Leading Questions

What is Good?

Moran-Sunrise by Kathryn Mapes Turner

This is the question that was the basis for the only philosophy course I took in college. The course, Philosophy of Art, I had hoped would explore the artist impulse that people have to create. And to be able to define what distinguishes a good piece of art from one that isn't.

Unfortunately, the course was neither about art nor how to distinguish what is good. Instead, it was a course in semantics, of how one talks about art, and why art can't be defined.

It wasn't that the professor spent portion of every class denigrating people who had religious faith. It was rather that we talked around subjects, never about them, and therefore never reaching a point of understanding or resolution.

He would take a seemingly innocent or benign idea, like goodness, and through a process of analytical reductive reasoning show us how there is no true idea of goodness. This simple and effective tactic left most of us in the class scratching our heads about what the class was about rather than questioning what we believed about anything.

For probably ten years, I would occasionally dream about this professor. Dream about us debating in class, and me changing his mind. I don't think the professor was so clever to think that he'd make philsophers of us all by tearing down our belief systems. Rather, I think he was convinced that truth could be understood in the analysis of language. And yet, that truth was not true in a values or universal sense, but true to the use of the words in that context.

I think he was an intellectual nihilist, yet did not live that way. He believed in something, and for him it was his art and athletic endeavors. It was what he truly valued. And I'm convinced they gave him a social context of friendship through which universal values were evident in their interaction.

What I understand today is that my professor's approach to understanding could not produce a kind of understanding that is whole, but rather small and fragmented. 

As a kid, did you ever take a part a toy, and then try to put it back together, only to have some parts remaining? The toy is something whole. Something more than the sum of its parts. Language is something whole, more than grammar and patterns of word usage.  

Say the word tide, and it conjures up a range of images. But you don't know what I mean. If I add high or roll to it, two very different images come to mind. The words are parts. Sentences, paragraphs, essays, chapters, and books are wholes. Not necessarily complete wholes, but some whole none-the less.

To describe the whole of something, or to describe an object as good, is not to describe its parts, but something else. 

For example, this image is of a portion of a map of the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. For many of you, it is just lines, shading, markers and names. You can tell it is a map, but it doesn't go much further than that.

The map can serve as a guide, an introduction, to what a person can find here on a visit.  Come this summer, you can visit the Fish Hatchery or swim in the cold waters at Sliding Rock or hike up to John's Rock. Each place is represented on the map. Each a place that has meaning for people who visit here.

For those of us who have spent time here, the map is much more. It is a visual connection point to memories and images of places, people, situations and experiences that we've had in locations noted on the map.

For example, just off the map image there is a place call Mt. Hardy.  Seen at the center of this picture.  On the map, it is just a name of one of hundreds of peaks to climb. Yet, on a June night in 2003, it was a place of fascination and horror, as we watched lightning flash and strikes all around as a group of us camped.

The place on the map represents more than a name. It is something whole and complete, because we experienced it as more than a name on a map. It is a place that will forever stay with those of us who camped there that night.

When we say something is good, we are not trying to analyze its component parts to identify what makes it good. We are saying something about the whole of the object.

I'm convinced that human thought is rationalized emotion. We feel something, and our words provide us a way to connect with those deeper parts of our lives that we know exist, but have a hard to time expressing. We use things like maps and art to provide a connection between those parts of us that are only understandable as something whole and complete.

When we talk about what is good, we are talking about values that capture for us something whole and often times something that is greater than us. These connections, to me, represent the emergent reality that I wrote about here. We are not just our thoughts or just our emotions. We are not just a bank of talent or a fulfiller of tasks along an assembly line. We are whole beings who cannot be understood in any complete way by analytical reduction. Our wholeness rather is understood as unrealized potential within a particular setting. When we look at a work of art, like this painting of Wyomng, that I found online many years ago, we can get really close and look at the technique of the artist, the picture fades and the brush strokes emerge. Then step back, and the picture takes on its wholeness again.

What is good about this painting can be described on many levels. There is the technique. The thematic material. The use of color and perspective. But all those are only parts of the picture. When they are all combined together, do they create a painting that we can say is good? Possibly, but it has a lot to do with the values that we bring to the experience.  And our values are products of our interaction with people in society.

I believe that our lives can be like this painting. Excellent in the execution of the brush strokes and use of color, but even more significant because of the picture itself. When we find wholeness in our life and work, we are more than the sum of activities that we do each day.  We become a work of art whose life and work is good.

When the Five Actions of Gratitude appeared in my mind one morning driving through northern Mississippi, this is the sort of thing I saw in the fifth action, Create Goodness.  A couple quotes from my Weekly Leader column.

The ancient Greek Philosopher Aristotle taught his students that “every action and pursuit is considered to aim at some good….what is the highest of all practical goods? … It is happiness, say both ordinary and cultured people; and they identify happiness with living well or doing well.” By this he means that the actions born from our individual initiative, through our relationships, in our work and the daily course of our lives aim at goodness, defined as happiness or living or doing well in life and work. ...

Contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in describing Aristotle’s thought on this point wrote,  “ What then does the good for… (humanity) … turn out to be? … It is the state of being well and doing well in being well … . “ The word that Aristotle uses is eudaimonia (eu-day-mo-knee-a), traditionally translated as goodness. Its meaning is much more complex that simply as an adjective for describing a piece of pie or last Sunday’s football game. It touches on ideas related to fulfillment, human flourishing, happiness and completeness. The good person is one whose whole life is an integrated combination of thought, feeling, initiative, interaction, and action, resulting a good life or good work, or a better product, community or world.

What is Good?

It is a life that is complete and whole, fulfilled, meaningful and makes a difference that matters. The good life is a complete and happy life.  It is a life connected to others just as their lives are connected to ours. And when we find that completeness, our lives are like a painting that evokes values that create goodness and elevate the lives of others. We also become like a map which is a reference point, an example, of what is possible, and for those who know that we have become a reminder of what the experience of a complete life is like.

What is Good?

The first and only philosophy class that I took in college was a course called The Philosophy of Art. In retrospect, I believe I took that class because I thought the class would be about something, not just ideas, but something tangible, like paintings or buildings.

I imagined looking at works of art to try to understand the artist's purpose. What I discovered was a class where we didn't so much discuss or debate, but were denounced for believing in values like the good or beauty. We were presented with as nihilistic and cynical view of art as you can imagine.  I came away from the class angry for the wasted time spent, and of my own inadequacy to offer arguments that countered the professor's own self-confident positions. 

For me, the question - What is good? - remains. 

It is through works of art that I find ways to reflect on this question.

For example, last year on a retreat, we were invited to paint a picture that would be hung with other pictures on a high wall in our church. This is my painting.

Is it good? Technically no. Artistically, not really. It is realistic? No. Is it beautiful? No.

But does it have meaning for me? Yes. It does because it is representative of a place that means something to me.

The same subject in the hands of an accomplished professional artist looks like this. This is Moran Sunrise by Kathy Turner of Jackson, Wyoming. It is of Mt. Moran, one of the mountains in the Grand Teton chain of peaks.

Copyright © 2009, Kathryn Mapes Turner Fine Art

Kathy is good at what she does. Just as I can stare at that mountain for hours on end, I can do the same to her painting.

What is the difference between my philosophy prof who cynically tried to convince us that there is no way to determine what is good and a painting by my friend Kathy?

I believe it revolves about context. If your context is only the abstract world of ideas, then you can argue that good is non-existent, except for a good argument. However, if the world that exists outside our minds is the context, then we'll recognize that we are not the center of the universe, that we are part of something larger.

Recently, I came across a couple quotes, one by a 19th century German writer name Max Stirner who was popular at the end of the century. "For me nothing is higher than myself." During the 1905 revolution in Russia, Konstantin Somov wrote, "I am delighted at every new victory of the revolution ... knowing that it will lead us not into an abyss but into life. I hate our past too much ... I am an individualist; the whole world revolves around me, and essentially it is no concern of mine to go outside the confines of this 'I.'"  I think my philosophy prof would approve.

When we talk about What is Good?, we are talking to one another. We are communicating a wide range of impressions and feelings that seek logic, coherence and understanding. When Kathy paints, she paints to communicate with people who may buy one of her paintings. They do so because some connection between the painter, the painter's purpose, and the world of awareness of the buyer has been reached.

To ask the question of What is Good? is to ask a moral question, a question about what we value. The answer to this question is a communal one, because for the good to be a real value is to see how it connects people together in a way that elevates their own awareness and their relation to the world outside their minds.

While I find a deep richness in Kathy's art, it is even more personal because it is a picture of this place that is special to me.  It connects me to more than a physical place of beauty,which it is. It also connects to people I've met in this setting. Some who have become life long friends.

For something to be good, it needs to reach inside us and connect us to some reality or truth or value outside of us. This is what great art does. And remarkably so, it is something that we can all achieve. We do not have to have professional talent in order to create works of art that have the ability to make connections. It certainly helps.

My advice is find you a way to express yourself artistically, and share it with others. Shared not for the accolades that may come, but to create the deeper connection that is represented in the purpose of the art that you've create. And good it will be.

Becoming a Linchpin - An Interview with Seth Godin.

Seth Godin has a new book coming out in a few days - Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? Here's a little taste in this  interview with Seth.

In the interview Seth expresses his desire that people decide. In essence make a choice. This what I mean when I say that leadership begins with personal initiative.  The industrial age was one of passivity, compliance and dispensibility. 

This isn't just about the individual's responsibility to act. It is also about how the failure of our current organizational structures to be sustainable. When downsizing is your only hope for sustainability, then you know the problem is the structure not the people. It is a tacit admitting that we don't know how to utilize the full talent of our people to create a profitable organization.

I look forward to reading Seth's book. I felt that his Tribes book was the most important leadership book in a generation. I'm certain that Linchpin will carry its momentum futher.

HT: Bernd

Bloodline in the rock

Over the weekend, we attended our church's annual congregation retreat. This year's theme was Play, and we played in many creative ways.

Drawing and painting on the form of a small Greek cross was one of activities. The collection of pictures will be brought together into a larger painting to be hung in the church in the future.  I painted two of these pictures.

Bloodline in the rock is of a mountain in Wyoming of which I'm particularly fond. Mt. Moran, in the Grand Teton range of Jackson Hole, is a mountain of massive granite which has a diabase basalt dike of reddish brown lava that cuts vertically through the mountain.  I find its presence endlessly fascinating because it represents to me how good things can rise up from the hardness of life. My picture is more of what the mountain represents to me, than a picture of the mountain itself.

In much of life, when we try something new, we are taking a risk. Risks are inherent in life. Do we accept these risks as a way to expanding the range of our expression, or as an unavoidable facet of life?

Andy Goldsworthy is a sculptor who uses natural materials in extraordinary ways. In his video Rivers and Tides, a sculpture that he has been working on falls apart in the wind, he says,

"When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse; that's a very beautiful balance."

Here is Goldsworthy creating an arch out of stone, and toward the end of the video removing pieces of it to see if it will collapse.

As in art, so also in life, translating what we see in the natural world into expressions of our passion and commitments enable us to see more of who we are in the context of the world we live in.

Having painted Bloodline in the rock, and then introduced to Andy Goldsworthy by our artist guide, I decided to paint another of my favorite objects, a simple rock cairn.  I called it Cairn of Fire.

What did I learn from this little experiment in artistic expression? It really helps to be an observant person. We see things as objects, like a mountain or a pile of rocks. But we don't normally see the interrelation of the parts. For example, in trying to draw a cairn, I knew that the typical cairn is not uniform, but very eclectic. What I did, as a result, is try to draw the stones in the cairn very quickly so they would not be uniform. 

The ability to see what is there in the picture is no different than seeing and hearing what is going on around you. Learning to observe is learning to be a better communicator. To observe is to shift one's attention away from your own thoughts to what is happening in front of you.

Whatever you think you see or hear is a perception of what actually takes place.

Bloodline in the rock is not an exact representation of Mt. Moran. The lava dike on the mountain is visible in the circle.  My painting is my perception of the mountain that you see here. To see it with the human eye, rather than through a photograph is to see it differently. In this shot, it seems insignificant. But to stand here by Jenny Lake in the Grand Teton National Forest and look at it, the dike stands out much more.

What I learned from playing with paint, a brush and some crayons is that we can learn to express ourselves in new ways. This is important if we are to communicate what is important to us.

I encourage you to take a pencil and quickly, in a manner of a few minutes, draw something that matters to you. It won't be perfect because there is no such thing in art. I once heard it say that a work of art is never finished. I think this is also true for our lives. And the more we test the boundaries and horizons of our expression, quite possibly as Andy Goldsworthy has learned, we'll find a very beautiful balance that will enhance the quality of our lives in ways unimaginable right this moment.