Does Pain Elevate Art?

Usually, we remain insensitive about people around us, and search for personal pleasures, which is akin to being an animal. The magnitude of pain remains to the extent of bodily agendas. In this way, we do not try to understand the extent of deprivation of human beings. At most times, even if we have any concern for others, then that would only about their personal deprivation.

For example we think that by giving money we are helping the poor. The pleasure that we will experience in doing that is equally superficial as the pleasure that we ourselves experience with wealth. Thus, as our pains remain limited in our personal dimension so does our pleasure remain stagnant. Where we actually get into business is when we start feeling that what human beings are actually deprived of. We than understand that we are deprived of consciousness about the larger process of reality and our evolutionary significance.

However, to understand our own potential we need to understand what we are really capable of doing. Through our intellect we understand the potential, inherent in ourselves, which we never actualized. We understand the logic of our existence, we understand our dormant capabilities, and then from that perspective we look around us and feel the pain that people feel in different guises but don’t understand its actual causation. We understand the vacuum in which they are trying to fly. We become conscious about our illogicality. We feel the pain of illogicality and seek for the pleasure of logicality.

How, can a blind person tell another blind person the beauty of the Taj Mahal? It is only possible that one of them could see that beauty and compare his previous situation with that and then make the other see and experience it. If there are people who want to be humanistic then they must be those who themselves are awakened and willing to awake people. These people on their part are ready to make them understand their deprivation and their potential to really understand and feel their pain as a pain of their own.

The most interesting thing is that the experience of pain is an emotional process. Pain is a category of experience and, in principle, our experience is not limited to our body sensations. We never feel what is happening in a twisted ankle, we feel only the experience and classify it as pain. We can experience the feelings of others regardless that their bodily causation is not located in us.

One can see that in the art process, this is what actually happens in communication. We feel the pains and pleasures of others through music; our emotional state becomes a shared emotional state. When we produce music we produce it according to our own magnitude of pain and pleasure. We can observe that the renaissance artists, who produced masterpieces, were those people who were sensitive to life. Their experience of pain and pleasure was not limited to their personal dimension. They incorporated the impersonal pains and pleasures into their personal pains and pleasures because they experienced their magnitude amongst their society. The themes that they used and the art that they produced were revolutionary. An artist, who does not know the meaning of revolution and never experienced a need for revolution, cannot produce a revolutionary art. This need cannot be an outcome of personal pain. It will be only experienced when the personal becomes impersonal and the impersonal becomes personal.

Art plays an important role in making people sensitive about their potential needs. It is such fulfillment that the audience experiences as emotional delight. If the artist is insensitive about the process of life, he will only communicate with those potential needs that have primacy in his own unintelligent agenda. The purpose of art is to unleash what the majority of the audience does not experience. The magic of art is in making people sensitive about the tension between their possible growth and prevailing inertia. Art can make that tension tangible at the verbal level by engaging the mind of the audience in a competition between human and animal emotions at the non-verbal level of the mind. The more it will unleash the possibilities of growth, the more will be the competition, and the more effective will be the communicated response. Factually, what is really communicated in the art process is the dynamism of that competition happening within the mind of the artist.

In the present state of music, either pop or classical, the most ignored aspect is the quality of themes used in the process of composition. The motivation emanating from impersonal pain not only encompasses the life of the individual but also his art process. If a person is motivated to become famous, he will inevitably use those themes that fulfill the commercial demands. And, one can very well understand what would be the nature of commercial demands in a decadent society.

The motivation also conditions the aesthetic senses. It constitutes the temporal dimension of the themes that an artist uses in the production of compositions. The themes when coalesced with the impersonal dimension of life do not evoke negative responses in the audience because their substance does not narrate a personal stagnancy but an impersonal growth. Their impact becomes more deep-rooted and long lasting.

The process of impersonal growth through art goes alongside the motivation of truth seeking. We cannot understand our illogicality without understanding our logicality.

The motivation of truth seeking can be of several types. I can be interested in knowing about the process of music because I want to be a teacher or a famous person or to earn money or to be attractive or to be powerful or don’t want to be what I am.

I can have a motivation to change society by questioning people or by motivating them to know themselves or I am not satisfied with the present music and I want to change it.

I might be concerned with the question: what is the basic problem with all of the human beings, or I do not want confusion in my mind. I might be willing to know because I want to live through my works, I want to be a part of life, or I want to know because Socrates said that an unexamined life is not worth living. I might be struggling to know because someone has told me that you will become happy and contented if you kept on knowing.

Thus, one can see within oneself the diversity of motivations. Now, the question, however, is that which motivation is the right one for truth seeking? Why do we want to know at all?

First of all, the process of truth seeking in philosophy cannot be a matter of my personal desire because if I want to live a life which is limited to myself then I do not want to know that why space is curved? Why do faster then light processes cannot happen? Why is my society in decadent? Why have I evolved from an ape? Why is there evolution in Nature? The answer to these questions are not a solution to the fulfillment of my immediate needs therefore these questions are irrelevant for me. In this case, my unsaid assumption is that I am insensitive about the people of my time and my ignorance is invincible.

The purpose of truth seeking is to discover logicality. The problem of our time is our insensitivity about the logic of our existence. We cannot even ask the proper questions because in the absence of an impersonal motivation we become slaves of our own ignorance. The insensitivity had not only made us untrustworthy in the eyes of others but had made us negate our own potential to trust our own selves. The seeds of truth seeking cannot flower in a mind dominated by unintelligent personal agendas. Truth seeking is a noble characteristic of such a mind that has learned the motivation from Nature. Its motivation is not a personal desire emerging from the animal mind but is the conscious expression of the capacity of “becoming”, inherent in Nature.

Through the emergence of consciousness that capacity of becoming has concretized in it as the passion to pursue quality of thought, character, and doing. The passion moves it continuously according to the macro logic of Nature and in that course the mind discovers new kinds of pleasure. For such mind, the evolution is important within him and around him. Its love is for life and growth that is why it does not endure the misery around it and conflict within it. The passion eliminates dogmas and prejudices; it finds its standard in discovering logic.

The inquisitiveness and curiosity about the things and concepts that a child possesses is an infant stage of passion. However, through cultural biasing his desire to seek gradually becomes less evocative. The process through which the desire to seek the true nature of things or curiosity about things transforms into passion occurs in the course of communication between the verbal and non-verbal mind.

The verbal mind although developed later in the evolutionary sequence as a new department of data processing but initially it becomes qualitatively better than the non-verbal mind because of language. It learns about things in more detail because of this acquired ability. Furthermore, it understands the causation and relationships of things and processes with the aid of reason and at a simultaneous operating level it feeds and conditions the motivation program. Through a motivation program the understanding of verbal mind becomes an integral part of the non-verbal mind. It starts to modify emotions from their animal and unintelligent status to an intelligent status. The non-verbal processes also share the same motivation as the verbal processes.

Gradually, understanding about Nature and the purpose of existence becomes more rational and consistent, and the situation of society and dominance of unintelligent culture in it becomes intolerable. The mind then starts to think about changing the society to an intelligent level where it can gain prosperity. It starts to invent and discover the means to change that situation of society and finds a new level of pleasure, which is a pleasure of impersonal dimension. Its search for truth and solution does not remain curiosity but it becomes passionately curious. To live for an impersonal cause becomes its primary agenda of life.

The relationship between truth seeking and the art process can be seen in Leonardo da Vinci and his works. He is regarded as one of the greatest minds that ever lived on the face of the earth. A study of his life makes it evident that he was more than a painter. He was an architect, sculptor, inventor, military engineer, and a philosopher. He anticipated the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Darwin.


He expressed his creative genius as constituted by seven principles:


· Curiosita-An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

· Dimostrazione-A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and willingness to learn from mistakes.

· Sensazione-The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

· Sfumato (literally “Going up in smoke”)-A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

· Arte/Scienza-The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. “Whole-brain thinking”.

· Corporalita-The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

· Connessione-A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

One can see that how the thread of truth seeking is knitted in the above fabric. The artists of such caliber are not living today. The question is why? Should we wait for a Leonardo or find out that what we are missing in ourselves?