We are feeling creatures. Actually, we are cauldrons of feeling. Our feelings can be stoked over a hot flame and brought to a boil, or they can be cooled and calmed. Our emotional cauldron can be stirred, seasoned like a recipe—and made into something that nourishes.
We use the word 'feel' as a euphemism for 'think' and our feelings almost always take precedence over our thoughts. The purpose of thought is often to explain, justify, or rationalize how we feel.
Plato didn’t imagine people as cauldrons. He imagined a charioteer trying to control two horses: one wild and unruly, representing our desires and passions, and the other trained and disciplined, representing our reason. He believed that these two forces are always in tension, pulling in different directions, and that the job of the charioteer—our conscious will—is to hold the reins and steer toward virtue.
I think Plato was optimistic. Most of the time, only one horse is steering the human chariot: the wild, passionate, undisciplined one. Reason is often just a passive passenger, taken along for the ride.
But Plato was right in seeing that life is a balancing act between reason and passion.
In school, we learn the tools of logic, reasoning, and critical thought through reading, writing, and mathematics. These sharpen the intellect. But more important, in terms of shaping our young, developing character, is the refinement of feeling. And this is done through the arts. We are taught about art, how to appreciate it, and how to create it. While mathematics aims at arriving at definitive, logical solutions, the arts exist in the space where skill meets emotion. Art involves craft, and craft has rules. Music is mathematical, writing has structure, painting follows form and technique. But the purpose of this structure is to produce something that moves us—to stir our emotional cauldron with intention and care.
The aim of all true art is the refinement of feeling. The more we experience art, whether as consumers or creators, the more our emotional life is shaped, deepened, and matured. Only art can do this.
There are of course art forms that do not refine the emotions, just as there are foods that do not nourish the body. This is “junk art” designed to momentarily satisfy a craving, but without any beneficial lasting impact. Junk food is to food, as junk art is to art: Product to be consumed and discarded.
My definition of art is that it must aim to satisfy as well as be emotionally nutritious.
Which begs the question: What happens when people live in a culture that promotes product over art? A culture that feeds its people with junk—cheap, empty, mass-produced—and starves them of emotional nourishment?
The answer: They grow unwell.
Just as junk food undermines physical health, junk art erodes emotional health. If great art helps us balance our passions with our reason, then the constant consumption of shallow, manipulative media throws that balance off. Emotion, untethered from thought, becomes the dominant force. It becomes the standard by which everything is judged—truth, value, meaning, even morality.
This is where we find ourselves today. And it goes beyond the processed food industry, the throwaway fashion trends, and consumer goods built to break. The more insidious damage lies in what we’ve chosen to devalue: the defunding of school music programs, the lack of literacy, the sidelining of art education. These aren’t just cuts to budgets; they’re cuts to the cultural soul.
If we want to live in a healthy society—emotionally, spiritually, and intellectually—we must reclaim the value of art as emotional nourishment. That means elevating it above entertainment, beyond commerce, and seeing it instead as a vital form of education. Art teaches us how to feel well, not just feel more. It trains the wild horse and empowers the charioteer. Without it, we risk becoming a culture of appetites with no direction—a cauldron left to boil over.
3 comments:
The analogy between junk food and crappy art is a good one. And there is also knowledge -- knowledge production and mobilization -- embedded in our making and experiencing art. Think of a small child with a rubik's cube in her hand. She turns it over and over with both hands, learning about weight and solidity, light and colour, her own hands as tools. As we age the richness of such simple experiences eludes us. As adults we can only generate such knowledge thru our encounters with works of art and music.
Consuming or making crappy art, like junk food, yields nothing in terms of nourishment.
Interesting example of the Rubik's cube and and the subtlety of that experience. Personally, I never had patience for it, and considered it nothing but a source frustration. But I think I understand what you are saying - we become desensitized as we age. Experiences are more blinkered, because our brains are looking for 'what is useful' and close off to 'useless' perceptual information. I'm arguing it's even worse than just closing off. Becoming accustomed to junk art deadens us and, like junk food, damages our thought and feeling. Like a diet of exclusively processed food, a diet of junk art clogs our emotional arteries until the inevitable heart attack.
Not desensitized, rather we become jaded, bored, remote! I remember 2 years ago discovering the band Sleaford Mods -- how exciting it was to be able to reach that post-punk feeling once more. A child with a set of coloured blocks is at school within himself.
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