Developing Your Aesthetic Intelligence

I learned to love music and philosophy, science and technology all at the very same time. A monolith appears pointing to the moons of Jupiter and the Sun, and what lays beyond. The opening chords of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra sound triumphantly. The orchestra swells and the timpani announce the beginning of a hero's journey. Our ego boundaries fall away and we become part of a cascade of light and sound toward a new life. And the underscoring for that journey was Ligeti's Atmospheres, which just seemed impossibly new in 1968.

The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey is revered by many and hated by some but what I feel for it is gratitude. I was a 12-year-old boy when I first saw the movie and it called out to something deep inside me. It led me to consider the subtly transcendent nature of the everyday. And it inspired me to develop what I would call my aesthetic intelligence. God knows I pursued that kind of learning with a passion that I never managed for the 3 R's (reading, wRiting, and aRithmatic!).

Stanley Kubrick understood music's unique role in taking us on a journey.And how a combination of sights and sounds could seem to mean something thoroughly profound. For me, it brought together the everyday with the eternal, using beauty to lead to a transcendent truth. At times, as I walk down the street I still find myself carried along by such a silent underscore.

There's plenty to complain about in Nietzsche's writing but, to me, he was spot on when he said that 'Without music, life would have been a mistake.' 1/

Music distills the essence of how a story feels. No words, no images and yet we feel the gut tug of a journey. We know the comfort of home and the adventure of going off into the unknown. Indeed, we are hardwired to resonate with it. Music's tonal magnetism draws us along a path from departure to arrival. Neuroscientists and psychologist will tell you that that path is embodied in our parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. Here is the tension of our fight-freeze-and-flee impulse and there is the grounding of our return home, experienced as our rest-and-digest state. So, while we can try to change our story by working on the lyrics, our actual behaviors are driven by the music.

Therefore, we cannot communicate change – or change ourselves – just by thinking about it. The true driver of human behavior is a type of counterpoint among our thoughts and feelings and behaviors, some of which is helpful and some of which, not. Our task, then, is to enter into life’s dance, taking the next step, one beat at a time. Hence, to find the most helpful path requires that we understand how all of our humanity can drive us and how to change when we need to. Let's go down that path a little farther.

Human life as we live it would be unrecognizable without music's essence. All human societies make music; it is a universal expression of our species. But why would that be true? Why do we all have music? Is it just something that rises out of our lives -- like the rhythms of the rain -- to which we are all just wired to respond? Do we copy bird songs just because we can? Do we listen to the howling wind and capture its melody on a caprice? Perhaps it is just a way to harmonize ourselves with the world in which we live. To join with its rhythms, to dance with it, and to show that we are the people of a given place. The people of the valley or the forest, the people of the mountain or the shore, each with their own particular music helping them to understand both where we are from and how we are the same, and how we are different.

Music is life's heartbeat. In a sense, our earliest memories might be our mother's heart thump-thumping in our ears even before they became ears. And we brought that memory with us as we were born, then joining with the rhythms of the awaiting world. Sometimes in synch, sometimes in counterpoint, but always joining with each step along our path. That universal experience joins us and this world in a near endless nesting of rhythms, melodies, and harmonies, all playing in tune with the music of our world and, at least at times, with the music of the spheres. But, at least in one way, our world is fundamentally different from the world of our ancestor’s and how they experienced their music.

Today, we may have more music than at any other time in mankind’s history. Just through our smartphones, we can listen to music spanning hundreds of years and dozens of cultures. But, I would argue that we do so more passively than ever before. The key to having a rich dance with others in the world is to participate fully, not just exchanging information through our dialogue but, in effect, entering into a duet. It’s a chance to connect deeply with others, finding a shared rhythm and a contrapuntal melody, and a way of harmonizing with them. Do that and it’s more likely that you’ll come away from your conversations – one-on-one and in front of a room, real or virtual – in a way that can create more than just a sale, it can create a lasting trust.

Understanding that is a form of aesthetic intelligence. That capacity comes from practicing all of the arts. They all have the ability to speak to our deepest humanity. And, we don't need to be Stanley Kubrick to wield our artistic nature to be just a little more deft in our everyday journeys.

1/ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols. Edited by Duncan Large, Oxford University Press, 2008.