Art is the name we have given to humanity’s most primal response to the mystery of existence. It was in the face of the mystery that dance, music, poetry, and painting were born.
art is the only truly effective means we have of engaging, in a communal context, the psyche on its own terms.
Art breaks down the barriers that normally stand between the physical and the psychic
Samuel Coleridge described the imagination as “the living power and prime agent of all human perception." (in Biographia Literaria (1817))
Human consciousness has access to a powerful otherworld, the place of dreams and myth, poetry and lunacy. I will refer to it in this book as the “imaginal,” the name Henry Corbin gave to the intermediate realm, central to the cosmology of the Sufi mystics, between the rational mind of Man and the inscrutable mind of God.
Didacticism exists in the “high arts” as well. Conceptualism, to cite just one example, is art that gives the concept—that is, the intellectual idea—primacy over the affect. While it can produce works that make important political points, often in clever and ingenious ways (think of Banksy or the early Damien Hirst), it seems to achieve the aesthetic emotion that Joyce ascribes to proper art only in very rare cases. That is, it tends not to astound us with the ineradicable mysteriousness of things (in fact, many conceptual pieces come with a written explanation that spells out the meaning of the work).
The role of the artist isn’t to manufacture illusions of meaning in a meaningless world (as a Kantian might insist) but on the contrary to excavate the real meaningfulness that lies hidden from the egoic mind—and to do this even if the meanings uncovered aren’t things we can humanly understand...For Kant and modern rationalism, beauty really is in the eye of the beholder. For Aquinas, Joyce, and Wilde, it is the other way around: beauty exists as a fundamental reality that we, as beholders, can come to witness as something larger than us.