The Uses of Beauty — Putting the Arts to Work
- David Purdy
- Jul 7, 2024
- 3 min read
A picture I took from a sidewalk in Greenwich Village NYC
Nietzsche's quote here may sound like hyperbole, but I’d argue he didn’t go far enough! Indeed, I believe that all the arts reflect our universal need to explore and express our humanity as experienced through all our senses. As such, I believe that arts education shouldn’t stop in elementary school or be focused only on those who wish to make the arts their profession. It should be woven throughout our lives from the inside out, helping us to connect with others and fully flourish in whatever career we choose.
I'm a musician so indulge me while we start there. In the case of music, it is heard with our ears but felt with our bodies. But that feeling is the universal core of the arts. Human life as we live it would be unrecognizable without music's essence. All human societies make music; it's 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're all just wired to respond? Do we copy bird song just because we can? Do we listen to the howling wind and capture its melody on a caprice? Perhaps it's 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 this place. The people of the valley or of the forest, the people of the mountain or the shore, each with their own particular music helping us to understand both where we're from and how we're the same, but also how we're 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 at odds, but always joining with each step along our path until our last step. 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 other spheres.
It's ironic that there may be more music in our age than in any other. Just through our phones we can listen to a lifetime of music without ever hearing the same thing twice. But I'd also argue that we may hear that music more passively than ever before. After all there's more to hear and see in our smartphones at any given moment than earlier generations had access to in their entire lives! Does the music heard this way work to connect us or distract us?
Arts Work Through Our Emotions as ‘Evolutionary Rationality Made Flesh’
What is art's essence? It's the tidal tug of emotion -- here peace, there the battle -- a gut sense of the journey from the safety of home to the trials of the arena. And only in the arts -- and particularly in music -- is that journey lived both deeply and with such agility. Here's the warmth of universal embrace, and there the darkness around the cave's corner; all felt in our bodies walking, or running, along a virtual path paved with rhythmic steppingstones. And we travel that path led by an inexorable beat. It draws us from this safe place to the unknown, to the mountain top or a dank pit. Along the way, we can feel at ease or at risk, almost instantly. And that emotional experience draws on our 'evolutionary intelligence,'1/ our gut sense that tells us this is good, that bad; primordially powerful and pervasive, experienced viscerally, without words. This is the experience of our mammalian ancestors relived through our bodies, as if to say without needing to, that here's home and here's the adventure.
So the arts modulate our body's response to the world, availing us of our full range of emotions. But while that experience is uniquely direct in music, it is also true for the expression and experience of all art forms. They all speak to us right to our gut. And in doing so, the arts communicate meaning viscerally. As such, using the arts in our work with others is a powerful — and beautiful — skill.
