The Place of the Arts is the Heart

The winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics a few years ago, Daniel Kahneman, wrote a bestselling book recently called Thinking Fast and Slow. The book explains that there are two basic methods of human thought, and it includes several examples to illustrate this theme. Here’s one example. You can buy a baseball bat and a baseball for a total of one dollar and ten cents. The bat costs one dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? If you think that the ball costs 10 cents, please raise your hand. Right, well, that’s the common answer. But if you think about it for a minute, you’ll see that it is wrong. If the ball costs 10 cents, and the bat costs one dollar more than the ball, the bat will have to cost one dollar and 10 cents; and the total cost of both of them will then be one dollar and 20 cents. The right answer is that the ball costs 5 cents; the bat costs one dollar and 5 cents; and together, they cost one dollar and 10 cents. The trouble with our thinking, Kahneman suggests, is that often it is too fast. To think through problems more accurately, we should slow down, think less intuitively and more rationally.

Kahneman’s book has been a huge success because it corresponds so well with our culture’s current beliefs and anxieties. Science, technology, business, and economics are seen as the most prestigious career opportunities for most students, and many schools are focusing primarily on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics as they rush to build STEM centers and innovation studios. Every year school officials pore over the published results of international educational achievements in science and mathematics, and every year administrators worry about our students’ comparative standing against those from Asia or Scandinavia. Rational thinking, the slow way of thinking in Kahneman’s book that is necessary for success in science and mathematics, is considered to be the most important learning skill that schools can impart to young people.

But I think that this overwhelming emphasis on rationality is wrong.

Now, please do not misunderstand me. I do not say that rationality itself is wrong, of course not. Rational analysis is an exceedingly important skill in many areas, and we humans are fortunate to possess the unique ability to exercise foresight, judgment, and logic as we deal with daily problems. We also have been recently shown how impulsive, knee-jerk reactions by powerful politicians can amplify dangerous situations and how easily people can be swayed by inflammatory rhetoric to respond to difficulties with fear, hatred, and other dark emotions. We have seen how public accusations and claims without any evidence can sow confusion and uncertainty. There is no question that rational, empirical thinking is crucial.

However, no amount of rational, empirical thinking will lead to wisdom, and the extent to which the pursuit of wisdom is deemed worthwhile is the degree to which we must aim to go beyond rationality. If Einstein has a reputation for being a wise man, it was not because he was the smartest scientist in the room; it was because he was the smartest human being in the room. There’s a difference. Rationality, or thinking with the head, is one half of our human inheritance; the other half is

Page 1 of 5 creativity, or thinking with the heart. And I submit that this is the place of the arts, both at Ridley College and in our culture as a whole. The place of the arts is the heart.

We can examine this idea more closely by looking into world-class exemplars from the fields of visual arts, literary arts, and performing arts.

It is worth noting that archaeology confirms that visual arts are as old as humanity. Wherever we find evidence of human habitation, no matter how far back in pre- history we look, we find art. The emergence of humanity from the world of nature is evident in the archaeological remains of human creativity. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Art is the signature of man.” The animal kingdom knew nothing of art until humanity happened.

We can learn more about the essence of visual arts by considering the achievements of the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Born in Florence in 1475, he flourished first through the patronage of the Medici family in Florence and then through the patronage of Pope Julius II in Rome. It is his world-famous Sistine Chapel ceiling frescos that most clearly reveal Michelangelo’s near-miraculous powers of human creativity. Irving Stone’s 20th century novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was made into a classic Hollywood movie starring Charlton Heston and Rex Harrison, tells of the incredible hardships and obstacles that Michelangelo struggled against as he worked on his painting.

For a long time, he remained dissatisfied with his attempts until at last he found an inspired idea that seemed worthy of his task, and then he fought through illness, poverty, and criticism as he sought to realize his inspiration through his art. The Sistine ceiling is a sustained meditation on the biblical account of creation, which serves as an extended metaphor for human creativity itself. Dorothy Sayers, the 20th century English mystery writer and translator of Dante, argued in a brilliant essay called “The Mind of the Maker” that if humanity was created in God’s image, and God’s first act in Genesis was to create the heavens and the earth, then creativity is essential to humanity. As Michelangelo explains to Pope Julius while they are contemplating the central panel showing Adam being made in the image of God, “the act of creation is an act of love.” The creation of the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the profound result of Michelangelo’s passionate love of beauty and life.

A comparable figure to Michelangelo in the field of literary arts is, of course, William Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, the year Michelangelo died. Shakespeare’s literary output, especially his 37 plays, has become well known around the world. It is said that his works have been translated into 80 languages, and what began as words on the page has been transformed into operas, songs, movies, and paintings, as well as every conceivable kind of theatrical production.

Given the nature of literature, it is not surprising that there are many interpretations of what Shakespeare really means in his works. One of the most compelling for our purposes is that of Ted Hughes, the former British poet laureate who earned some

Page 2 of 5 notoriety through his tempestuous marriage to Sylvia Plath, the American writer who committed suicide in 1963. Hughes wrote an unusual work of Shakespeare criticism called Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. It is unusual because Hughes claims to have discovered a key idea or myth that unlocks the meaning of Shakespeare’s most powerful and famous plays.

This myth can initially be seen in the combination of two of Shakespeare’s non- dramatic poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” which were first published in the early 1590s. Hughes shows how this myth, unique to Shakespeare, deepens and becomes more violent and transformative through his mature tragedies such as Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra and then in the final works such as The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. What is especially startling about Hughes’s interpretation is that this central and dynamic myth of Shakespeare’s, which the playwright apparently developed through a brave and relentless inner voyage of discovery into his own psyche, became real in the turbulent world of English history during the half-century following his death. Shakespeare’s own personal myth became England’s public myth after he died, and Shakespeare is seen to be not only a playwright and poet but also a shaman and prophet.

Ted Hughes’s interpretation of Shakespeare remains controversial – most academic critics do not approve of such out-of-the-box thinking. But Hughes has a connection to Shakespeare that the academic critics lack, which is found in his life as a poet. And Hughes thinks that he can see exactly when and where Shakespeare himself began to take his own literary life seriously. Hughes considers the play As You Like It to be the first of the series of plays that explore Shakespeare’s personal myth, and he suggests that Shakespeare identifies with the one character who doesn’t join the others in the play’s happy ending but instead goes off into the forest to think. Hughes sees this as an autobiographical portrayal of Shakespeare’s own decision to devote himself to his writing and to search for the roots of his myth in his individual subconscious and maybe in his culture’s collective unconscious.

Whether or not we agree with Hughes in the specific details of his interpretation, I think that we can accept that there is a certain kind of literary artist – a certain kind of artist – a certain kind of person – who truly does dedicate himself or herself to art and creativity, even to the extent of sacrificing a more lucrative or comfortable career. This, then, is another aspect of what I have called thinking with the heart as opposed to thinking with the head. The devotion of oneself to one’s calling, even when the calculating brain raises objections, is as important as the love of beauty and life to the creative thinker. We cannot all be a Michelangelo or a Shakespeare, but we all can learn from them, and artists like them, about how to think with the heart.

We will add a final example to our exploration, this time from the field of the performing arts. Music, like visual arts and literature, has its origins in the obscure depths of the past, and until the 20th century, music could only be experienced in the moment. It is hard for us to imagine a world without CDs or Internet downloads or

Page 3 of 5 streaming subscriptions, but that’s the way it used to be. Music was performed live or not at all. This means that music is the most transitory, the most ephemeral of the arts. Music exists only while someone is playing and someone is listening. The English poet John Keats refers to the sweetness of “unheard music,” but it is difficult for us to understand what that could mean.

Since music naturally exists only within time, my musical example is something of a mystery. Johann Sebastian Bach was born in what is now Germany in 1685, almost 70 years after Shakespeare’s death. During his lifetime, Bach became well known as an outstanding composer and performer within his geographical locality, but he was largely unnoticed outside of the 100-mile circle of German towns where he lived. After his death in 1750, the only people who heard of him were the serious musicians like Hayden, Mozart, and Beethoven, but his music was not performed, and his reputation faded almost into nothingness. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that conductors began to arrange productions of his music and his star began to rise. Today, of course, Bach is considered to be probably the greatest composer of all time.

During the last 15 years or so of his life, Bach worked on a personal project that was completed just before he died. It was a musical setting of the Roman Catholic mass in Latin, and it is called the Mass in B minor. The work is considered by many music critics to be the best example of its genre and one of the supreme achievements of classical music. It is an outstanding triumph of musical art. But Bach never heard it.

What makes this magnificent piece of music so mysterious is that it was never performed in Bach’s lifetime. Why not? First, because all the churches in Bach’s part of Germany were Lutheran. These churches used the vernacular German language in their services, not Latin. Second, the Lutheran liturgy did not include the complete Roman Catholic mass, and so there was no place where the Mass in B minor could be performed. We need to remember that church music in the 18th century was performed in churches as part of the service – it was not appropriate for church music to be played in concert halls. It couldn’t even have been performed in a Catholic church because at two hours in length, it was far too long. And so Bach never heard this great piece of music to which he devoted years of work. In fact, not only did Bach never hear it, he could never have imagined a world in which anyone would ever hear it!

So the question now is, why did he do this? He was a busy man with a large family to support. Why work for years on a piece of music that no one would ever hear? It flies in the face of common sense and rationality. And though there’s really no clear answer, the inescapable conclusion is that Bach’s faith must have been at the bottom of it: His faith in God, to whom he dedicated all his church music, and his faith in the power of his creativity to transcend the natural limits of music and time.

Bach’s creativity was founded on faith, just as Michelangelo’s was based on love and Shakespeare’s was centered on devotion to his art. Maybe all three of these mean the same thing, but if not, they are all part of creative thinking, thinking with the

Page 4 of 5 heart. If participation in and appreciation of the arts help us to develop our creativity, then the place of the arts is the heart.

I said earlier that creativity was the other half of our human inheritance, along with rationality, and that if we wished to pursue wisdom, we would have to cultivate both kinds of thinking. It is easy enough to recognize the benefits of thinking with the head: distinguishing fact from opinion, truth from falsity, reality from illusion. Rational thinking is clearly behind the stunning achievements of modern civilization, and there is no doubt at all that we are blessed to have such capabilities. But what good, really, is thinking with the heart? Art gives us pleasure, sure, but so do sports and good food. Why am I claiming such a privileged place for the arts?

I will go back to Michelangelo and let him give the final answer. At the end of The Agony and the Ecstasy, Pope Julius asks Michelangelo what he has learned from his years of creative work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and Michelangelo replies: “I have learned that I am not alone.” That may well be the most priceless reward of art and creativity: By thinking with the heart, we realize that we are not alone.

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