A new domain of psychical expansion, that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it…
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs
A new domain of psychical expansion, that is what we lack. And it is staring us in the face if we would only raise our heads to look at it…
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man
From the artist Corita Kent’s book, Learning by Heart: Teachings to Free the Creative Spirit:
“A tremendously constricting force on our contemporary society is the concept of the professional or specialist, who deals for the most part with what has already been done and builds on his own limits. To the extent we can approach our job as an amateur (from the Latin amare, meaning to love) will we be successful in our work. When we pursue a thing for love, we are free to fumble and make mistakes. The course of our work may not run smoothly, but we are open to possibilities, embracing everything we have contact with. Our vision is not narrowed by convention.”
Sister Corita Kent (1918 – 1986) was a Catholic nun, as well as one of the most innovative and unusual pop artists of the twentieth century. Many of her artworks, “serigraphs,” combine advertising slogans and poetry, and are now recognized as some of the most striking and joyful American art of the 1960s.
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.”
Came across this in my notes the other day, by David Edwards in his book, Artscience: Creativity in the post-Google generation.
(By the way, I googled “aesthetic mind” and got 5,240 cites. Wow. I have a lot of reading to do….)
When I speak of art, I will mostly refer to an aesthetic mind, by which I mean a process of thought that is guided by images, is sensual and intuitive, often thrives in uncertainty, is “true” in that it seems to reflect or elucidate or interpret what we experience in our lives, and is expressive of nature in its capacity for complexity.
Sound like anyone you know?
In No More Secondhand Art, Peter London wrote that artists were custodians of issues larger than themselves. This is also true for those of us working in diverse areas of social change: our tasks our larger than we are. Our work isn’t simply a matter of expressing ourselves properly, fixing what appears to be broken, or making the right connections. When we feel passionately about something—local food, clean water, better government, art education, or any number of other issues—-we can assume that Spirit/Universe/the world is asking us to enter into a relationship with this thing that is outside of our “small” self.
Viewing our work as relational is important for two reasons. First, a relationship means that there is give-and-take, i.e., we don’t have all the answers. We are in relation to something that is “other,” at least somewhat unknown to us. We can’t solve or figure this out ahead of time; we don’t have all the answers; and we don’t know where the ultimate solutions will lie. All we can do is put something out there, see what comes back, and use feedback to alter course.
Second, when we form a relationship with something we deeply care about, a “space” is created. Hannah Arendt called this space an “in-between.” Theologians often call it a “Divine Third” and Martin Buber called it “Thou.” When we become bound up in relation to something, Buber said, the thing is no longer an “It.” Creating and acknowledging this “in-between” space is important, because we must have space for the expansion of our knowing to happen.
However, for most of us, our models for “learning” were developed in school, where the subject that we will be studying is laid out for us in tidy little boxes. We typically don’t learn how to enter into a relationship with the unknown. In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer writes,
Western culture has a million ways of reinforcing the illusion that the world consists of inert stuff out there and that we are the active agents of change whose education has been aimed at giving us the tools to exercise dominion over the earth.
Along those lines, I once heard a prominent science professor remark (off the cuff, of course) that Ph.D.’s were the ones who were destroying the earth. What he meant was that Ph.D.s are trained to think in narrow ways rather than expansive ways. Since I hold a Ph.D. from one of the best universities in the country, I believe I’m allowed to admit this truth: Ph.D.’s are expert at gathering and analyzing information. What Ph.D.’s generally aren’t trained to do is wonder and explore (think outside the box). Further, this professor was also referring to the fact that many of the world’s research organizations are led by scholars who hold Ph.D.s, thus further reinforcing the use of a narrow problem-solving style to resolve the world’s most intransigent problems. Instead of dissecting and analyzing our problems, cutting them up into little segments that feel neat and orderly, this professor was claiming the need for all of us to be learners, able to explore realms and issues that are bigger than our current ways of knowing. We need to learn how to not know, stepping forward into unknown space.
For most of us, and especially those of us involved in social change, our work is larger than we are.