Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing – “Plato’s Art” – Christopher A. Dustin and Joanna E. Ziegler
In Plato’s view, it is not what we learn about art that is most important, but what we learn from it. For him, education in art is education by art.
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In describing what the craft of education involves, Socrates is not simply drawing an analogy between the body and the soul…To see what is requires not just the reasoning part but an investment of all the parts of the soul. It is not just thought that is brought to bear on reality. You need to take desire and emotion along with you, turn the whole soul around, or you will not really see what lies before your eyes. If Thoreau warns us against the reduction of vision to merely perception, Plato warns us against the reduction of reason and thought to detached cognition…the philosopher loves the Forms with a passion that surpasses that of the lovers of sights and sounds…He studies the Forms in the way that one might gaze – with wonder and awe – at the stars…He does not just think philosophically, he lives philosophically, from the inside out…
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…that it cannot be calculated, or manipulated, or controlled, does not mean that it cannot be practiced. This practice is philosophy, as Plato would have us envision it…
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Being a complete person, in Plato’s sense, does not being a pure reasoner. It means being fully alive…
Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing – “The Beatification of the Mundane” – Christopher A. Dustin and Joanna E. Ziegler
Thoreau and Okakura devoted their professional time to writing about living, especially about what constitutes a life well lived. They were concerned with the problem of character and how it is most deeply informed by the attitude toward mortality. They both explored the idea of daily living not as an abstract idea, but a concrete performance, and the contentment it could afford…For Thoreau and Okakura, habits of ritual cultivate attitudes in us – attitudes that in turn hold forth the promise of living a meaningful life.
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…Okakura helps us see the opportunity for our everyday routines to become practical – and practiced – ways for us to live artistically and philosophically, by which he means more beautifully.
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This is the aim of the present essay: to ask why living should not be an art, why our daily rituals should not be “artistic,” and what this could really mean.
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…We know people who have surrounded themselves with beautiful objects, but have otherwise eschewed the art of living beautifully. Not habits, no “practices” surround these things, which are merely nice to look at in what is indeed the most superficial of senses. Money can buy fine art, but it cannot purchase the ethically transformative experience that accompanies a contemplative awareness of, and openness to, the beauty of form.
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Okakura does not mean art, as our culture ordinarily understands it, as a class of objects housed in museums or exhibited in art galleries…Okakura was able to understand art in the way in which we are trying to understand it in this book: as a place of connectedness, through particularized awareness, between ourselves and fundamental sources of meaning….Art, then, is a mode of awareness…an attitude of reverence.
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Viewed as a constellation of habits, rather than a category of object, art is both a mirroring and molding of our lives.
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…our seemingly trivial and commonplace daily routines become settings in which the real and most fateful drama of our lives is played out.
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…the marrow of human life is being fed day in and day out, when we wash dishes, scrub floors, clean teeth, bathe, eat and drink…Performing them artfully or mindlessly determines, whether we know it or not, the innermost reality – and ultimately the distinctive meaning of our lives.
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…Together with Okakura, we would locate art in life, manifest in our common practices and daily habits, What is truly paradoxical, perhaps, is the way in which modern culture – art, philosophy, and even our everyday practices – has made us less mindful of these practices as sources of beauty and meaning.
Practicing Mortality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing – “What it Means to See” – Christopher A. Dustin and Joanna E. Ziegler
…a conversation on what we love about art and philosophy, and how that love has ineluctably become a part of our own living.
We talk about how art and philosophy can help one live more fully, each and every day…Art – so called – high Art, with a capital A – is usually set a part, in museums, often behind glass, or in upscale and rather forbidding galleries. It can frequently seem to be about things very few people understand or care about. Philosophy, meanwhile, is identified with the most abstruse and isolated of academic pursuits. With its abstract arguments and highly technical vocabulary, it, too, is seen as impractical and often irrelevant – as specialized as the art world seems to be. While philosophy claims to address questions of importance to all of us, its own pretensions (or pretentiousness) sets it apart from the everyday cares and business of living in much the same way that the pretensions of “high Art” seem to do. Not only do art and philosophy seem to be isolated from “real” or “everyday” life, but also seem to be as separate from one another as thinking and feeling, experience and analysis have come to be.
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…Art and philosophy, as invoked here, are to be lived and not merely talked about. We make the case that art and philosophy are not at odds with daily life; they are, in fact, essential to life itself.
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…The arts we discuss include painting, architecture, and music (among others), but also such seemingly humble pursuits as gardening and even walking. While this book addresses what is often referred to as the “inner life,” the authors also intend to show how attendance upon “inner” presupposes an engagement with the world around us.
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The way of living [Eric] Sloane describes is one that is characterized by an extraordinary awareness of life itself, by gratitude and inner satisfaction, one that is governed by routine and daily habit – that is by daily practice. It is, at the same time, a profoundly contemplative way of life. It draws its sustenance from a capacity for wonder.
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…to live artfully and philosophically is what it means to be truly alive.
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Living artfully and philosophically is not the same as taking a philosophy course alongside an art course. It is not an interdisciplinary undertaking, where one operates in two separate departments (or compartments) at once. As we hope the following chapters will help our readers to realize, to live philosophically is to live artfully, and vice versa.
Lebenskünstler 
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