The transformative power of art

In my other class this summer I read a book by Wendy Donniger O’Flaherty called Other People’s Myths(1988). One thing that Donniger O’Flaherty says really ties into what I am thinking about currently in this course, and to what I am reading about in Neil Everenden’s Social Creation of Nature (1992). [I will write more about this book at another time]

Donniger O’Flaherty(1988) suggests that that “[n]ew myths move us into new worlds where we can begin to think thoughts that not only were impossible to think within our old familiar world of ideas but that we could not even realize that we had been unable to think in that world.”(p. 166).

Everenden(1992) – speaking of the change of the conception of nature during the Rennissance period – argues that “[t]he expulsion of human qualities from nature, although radical in the extreme, was justified through the assertion that only when the distorting effects of human projection are removed can we achieve an understanding of the “primary” or real properties of nature, properties that can be articulated through the perfect language of mathematics . . . and once the use of normal perception is banished, society becomes dependant on a secular priesthood for its knowledge of nature.”(p. 49) In other words a new myth about objective, scientific, rational understanding of ‘nature’ was created and thereby changed the way we think about nature and about how we can gain knowledge of nature.

However, Everenden’s(1992) argument does not end there. He goes on to address how it was possible that a new understanding, a new myth, about nature held by a few intellectuals could have so rapidly replaced older understandings of nature. “The answer, I suspect, is that no overt argument or logical demonstration was necessary, in the initial stages: it would suffice to show the world what nature is “really like.” As will become apparent, the means existed to just that through the medium of art.”(p. 58).

The conclusion I draw from this is that not only myth but other artistic mediums have the same transformative power to change the way we see the world. Everenden(1992) is addressing a negative example of the transformative power of art on social understanding of the world where Donniger O’Flaherty (1988) is looking at possible positive uses of this power. I suspect that this transformative power of art has been used – intentionally or not – throughout human history to change the way people view the world. The same power which allowed art to alter the way people saw nature in the Renaissance period could, therefore, be harnessed to again alter how we view the world.