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From moon worship to moon walk the path of human-kind has
been one of uneven progress, yet the relentless pursuit of
it and the levels of progress achieved during certain
stunning periods in history have resulted in the raising of
our species high and far away from its primitive origins.
Often what we consider primitive today was progress in
another day. Sometimes progress regresses into primitivism,
as in the Medieval Era, and then forges ahead again with
revitalized vigor, as in the Renaissance. The art produced
during any epoch—from Paleolithic cave drawings to the
Parthenon—is always an accurate philosophical and spiritual
testament to the degree of progress or primitivism of its
own time, to the ideas that informed it. With this in mind,
what have we to say about our own artistic testament today?
And what of tomorrow? As we approach a new millennium it
becomes imperative to pause, survey, and judge our present
context in order to choose which set of values and
what forms of art out of our long human saga we shall carry
forward as our cultural legacy into the future. Today,
astronauts sail space as ancient mariners sailed seas.
Science will take us where we want to go but only philosophy
can tell us what ideas to take with us. And only art can
let us experience those ideas, now, in tangible form.
The twentieth century has been one of nihilism, the
iconoclastic destruction of nearly every previously
cherished value and art form in Western civilization. The
result is intellectual and artistic anarchy. But strange as
it may seem, this chaos can actually serve us, because it
leaves the way out of the ruins open and obstacle-free of
ossified preconceptions that might otherwise hinder our
judgment. If we are wise, we will turn the devastation to
our advantage, and like the phoenix—that mythical bird of
great beauty and self-renewing powers, rising up from the
ashes of its own funeral pyre—we can fly to the future on
unfettered wings.
But where to start? From whence we came, nearly three
thousand years ago. Since our calendars pronounce the
coming millennium as the year two thousand, we may rightly
ask why we should consider it as the year three
thousand. Because “two thousand” is an arbitrary
ecclesiastical date made secular, whereas the fundamental
values that comprise Western thought originated nearly 3,000
years ago in the epic poems attributed to Homer, which first
approached the domain of the philosophy that was to become
the cornerstone of what we know as Western civilization.
That philosophy, rooted in reason and individualism, was
limned in Homer’s works by stressing the aretē of
certain characters; aretē evolved to mean the
virtuous man, not only in his warlike valor but also in his
proud and courtly morality, nobility of action and nobility
of mind combined. By incorporating this quality into the
characters of his heroes, Homer gave the world its first
humanistic heroes; they may have been guided (or misguided)
by the gods, but they were personally responsible and
accountable for their own actions.
Later, beginning with Thales of Miletos (seventh century BC)
and other natural philosophers, Greek scholars transformed
their own era into a veritable fountainhead of inquiry, a
fount to which their intellectual heirs could eternally
return for ideological sustenance, a fount that changed the
course of history because those innovative thinkers sought
to discover—rather than invent—the nature of reality and the
nature of man. They began by observing the world and man
empirically. But they didn’t stop there. They went on,
consciously employing logic, to expand their observations
into abstract principles, thereby establishing a means of
thinking philosophically rather than mythically,
conceptually rather than metaphorically. Therefore, let us,
with an eye fixed firmly on the future, identify the primary
ideological and artistic legacy of what some call our
Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian or Euro-American heritage at
its true source: ancient Greece and the first notion of
individual excellence, of human achievement and happiness
here on earth, of “man at his best.”
We have only to look at the sculpture from the apex of that
seminal period of Classical Greece to comprehend in an
instant the unprecedented phenomenon of man at peace with
himself, his body and the physical world in which he lives.
Man able to move, able to act; man unafraid and
unashamed. Here, for the first time in human history, we
encounter the combination of mental and physical health
brought into perfect balance by a fusion of the real and the
ideal, portraying human beauty in all its grandeur. Here we
are presented for the first time with consummate images of
human sovereignty, yet always in harmony with human nature
itself as well as with the natural world. Thus, the great
Greeks introduced the unique idea of a physical world and of
human beings qua human as knowable, of science as a
reliable methodology and human nature as a serious study.
Here we are introduced conceptually to scientific inquiry
not as “technology” devised to solve existential problems of
agriculture, architecture, war or navigation but as an
interdisciplinary system for the purpose of understanding
the universe, the world and man’s place in it. Here we find
defined for the first time our mental faculty of reason.
Reason. Health. Humanism. Individualism. Beauty. The
predominant values of Western civilization.
There is no desire here—nor any need—to romanticize the
Greeks or Greek society. Yes, women were viewed as
subordinate, slaves were owned, mystic cults co-existed
alongside philosophical growth, and bloody wars were fought
over a variety of governmental systems vying with each other
for preeminence. Yes, the Golden Age was a tumultuous
period. So was the Italian Renaissance. Benvenuto
Cellini’s autobiography is as much about papal and political
intrigue (and street scrapes) as it is about sculpture.
Nevertheless, through applications of new knowledge of Greek
philosophy—especially Aristotle, though Neoplatonism was
well represented—and Roman art, that era became one of a
rebirth of humanism (combined imaginatively with
Christianity) that produced some of the most ingenious and
important art in Western civilization’s history. So is our
present period tumultuous. The failed aspects of any era
are secondary to its positive achievements, if the
achievements are significant enough to outweigh the
failures. Yes, Americans, too, once held slaves, but what
is significant is that the country split itself to
shreds, brother fighting brother, until slavery was
abolished. Even more crucial, for all its faults America is
the only country whose government was founded on and
consciously designed to protect individual liberty.
Politically, America began near the top, but unfortunately,
we have followed a downward track toward collectivism for
most of the twentieth century. Why? Ultimately for the
same reason the nation could not sustain progress in the
arts. Eschewing serious philosophy, Americans have
traditionally relied on good old common sense in the ethical
realm and an insatiable voracity for a quantity of material
gratification that deflected them from any development in
the spiritual realm, an area where idea-generated art
(regardless of the validity of the ideas) would naturally
flourish. But common sense is not enough. And at this late
date, now that reason has been virtually booted out of the
educational system, even common sense has gone by the way,
leaving us lost in a void barren of any value system
whatsoever to guide our behavior or to help us judge either
our materialism-cum-spiritualism or our present, predominant
“art.” To further complicate matters, by exploiting the
value-confusion generated after two World Wars and Vietnam,
the promulgators of the “Age of Aquarius” have led us ever
deeper into the troubled waters of subjectivism.
Far from being a “New Age” as we stumble uncertainly toward
the next millennium, American culture is suffering the
throes (hopefully the death throes) of the most irrational
primitive beliefs of all now made grotesquely modern. The
contemporary artistic enshrinement of the ugly, the
frightening, the freakish, the drug-induced, the occult, the
hedonistic and the
violent remains dominant throughout our entire
society. Witness the increasingly hysterical efforts to
sensationalize every form of so-called “art,” from
performance pornography to “music” events, the latter of
which have become alarmingly similar to the rites of tribal
ritual. This state of affairs is predictable and inevitable
in any culture that abandons its value system. Without
values that stimulate genuine emotions, individuals are
reduced to a perceptual stage of existence and must turn to
sensory stimulants to feel anything at all; hence, the
escalating need for ever more harsh excitation. Witness,
also, the raw sex and violence in movies, which only assist
in mobilizing a lazy populace toward continuous nonstop
distraction, simultaneously immobilizing their brains.
Add to this primal art scene the forced institutionalization
of tribalism through the euphemism of “political
correctness” in newspaper “reportage” and TV news,
government, corporate and university policies—and even the
court system, where justice may give way to tribal sway on
any day. Twentieth century tribes of color, creed, gender,
gender preference, age, et al. band together too seldomly
for the proper purpose of redressing genuine abrogations of
individual rights. They seek too often to establish
themselves as power centers formed not for the sake of
individual survival (such as that which impelled the
formation of extended-family tribes in prehistory) but for
the clout of political privilege. If the fraud of these
last vestiges of twentieth century primitivism in art and
politics—and the philosophies that spawned them—does not
soon expire on the altar of subjectivism, the doomsayers may
well have their way. These modern manifestations of
primeval behavior must, of course, at some point self
destruct for the same reason that communism as a political
system did—because, in the end, they are incompatible with
civilized survival.
Fortunately, there are early signs that this demise may come
sooner rather than later because the ideas (all being
anti-ideas, as in anti-reason, anti-responsibility,
anti-technology and anti-values) responsible for inculcating
apathy or anger and alienation into our modern world are
beginning to show symptoms of having run their course; even
the most devoted advocates of a return to the jungle in the
humanities cannot run backward at high speed forever. The
novelty of the anti-life philosophy that fueled a
reincarnation of primitivism in the arts at the dawn of this
century is wearing thin, undoubtedly because we are becoming
numb to arousal by shock. Still, even though certain
religions have attempted to remain a positive moral and
ethical force in our society, only a change in philosophy
can be broad enough in scope to effectively redirect the
arts so that the arts in turn—think of the power of
television!—may then encourage meaningful cultural reform.
Because art acts as a shortcut to our most deeply-held
premises (whether they be good or bad), it possesses
irresistible vitality and puissance. Through an aesthetic
process of bypassing our consciously-held value system and
going straight to the “heart” of our unconsciously held
premises, art makes our most deep-seated ideas accessible to
us in physical form. If our stated values accurately
reflect those in our subconscious, the emotional impact can
be one of supreme affirmation. If a mental conflict exists,
our emotional responses to art will also be in conflict.
Because art shows us our abstract ideas, lets us see
them, touch them and hear them. Great art is a vision of
values that shows us possibilities—as Aristotle said, “a
kind of thing that might be.” But as ennobling as art can
be, so, as we have observed, it can also abet fear, evil,
and destruction. Because of the impoverishment of most
twentieth century art, there are many among us who have
given up hope altogether and claim that we are a culture in
irreversible decline. But if we look closely, this,
demonstrably, is not true—Yet. And the reason we may know
it is not true is because fundamental questions are
finally being raised. The value of values, as such,
is being argued. The tiresome haranguing we have heard for
decades over the implementation of worn-out conventions is
abating. The call for abnegation of all values rings
hollow. The futile attempts at impossible syncretism have
been revealed as just that. Too many Americans have finally
become so drugged, decadent and dependent that those others
who do not look to the government to solve all our problems,
are finally starting to search for long-term legitimate ways
out of the morass. The currency of conversation among
thinking people today is not an itemization of what is wrong
in our culture but a reflective analysis of why it is
wrong, a query that if pursued logically, will lead to the
creative part of that intellectual equation: What is
right? What philosophical system can make human life
and the culture we live in better? And what kind of art can
give us palpable evidence of what that kind of world and
those kinds of human beings might be like?
With honest answers to questions such as these we may
absolutely halt the otherwise inescapable descent into
another Dark Age and stand, instead, on the brink of a new
age of humanism, the leitmotif of every genuinely
progressive age in history. Why is humanism so important?
About the first Renaissance, J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish
stated the following in The Western Intellectual
Tradition (Harper & Brothers, 1960; reprinted, Dorset
Press, 1986):
Human nature has been believed to follow
intelligible laws, just as physical nature has...
Secularization, then, is one facet of that advancing
humanism which the Renaissance introduced and to which, in
some way, every personage...is witness. It is not an
affront to traditional values, but a desire by the human
spirit to examine itself.... In each trans-formation...men
have had before them a single vision: the vision of their
own humanity. This above all is what the Renaissance did—to
inspire men with a feeling that there is a picture of man,
the essential man, to which they themselves aspire. The
Renaissance made ideas a new prime mover which could shape
men and their societies, and the men then went on to reshape
the ideas. In this historical circulation, one of the most
important ideas has been the idea which man has had of
himself...
What has been accomplished before can be accomplished again,
now, and by the same method: by making “ideas a new prime
mover.” We hear the word Renaissance popping up all over
the country, and popping out of our own mouths, too. Well,
a Renaissance can happen. And it may happen.
But we who would foster a rebirth of life-serving art and
ideas must be not only diligent but patient as well. No one
can begin a Renaissance in the middle; we must start from
where we are. We do have models to which we can repair for
guidance, however. If we look carefully beneath the ashes
of twentieth century burn-out, we can catch a glimmer of the
still-glowing embers from those other paradigm eras. It is
a small flame but a constant one that, because of the
scientific knowledge we now have in our arsenal, may be
ignited anew to light the way to a more advanced and
exciting epoch than has ever existed before. Those faintly
flaming embers are the art and ideas that have preserved the
best of our Western heritage. The legacy of an unending
search toward the betterment of humankind has survived, and
it is being revived here and there across the land in
sparks of beauty and life-affirming ideas that may forge
their combined energy into a blazing torch to illuminate the
next millennium.
A fair amount of the art being produced in America right now
(although largely ignored by most critics and intellectuals,
who lag behind the times) actually confirms this. Driven
underground by academics, critics and artists of avant garde
art for decades and largely untaught in any of our learning
institutions, the crafts of representationalism in painting
and sculpture have continued to be taught by a handful of
artist/teachers who refused to let their art forms perish.
We owe these men and women—now in their seventies and
eighties—a debt of gratitude for safeguarding the techniques
passed down from Greece through the Italian Renaissance to
nineteenth century Europe and then on to them here in
America in the early twentieth century. It is their
students—now professional artists in their own right—who are
presently coming of age to lead the current resurgence of
interest in these art forms, which are based in established
Western art traditions. Novelists, poets and composers,
too, are reaching back to the past for techniques that will
help them contemporize the everlasting verities of life with
bracing relevance to our own time and place in history.
The crafts of the great arts of Western civilization are
surfacing everywhere in America. But what of ideas? Many
artists, today, succeed in capturing reality, but how
many of them create a heightened reality, one that not only
brings into sharper focus selected aspects of life through
compelling aesthetics but also communicates ideas? Without
authentic relevance to the fundamentals of the contemporary
human condition, art becomes either decorative or banal.
Without ideas informing it, art becomes a pretty pastime
without further value. Most artists are not philosophers;
they are, rather, more sensitive souls who intuitively
incorporate value premises into their work. Great artists,
however, whose work reverberates with meaning forever, are
fully conscious of the ideas permeating their work; they, in
fact, use form and aesthetics for the express purpose of
communicating—beautifully—the content of their art. For
these superlative artists, nothing is accidental; they
select and include in their art only the requisite elements
necessary to communicate their themes. Such artists distill
the essence of one image or one fleeting moment (or in the
case of literature and music, one finite time-experience)
for their own sake first; they make it “stand still” so
they can experience and return at will to the
quintessence of that moment for renewal. Then they pass
their vision on to us for further contemplation of the
beauty and the values inherent in the work. In this regard,
great art is a continual source of inspiration; we can
revisit it time and again, always discovering something new
and something deeper as we, ourselves, develop. Then, as a
result of our own self-realization, we may appreciate not
only what the work offers on its own but also what it
stimulates in us as our minds grasp insights that the artist
himself has merely glimpsed, or as we formulate new
connections of thought perhaps not even intended by the
artist but which, nonetheless, enrich our lives by result of
our own creative process. Good art challenges the mind; it
makes us think.
Art is not for enjoyment alone; it does not exist just to
make us “feel good.” Great art opens a passage not only to
our inner selves but also to the outer world. It implicitly
teaches us structure and coherence through its design at the
same time it encourages us to “see” both nature and all
living things, including ourselves, more perceptively. A
landscape painting made of morning light arching into the
colors of a rainbow that hovers over an apple-green orchard
may guide our vision the next time we tarry in the
countryside. A flower painting of scintillating colors and
luscious textures can whet our senses to appreciate the
fragility and translucent wonder of petals soft, defined and
fragrant, not to mention give us pause to consider the
transience of all life, including our own. A cityscape can
augment our respect for the soaring imagination and
technological skills of architects and engineers. A novel
can transport us to different places and introduce us to
different people, whom we are thrilled to know. A nude of a
male or female sculpture can cause us to marvel at the
inherent beauty of the human body—the temple of our soul.
Great art does far more than bring us pleasure; it can be a
seductive tutor in that by emphasizing selected facets of
reality for our scrutiny it whispers, “Look. Listen. This
is important.” By our interaction with great art we hone
our own sensibilities to live out the details of life ever
more fully. Art, like a person, has a spiritual center
where mind and matter are united to become one.
I submit that only by adopting values based in rational
humanism can artists begin again an earnest spiral upward
toward a cultural growth that will eventually enrich the
lives of every person who will look and listen. Ideas:
From philosophy to the artists, from artists to the world.
Happily, many artists in our country are imbuing their work
with values that elevate the spirit by providing reflective
content. Palengenisia (Greek for a new beginning) is
within reach, because the search is on, philosophically and
artistically. Such a quest for earthly beauty and
life-serving values—and the art it inspires—is still in an
embryonic stage in America. But it does exist. An art
exhibit subtitled “A Celebration of the World at its Most
Beautiful and Man and Woman at Their Best” is part of the
proof that it exists.
Let us now shun primitivism in all its forms and
contemporize, instead, the nucleus of ancient Greek thought
in order to re-energize the helix of progress begun by those
noble minds of antiquity. Let us support modern
philosophical ideas based on the same premises but brought
up-to-date in our present space age. Let us restore the
ageless values that engender true progress and the art that
concretizes those values in order to usher in what we may
term an “Age of Eudaemonia” in philosophy and “ROMANTIC
REALISM” in the arts. We can narrow those values down to
the same five fundamentals mentioned earlier: reason,
health, humanism, individualism, and beauty.
1) Reason: our mental faculty of intellection: identifying,
evaluating, and integrating information provided by our
senses, also including the ability to form concepts from
percepts and to employ logic (non-contradictory thought).
2) Health: soundness of body and mind.
3) Humanism: a concentration on human interests, human
nature and human culture. Often misunderstood, humanism
does not mean a religion of self worship, nor does it
mean self interest at the forfeit of others or of the planet
on which we live. A philosophy based in humanism concerns
itself with the secular world of life here on earth—the
universals of life common to all human beings regardless of
color, creed or personal circumstance. Human beings, like
all other living entities, have a fundamental
nature that is inborn and does not change. Our primary
attributes are free will and the ability to reason. It is
upon these premises that humanism is based.
4) Individualism: a concept of the individual as a
self-determining entity, free to pursue individual happiness
through the use of free will and rational means and
responsible and accountable for personal thoughts and
actions.
5) Beauty: both an identification and an evaluation. As an
identification: unity and harmony in variety. A perfection
of form through a fulfillment of potential that brings
pleasure to our senses. As an evaluation: pleasurable or
approving response to the qualities of an entity or
an idea—“beautiful” meaning that which we judge to be
“good.” (Both aspects of beauty function together in art,
as it is the appeal to our senses that draws us to art in
the first place, followed by the personal confirmation or
rejection of the value content that either holds that
attention rapt for blissful contemplation or sends us
running in the opposite direction.)
A steadfast pursuance of these basic values can turn the
coming millennium into an “Age of Eudaemonia.” The term
Eudaemonia—from the Greek “good demon or spirit”—was
used by Aristotle to describe human happiness as that
abiding inner state of contentment achieved by virtue of
living a life of reason. In his Nicomachean Ethics,
interpreted by Friedo Ricken in Philosophy of the
Ancients (University of Notre Dame Press, 1991),
Aristotle’s depth of point was concisely this:
The end or good of human beings lies in the activity
that the rational soul [mind] of human beings exercises due
to its highest capabilities and in its best condition.
Happiness consists, not in having or receiving, but rather
in being active. Happiness requires effort. It is a
function that human beings must exercise. The higher the
exercised capabilities are, the more intense the experience
of happiness will be.
“Happiness,” then, is not “I feel good” but “I feel
good because I am good,” meaning “I am the best I
can be.” Epicurus concurred with Aristotle’s moral ideal as
the definition of enduring happiness. In addition, by
holding the evidence of the senses as the foundation of all
knowledge, he also verified concepts as formulations of
abstract thought allowing us to universalize percepts and
went on to identify emotions as being the criteria of value
judgments. Although Epicurus viewed feelings as purely
physical reactions to pleasure and pain, his connection of
emotions to value judgments opened the door to a further
understanding of the psycho-physical phenomena of
emotional pain or pleasure as being value stimulated.
This understanding leads to an explanation of why we respond
so intensely to art; by sensorily experiencing our deepest
philosophical values, we are emotionally “feeling”
our intellect.
“ROMANTIC REALISM” in art has similarities to but is not
synonymous with Romanticism. The similarities are to
be found in the emotional content of the art: A “romantic”
artist charges an artwork with his or her own value system
to a higher power, investing the work with a personal
passion that, if the values match, mirrors our own and
expresses it in such a sensuous, dramatic and poetic way as
to magnify our own responses. But Realism qua form
ties subject matter to real life (even if the subject is a
fantasy) because the forms are communicable through the
representation of recognizable images; therefore, universal
artistic “languages” are established within each art
form—note that all art forms except those based in written
or spoken language are understandable to all peoples,
regardless of background or individual context. Classical
elements in realism project universality of beauty and
reason. Ideal elements project the fulfilled potential of
natural or mental and physical excellence possible at the
highest level in the physical world and in real life.
Romantic elements exploit the subjective and often rely on
the exotic, the historical or foreign settings to provide
extra stimulation. While incorporating all of the other
combined elements of Classicism (universality), Idealism
(potential fulfilled), and the best of Romanticism
(subjective passion), Romantic Realist artists reject the
Romantic’s “call of the wild” and bring their content home
by focusing on the here and now without diluting the
charismatic spin of personal style and temperament. The
balance and integration of all these elements is delicate
and difficult to achieve, especially because it requires
objective restraint of subjective ardor. Self expression by
some Romantics—as certain artists in the nineteenth century,
for example, and many of their contemporary offspring—can
become too subjective, to the point where the work loses
interest for anyone but the artist and those few others who
might be interested in that particular artist’s psychology.
As Eric Newton states in The Romantic Rebellion,
published in Great Britain by Longmans, Green and Company,
Ltd. in 1962:
Romanticism claims full freedom of individual
expression, it asserts that heightened personal emotion
alone is worth expressing, that the means of expression must
be forged in every case to fit that heightened emotion, and
that to follow tradition or...what has been done in the past
is to destroy the uniqueness of the individual.... Yet
despite the romantic protest against the discipline of law
we know well enough that without obedience to law and the
traditions that enshrine law no human creative act can be
intelligible or eloquent. The wildest garden must be
designed, or it becomes meaningless because chaotic....
Intelligibility demands intelligence, and however deeply the
romantic mistrusts the intellect he is lost if for a single
moment he loses touch with it.
This is precisely why great art must be based in ideas.
The techniques of established Western art forms (because of
their malleability of form and endless vocabulary of
aesthetics) are especially suited to communicate ideas.
There is great compelling evidence—particularly in the work
of certain contemporary writers, painters and sculptors—that
through not Romanticism but ROMANTIC REALISM, where
the romantic impulse is grounded in the real here-and-now
world of rational possibilities, reason and emotions are
being united harmoniously with form and content to create
exhilarating, penetrating, idea-based art that could become
the most brilliant of any produced in all of history. This
persuasion of art is still in its infancy, but it does
exist. Technique alone produces cold and sterile work;
emotions alone produce psychological purges. Most artists,
today, still remain in one camp or the other. But when form
(physical presentation) and content (ideas/reason) and
personal expression (emotions) are successfully integrated
in a work of art, the physical/intellectual/emotional impact
is so monumental that we know our souls have been touched,
deeply and lastingly.
Which brings us back to our starting point: the benefit to
one and all that comes as a result of a striving for human
excellence, of human achievement and happiness here on this
earth, of “man and (now) woman at their best,”
feeling their best because they have attained a state of
eudaemonia as a consequence of their own efforts. Experiencing those values and achievements through the
emotionally stirring art of Romantic Realism offers us one
of the summits of life experiences. Add to that the human
relationships of friendship—both Aristotle and Epicurus made
much of the value of friendship—and love (if we can find
it), and we will have achieved the highest joys of life.
The efflorescence of these ideas in ancient Greece was not
brought forth in full bloom from the head of Zeus. It was a
culmination of energy and ideas from many previous cultures
and peoples and experiences joining together in a compatible
and timely manner so as to generate a pivotal leap forward
in human progress. Like the biological link that
transformed a particular lineage of primates into humans in
prehistoric Africa, ancient Greece experienced a mental
crossover from metaphors and myth to concepts and
philosophy. The biological and intellectual fundamentals
have been established. But the fundamentals of the
spiritual realm are very much open to exploration. And art
in its highest function provides a spiritual experience, so
to probe the elements of art (including the philosophy that
informs it) is to explore the spiritual realm.
That prodigious challenge clearly falls to us, now. As
European culture was the result of the best of Greek
intellectual achievement, and the political formation of
America was a result of the best of European intellectual
achievement, now let us become intellectual producers
ourselves in the one realm left to complete the circle of
progress. Let the clarion call be sounded. It is our turn
to further human progress by advancing the
ideological progress that the Greeks began nearly three
thousand years ago. The whole world is scrambling to share
in the material benefits made possible via the Western
heritage legacy. Now
let us take leadership in the philosophic/artistic arenas
and offer an earthly spiritual component to life’s exalted
experiences as well.
With our base founded firmly in the best of our Western
heritage philosophy—rational humanism—plus the great influx
of ideas pouring into our country over the past two
centuries from people raised in other lands, an abundance of
choice surrounds us. Let us move beyond the present
cultural wreckage and seize this moment to sift mindfully
through our riches and select only the best life-serving
ideas to add to that which is infinitely worthy in our
already-great legacy. Let us judge the tenets of competing
contemporary philosophies according to their internal
congruity and their fealty to the following criteria: 1) a
rational, humanistic ideology applicable to all individuals
at all times under all circumstances and achievable in real
life by practical means, and 2) an objective philosophy
where the religious of all creeds and the nonreligious,
alike, may pursue their own values freely but may not impose
them on others, and where people of all colors, backgrounds
and beliefs can exist in harmony together by respecting the
fundamental “sameness” that we share in common, at the same
time tolerating our differences. Such a core philosophy
(and the art it generates) is to be found only within the
legacy of our great Western heritage, a heritage that is far
wider than any geographical spot on the globe; it is a
state of mind that spans all place and all time because
it is consonant with the inherent nature of human beings.
The novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand eloquently connected
philosophy and art in her 1969 book, The Romantic
Manifesto. Concluding an essay entitled “Art and Moral
Treason,” she says: “...art is the fuel and spark- plug of
a man’s soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never
let it go out. The task of providing that fire with a motor
and a direction belongs to philosophy.”
Against all odds we must not repeat the past. The genius of
the European Renaissance leaders was that they took the
fundamentals of Greek philosophy and made them their own:
David, not Apollo. It is for us to refine universal truths
in light of our own present context and knowledge and to
bring consistency to value systems that contain internal
contradictions. We have learned so much more about the
wonders and workings of the whole universe and of our own
nature than our forebears knew that another momentous leap
forward is not just possible, it is probable. Now, in this
brilliant scientific age that permits travel to outer space
as routine, the time has come to initiate a journey into
inner space—the humanities—to discover a deeper, rational
understanding of man as a spiritual creature who needs
access to the profound meanings of life, meaning that is
made understandable through philosophy and is in turn made
manifest through the arts, especially through the
objectively intelligible and emotion-evoking power of
Romantic Realism
in all its forms. By championing art that
promotes beauty and life-affirming values passionately
expressed, we champion our own future.
The legacy lives in each of us. In the best of each
of us. Let us all rise, in Aristotle’s words, to our
“highest capabilities” in order to achieve first a personal,
inner state of eudaemonia. Then let our individual
achievements become guidelights, giving others the courage
to strive for the same in themselves until we have
engendered an Age of Eudaemonia—an Age of Excellence—where
future generations may inherit the best we have achieved, as
we have chosen to inherit the best bequeathed to us from our
own ancestors. It can be done! Any time of crisis such as
we are now experiencing is always a time of opportunity as
well. Let those of us who comprehend the incalculable worth
of our philosophical and artistic Western heritage legacy
join together to turn our present opportunity into reality.
The time is ripe for it. Let us become the real-life
embodiments of those ideas that will connect the ideological
genesis writ large in ancient Greece to our own American
revelation writ bold tomorrow. Let us embrace the challenge
of the new millennium with energy and confidence, knowing
that the promise of the future depends on life-affirming
ideas put into action today. Let the legacy live.
Copyright © Alexandra York. All rights reserved |
