Tag Archives: aesthetics

Conference Presentation: An Explication of Aesthetic Freedom with Implications for Mental Health

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I presented at the Psychology and the Other Conference at Boston College in September 2025. This conference is always a joy! It is also exciting to see my book being sold at the book exhibit since it is part of the Psychology and Other Book Series.

Here is an abstract of the paper:

In promoting strong mental health, we desire each individual to walk in a state of freedom. Freedom becomes then a goal or ideal that we encourage in our patients and all those around us. And yet, due to its familiarity, we must not forget what it looks like when freedom is deprived, when we are trapped in some kind of bondage, captivity or slavery. To walk in freedom means decidedly not to be enslaved to something or someone and not to be owned by another or controlled by something else. Thinking in terms of art, we know intuitively that art cannot be done under coercion or dictated by another nor can it be done for the sake of an agenda or to spread propaganda. Art may arise out of bondage, and often does, but art cannot be created by the slavery; any art made by those in captivity transcends the bounds of that slavery.

In this paper, I will explicate aesthetic freedom — in other words, I will look to expressions of freedom in art — in order to apply this kind of freedom to goals in mental health. To do so, I will perform a phenomenological analysis on the freedom that exists in art to find its necessary place. I will sketch the relation of art to freedom according to the existentialist accounts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel. Keenly aware of the experience of bondage due to living through the occupation of France during the Second World War, the existentialists see freedom as saturating all creation of art (such as the writing of a novel or the painting of a still life) and all participation in art (such as the reading of the novel or the viewing of a still life painting) just like it saturates all actions of the human life. Although each thinker heralds freedom as essential to art and life, there are tensions that abound in their accounts of freedom with some privileging an autonomous style of freedom (“radical freedom”) while others emphasizing freedom dependent on others (“situated freedom”). In the larger chapter, I describe how freedom must be present at each layer of the aesthetic experience: in the act of the artist, in the experience of the audience and in the artwork itself, but for this paper, we will be looking solely at the freedom for the artist.

Conference Presentation: Art Speaks the Unspeakable: Suffering of the World in Aesthetic Expression or L’art dit l’indicible: souffrance du monde dans l’expression esthétique

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I presented at the International Network of Philosophy of Religion conference which took place in Perugia, Italy on June 11, 2024. It was a wonderful conference connecting with old friends and meeting new ones. The location was beautiful overlooking several small cities including Assisi (where St. Francis was from).

Here is a picture from the back of the hotel.

The conference is both in French and English so I wrote my abstract in both. And like last time, I read my paper in English but read the longer quotations in the original French.

Title: Art Speaks the Unspeakable: Suffering of the World in Aesthetic Expression

Abstract. Responding to the discussion on solitude and tragedy (the “extra-phenomenal”), at our last conference, and reflecting on the crisis of our created world, for this conference, this paper looks to the power of art to speak into the silent spaces of deep suffering. Because there are events where no human language — not even the language of phenomenology — can offer us a satisfying response, art has an ethical obligation to speak to us in the midst of personal and global suffering. Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s idea that art emerges out of silence, I will first offer further proof for why it is that art must speak of suffering. Next, I will describe how art fulfills this obligation due to its facility with the vocabulary surrounding suffering, for example, death and brokenness, as seen in illustrations from the art of the French existentialists, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Lastly, I will present what art says to us in suffering to demonstrate its indispensability; for the uncompromising message of aesthetic expression reveals to us the fullness of reality, the hard and the good, unlike anything else.

L’art dit l’indicible: souffrance du monde dans l’expression esthétique

Le résumé. Répondant à l’échange sur la solitude et la tragédie (le “Hors-phénomène”), lors de notre dernière conférence, et réfléchissant sur la crise de notre monde créé, pour cette conférence, cet article se penche sur le pouvoir de l’art de parler dans les espaces silencieux de la souffrance profonde. Parce qu’il y a des événements où le langage humaine — même le langage de la phénoménologie — ne peut pas nous offrir une réponse satisfaisante, l’art a une obligation éthique de nous dire quelque chose au milieu de la souffrance personnelle et globale. Faisant appel à l’idée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty selon laquelle l’art émerge du silence, j’offrirai tout d’abord une preuve en plus du fait que l’art doit parler de la souffrance. Ensuite, je décrirai comment l’art remplit cette obligation par sa richesse de vocabulaire du domaine de souffrance, par exemple, la mort et le monde cassé, comme le montrent les illustrations des arts des existentialistes français, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre et Albert Camus. Et enfin, je présenterai ce que l’art nous dit dans la souffrance pour démonter sa nécessité ; car le message intransigeant de l’expression esthétique nous révèle la plénitude de la réalité, du dur et du bien, contrairement à toute autre chose.

Myth and the Human Condition: Merleau-Ponty and Tolkien (Part 1)

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I will be doing a two part series on myth. This first post will focus on myth and the human condition and refer to French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the British novelist J.R.R. Tolkien. The second post will focus on myth and religion and refer to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

IMG_2347Maurice Merleau-Ponty discusses the purpose of myth in his Phenomenology of Perception:

[M]yth is a projection of existence and an expression of the human condition. But understanding the myth does not mean believing in it, and if all myths are true, this is insofar as they can be put back into a phenomenology of spirit that indicates their function in the emergence of self-consciousness and that ultimately grounds their proper sense upon the sense they have for the philosopher.[ref]Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 306[/ref]

There is truth in myth, Merleau-Ponty argues, but it is not found in establishing the historical validity of the myth. A myth is true when it illustrates something true about the human condition, when it represents the true spirit of the human consciousness seeking to understand the world. He often uses the word “magical” in describing how a human puts together the facts or sensations of the world to establish a cohesive whole. There is a magical or mythical element to the way we are in touch with the world.

Tolkien, author of the great mythical stories found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, also believes in the truth of myths. Before his creation of middle earth, Tolkien is first famous for his work on the myth of Beowolf. In a lecture on Beowulf, Tolkien gives an analogy of a man who built a tower from old stone only for it later to be mocked and torn down. But, before it was destroyed, the man who built it had been able to climb the tower and “look out upon the sea.”[ref]J.R.R. Tolkien, a lecture to the British Academy in 1936 in Essays, pp. 7-8, quoted in T.A. Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000), 162.[/ref] (See the picture above of the beautiful sea at Muriwai Beach on the North Island of New Zealand.) Tolkien relates this to Beowulf, who built a tower, his poem, only for it later to be criticized so severely. And yet, the building of the tower was not in vain as the man was still able to look out at the sea.

This is the benefit of the myth: the opportunity to look upon something great. Those who write myths are part of pointing us toward something great. Tolkien writes in his poem, “Mythopoeia”: “Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme, of things not found within recorded time.”[ref]Tolkien, “Mythopoeia,” in Tree and Leaf, including the Poem Mythopoeia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), 144, quoted in Bradley Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), xxi.[/ref]

The blessing of “looking out upon the sea” is like the blessing of looking upon truth. Myth reveals parts of our world to us and the way humans interact with the world. Tolkien believes that the best myths and fairy stories will provide the reader with euchatastrophe, unexpected joy. This will all the more take place when we encounter the greatest true myth, the incarnation of Christ. For Tolkien, the God-becoming-man myth is the key to understanding the human condition; this myth is where, according to Tolkien, “Legend and History have met and fused.”[ref]Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” in Christopher Tolkien, ed., The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, 109, quoted in Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, 40.[/ref] When the man looks out at sea, Tolkien may be imagining him facing this incredible, infinite Truth of redemption. He may be thinking of the Psalmist who writes how such truth is greater than the ocean and deeper than the sea.[ref]See Psalm 36:5-7: “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the great deep . . . How priceless is your unfailing love!”[/ref]

Although Merleau-Ponty would not see redemption as part of the truth of myth, he, along with Tolkien, believe in the mythical element in the human condition. From his approach, Merleau-Ponty finds that pure objective thought does not account for the real way that humans live in the world. For example, humans live in what he calls a “mythical space.”[ref]Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 298[/ref]. This is why we can physically be in one place but that place “not necessarily [be] the landscape of our life.” He continues, “I can ‘be elsewhere’ while remaining here and if I am kept far from what I love, I feel far from the center of real life.”[ref]Ibid., 299.[/ref]. Homesickness, for example, is a way for us to be dwelling in the mythical space of our home while being physically somewhere else. Anyone who has been in love or has observed someone in love has seen that while that person may be in one location, perhaps even doing something enjoyable, he or she is not fully engaged because of the desire to be with his or her lover. Even dreams, as Merleau-Ponty points out, demonstrate the way that humans have a connection to the mythical. We escape to the myth in our sleep.

These mythical elements of the human experience are not peripheral, but integral to the very way we interact with the world. We approach objects, not as mere appearances, but as actual essences, because we believe, somehow, that there is a sense or meaning to all things. The world of myth invades are world of perception. Merleau-Ponty writes, “The myth fits the essence into the appearance; the mythical phenomenon is not a representation, but a genuine presence.”[ref]Ibid., 303.[/ref]. We experience objects as having a mythical presence, react according to that presence, and create our lived space in this world.

In summary, Tolkien finds mythical element in the human condition because it reveals our pursuit of truth. Ultimately, our love for myth, he argues, will drive us toward the highest form of truth, a religious form of truth. (We will find a similar notion, although not in accordance with the Christian religion, when we turn to Nietzsche’s notion of myth in the next post.) In a different way, Merleau-Ponty finds the mythical element in the human condition to explain the way we interact with the world. We are not mechanical, calculating robots but experience places and people according to mythical relationships. Both are revealing the integral part myth plays in the human.

Taking Off My Subjective Weight

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There is power in knowing one’s self, being one’s self, perfecting one’s self, and loving one’s self. It can be argued that without a strong self-identity, life loses much of its meaning, joy and fulfillment. For example, how can you relate with the other without first relating to yourself? Some knowledge of self is necessary in building relationships because a relationship must include a connection between one self and another.

With that said, however, the burden of my own individual subjectivity can become very heavy.[ref]I would like to thank Phillip Rosemann for suggesting this terminology.[/ref] Who am I? I am a person limited by my body, my thoughts, and my abilities. I have my own personal history and my own personal thought patterns which are forever upon me and can never be changed. I carry around this inevitable me-ness in this particular time and space and it enters into every circumstance and encounter that I have in my life.

As humans, we look for ways to relieve our subjective weight. Sometimes we try things that appear to give us relief, and actually do temporarily, only to have the weight come back, heavier than before. Escaping to the world of fantasy, where we allow our minds to participate in actions and thoughts which we usually regard as vile and undignified, temporarily relieves our subjective weight. But, upon coming back to the world of reality, we are faced with the shame and guilt for entertaining such images and thoughts. On another level, we may take part in a mob where we move beyond our insignificant selves to become one with others around us. Acting as one, heinous crimes have been committed by those elated with feelings of freedom and unity.

Nietzsche argues that art is a way, or I should say, the way, to take off our subjective weight. In The Birth of Tragedy, he makes a distinction between two types of art: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian art represents the ordered, beautiful and calculated art. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is art which comes from frenzy, laughter, and natural life. He argues that Dionysian art is shown through the presence of the chorus in an Ancient Greek tragedy. In the environment of the chorus, the Dionysian aesthetic is exemplified: the members of the chorus as well as anyone who joins them are able to rise to a new level of artistic experience. Nietzsche writes:

This process of the tragic chorus is the dramatic proto-phenomenon: to see oneself transformed before one’s own eyes and to begin to act as if one had actually entered into another body, another character. [ref]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), Section 8, p. 64.[/ref]

Through participation in the dramatic proto-phenomenon, one is able to move beyond one’s self into another. Nietzsche contrasts this with the Apollonian:

[In the Apollonian] the virgins who proceed solemnly to the temple of Apollo, laurel branches in their hands, singing a processional hymn, remain what they are and retain their civic names: the dithyrambic chorus [Dionysian chorus] is a chorus of transformed characters whose civic past and social status have been totally forgotten: they have become timeless servants of their god who live outside the spheres of society.[ref]Ibid.[/ref]

Unlike the ordered, calm procession of the worshippers of Apollo, the worshippers of Dionysius have reached such a state of transformation that they have left behind their past and their social status. They have given themselves completely to the worship of this god. In this act, the individuals become united as one, and their identity becomes the identity of the group. Dropping their subjective weight, they can taste the freedom that comes from rising above the self.[ref]In Greek mythology, sometimes Dionysian worship did result in heinous crimes similar to the behavior of a mob, mentioned above. In one myth, Pentheus’s mother, due to her frenzied state of Dionysian worship, unknowingly participated in dismembering her own son.[/ref]

I think that many will resonate with this above description, because we too desire to have freedom from ourselves. We could argue that there is something in the human condition which pushes us toward aesthetic experiences: we long to rise above ourselves and feel part of something bigger than ourselves. Whether it is engaging in a piece of music, encountering an epic story in a movie or book, losing one’s self in a painting or acting as a character in a play, art allows us to take part in this beautiful act of freedom.

Notice, however, that while Nietzsche is writing about art, he uses the example of worship. Worship is then an aesthetic experience where we creatively adore someone above ourselves. A theist would argue that worshipping an immanent god, such as Dionysius, only provides a temporary release from our subjectivity, and that the worship of a transcendent God is needed for true subjective relief.[ref]However, it should be noted that Dionysius has characteristics of a Christ-like figure who suffers, dies and resurrects.[/ref] Such worship, however, cannot be on one’s own. As Nietzsche reminds us, taking off the weight of subjectivity must be done with others, acting as a united whole, where I lose my identity in a timeless communal act of worship.[ref] See also my post on the human need to worship: Is the “Need to Worship” Part of the Human Condition?[/ref]

Sculpture: An Exemplar for the Unreal Nature of Art

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Sculpture plays a unique role in the philosophy of art by bringing to light some of the often overlooked characteristics of artworks. All artworks, in my opinion, point us toward another world, but sculpture reflects attributes of the other world in a way that no other artwork is capable of. With its solid and durable materials, sculpture symbolizes a stability and a rigidity, which can withstand the weathering of time. Robert Wood points out:

Bronze and stone, and to a lesser extent wood or ceramic clay fired at extreme temperatures, have a fixity, a solidity less subject to the decay of time than paint on canvas or plaster . . . A sculpted piece suggests an endurance, a hardness, a resistance and is particularly fit for memorializing – especially in stone and bronze. It renders its subject “immortal.”[ref]Robert Wood, Nature, Artforms and the World Around Us, Forthcoming, 76. [/ref]

The permanency of the sculptural materials reflects permanency in another realm; though we know that the materials are not immortal, the longevity of their life suggests to us things or beings which are immortal. But, how exactly does a material artwork, such as a piece of sculpture, reflect something immaterial?

Sartre offers a helpful answer to this question through his description of the real and the unreal (imaginary) worlds. He believes that each work of art participates in both the real and the unreal worlds. The artwork in the real world is the ‘physical analogue’ because it contains the material and physical dimensions of the artwork. A sculpture excellently typifies this due to its permanency of materials, but other artforms have their physical nature as well: the frame, paint and canvas of a painting, the sound waves of a musical piece, or the page filled with words of a poem, for a few examples. The ‘physical analogue’ is not the complete work of art, as it also symbolizes the imaginary artwork in the unreal world. A sculpture, as the ‘physical analogue,’ holds the place in the real world for the sculpture in the imaginary world; it acts as its file name or reference number. Behind the reference number, or ‘physical analogue’, an artist has created an unreal object or image.

Sartre gives us an example of the statue of Ganymede (see image above), a handsome mortal in Greek mythology, to illustrate the way a sculpture symbolizes both the real and the unreal. He proposes:

Consider Ganymede on his pedestal. If you ask me how far away he is, I will tell you that I don’t know what you are talking about. By ‘Ganymede’ do you mean the youth carried away by Jupiter’s eagle? If so, I will say that there is no real distance between us, that no such relation exists because he does not exist. Or are you referring to the block of marble that the sculptor fashioned in the image of the handsome lad? If so, we are dealing with something real, with existing material and can draw comparisons.[ref]Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Quest of the Absolute,” in Essays in Aesthetics, ed. Wade Baskin (New York: The Citadel Press, 1963), 86.[/ref]

Ganymede is both a statue of marble, 15 feet away, as well as an imaginary figure of Greek mythology. An artwork is free to live in both of these worlds: it will stand in front of us, as real as marble, but it will also dwell in the imaginary world of the unreal.

Sartre’s definition of an artwork as both real and unreal gives us a language to understand more fully the power of art, and in particular, the power of sculpture. Though a decidedly physical object, sculpture ironically represents a lasting nature in both the mortal and the immortal worlds.