Casting a wide net for Art-Psychology

The artist Joseph Beuys defined art as the science of freedom  [What is Art? J.Beuys. Clairview. 2007]. Since freedom is an essential matter for the human being, the artwork and the artistic actions are anthropological primary productions, actually, the underlying production for everything else. The Romantic program resounds in his words, especially, Schiller’s “Uber die Asthetische Erziehung des  Menchen” (On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”).

Art is not only the science of freedom but the school o freedom, the place to learn and to practice freedom for oneself and for “the others”, the “I” and the “thou” among “the others”. Freedom is not to be understood in negative terms: we are not talking about freedom from the chains of necessity, the iron chain of “Agnanke”, the goddess “Necessity” of Ancient Times. We are talking about freedom in its positive unstoppable sense of “initial movement” both in the realms of active thinking and active feeling in relation to the development of an inner life harmoniously established in Nature. Nature comes into the picture again, especially today. Well, it never was out of it, we just obviated her presence, ended up forgetting about her, about ourselves. The Romantics talked profusely about Nature and Spirit, and here we go again, now a rather stressful relationship, but happily retaken over by the will of freedom. Freedom in Nature, through art and Nature, with us as Nature, an ample movement to be lived from a deeper understanding than the one procured for us by contemporary science, that mechanistic mode of our brain functioning stiff as a mineral.

Becoming free is not an easy process. The process itself changes us, but it is not the end of the road: once freedom is gained, we have to live freely. For that kind of living, valor is needed. Art insufflates in us the required valor. We can sense that freedom is already here and now, sometimes in a fuzzy dream-like picture, sometimes as the real meaning for our living. Human life is meant to thrive in the fathomless ocean of freedom, for freedom is our nature and we can imprint it in our surroundings. There we cast our Art-Psychology nets.