Spencer Heath Archive

Item 947

Penned essay in a pocket notebook. Title supplied.

February 1934

 

White envelope has items 947-959.

 

/THE MINISTRY OF ART/

 

Art is the sole fountain of philosophy. The ministry of art is Inspiration. Inspiration conditions for activity — charges the being with creative energy. This energy manifests itself in forms:

 

1. Through the aesthetic sense as Art forms

 

2. Through the rational sense as Philosophy forms

 

3. Through the biologic sense (will to exist) as growth and structure forms.

 

     Art forms in their positive manifestations are those objective forms presented by nature, or created by man under inspiration, that arouse an immediate sense of beauty with accompanying inspiration to activity and release of creative energy.

    

     Philosophy forms are objective forms resulting from the employment or exercise of creative energy in the field of abstraction and generalization — on the plane of universal concepts.

 

     Growth and structure forms are objective forms result­ing from the exercise of creative energy in the field of the concrete and particular, under the will to be and to do. These comprise all structure with division and differentiation and corresponding functional relations. These forms evolve in a series of syntheses of particular units into ever wider and more complex organization in a series (like a mathematical progression), the ultimate of which is a completely organic universe — (but not absolutely attainable). This is the genetic history of man, the individual organism, and of mankind as a synthesis of individual units with differentiation and corresponding functional relations between and among units and groups. This is the Social Organism.

 

     Like all organisms it has a physiology which is positive because creative and a pathology which is negative because destructive (dis-organizational) and which gives occasion wherever man is concerned to conscious and sometimes deliberate policy which is treatment, as concerns the individual, or politics as concerns the social organism. The continuation, permanence, of organic development depends upon policy.

 

     Now policy is exercise of energy. Energy can be employed or consumed in two ways: for integration into organic systems and relations or for a corresponding dis­integration — for creation or for destruction, according as it has been released in the individual by inspiration or by an opposite motivating (emotional) experience.

 

     It happens that all events may have opposites or negatives. In the quantitative sciences (as mathema­tics, etc.) this denotes nothing but direction. But the social sciences introduce qualitative concepts, the element of value, an element that includes and transcends quantity alone. In this realm that which is creative is positive and that which is destructive is negative.

     Going back now to Art as the source of inspiration, it has also a negative aspect. Broadly, what distinguishes art is its power of motivation, of giving emotional experience and thus releasing energy in us. This emotional effect may be positive or negative. If it is positive it inspires us and thus releases energy that is creative both

within us (recreative) and without us upon whatever it may impinge or be directed. The emotional reaction to art in its positive manifestation is signalized by expansive atti­tudes and posture, deep inhalations, uplifted eyes, acceler­ated pulse, heightened nervous reactions and muscular tone.

 

     In its negative manifestations, however, art does not inspire. On the contrary its reactions are signalized by all the opposite from that just described — a sense of weight upon the chest, a shrinking and drawing together of the members of the body, a lowering of the eyes and a general sense of nervous and physical debilitation. This state, if long continued or often experienced, brings on a reaction of defense, first only as indignation or moral revolt but finally heightening to animal anger and destructive attack. Or the first reaction may be only fear, and this heightens to terror and flight or some other mode of escape. If the escape be a moral one, from the sins and wickedness of his world, the victim tends to become an anchorite barren of the amenities of existence; if his flight be from the pain of living, he seeks to become a sybarite and luxuriate (and decay) upon his bed of down and rose /?/ leaves. The one, if he remains in society, becomes the militant and destructive reformer, the other the decadent parasite.

 

     From all this it must be clear that the supreme need of mankind, whether in his quest for technical ameliorations or in his pursuit of things of beauty and the spirit, is the full flowering of art in its positive, inspiring and creative aspects. Here we find not only the fountain of philosophy but the motivation of everything that is creative in the conscious life of man.⁹⁴⁷