(...) art is part of a universal force. It has no less purpose or meaning than science, religion, philosophy, politics, or any other discipline, and is as much a form of intelligence or knowing as a first kiss, a last goodbye, or an algebraic equation. Art is an energy source that helps make change possible; it sees things in clusters and constellations rather than rigid systems. It is both a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself, a medium or matrix through which one sees the world. It grants that pleasure is an important form of knowledge. Art is not optional; it is necessary. It is part of the whole ball of wax. These thoughts, partly inspired by the moral philosopher Mary Midgley, are an attempt to get around all those dogmatists, ideologues, academics, and theorists who demonize and belittle art as a gratuitous, semi-mystical, merely beautiful, purely formal amusement. These aesthetician-scientists regularly reduce art to simplistic, supposedly objective dualisms like mind-body, abstract-representational, reason-imagination, political-apolitical, thinking-feeling, and so on. But all thinking is fed by feeling, and all genuine feeling involves reasoning. As Midgley observes, “It’s like saying that shape and size are competing opposites when they’re complementary aspects of a larger whole.”
