• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Kim Hermanson PhD

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

  • Home
  • Events
  • Readings
    • Request a Reading
    • Testimonials
  • Products
    • Books
    • Self-Study Audio Courses
    • Courses to License
  • Blog
  • About
    • Official Bio
    • Lectures and Interviews
    • Personal Story
  • Doorway Sessions
    • Book a Session
    • What Clients Say
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search

Notes on Art and Social Change

June 9, 2009

In the process of writing up some new course proposals, I discovered some old writing I’d never sent out. The ideas are still present for me, so I offer them to you.


I think we can all feel it: the rumblings of change are happening all around us. Of course, change is part of life, but there’s something else happening. Entire structures are crumbling. We all know people who have lost their 30-year careers or life savings, but I’d prefer to focus on where I believe we’re being asked to focus…someplace other than financial security, obviously. Here are the notes:


Art and Social Change


Back in the early 1800s, the German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic. More recently, business consultant Michael Jones has argued that “aesthetic consciousness” is the primary new work for leaders. And cosmologist Brian Swimme believes that beauty is what “will lead us to a new era of being human.” In other words, our task as humans is to follow and learn from those things that we find beautiful, those things that inspire our passions. It is time to immerse ourselves in beauty.


In his book, The Aesthetic Dimension, Herbert Marcuse wrote that “art [functions to] break open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle…The encounter with the truth of art happens in the language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.” (p. 72)

Teilhard de Chardin believed that we can experience the aesthetic dimension of life only if we are educated in our wholeness, that is, educated to become a “fully experiencing self.”

Previous Post
Next Post

Art, Books, Imaginal, Learning & Creative Process, Social Change art, goethe, herbert marcuse, social change

Primary Sidebar

Blog Categories

  • Art
  • Books
  • Doorway Sessions
  • Earth/Nature
  • Imaginal
  • Inspiration
  • Learning & Creative Process
  • Metaphor
  • Social Change
  • Teaching, Coaching & Facilitating
  • Uncategorized

Blog Archives

Blog Tags

aesthetics albert einstein art artist beauty Betty Edwards Book Passage carl jung coaching consciousness creative process creative writing creativity depth psychology depth psychology alliance doorway sessions drawing on the right side of the brain eckhart tolle esalen institute george lakoff getting messy goethe heart learning herbert marcuse image imaginal imagination inspiration james hillman John O'Donohue kim hermanson learning marshall mcluhan martin foss metaphor nature picasso poetry Robert Henri social change Sophia Center stanley kunitz teaching The Art Spirit third space
Give your creativity a kick in the pants.
Get Kim's Guide: "15 Tips for Creative Breakthroughs"
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2021 Kim Hermanson, PhD

Website by Digital PDX

Header Image by California Artist Logan Payne.