January 2007

"Art as a Way of Knowing and Being" (vol.1 issue 3)

Next month the Department of Arts & Consciousness will hold an important conference for artists, educators, and creative thinkers entitled Holistic Approaches to Arts Education. Some of the topics to be explored at the Berkeley campus include art as a way of knowing, creativity and complex systems theory, and the power of improvisation to enhance thinking. That upcoming conference finds me reflecting upon the power of art and its role in the School of Holistic Studies. Art plays an essential role in developing an all-sided person capable of thinking with the heart and mind. The variety of thinking and learning styles promoted by art-making provides us cognitive channels required for ordering the abilities of the self. By extending ourselves in and through the arts, we remake ourselves in salutary ways along the lines of the human's spirit longing for wholeness, for contact with what is sacred and human. How might this happen?

Art and art-making are rich in generative images that can inspire us to reach beyond ourselves and our worldview. An education based upon the global arts and comparative aesthetics, like the one offered by our A&C Department, can open spaces within us in which to think, speak, act, and grow. Art shapes the mind, transforming the self through a release of the cognitive imagination. True creativity engages the mind, since it is always a union of imagination and reason. Art and art-making encourage us to think aesthetically, using the judgment of the senses to fashion a self equal to the challenges of a complex world. They encourage us to live out our grand imaginings, rather than our limitations. "The possible's slow fuse," the poet Emily Dickinson mused, "is lit by the imagination."

To study the global arts is to learn the language of images that fires and directs the human spirit. To "read" is to interpret sensorial images generated by events, objects, and people, finding meanings in relation to our lives. To read life imaginatively is to gain knowledge beyond the literal meanings of things, inquiring as to their significance for the soul. Artists often refer to their craft as a special form of knowledge expressed in a highly specialized language of images. That is to say, musicians think in music and not simply about music from an analytical distance, and painters consider the use of color and form as a kind on knowing how to face problems and make decisions within their mediums, rather than simply knowing about color and form. By thinking in the domain of images through the first-hand making of art, we reconnect with our primal humanity and rediscover the basic impulses behind the aesthetic/artistic experience.

It is not my intention here to belittle the literal component of life. The literal is essential for our daily negotiations with statistics, the environment, and others in society. Without effective use of and appreciation for the literal things of the world, we lack an adequate adaptation to life. The surface level of things is but the starting place to disclose meaning, however. Children and artists, for examples, use the literal and the obvious as raw materials, or building blocks of their creative play. Poets and visionaries in all professions are "artists" not because they are prone to erratic fantasies, or states of dissociation, but because they use their visions for productive ends.

Many of the masters of modern art, including Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, and Miro, studied and used the art of children as inspirational sources of some of their greatest achievements. The child was Wordsworth's common image for poetic power. It is as if those masters understood that they must somehow return to a child-like mind, tapping the wellspring of creative adult consciousness in order to provide for their personal and professional well-being. When one does the work of the arts, one functions in encoded forms of knowledge which are in and of themselves valuable tools for enriching all aspects of life. Children by their own natures possess the capacity for creative vision and for playfully, shifting their experience of reality. Heraclitus asserted, "Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."

Poetic thinking in images allows us to see all experiences as fundamentally literal and metaphoric, subject to interpretation and change. Metaphor carries us beyond the literal, providing liberation from repressive cognitive styles. In "Education by Poetry," Robert Frost observed that unless we have had a "proper poetical education," we are "not safe anywhere..." Similarly, William Carlos Williams understood, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there." Kandinsky sought in children's art a universal language, or imagistic vocabulary, predating the cultural imposition of linguistic competence on a child. Picasso noted, "All children are artists; the trick is to reclaim this when we grow up." The child and the artist alike share the principle of creative appropriation, freely borrowing and using images of things for their creative purposes.

My point here is that imagistic thinking in and through the arts is a profitable mode of learning and knowing for everyone. There seems to be something inherent in the images of each artistic "language" that prepares the mind for a variety of sophisticated cognitive acts, quantitative and qualitative. Image-making is the mind's fundamental activity of knowing; no cognitive operation is more central to consciousness. Whatever we are conscious of exists in the mind as an image. Learning results when experiences provide, confirm, or modify images of oneself and the world. As primary units of consciousness, images exist in all the sensory modes of perception. Images of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell abound in the mind. Not simply metaphors for ideas, images relate to how people acquire, organize, retrieve, and use information. This is as true for scientists as it is for artists.

Scientists, like artists, note the function of imagery in their creative work. Einstein, for example, acknowledged the key role that kinesthetic and visual imagery played in his reformulation of electromagnetic theory. A vision of a snake with its tail in its mouth triggered Kekule's discovery of the "benzene ring." The best scientists have always integrated affective, image-rich artistic modes of perception with analytical reasoning. Very often it is imagery in the form of dreams or waking consciousness that give rise to scientific and technological breakthroughs. This is true since the distinctive power of the poetic mind is its ability to grasp identities, the inner life of things, and not simply perceive similarities, or outer relationships. The image is a fundamental epistemological means by which we perceive inner substance and structure. The cognitive imagination is the linchpin of breakthroughs in art and science since, as Owen Barfield has stated it "establishes a relationship between spirit and matter in which neither is obliterated or resolved into each other."

Moreover, prominent artists and scientists alike use a series of shared mental skills and operations. Root-Bernstein identifies seven cognitive traits common to both groups: accurate observation, spatial thought, kinesthetic thought, identification of essential components of a complex whole, recognition and invention of patterns governing a system, empathy with objects of study, and visual, verbal, or mathematical synthesis and communication of results. When the logico-mathematical elements of the mind fuse with aesthetic elements through artistic experience, we can undergo the transformation of holistic knowing that challenges, at least temporarily, divisions between reason and feeling, body and mind, text and context.

To heal the inner divisions caused by the pervading influence of economic rationality and dualism, we need to develop holistic learning environments like our A&C program that promote the employment of logical analysis and artistic synthesis, the unity of objective and subjective knowledge. Art-making, as part of a holistic approach to education, is invaluable to our pursuit of human wholeness. As such, we cannot afford to ignore the arts or the power of the imagination. I hope that you will join us at the Berkeley campus for our exciting education conference.

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