By Martin LeFevre
“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it.” — Rilke
The cave paintings of animals at Lascaux in France are as exquisitely rendered as the portraits of the great masters during the Renaissance. Why did the people of the Upper Paleolithic lovingly and skillfully draw horses, deer, aurochs, ibex and bison?
We don’t know, but the sensitivity with which they painted these and other animals echoes in the heart of every artist today. Human nature, in all its creative and destructive aspects, was fully formed when Cro Magnons encountered Neanderthals in Europe about 50,000 years ago.
There’s a strong correlation between the beginnings of art in prehistoric times and the emergence of what anthropologists call “fully modern humans.” Human consciousness has not evolved—and cannot evolve. It can only radically change, though it has not to this point.
To my mind, art facilitates this great transition, even though art is always done, in whatever form, for its own sake. Clearly, one doesn’t have to paint or sculpt to be an artist. Indeed, one has to be an artist inwardly before one can give expression to beauty in one’s life.
I walked on in my 30s as graduate student in philosophy at one of the few Continental Schools in America. I needed to prove to myself that I had the chops to make it in academia as a philosopher, and after a year, I had earned the respect of the professors in the large department.
So, I was taken aback when my best friend in the department said one day, “I see you as an artist.” When I asked what he meant, my extremely rational friend couldn’t give me a satisfying explanation. I chalked it up to a lack of understanding of where I was coming from philosophically.
It wasn’t that I thought philosophers were superior to artists, but that I never considered myself an artist and wanted to be considered a philosopher. They were totally different vocations after all, weren’t they?
Artists aren’t philosophers and don’t generally philosophize, though true philosophers are artists in an essential way. Artists don’t feel the need to explain themselves or their art, and many times the beneficiaries of art see things in an artistic production that even the artist didn’t. In one sense, creative interpretation defines art.
Philosophers are by definition explainers of phenomena. So, there’s a bit of a contradiction in saying that true philosophers are also artists. For me the paradox is resolved in realizing that the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. When words and images dissolve in the stillness of mind, art and philosophy engender new insight
Essentially art, in whatever form, is a relationship with the beauty of nature. That doesn’t mean one has to paint landscapes, only that one reflects the essence of beauty in some way. The essence of beauty lies beyond all line and form, though as the saying goes, “color is God.”
All human beings growing in insight are drawing upon the senses of the body, the feelings of the heart, and the faculties of the mind. In that sense we can all be artists. Therefore, art is in our relationships and work, and reflects intimations of that which cannot be tangibly expressed.
So, what is the relationship between complex symbolic thought, first evidenced on the cave walls of Homo sapiens in South Africa and Europe, and art? Were our closest cousins, the Neanderthals, capable of producing art as we know it?
Let’s take this passage from a recent National Geographic article, “What were Neanderthals really like—and why did they go extinct?”
“A breakthrough was the discovery that Neanderthals may have been capable of symbolic thought. In 2018 researchers announced they’d discovered evidence of cave paintings from 65,000 years ago—the oldest artworks of their kind. But the abstract nature of this art continues to fuel debates among scientists about how complex their mental capacities were.”
This strikes me as funny. The crude and childlike sketches and hand stencils that Neanderthals apparently drew only demonstrate that they were capable of childlike art arising from rudimentary symbolic thought.
Despite misguided attempts to blur the distinction between Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, they were not our cognitive equals. That isn’t to say our species was morally superior to Neanderthals. We drove them out, killed them off, and occasionally interbred with them until they ceased to exist as a distinct species, much as colonizers around the world have done with indigenous peoples whenever they encountered them—peoples who were the cognitive equals of their conquerors.
Neanderthals clearly had a primitive capability for art, and their tools and hunting abilities attest to a rudimentary capability for symbolic thought. However, the cave art of Cro Magnons—the Homo sapiens that encountered Neanderthals—foreshadows that of the Sistine Chapel, indicating the presence of fully modern humans, possessing and possessed by complex symbolic thought.
“Whatever their cognitive abilities, Neanderthals were ultimately doomed,” the National Geographic article concludes. They weren’t doomed by some natural event, but by Homo sapiens—we humans, who are presently driving to extinction so many other sister species with which we are meant to be sharing the Earth.
The great paradox is that our cognitive abilities, turning on complex symbolic thought (also known as “higher thought”), have both given us the capacity for the highest expressions of art and led to the decimation of the Earth.
That means the consciousness arising from complex symbolic thought must be superseded by consciousness that transcends thought if the human being is to grow, rather than shrink and become extinct as well.
Art cannot make us inwardly alive if we aren’t alive and deepening in insight.
