What Is Culture For?

Alain de Botton, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781999917944
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

What is culture really for?

How to find compassion, hope and perspective in the arts.

Many people search for the meaning of life through music, film, literature and the visual arts. But how can we synthesize the emotions we feel through art?

This book looks at how works of culture were made - that is, to improve the way we live. Connecting a range of (Western) cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas, we learn to better see culture as a resource, a way to address the agonies of being human.

It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

Using common themes - such as companionship, hope balance, compassion, knowledge, encouragement, appreciation, and perspective - and combining them with works from Bach to Renoir, The Beatles to Mel Gibson's Braveheart, Hamlet, Anselm Kiefer, and writers like Proust and Virginia Woolf, this book provides the key to unlocking culture. Indeed, the keys to transforming our lives.

• HOW MUSIC, FILM, LITERATURE AND VISUAL ART operate in our society and lives.
• EXPLORES CULTURAL MASTERPIECES and how they relate to our everyday lives.
• ILLUSTRATED with full color images throughout.
• THOUGHT-PROVOKING CONCEPTS that enhance any future visit to a gallery, theater or cinema.
• BEAUTIFULLY PRODUCED premium gift format.

Companionship

The greatest share of art that humans have ever made for one another has had one thing in common: it has dealt, in one form or another, with sorrow. Unhappy love, poverty, discrimination, anxiety, sexual humiliation, rivalry, regret, shame, isolation and longing; these have been the chief constituents of art down the ages.

However, we are, in public discussion, often unhelpfully coy about the extent of our grief. The chat tends to be upbeat or glib; we are under awesome pressure to keep smiling in order not to shock, provide ammunition for enemies or sap the energy of the vulnerable.

We thereby end up not only sad, but sad that we are sad – without much public confirmation of the essential normality of our melancholy. We grow harmfully stoic or convinced of the desperate uniqueness of our fate.

All this, culture can correct – standing as a record of the tears of humanity, lending legitimacy to despair and replaying our miseries back to us with dignity, shorn of many of their haphazard or trivial particulars. ‘A book [though the same could be said of any art form] must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’ proposed Kafka in a 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak. In other words, a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.

There is relief from our submerged sorrows to be found in all of history’s great pessimists. For example, in the words of Seneca from his On Consolation to Marcia (c. 40 AD):

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.

Or the ironic maxims of Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1818):

There is only one inborn erroneous notion…that we exist in order to be happy…. The wise know it would have been better never to have been born.

Such pessimism tempers prevailing sentimentality. It provides an acknowledgement that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always – slowly – dying.

Life is sorrow
Anselm Kiefer,
Alkahest,
2011

This vast painting (nearly four metres across) by Anselm Kiefer is – unlike the normal habits of our society – extremely forthright about the essentially sorrowful character of the human condition. Everything we love and care about will come to ruin, all that we put our hope in will fail. In a note to the painting, Kiefer writes: Even ‘rock that looks as though it will last for ever is dissolved, crushed to sand and mud’. The dramatic scale is not accidental: it’s a way of trying to make obvious something that is often repressed and ignored: dejection, sadness and disappointment are major parts of being human. The work’s icy, grey, harsh character summons up equally grim thoughts about our own lives.

It’s not an intimate picture because the fact Kiefer is asserting isn’t a personal one: it’s not so much we who are unduly down, it is life itself which demands a melancholy response. He’s not attempting to delve into the unique painful details of our individual sorrows. The painting isn’t about a relationship that didn’t work out, a friendship that went wrong, a dead parent we never fully made peace with, a career choice that led to wasted years. Instead it sums up a feeling and an attitude: lonely, lost, cold, worried, frightened. And instead of denying these feelings as worthy only of losers, the work proclaims them as important, serious and worthy. It is as if the picture is beaming out a collective message: ‘I understand, I know, I feel the same as you do, you are not alone.’ Our own private failings and woes – which may strike us as sordid or shameful or very much our own fault – are transformed; they are the personal way in which a tragic theme of existence happens to play out in our own lives. They are, in fact, ennobled, by their kinship to this grand work. It is like the way a National Anthem works – by singing it the individual feels themselves part of a great community, they are strengthened, given confidence, they can see themselves as strangely heroic, irrespective of their circumstances. Kiefer’s work is like a visual anthem for sorrow, one that invites us to see ourselves as part of the nation of sufferers, which includes, in fact, everyone who has ever lived.

Jean-Baptiste Corot described his painting The Leaning Tree Trunk as a souvenir or memory. It is filled with the idea of farewell. The moment will pass, light will fade, night will fall. The years will disappear, we will wonder what we did with them. Corot was in his late sixties when he painted this work: the mood is elegiac, mourning what has gone and will never come back. Ultimately, it is a farewell to life but it is not a bitter or a desperate one. The mood is resigned, dignified and, although sad, accepting. Our own personal grief at the passing of our lives (if not soon, then someday – but always too soon) is set within a much wider context. A tree grows, it is bent and twisted by fate and eventually will dry up and wither, like that on the lefthand side of the painting. The sunlight illuminates the sky for a while and then is hidden behind the clouds and night descends. We are part of nature. Corot isn’t glad that the day is over, that the years have gone and that the tree is dying, but his painting seeks to instil a mood of sad yet tranquil acceptance of our own share in the fate of all living things.

This is a move we encounter repeatedly in the arts: other people have had the same sorrows and troubles that we have, and it isn’t that they don’t matter, or that we shouldn’t have them, or that they aren’t worth bothering about. What counts is how we perceive them. By interacting with art, we encounter the spirit or voice of someone who profoundly sympathises with suffering, but who allows us to sense that through it, we’re connecting with something universal and unashamed. We are not robbed of our dignity: we are discovering the deepest truths about being human – and therefore we are not degraded by sorrow but, strangely, elevated.

Our lives too will pass and fade, like this moment
Jean-Baptiste Corot,
The Leaning Tree Trunk,
c. 1860–65

We can feel this elevation through sorrow especially in the presence of ‘sad’ music. One of the most calming things that societies have ever devised is the lullaby. In almost every culture there has ever been, parents have sung their babies to sleep. A humbling point that a lullaby reveals is that it’s not necessarily the words of a song that make us feel more tranquil. The baby doesn’t understand what’s being said but the sound has its effect all the same. The baby shows that we are all tonal creatures long before we are creatures of understanding. As adults, we grasp the significance of words of course, but there remains a sensory level that cuts through and affects us far more than an argument or an idea ever could. The musician can, at points, trump anything the philosopher might tell us.

Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the story of the legendary musician Orpheus. At one point he had to rescue his wife from the underworld. To get there he needed to make his way past Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the land of the dead. Orpheus was said to have played such sweet, enchanting music that the wild beast calmed down and became – for a while – mild and docile. With this myth, the Greeks were reminding themselves of the psychological power of music. Orpheus didn’t reason with Cerberus, he didn’t try to explain how important it was that he should be allowed to pass, he didn’t speak about how much he loved his wife and how much he wanted her back. Cerberus was – as we ourselves are at times of distress – pretty much immune to reason. But he was still open to influence. It was a matter of finding the right channel to reach him.

When we feel anxious or upset, kindly people sometimes try to comfort us by pointing to facts and ideas: they try to influence our thinking and – via careful arguments – to quieten our distress. But, as with Cerberus, the most effective way to deal with sorrow may simply be to play us music.

For instance, in Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ (composed in 1825) we feel enfolded in a generous, tender embrace, encountering no criticism or rebuke, but endless depths of understanding and compassion for our troubles. The music lifts us up and gently distracts us from any immediate cause of agitation, as a parent might try to distract an upset child. Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ (1986) is designed as a similar kind of musical therapy. It’s intended for those times when we do feel like giving up, when we’ve lost all confidence and feel crushed by the demands of the world. The strategy is to be as sympathetic as an imagined mother: first to acknowledge the horribly painful sense of failure and then to offer a kindly reassurance. The messag...