Beauty and Life. Exploring the anthropology behind the fine arts

I believe that artists, like certain madmen, have within them the seed of a very distant memory, something that happened before all stories. Beauty is the spark of everything. I, here, believe that in certain men a memory is left, grainy, gone into the subconscious. These men look at everything as it really is, before the thing that happened, and that changed everything.

Daniele Mencarelli, Tutto chiede salvezza (2020)

There is in art, in all its forms and expressions, an indecipherable element, which cannot be explained and whose meaning no interpretation, however articulate, will be able to grasp. It is necessary, then, in approaching it, to be aware that we are facing a mystery that can only be partially revealed to us. It is the mystery of the human being, that mystery whereby ‘a man is always much more than what he is in the present moment’ (Jiménez Cataño 2021, 75). That mystery whose beauty lies in its non-finite nature, in perpetual evolution and in the face of which, with good reason, vision gives way to contemplation.

And it is this mystery that permeates the pages of Beauty and Life. Exploring the anthropology behind the fine arts, whose authors invite us and guide us to rediscover the beauty that lies within the work of man.

What is needed, however, are eyes capable of seeing, ears trained to listen, a body that knows how to feel, an interiority in which what is seen, heard and perceived can resonate. First of all, we need to turn down the background noise that has become the soundtrack of our society, that leitmotif (or perhaps we should say 'life motif') for which only what happens and not what is matters.

There is, in today’s man, an undeniable difficulty in accessing the inner world, a progressive shift outward, towards what is visible, demonstrable, to the detriment of what is invisible, but no less true. Is this not perhaps the foundation of the scientific method? The shift, as Galileo would say, from sensible experiences to necessary demonstrations, the conviction that truth is such only if it meets the criteria of validity and reliability, if what is discovered, in other words, does not remain confined to the here and now, but is reproducible and provable again in different contexts and times, provided that all the variables in play are controlled?

But knowledge cannot be reduced to the mere reception and analysis of data: as Aristotle taught, it is, before anything else, the work of an active intellect, of a thinking subject capable of abstracting hidden laws and truths from visible reality. And if the scientific community still continues to clash and question itself on the misleading assumption that everything true is demonstrable and that, consequently, everything that is not demonstrable cannot be considered true, even more so the socio-historical reality in which we live is forced to come to terms with the false myth of demonstration. ‘Show them who you are’, ‘prove your worth’ are just two examples of how much our society has made this belief its own, entrusting demonstrability and what is visible with the task of representing who we really are.

In the long run, a logic of this kind, which has shifted the focus outwards, in which one is nothing if one does not possess something (a title, a property, a status); a logic in which being coincides, in fact, with having, has an impact on man's ability to look inside himself, to question himself, to dialogue with himself. And, if it is true as John Donne said that ‘no man is an island’, then this inability to read oneself cannot but have as its consequence the inability to enter into a relationship with the outside world. How can I think of knowing someone who is other than myself, if I do not know myself to the full?

This is one of the dramas of our society: the inability to create relationships with significant others in the literal sense of the term, that is, relationships with someone capable of giving meaning to my life, of weaving, stitch by stitch, the fabric of my story. Often our relationships break down precisely when the other, fulfilling his function as a mirror, reflects an image of me in which I struggle to recognise myself.

It is necessary then, in order to be truly open to the other-from-us, to recover that ability to look inside ourselves to see that which makes us human, to question ourselves about who we are, about what desires inhabit our minds. The risk, otherwise, is to let others answer these questions for us. And, when this happens, feelings such as guilt and fear of judgement grow in us, creating a barrier between us and the world, preventing us from having real life experiences.

One of the most urgent educational challenges is then perhaps precisely to help people to enter into a relationship with themselves, to resume telling their own story to themselves. How? By suspending, at least for a moment, judgement and letting the beauty of the world speak to us about us.

Beauty and Life. Exploring the anthropology behind the fine arts is thus proposed as a journey of new humanisation in the company of the finest instruments of beauty: the fine arts. Fiction, architecture, cinema, music, dance and theatre will be our cicerones in the rediscovery of ourselves, great masters in teaching us to see how much beauty there is in this life.

It is narrative that offers itself as the first ally among the fine arts on this voyage of discovery that starts from the interior and opens up more and more to the exterior. It is not infrequent, when referring to a book one has just read, to say 'that book changed my life'. This happens, albeit gradually and often imperceptibly, every time we enter into a relationship with a text, every time that, convinced we are increasing our knowledge of the world, we discover something more about ourselves, about what inhabits us. Narrative is thus an opportunity, proposed and never imposed, to rediscover the symbolic nature of language, capable of becoming the bearer of the subjectivity of human experience. And it is precisely by virtue of this symbolic nature, as the chapter by Federica Bergamino so aptly illustrates, that a relational reciprocity is created between the reader and the text, a relation capable of breaking down the barriers between the self and the world, between me and the other-from-me. We need encounters, today more than ever. Even more, we need moments of sharing, spaces in which to experience otherness. Yet, our existences seem to go in a completely different direction. We live, as the chapter by Juan Carlos Mansur clearly shows, in societies in which even the infrastructure bears witness to modern man's profound division and constant tendency towards separation. But, as Heidegger (1971, 1431) would say, 'I am insofar as I inhabit something'. We have long since stopped inhabiting our workplaces and homes. We merely occupy, in more or less opportune ways, our spaces. We defend, as workers, the right to autonomy while forgetting the added value of sharing, and we live rhythms of life that do not contemplate the possibility of encounter, much less confrontation.

This is how the city and the use of its spaces become incorruptible witnesses of the way we live. We need to recover, even in the architecture of places, a look of union, even more of communion; rather than putting up walls, we need to build the walls of a new society, one that is sustainable – for the environment, yes, but even more so for the man who lives there. We still need to draw roads and design bridges that connect realities while respecting differences, that preserve the relationship with the other-from-me.

The other-from-me can reach us through the most varied artistic forms: for example, by the notes of the famous composer Schnittke, through which ‘Seizing the unseizable’ is possible, and accessing the profound mystery of human nature, a perfect unfinished creature (chapter by Rafael Jiménez Cataño). Or through the cultural-historical past of the land I inhabit, which tells of a history that precedes me and in a certain sense surpasses me, but which in order to exist needs someone to witness it (chapter by Fulvia Strano); or rather a cinematographic film, which invents worlds capable of framing a general reality that includes historical facts and events, investing them with universal meanings (chapter by Juan José García-Noblejas). Or perhaps through a musical vinyl, capable of enclosing and divulging the cornerstones of Freudian thought and the technique of psychoanalysis (chapter by Giuseppe Madonna and Michela Cortini), questioning us on our capacity, but even before that on our will, to know ourselves. Or it could be kinaesthetics, thanks to which it is possible to get to know our bodies and reach higher levels of self-awareness (chapter by Jaana Parviainen); an example of this is the principle of reversibility (Stein 1989; Merleau-Ponty 1962), which reminds us that lived bodies can never know themselves directly, but rather learn to know themselves indirectly through others, as with kinaesthetics I can discover my body through other bodies. Finally, theatre, the mirror of reality, which testifies to the dramatic need we have for stories, be they dramas or comedies, in which we can reflect ourselves and at the same time discover ourselves to be part of a greater reality (chapter by Gianpiero Pizzol).

‘No one is an island, No one born alone' sings Marti Webb in the last track of the album Freudiana. And No one is saved alone is the title of Margaret Mazzantini's 2011 novel. None of us could exist if there were not another to subjectify us. In spite of what we would like to believe, in spite of the legacy of an Enlightenment era in which this belief certainly had its raison d'être, man did not make himself and is not sufficient for himself. Our birth is the fruit of a relationship, and it is in the daily encounter with the other that we grow and our self takes shape. We could not exist if not within a relationship, by virtue of which we discover and define ourselves.

As Merleau-Ponty (1968) suggests, man is fundamentally alien to himself until he turns to other living beings in search of answers.

The true dimension of freedom consists then not in being able to do and have what one wants, but in abandoning the status of absolute protagonist of history and recovering that capacity to share that is proper to human dignity. No longer soloists, but a choir whose ‘different sounds, postures and vocalizations progressively facilitate new perceptions’ (chapter by Silvana Noschese). It is then perhaps not so much a 'being free of' as a 'being free from', from the angst of having to be sufficient for oneself.

Is it not paradoxical that a gaze, at least one, is necessary for the ruins and cultural heritage of a city to remain alive? Without the human gaze, every work of art would cease to narrate its plot, would be deprived of its raison d'être: testifying to history. And if this is true for the ruins of an ancient city, it is even more meaningful if we look at man, whose existence can truly be called a masterpiece to the extent that he has deep roots and is capable of bearing much fruit (Jn 15:8).

Teresa Galanti
Department of Psychological, Health, and Territorial Sciences, G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
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