporated.

If persons read poems or gaze at works of art to enjoy, first and foremost, the feelings aroused in them, then quite obviously they are enjoying, not the beauty of artistic reality which is an encounter with a Thou-Art thing, but the sterile momentary self-gratification of a lustful I love me and mine. Some people can seduce themselves to enjoy almost anything, even pain, that has power to evoke an emotional response by its impact on them. All they would demand of art is a stimulus or intoxication akin to and often directly linked with drug-induced hallucinations and the mesmerism of psychedelically intensified disorder. The beauty of a great work of art is independent of one’s feelings about it. It is something of a self made into self’s otherness and as such, it is something that may be recognized by anyone and everyone of good will and integrity of mind.

The physical world has an existence and reality of its own. Aseity’s self-revelation blooms physically and biologically in the primatial pregnant placental mammal and continues psychically and analo- gously in the human self. By the latter’s complex physiological and cerebral activity, the physical is drawn, in sensible information, inside the self and given a new style of existential reality with a superficial name-stamp of the self’s own conceiving and designation. As this psychical or cultural evolution proceeds, matter is made increasingly aware of the inner life of its maternal other, the divine Mother both around and in the pregnant womb of her own ovoidal creation. The intelligent logical self is not only confronted with the existence of this necessary Other, but can choose to be infused consciously with the essence and spirit of its being’s becomingness.

The definition or description of truth as the self’s witness to positive integral becomingness may seem at first sight to be entirely subjective. It would be if we did not understand the reflex nature of technological good and evil and the full implications of what integral becomingness implies in a self-other-functioning feedback system. We have to take the world as we observe it scientifically and deduce from our reading between the curved lines of spaced time those general laws which seem to govern the Cosmos. We have already elaborated on these.

From out of hindsight’s apparent yet deceptive anarchy, there has been made to evolve the most astonishing complex unities and ordered selflife processes. In the living growing world around us, we observe progressive change towards increased freed relational interdependence in a more and more orderly togetherness until with the phenomenon of man, a new distinction was introduced with the evil seed of counter or disordered backwards evolution. True scientific knowledge only advances with the experience of the unity of positive becomingness in regard to Mother Nature’s works of art. Aesthetic experience arises for the scientist when he or she begins to contemplate the Cosmos as an evolving whole, as Aseity’s slow and teasing unveiling of herself to her otherself, nude and unashamed. The true real beauty of Science is the joyful revelation to a human self contained in matter, of and by its complementary divine otherself not contained by matter but containing and indwelling it.

For most of human history, aesthetic appreciation has sought the experience of the contemplated unity existing between a self and the true positive transitive becomingness of works of human artistry. The subject-object, self-other nature of art was taken for granted. Art was the conscious expressioning of an inner creation, an inner other whose fullest revelation required its added growth into an external and independent existence. The art-full self conceived and rejoiced in its brain-child and after mute gestation gave it birth in the fullness of spaced time. The trials and frustration of confinement and the subsequent labour pains of its materialization were forgotten in the joy that a new reality had emerged to be shared by all.

Aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation result from contemplation’s psychic unity effected by the self’s becoming one with its known other good. To know is to become, and to appreciate true art neces- sitates a species of psychic identification with the artifact. A self’s ordered identification with positive becomingness ensures its continual growth through the expansion of consciousness as aseistic evolution intends. Identification with the negative unbecomingness of cultural excrement and with the disorder of quasi-random behaviour are retrogressive anarchical evils of the worst kind. That Philosophy of Science which sees the Cosmos as a mere fortuitous conglomeration of chance and purposeless events has its counterpart in much pseudo-philosophizing about modern lunatic art. Accolades of award and merit are heaped on artists seeking glory in their worship of the unbecoming and the disordered, the irrational and the unreal. They magnify the evil one of a sterile virgin self without the restraining discipline of any beloved other. Those who recklessly abandon Nature’s positive becomingness and insanely identify themselves with such deliberate and premeditated disorder are literally and metaphorically, out of their minds and senses.

Religion, Art and Science are all dedicated to the cause of unity and the integral understanding of reality. Directing them to positive becomingness does not restrict truth’s liberty and scope but rather ensures the successful attainment of worthy goals. Art is not exempted from loving discipline, nor is it suffocated by an orderly development which is in fact absolutely necessary for true and perfecting growth. Everything which exists is beautiful in virtue of its reality but since all things partake differently of reality, each according to its own becomingness, then the beauty of one thing differs from the beauty of another. Every genuine work of art has its own proper beauty according to its individual nature.