2026-02-07 03:22:01
This essay is adapted from Traversal.
“Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a daughter she was yet to have. “Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.”
In late 1791, as important men were sitting down in America to make ten amendments to the young country’s constitution, which they called a Universal Bill of Rights, Wollstonecraft was sitting down in England to complete A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects — the beacon of political philosophy, inspired by Paine’s treatise, that would expand the universal to include all chromosomal arrangements, “demanding justice for one half of the human race” and laying the foundation of women’s political power, not by shaming and blaming the oppressor but by painting a passionate portrait of possibility.
When Wollstonecraft’s publisher invited her to a dinner celebrating one of those important men — Thomas Paine, whose landmark insistence on the right of the people to overthrow their rulers had inspired Wollstonecraft’s treatise — another of the publisher’s most successful and controversial authors was also there: the radical political philosopher William Godwin.
Both Wollstonecraft and Godwin, who had never before met, had made their reputations on the bold denunciation of institutions, including the institution of marriage: Wollstonecraft in her Vindication and Godwin in An Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice, which issued a rigorously reasoned eight-book call for a society of equals, indicting government, religion, and marriage as oppressive forces that limit individual freedom and gape the abyss of inequality. Government and religion, Godwin argued, would be rendered obsolete with sufficient advancement of human knowledge and morality. “Marriage, as now understood,” he wrote, “is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.”
Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.
She had seen firsthand the moral, emotional, and bodily tyranny of an institution that considered the wife property of the husband, a creature owed as much sympathy and tenderness as a boot. As a child growing up in a house shaken by the cries of her own mother, regularly raped and beaten by her alcoholic husband, Wollstonecraft had stood sentinel before her mother’s door to keep her father from entering, which only aggravated his brutality. In a culture where just four women successfully obtained a divorce in the whole of a century, she came to see that to salvage the family, one had to revise the entire political foundations of society.
When the two philosophers met at their publishers’ dinner, the balding and reserved Godwin — a man so afraid of emotion that he never cared for music — found Wollstonecraft — a woman of symphonic intellect and unselfconscious passions — too eager to dominate the conversation with Paine. The middle child in a brood of thirteen, Godwin had always been introverted, awkward, and greatly challenged at attuning to the emotional states and needs of others. He regarded his peculiarity with both self-awareness and genuine bafflement:
I have a singular want of foresight on some occasions as to the effect what I shall say will have on the person to whom it is addressed. I therefore often appear rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention and often get a character for harshness that my heart disowns.
Wollstonecraft was extroverted, her quick mind coupled with a kind of social magnetism, but the very capacity for large thought and feeling that made her so magnetic also made her capable of despair so fathomless that she came to regard herself as “a strange compound of weakness and resolution,” marked by a great “defect” of mind and a “wayward heart” that creates its own misery.
For the two philosophers, love did not barge through the barn door of animal passion — it entered slowly, quietly, through the sun porch of shared ideals and mutual respect. Respect begot friendship begot love. Wollstonecraft came to see the “tender affectionate creature” from which Godwin’s coolly reasoned idealism sprang — his pursuit of political justice was at bottom a philosophy of universal sympathies and unconditional kindness, impulses of which his own nature was woven. Godwin discovered above the gratifications of being admired the gladness of being seen:
After all one’s philosophy it must be confessed that the knowledge that there is some one that takes an interest in one’s happiness, something like that which each man feels for his own, is extremely gratifying.
There is something singularly endearing in his matter-of-fact account of how their relationship developed:
The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each… When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.
In his autobiography, never published in his lifetime, he would eventually acknowledge that “there is nothing that the human heart more irresistibly seeks than an object to which to attach itself.” When he did attach himself to Wollstonecraft, it was a molecular bond that staggered him, altered him.
In the first days of spring in 1797, in the small churchyard of St. Pancras, four months into her pregnancy, Mary and William entered a trailblazing marriage of equals, then took up residence together in a home where they shared a bed and a value system but kept separate studies, Wollstonecraft writing and receiving visitors in a room of her own, and Godwin in his. The choice to marry against their stated credos had puzzled both their public admirers and their private circle. It mattered little, even the response from Godwin’s mother, spiked with the fine quills of passive aggression of which only mothers are capable: “Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel.”
Convinced that their child was to be a boy, the parents-to-be named him William. Wollstonecraft resumed work on a book of moral lessons for children, which William Blake would later illustrate. Godwin channeled their daily conversations about how to bring up happy, intelligent, and morally elevated children in a series of essays later published as The Enquirer his most timeless, if least known, book: an incisive inquiry into how we become who we are, laying out a radical new vision for optimal parenting and early childhood education.
“William” arrived on August 30, 1797, and was corrected, without fret or fanfare, to a Mary. After nine hours of labor and a difficult birth, the placenta and fetal membranes failed to leave Wollstonecraft’s uterus. A surgeon was summoned to extract it, rushing in from the street to plunge his hands into her flesh.
Within hours, the young mother was shivering with a savage fever.
* * *
Exactly fifty summers later, the Vienna General Hospital — one of the best teaching hospitals in the world — found itself the epicenter of a menacing medical mystery blackening the crucible of life with death: Young women were dying in agony by the legion shortly after giving birth.
The hospital had two maternity wards — one staffed by elite obstetricians and their medical students, the other by midwives with no formal medical training. (This was an era when the world’s university doors were closed to women.) Tenfold more mothers were dying of puerperal fever in the first.
The medical elders initially assumed that the students were treating the pregnant women too roughly. But retraining didn’t change the ratio. Baffled, these thoroughly trained scientists fell to superstition — a priest walked through the doctors’ ward ringing a bell for each death and a theory emerged that the haunting sound was terrifying the living mothers into dying.
A young Hungarian doctor by the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, in his first year as assistant professor at the hospital, wrote in his diary:
Even to me myself it had a strange effect upon my nerves when I heard the bell hurried past my door; a sigh would escape my heart for the victim that once more was claimed by an unknown power. The bell was a painful exhortation to me to search for this unknown cause with all of my might.
When the pastor was asked to stop making his bell rounds, the deaths continued and the sigh kept bellowing in the young doctor’s heart as he bent his mind around the mystery. He catalogued all the visible variables and pored over the data, but it told no discernible story. Because the unknown will always be greater than the sum of all our analyzable knowns, because the sum is always “simpler than its parts,” the history of science, the history of knowledge, is a rosary of breakthroughs that arrive through the side door of our reasoned theories. One day, Semmelweis’s mentor was teaching dissection at the morgue when a student accidentally nicked the professor’s finger with the scalpel while cutting open the cadaver on the table. Within days, he died a horrific death. A familiar death. It devastated Semmelweis, but it also pressed his face against the revelation — the doctors and medical students at the hospital were doing the exact same thing with the pregnant women: dissecting cadavers at the morgue, which none of the midwives did, and immediately going into the maternity ward to touch open flesh.
The young doctor realized that the men’s hands transferred some particle of death to the vulnerable living. He called them “cadaver particles” and set about devising ways to eradicate them, experimenting with various washing solutions and testing his results by smell alone — did his hands still have the putrid cadaver smell after washing them in the different agents. Eventually, he settled on a solution of chlorine and lime — bleach not strong enough to burn his hands, but strong enough to vanquish the other and, with it, the cadaver particles he theorized. When he implemented the protocol at his ward, the death count plummeted to that of the other ward.
That year, Louis Pasteur began his crystallography research that would lead to the birth of germ theory more than a decade later. The notion that some invisible unit of matter could unravel a body was still inconceivable. Semmelweis was a brilliant theorist and a fine empiricist, but a terrible communicator. He took the opposite of Mary Wollstonecraft’s approach, pouring polemics into letters to every major hospital and medical school, pummeling colleagues with that least effective of all behavioral change strategies: shaming. He went as far as calling doctors who didn’t wash their hands murderers and warned medical students that unless they adopted his protocol, they would be accomplices in an epochal crime.
Unsurprisingly, Semmelweis was largely dismissed; unsurprisingly, he grew increasingly cantankerous. By the time he was in his early forties, the idealistic young doctor had undergone a staggering physiological and psychological change — he looked at least sixty, had frequent detonations of temper, and suffered baffling lapses of memory in the midst of lectures. The mysterious malady — possibly early-onset Alzheimers, possibly tertiary syphilis, likely some parallel discomposure of body and spirit — made him unbearable to be around.
One day, a colleague lured him to an asylum on the pretext of seeing a new facility. When Semmelweis realized he was about to be committed against his will, he raged to get away, but was brutalized by the wardens and put into a straitjacket.
He died two weeks later from an infection contracted from the beating.
Four years later, two French scientists discovered the microbes en chainettes — “microbe chains” — of his hypothesized “cadaver particles,” which Pasteur would identify as the bacterium haemolytic streptococcus a decade later. It was ultimately a nurse — Florence Nightingale — whose extraordinary data diagrams and passionate advocacy persuaded the medical establishment to standardize hospital sanitization.
* * *
Just before eight on a late-summer morning ten days after giving birth, Mary Wollstonecraft drew her last breath, leaving behind a fragile baby girl, a baffled philosopher stony with heartache, and an angel-winged William Blake etching.
For Godwin, who had spent his life sieging religion with the artillery of reason, the loss was total and irrevocable. The notions of personal immortality and reunion with loved ones in an imaginary afterlife were the pacifier of puerile minds. And yet loss unlatches an emotional trapdoor beneath our firmest cerebral convictions, plunging us into elemental questions that live beyond our reasoned beliefs, childlike in their disbelieving sincerity. It was such a question that sprang unbidden to my atheist engineer grandmother’s lips as she stood over the hospital bed holding the dead body of my atheist engineer grandfather, her love of half a century: Where did you go, my darling?
The guarded Godwin kept a diary more like a ship’s log than a discursive journal of an inner life:
“Seneca, Ep. 8, 9.”
“Call from Coleridge.”
“Queen dies.”
On the day of his beloved’s death, this man of factual records could not bring himself to name the fact. All he wrote in the ledger was “20 minutes before 8,” followed by an interminable sequence of dashes suturing the unspeakable.
“– — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — ”
By evening, he was able to write to his oldest friend with a confused fusion of dissociation and disconsolation:
My wife is now dead. She died this morning at eight o’clock… I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. When you come to town, look at me, talk to me, but do not — if you can help it — exhort me, or console me.
In the corner, his baby daughter was sleeping in her crib. She would learn to read by tracing the letters on her her mother’s tombstone and would come to write, while still a teenager, an epochal reckoning with the eternal interplay of life and death.
The year her Frankenstein was published, Ignaz Semmelweis was born in a Hungarian hospital.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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2026-02-07 03:01:13
Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote between two World Wars. The transmutation of despair into love is what we call meaning. It is an active, searching process — a creative act. Paradoxically, we make meaning most readily, most urgently, in times of confusion and despair, when life as we know it has ceased to make sense and we must derive for ourselves not only what makes it livable but what makes it worth living. Those are clarifying times, sanctifying times, when the simulacra of meaning we have consciously and unconsciously borrowed from our culture — God and money, the family unit and perfect teeth — fall away to reveal the naked soul of being, to hone the spirit on the mortal bone.
The poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks (July 9, 1933–August 30, 2015) — who thought with uncommon rigor and compassion about what it means to be human and all the different ways of being and remaining human no matter how our minds may fray — takes up this question of life’s meaning in one of his magnificent collected Letters (public library).
In his fifty-seventh year, Sacks reached out to the philosopher Hugh S. Moorhead in response to his anthology of reflections on the meaning of life by some of the twentieth century’s greatest writers and thinkers. (Three years later, LIFE magazine would plagiarize Moorhead’s concept in an anthology of their own, even taking the same title.) Sacks — a self-described “sort of atheist (curious, sometimes wistful, often indifferent, never militant)” — offers his own perspective:
I envy those who are able to find meanings — above all, ultimate meanings — from cultural and religious structures. And, in this sense, to “believe” and “belong.”
[…]
I do not find, for myself, that any steady sense of “meaning” can be provided by any cultural institution, or any religion, or any philosophy, or (what might be called) a dully “materialistic” Science. I am excited by a different vision of Science, which sees the emergence and making of order as the “center” of the universe.
It is in this 1990 letter that Sacks began germinating the seeds of the personal credo that would come abloom in his poignant deathbed reflection on the measure of living and the dignity of dying thirty-five years later. He tells Moorhead:
I do not (at least consciously) have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve (or “remember”) it when I am “inspired” by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History.
I do not believe in, never have believed in, any “transcendental” spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to “explain” life, give it “meaning.”
Nine years later, in a different letter to Stephen Jay Gould, he would take issue with the idea that there are two “magisteria” — two different realms of reality, one natural and one supernatural — writing:
Talk of “parapsychology” and astrology and ghosts and spirits infuriates me, with their implication of “another,” as-it-were parallel world. But when I read poetry, or listen to Mozart, or see selfless acts, I do, of course feel a “higher” domain (but one which Nature reaches up to, not separate in nature).
A century and a half earlier, his beloved Darwin had articulated a similar sentiment in contemplating the spirituality of nature after docking the Beagle in Chile, as had Whitman in contemplating the meaning of life in the wake of a paralytic stroke — exactly the kind of physiological and neurological disordering Sacks studied with such passion and compassion for what keeps despair at bay, what keeps life meaningful, when the mind — that meeting place of the body and the spirit — comes undone. At the heart of his letter to Moorhead is the recognition that there is something wider than thought, deeper than belief, that animates our lives:
When moods of defeat, despair, accidie and “So-what-ness” visit me (they are not infrequent!), I find a sense of hope and meaning in my patients, who do not give up despite devastating disease. If they who are so ill, so without the usual strengths and supports and hopes, if they can be affirmative — there must be something to affirm, and an inextinguishable power of affirmation within us.
I think “the meaning of life” is something we have to formulate for ourselves, we have to determine what has meaning for us… It clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.
As if to remind us that the capacity for love may be the crowning achievement of consciousness, which is itself the crowning achievement of the universe, which means that we may only be here to learn how to love, he adds:
I do not think that love is “just an emotion,” but that it is constitutive in our whole mental structure (and, therefore, in the development of our brains).
Complement this small fragment of Oliver Sacks’s wide and wonderful Letters with Rachel Carson on the meaning of life, Loren Eiseley on its first and final truth, and Mary Shelley — having lost her mother at birth, having lost three of her own children, her only sister, and the love of her life before the end of her twenties — on what makes life worth living, then revisit Oliver Sacks (writing 30 years before ChatGPT) on consciousness, AI, and our search for meaning and his timely long-ago reflection on how to save humanity from itself.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-07 03:00:00
“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire,” Adrienne Rich wrote in contemplating what poetry does. “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock,” Denise Levertov asserted in her piercing statement on poetics. Few poems furnish such a wakeful breaking open of possibility more powerfully than “Do not go gentle into that good night” — a rapturous ode to the unassailable tenacity of the human spirit by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (October 27, 1914–November 9, 1953).
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time in the Italian literary journal Botteghe Oscure in 1951 and soon included in his 1952 poetry collection In Country Sleep, And Other Poems. In the fall of the following year, Thomas — a self-described “roistering, drunken and doomed poet” — drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in America organized by the American poet and literary critic John Brinnin, who would later become his biographer of sorts. That spring, Brinnin had famously asked his assistant, Liz Reitell — who had had a three-week romance with Thomas — to lock the poet into a room in order to meet a deadline for the completion of his radio drama turned stage play Under Milk Wood.
In early November of 1953, as New York suffered a burst of air pollution that exacerbated his chronic chest illness, Thomas succumbed to a round of particularly heavy drinking. When he fell ill, Reitell and her doctor attempted to manage his symptoms, but he deteriorated rapidly. At midnight on November 5, an ambulance took the comatose Thomas to St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York. His wife, Caitlin Macnamara, flew from England and spun into a drunken rage upon arriving at the hospital where the poet lay dying. After threatening to kill Brinnin, she was put into a straitjacket and committed to a private psychiatric rehab facility.
When Thomas died at noon on November 9, it fell on New Directions founder James Laughlin to identify the poet’s body at the morgue. Just a few weeks later, New Directions published The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (public library), containing the work Thomas himself had considered most representative of his voice as a poet and, now, of his legacy — a legacy that has continued to influence generations of writers, artists, and creative mavericks: Bob Dylan changed his last name from Zimmerman in an homage to the poet, The Beatles drew his likeness onto the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Christopher Nolan made “Do not go gentle into that good night” a narrative centerpiece of his film Interstellar.
Upon receiving news of Thomas’s death, the poet Elizabeth Bishop wrote in an astonished letter to a friend:
It must be true, but I still can’t believe it — even if I felt during the brief time I knew him that he was headed that way… Thomas’s poetry is so narrow — just a straight conduit between birth & death, I suppose—with not much space for living along the way.
In another letter to her friend Marianne Moore, Bishop further crystallized Thomas’s singular genius:
I have been very saddened, as I suppose so many people have, by Dylan Thomas’s death… He had an amazing gift for a kind of naked communication that makes a lot of poetry look like translation.
The Pulitzer-winning Irish poet and New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon writes in the 2010 edition of The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas:
Dylan Thomas is that rare thing, a poet who has it in him to allow us, particularly those of us who are coming to poetry for the first time, to believe that poetry might not only be vital in itself but also of some value to us in our day-to-day lives. It’s no accident, surely, that Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” is a poem which is read at two out of every three funerals. We respond to the sense in that poem, as in so many others, that the verse engine is so turbocharged and the fuel of such high octane that there’s a distinct likelihood of the equivalent of vertical liftoff. Dylan Thomas’s poems allow us to believe that we may be transported, and that belief is itself transporting.
“Do not go gentle into that good night” remains, indeed, Thomas’s best known and most beloved poem, as well as his most redemptive — both in its universal message and in the particular circumstances of how it came to be in the context of Thomas’s life.
By the mid-1940s, having just survived World War II, Thomas, his wife, and their newborn daughter were living in barely survivable penury. In the hope of securing a steady income, Thomas agreed to write and record a series of broadcasts for the BBC. His sonorous voice enchanted the radio public. Between 1945 and 1948, he was commissioned to make more than one hundred such broadcasts, ranging from poetry readings to literary discussions and cultural critiques — work that precipitated a surge of opportunities for Thomas and adrenalized his career as a poet.
At the height of his radio celebrity, Thomas began working on “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Perhaps because his broadcasting experience had attuned his inner ear to his outer ear and instilled in him an even keener sense of the rhythmic sonority of the spoken word, he wrote a poem tenfold more powerful when channeled through the human voice than when read in the contemplative silence of the mind’s eye.
In this rare recording, Thomas himself brings his masterpiece to life:
For more beloved writers reading their own work, see Mary Oliver reading from Blue Horses, Adrienne Rich reading “What Kind of Times Are These,” J.R.R. Tolkien singing “Sam’s Rhyme of the Troll,” Frank O’Hara reading his “Metaphysical Poem,” Susan Sontag reading her short story “Debriefing,” Elizabeth Alexander reading “Praise Song for the Day,”, Dorothy Parker reading “Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom,” and Chinua Achebe reading his little-known poetry.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-07 02:06:03
“To decide whether life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in his classic 119-page essay The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. “Everything else… is child’s play; we must first of all answer the question.”
Sometimes, life asks this question not as a thought experiment but as a gauntlet hurled with the raw brutality of living.
That selfsame year, the young Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) was taken to Auschwitz along with more than a million human beings robbed of the basic right to answer this question for themselves, instead deemed unworthy of living. Some survived by reading. Some through humor. Some by pure chance. Most did not. Frankl lost his mother, his father, and his brother to the mass murder in the concentration camps. His own life was spared by the tightly braided lifeline of chance, choice, and character.
A mere eleven months after surviving the unsurvivable, Frankl took up the elemental question at the heart of Camus’s philosophical parable in a set of lectures, which he himself edited into a slim, potent book published in Germany in 1946, just as he was completing Man’s Search for Meaning.
As our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame — these existential infusions of sanity and lucid buoyancy fell out of print and were soon forgotten. Eventually rediscovered — as is also the tendency of our collective memory when the present fails us and we must lean for succor on the life-tested wisdom of the past — they are now published in English for the first time as Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything (public library).
Frankl begins by considering the question of whether life is worth living through the central fact of human dignity. Noting how gravely the Holocaust disillusioned humanity with itself, he cautions against the defeatist “end-of-the-world” mindset with which many responded to this disillusionment, but cautions equally against the “blithe optimism” of previous, more naïve eras that had not yet faced this gruesome civilizational mirror reflecting what human beings are capable of doing to one another. Both dispositions, he argues, stem from nihilism. In consonance with his colleague and contemporary Erich Fromm’s insistence that we can only transcend the shared laziness of optimism and pessimism through rational faith in the human spirit, Frankl writes:
We cannot move toward any spiritual reconstruction with a sense of fatalism such as this.
Generations and myriad cultural upheavals before Zadie Smith observed that “progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Frankl considers what “progress” even means, emphasizing the centrality of our individual choices in its constant revision:
Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.
Insisting that it takes a measure of moral strength not to succumb to nihilism, be it that of the pessimist or of the optimist, he exclaims:
Give me a sober activism anytime, rather than that rose-tinted fatalism!
How steadfast would a person’s belief in the meaningfulness of life have to be, so as not to be shattered by such skepticism. How unconditionally do we have to believe in the meaning and value of human existence, if this belief is able to take up and bear this skepticism and pessimism?
[…]
Through this nihilism, through the pessimism and skepticism, through the soberness of a “new objectivity” that is no longer that “new” but has grown old, we must strive toward a new humanity.
Sophie Scholl, upon whom chance did not smile as favorably as it did upon Frankl, affirmed this notion with her insistence that living with integrity and belief in human goodness is the wellspring of courage as she courageously faced her own untimely death in the hands of the Nazis. But while the Holocaust indisputably disenchanted humanity, Frankl argues, it also indisputably demonstrated “that what is human is still valid… that it is all a question of the individual human being.” Looking back on the brutality of the camps, he reflects:
What remained was the individual person, the human being — and nothing else. Everything had fallen away from him during those years: money, power, fame; nothing was certain for him anymore: not life, not health, not happiness; all had been called into question for him: vanity, ambition, relationships. Everything was reduced to bare existence. Burnt through with pain, everything that was not essential was melted down — the human being reduced to what he was in the last analysis: either a member of the masses, therefore no one real, so really no one — the anonymous one, a nameless thing (!), that “he” had now become, just a prisoner number; or else he melted right down to his essential self.
In a sentiment that bellows from the hallways of history into the great vaulted temple of timeless truth, he adds:
Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is, and everything depends on each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.
Frankl then turns to the question of finding a sense of meaning when the world gives us ample reasons to view life as meaningless — the question of “continuing to live despite persistent world-weariness.” Writing in the post-war pre-dawn of the golden age of consumerism, which has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product, Frankl first dismantles the notion that meaning is to be found in the pursuit and acquisition of various pleasures:
Let us imagine a man who has been sentenced to death and, a few hours before his execution, has been told he is free to decide on the menu for his last meal. The guard comes into his cell and asks him what he wants to eat, offers him all kinds of delicacies; but the man rejects all his suggestions. He thinks to himself that it is quite irrelevant whether he stuffs good food into the stomach of his organism or not, as in a few hours it will be a corpse. And even the feelings of pleasure that could still be felt in the organism’s cerebral ganglia seem pointless in view of the fact that in two hours they will be destroyed forever. But the whole of life stands in the face of death, and if this man had been right, then our whole lives would also be meaningless, were we only to strive for pleasure and nothing else — preferably the most pleasure and the highest degree of pleasure possible. Pleasure in itself cannot give our existence meaning; thus the lack of pleasure cannot take away meaning from life, which now seems obvious to us.
He quotes a short verse by the great Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize, Einstein’s onetime conversation partner in contemplating science and spirituality, and a man who thought deeply about human nature:
I slept and dreamt
that life was joy.
I awoke and saw
that life was duty.
I worked — and behold,
duty was joy.
In consonance with Camus’s view of happiness as a moral obligation — an outcome to be attained not through direct pursuit but as a byproduct of living with authenticity and integrity — Frankl reflects on Tagore’s poetic point:
So, life is somehow duty, a single, huge obligation. And there is certainly joy in life too, but it cannot be pursued, cannot be “willed into being” as joy; rather, it must arise spontaneously, and in fact, it does arise spontaneously, just as an outcome may arise: Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty… All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.
In a sentiment James Baldwin would echo two decades later in his superb forgotten essay on the antidote to the hour of despair and life as a moral obligation to the universe, Frankl turns the question unto itself:
At this point it would be helpful [to perform] a conceptual turn through 180 degrees, after which the question can no longer be “What can I expect from life?” but can now only be “What does life expect of me?” What task in life is waiting for me?
Now we also understand how, in the final analysis, the question of the meaning of life is not asked in the right way, if asked in the way it is generally asked: it is not we who are permitted to ask about the meaning of life — it is life that asks the questions, directs questions at us… We are the ones who must answer, must give answers to the constant, hourly question of life, to the essential “life questions.” Living itself means nothing other than being questioned; our whole act of being is nothing more than responding to — of being responsible toward — life. With this mental standpoint nothing can scare us anymore, no future, no apparent lack of a future. Because now the present is everything as it holds the eternally new question of life for us.
Frankl adds a caveat of tremendous importance — triply so in our present culture of self-appointed gurus, self-help demagogues, and endless podcast feeds of interviews with accomplished individuals attempting to distill a universal recipe for self-actualization:
The question life asks us, and in answering which we can realize the meaning of the present moment, does not only change from hour to hour but also changes from person to person: the question is entirely different in each moment for every individual.
We can, therefore, see how the question as to the meaning of life is posed too simply, unless it is posed with complete specificity, in the concreteness of the here and now. To ask about “the meaning of life” in this way seems just as naive to us as the question of a reporter interviewing a world chess champion and asking, “And now, Master, please tell me: which chess move do you think is the best?” Is there a move, a particular move, that could be good, or even the best, beyond a very specific, concrete game situation, a specific configuration of the pieces?
What emerges from Frankl’s inversion of the question is the sense that, just as learning to die is learning to meet the universe on its own terms, learning to live is learning to meet the universe on its own terms — terms that change daily, hourly, by the moment:
One way or another, there can only be one alternative at a time to give meaning to life, meaning to the moment — so at any time we only need to make one decision about how we must answer, but, each time, a very specific question is being asked of us by life. From all this follows that life always offers us a possibility for the fulfillment of meaning, therefore there is always the option that it has a meaning. One could also say that our human existence can be made meaningful “to the very last breath”; as long as we have breath, as long as we are still conscious, we are each responsible for answering life’s questions.
With this symphonic prelude, Frankl arrives at the essence of what he discovered about the meaning of life in his confrontation with death — a central fact of being at which a great many of humanity’s deepest seers have arrived via one path or another: from Rilke, who so passionately insisted that “death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love,” to physicist Brian Greene, who so poetically nested our search for meaning into our mortality into the most elemental fact of the universe. Frankl writes:
The fact, and only the fact, that we are mortal, that our lives are finite, that our time is restricted and our possibilities are limited, this fact is what makes it meaningful to do something, to exploit a possibility and make it become a reality, to fulfill it, to use our time and occupy it. Death gives us a compulsion to do so. Therefore, death forms the background against which our act of being becomes a responsibility.
[…]
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence significance. But it is not only the uniqueness of an individual life as a whole that gives it importance, it is also the uniqueness of every day, every hour, every moment that represents something that loads our existence with the weight of a terrible and yet so beautiful responsibility! Any hour whose demands we do not fulfill, or fulfill halfheartedly, this hour is forfeited, forfeited “for all eternity.” Conversely, what we achieve by seizing the moment is, once and for all, rescued into reality, into a reality in which it is only apparently “canceled out” by becoming the past. In truth, it has actually been preserved, in the sense of being kept safe. Having been is in this sense perhaps even the safest form of being. The “being,” the reality that we have rescued into the past in this way, can no longer be harmed by transitoriness.
In the remainder of the slender and splendid Yes to Life, Frankl goes on to explore how the imperfections of human nature add to, rather than subtract from, the meaningfulness of our lives and what it means for us to be responsible for our own existence. Complement it with Mary Shelley, writing two centuries ago about a pandemic-savaged world, on what makes life worth living, Walt Whitman contemplating this question after surviving a paralytic stroke, and a vitalizing cosmic antidote to the fear of death from astrophysicist and poet Rebecca Elson, then revisit Frankl on humor as lifeline to sanity and survival.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-06 17:00:22
Although Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940–July 20, 1973) is best known for his legendary legacy in martial arts and film, he was also one of the most underappreciated philosophers of the twentieth century, instrumental in introducing Eastern traditions to Western audiences. A philosophy major in college, he fused ancient ideas with his own singular ethos informed by the intersection of physical and psychological discipline, the most famous manifestation of which is his water metaphor for resilience.
Early in his career, Lee was systematically sidelined by Hollywood’s studio system, which operated with extreme racial bias and still used white actors in yellowface to portray Asian characters based on flat stereotypes. Over and over, Lee was told in no uncertain terms that white audiences simply wouldn’t accept an Asian man as a lead character in a movie.
Even when he finally broke through and was cast as a lead, the studios continued to treat him as a brainless robot, there to entertain with his kung-fu skills. When they tried to cut all the philosophy out of Enter the Dragon because they wanted a vacantly entertaining action movie, Lee refused to go on set for two weeks, insisting that the kung-fu and the philosophy were inextricably entwined, each the vehicle for the other. Hollywood eventually had to relent and it was precisely the philosophical dimension that rendered the movie — just before the release of which Lee met his untimely death — a cultural icon and a beacon of racial empowerment associated with the Black Power movement, later acquired by the Library of Congress as a “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” artifact.
Lee saw philosophy as inseparable from everyday life, just as he saw the mind as inseparable from the body, each end of the battery constantly charging the other. He recorded his rigorous workout routine alongside his philosophical meditations, which he fleshed out in the course of living. Like Oliver Sacks, who carried a notebook everywhere, Lee always had a tiny 2×3″ pocketbook with him, which he filled with everything from training regimens to the phone numbers of his pupils (who included trainees like Chuck Norris and Steve McQueen) to poems, affirmations, and philosophical reflections. Even his handwriting, meticulously neat and measured to fit the tiny page, radiates Lee’s formidable discipline and orderliness.
But perhaps the most notable portion of his pocketbooks — or day timers, as they were called — were his affirmations, reminiscent of the rules of conduct Nobel laureate André Gide penned in his youthful journal and of artist Eugène Delacroix’s diaristic self-counsel. In these notes to himself, Lee articulated his personal philosophies aimed concretely at his own growth but resonating with universally applicable insight into our common psychology, behavior, and human nature.
With special permission from the Bruce Lee estate, here is an exclusive look at several pages from his 1968 pocketbook, penned shortly before Lee’s twenty-eighth birthday, each transcribed below, beginning with Napoleon Hill’s “Daily Success Creed,” which Lee copied into his notebooks:
WILL POWER: —
Recognizing that the power of will is the supreme court over all other departments of my mind, I will exercise it daily, when I need the urge to action for any purpose; and I will form HABIT designed to bring the power of my will into action at least once daily.
EMOTION: —
Realizing that my emotions are both POSITIVE and negative I will form daily HABITS which will encourage the development of the POSITIVE EMOTIONS, and aid me in converting the negative emotions into some form of useful action.
REASON: —
Recognizing that both my positive & negative emotions may be dangerous if they are not controlled and guided to desirable ends, I will submit all my desires, aims and purposes to my faculties of reason, and I will be guided by it in giving expression to these.
IMAGINATION: —
Recognizing the need for sound PLANS and IDEAS for the attainment of my desires, I will develop my imagination by calling upon it daily for help in the formation of my plans.
MEMORY: —
Recognizing the value of an alert memory, I will encourage mine to become alert by taking care to impress it clearly with all thoughts I wish to recall, and by associating those thoughts with related subjects which I may call to mind frequently.
SUBCONSCIOUS MIND: —
Recognizing the influence of my subconscious mind over my power of will, I shall take care to submit to it a clear and definite picture of my CLEAR PURPOSE in life and all minor purposes leading to my major purpose, and I shall keep this picture CONSTANTLY BEFORE my subconscious mind by REPEATING IT DAILY.
CONSCIENCE: —
Recognizing that my emotions often err in their over-enthusiasm, and my faculty of reason often is without the warmth of feeling that is necessary to enable me to combine justice with mercy in my judgments, I will encourage my conscience to guide me as to what is right & what is wrong, but I will never set aside the verdicts it renders, no matter what may be the cost of carrying them out.
When Lee felt that he had arrived at a particularly significant idea, he wrote it on the unlined back of a plain 3×5″ lined yellow notecard, which he signed, almost like a will or perhaps a contract with himself. He would often refine or copy reflections first recorded in his pocketbook onto the notecards reserved for only his firmest convictions and deepest dedications.
What makes the affirmations especially notable is that they fuse ancient philosophical and spiritual traditions (particularly Zen Buddhism’s ideas about character, the self, and the ego), questionable New Agey magical thinking, and habits of mind which contemporary psychology has since proven fruitful — a reminder that our personhood is a mashup of our era and our culture, with all their inherent knowledges and ignorances, and it is the way we combine the elements at our disposal that makes us who we are.
You will never get any more out of life than you expect
Keep your mind on the things you want and off those you don’t
Things live by moving and gain strength as they go
Be a calm beholder of what is happening around you
There is a difference a) the world b) our reaction to it
Be aware of our conditioning! Drop and dissolve inner blockage
Inner to outer ~~~ we start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer condition
See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through
No one can hurt you unless you allow him to
Inwardly, psychologically, be a nobody
I know that I have the ability to ACHIEVE the object of my DEFINITE PURPOSE in life; therefore I DEMAND of myself persistent, continuous action toward its attainment, and I here and now promise to render such action.
I realize the DOMINATING THOUGHTS of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality; therefore I will CONCENTRATE my thoughts for 30 min. daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear MENTAL PICTURE.
I know through the principle of autosuggestion, any desire that I PERSISTENTLY hold will eventually seek expression through some practical means of attaining the object back of it; therefore, I will devote 10 min. daily to DEMANDING of myself the development of SELF-CONFIDENCE.
I have clearly written down a description of my DEFINITE CHIEF AIM in life, and I will never stop trying until I shall have developed sufficient self-confidence for its attainment.
Complement with Lee on the crucial difference between pride and self-esteem, then tune into the excellent new Bruce Lee podcast, in which Lee’s daughter, Shannon, and creative director Sharon Lee unpack his philosophies and discuss how the abiding ideas behind each of his tenets apply to various aspects of our modern lives. You can help keep his legacy alive with a donation to the Bruce Lee Foundation.
For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.
2026-02-05 18:00:42
“Art is a form of nourishment (of consciousness, the spirit),” 31-year-old Susan Sontag wrote in her diary in 1964. “Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness,” wrote Alain de Botton half a century later in the excellent Art as Therapy. But perhaps the greatest meditation on how art serves the soul came more than a century earlier, in 1910, when legendary Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (December 16, 1866–December 13, 1944) published Concerning the Spiritual in Art (free download | public library) — an exploration of the deepest and most authentic motives for making art, the “internal necessity” that impels artists to create as a spiritual impulse and audiences to admire art as a spiritual hunger.
Kandinsky’s words, penned in the period between the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the consumer society, ring with remarkable poignancy today. He begins by considering art as a spiritual antidote to the values of materialism and introduces the notion of “stimmung,” an almost untranslatable concept best explained as the essential spirit of nature, echoing Tolstoy’s notion of emotional infectiousness as the true measure of art. Kandinsky writes:
[In great art] the spectator does feel a corresponding thrill in himself. Such harmony or even contrast of emotion cannot be superficial or worthless; indeed the Stimmung of a picture can deepen and purify that of the spectator. Such works of art at least preserve the soul from coarseness; they “key it up,” so to speak, to a certain height, as a tuning-key the strings of a musical instrument.
Bemoaning the tendency of the general public to reduce art to technique and skill, Kandinsky argues that its true purpose is entirely different and adds to history’s most beautiful definitions of art:
In each picture is a whole lifetime imprisoned, a whole lifetime of fears, doubts, hopes, and joys. Whither is this lifetime tending? What is the message of the competent artist? … To harmonize the whole is the task of art.
And yet, Kandinsky admonishes, the notion of “art for art’s sake” produces a “neglect of inner meanings” — a lament perhaps even more “sad and ominous” in our age of consistent commodification of art as a thing to transact around — to purchase, to own, to display — rather than an experience to have. He writes:
The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose.
He goes on to offer a visual metaphor for our spiritual experience and how it relates to the notion of genius:
The life of the spirit may be fairly represented in diagram as a large acute-angled triangle divided horizontally into unequal parts with the narrowest segment uppermost. The lower the segment the greater it is in breadth, depth, and area.
The whole triangle is moving slowly, almost invisibly forwards and upwards. Where the apex was today the second segment is tomorrow; what today can be understood only by the apex and to the rest of the triangle is an incomprehensible gibberish, forms tomorrow the true thought and feeling of the second segment.
At the apex of the top segment stands often one man, and only one. His joyful vision cloaks a vast sorrow. Even those who are nearest to him in sympathy do not understand him. Angrily they abuse him as charlatan or madman. So in his lifetime stood Beethoven, solitary and insulted.
[…]
In every segment of the triangle are artists. Each one of them who can see beyond the limits of his segment is a prophet to those about him, and helps the advance of the obstinate whole. But those who are blind, or those who retard the movement of the triangle for baser reasons, are fully understood by their fellows and acclaimed for their genius. The greater the segment (which is the same as saying the lower it lies in the triangle) so the greater the number who understand the words of the artist. Every segment hungers consciously or, much more often, unconsciously for their corresponding spiritual food. This food is offered by the artists, and for this food the segment immediately below will tomorrow be stretching out eager hands.
But he admonishes that our “spiritual food” should always be appropriately suited to the segment we belong to, else it becomes indigestible and even toxic:
Too often it happens that one level of spiritual food suffices for the nourishment of those who are already in a higher segment. But for them this food is poison; in small quantities it depresses their souls gradually into a lower segment; in large quantities it hurls them suddenly into the depths ever lower and lower. Sienkiewicz, in one of his novels, compares the spiritual life to swimming; for the man who does not strive tirelessly, who does not fight continually against sinking, will mentally and morally go under. In this strait a man’s talent (again in the biblical sense) becomes a curse—and not only the talent of the artist, but also of those who eat this poisoned food. The artist uses his strength to flatter his lower needs; in an ostensibly artistic form he presents what is impure, draws the weaker elements to him, mixes them with evil, betrays men and helps them to betray themselves, while they convince themselves and others that they are spiritually thirsty, and that from this pure spring they may quench their thirst. Such art does not help the forward movement, but hinders it, dragging back those who are striving to press onward, and spreading pestilence abroad.
But the most culturally toxic effect of all, Kandinsky argues, takes place in periods when “art has no noble champion” and “the true spiritual food is wanting.” It is then that we begin to mistake technical advances for spiritual growth and, dismissing the artists whom history would one day deem geniuses, we come to worship at false altars:
The solitary visionaries are despised or regarded as abnormal and eccentric. Those who are not wrapped in lethargy and who feel vague longings for spiritual life and knowledge and progress, cry in harsh chorus, without any to comfort them. The night of the spirit falls more and more darkly. Deeper becomes the misery of these blind and terrified guides, and their followers, tormented and unnerved by fear and doubt, prefer to this gradual darkening the final sudden leap into the blackness.
At such a time art ministers to lower needs, and is used for material ends. She seeks her substance in hard realities because she knows of nothing nobler… The artist in such times has no need to say much, but only to be notorious for some small originality and consequently lauded by a small group of patrons and connoisseurs (which incidentally is also a very profitable business for him)…
But despite all this confusion, this chaos, this wild hunt for notoriety, the spiritual triangle, slowly but surely, with irresistible strength, moves onwards and upwards.
He then turns to the spiritual essence of art and the artist’s responsibility in bringing it forth:
If the emotional power of the artist can overwhelm the “how?” and can give free scope to his finer feelings, then art is on the crest of the road by which she will not fail later on to find the “what” she has lost, the “what” which will show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life. This “what?” will no longer be the material, objective “what” of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul without which the body (i.e. the “how”) can never be healthy, whether in an individual or in a whole people.
This “what” is the internal truth which only art can divine, which only art can express by those means of expression which are hers alone.
Kandinsky considers art a kind of spiritual anchor when all other certitudes of life are unhinged by social and cultural upheaval:
When religion, science and morality are shaken … and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what at first was only a little point of light noticed by few and for the great majority non-existent. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but on the other hand they turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul.
And yet despite this eternal spiritual element, he recognizes that all art is inescapably a product of its time. Examining the music of Wagner, Debussy, and Schoenberg — each celebrated as a genius in his own right — Kandinsky writes:
The various arts of today learn from each other and often resemble each other… The greatest freedom of all, the freedom of an unfettered art, can never be absolute. Every age achieves a certain measure of this freedom, but beyond the boundaries of its freedom the mightiest genius can never go. But the measure of freedom of each age must be constantly enlarged.
A key source of this enlargement, Kandinsky suggests, is the cross-pollination of the different arts, which inform and inspire one another:
The arts are encroaching one upon another, and from a proper use of this encroachment will rise the art that is truly monumental. Every man who steeps himself in the spiritual possibilities of his art is a valuable helper in the building of the spiritual pyramid which will some day reach to heaven.
Kandinsky, who was greatly influenced by Goethe’s theory of the emotional effect of color and who was himself synesthetic, considers the powerful psychic effect of color in the cohesive spiritual experience of art:
Many colors have been described as rough or sticky, others as smooth and uniform, so that one feels inclined to stroke them (e.g., dark ultramarine, chromic oxide green, and rose madder). Equally the distinction between warm and cold colors belongs to this connection. Some colors appear soft (rose madder), others hard (cobalt green, blue-green oxide), so that even fresh from the tube they seem to be dry. The expression “scented colors” is frequently met with. And finally the sound of colors is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would try to express bright yellow in the bass notes, or dark lake in the treble…
Color is a power which directly influences the soul. Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
He later adds:
The spirit, like the body, can be strengthened and developed by frequent exercise. Just as the body, if neglected, grows weaker and finally impotent, so the spirit perishes if untended. And for this reason it is necessary for the artist to know the starting point for the exercise of his spirit.
Considering color and form the two weapons of painting, and defining form as “the outward expression of inner meaning,” Kandinsky examines their interplay in creating a spiritual effect:
This essential connection between color and form brings us to the question of the influences of form on color. Form alone, even though totally abstract and geometrical, has a power of inner suggestion. A triangle (without the accessory consideration of its being acute — or obtuse — angled or equilateral) has a spiritual value of its own. In connection with other forms, this value may be somewhat modified, but remains in quality the same. The case is similar with a circle, a square, or any conceivable geometrical figure [which has] a subjective substance in an objective shell…
The mutual influence of form and color now becomes clear. A yellow triangle, a blue circle, a green square, or a green triangle, a yellow circle, a blue square—all these are different and have different spiritual values.
In a footnote, he makes the case for the sensibility of minimalism:
Form often is most expressive when least coherent. It is often most expressive when outwardly most imperfect, perhaps only a stroke, a mere hint of outer meaning.
In considering the inherent aesthetic intelligence of nature, Kandinsky returns to his piano metaphor:
Every object has its own life and therefore its own appeal; man is continually subject to these appeals. But the results are often dubbed either sub- or super-conscious. Nature, that is to say the ever-changing surroundings of man, sets in vibration the strings of the piano (the soul) by manipulation of the keys (the various objects with their several appeals).
But perhaps his most poignant insight has to do with the expectations of art:
There is no “must” in art, because art is free.
Rather than a “must,” Kandinsky argues, art springs from an inner need, the psychological trifecta of which he itemizes:
The inner need is built up of three mystical elements:
- Every artist, as a creator, has something in him which calls for expression (this is the element of personality).
- Every artist, as child of his age, is impelled to express the spirit of his age (this is the element of style) — dictated by the period and particular country to which the artist belongs (it is doubtful how long the latter distinction will continue to exist).
- Every artist, as a servant of art, has to help the cause of art (this is the element of pure artistry, which is constant in all ages and among all nationalities).
A full understanding of the first two elements is necessary for a realization of the third.
Sharing in Schopenhauer’s skepticism about style, Kandinsky predicts that only the third element, “which knows neither period nor nationality,” accounts for the timeless in art:
In the past and even today much talk is heard of “personality” in art. Talk of the coming “style” becomes more frequent daily. But for all their importance today, these questions will have disappeared after a few hundred or thousand years.
Only the third element — that of pure artistry — will remain forever. An Egyptian carving speaks to us today more subtly than it did to its chronological contemporaries; for they judged it with the hampering knowledge of period and personality. But we can judge purely as an expression of the eternal artistry.
Similarly — the greater the part played in a modern work of art by the two elements of style and personality, the better will it be appreciated by people today; but a modern work of art which is full of the third element, will fail to reach the contemporary soul. For many centuries have to pass away before the third element can be received with understanding. But the artist in whose work this third element predominates is the really great artist.
[…]
It is clear, therefore, that the inner spirit of art only uses the outer form of any particular period as a stepping-stone to further expression.
In short, the working of the inner need and the development of art is an ever-advancing expression of the eternal and objective in the terms of the periodic and subjective.
Therefore, Kandinsky points out, the true artist gives credence only to that inner need, and not to the expectations and conventions of the time:
The artist must be blind to distinctions between “recognized” or “unrecognized” conventions of form, deaf to the transitory teaching and demands of his particular age. He must watch only the trend of the inner need, and hearken to its words alone. Then he will with safety employ means both sanctioned and forbidden by his contemporaries. All means are sacred which are called for by the inner need. All means are sinful which obscure that inner need.
This is also why theory invariably fails to capture the essential impulse of art. Kandinsky offers a beautiful, if inadvertent, disclaimer to his own theoretical treatise:
It is impossible to theorize about this ideal of art. In real art theory does not precede practice, but follows her. Everything is, at first, a matter of feeling. Any theoretical scheme will be lacking in the essential of creation — the inner desire for expression — which cannot be determined. Neither the quality of the inner need, nor its subjective form, can be measured nor weighed.
In another parenthetical, he considers the paradox of what we refer to as “beauty,” which is more of a theoretical agreement based on convention rather than a true spiritual response:
“Outer need” … never goes beyond conventional limits, nor produces other than conventional beauty. The “inner need” knows no such limits, and often produces results conventionally considered “ugly.” But “ugly” itself is a conventional term, and only means “spiritually unsympathetic,” being applied to some expression of an inner need, either outgrown or not yet attained. But everything which adequately expresses the inner need is beautiful.
[…]
That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs from the soul.
In reflecting on the birthplace of art, he returns to the notion of creative freedom:
The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life. It exists and has power to create spiritual atmosphere; and from this inner standpoint one judges whether it is a good work of art or a bad one. If its “form” is bad it means that the form is too feeble in meaning to call forth corresponding vibrations of the soul… The artist is not only justified in using, but it is his duty to use only those forms which fulfill his own need… Such spiritual freedom is as necessary in art as it is in life.
He brings everything full-circle to the metaphor of the spiritual triangle, reexamining the essence of art and the core responsibility of the artist:
Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul — to, in fact, the raising of the spiritual triangle.
If art refrains from doing this work, a chasm remains unbridged, for no other power can take the place of art in this activity. And at times when the human soul is gaining greater strength, art will also grow in power, for the two are inextricably connected and complementary one to the other. Conversely, at those times when the soul tends to be choked by material disbelief, art becomes purposeless and talk is heard that art exists for art’s sake alone…
It is very important for the artist to gauge his position aright, to realize that he has a duty to his art and to himself, that he is not king of the castle but rather a servant of a nobler purpose. He must search deeply into his own soul, develop and tend it, so that his art has something to clothe, and does not remain a glove without a hand. The artist must have something to say, for mastery over form is not his goal but rather the adapting of form to its inner meaning.
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The artist is not born to a life of pleasure. He must not live idle; he has a hard work to perform, and one which often proves a cross to be borne. He must realize that his every deed, feeling, and thought are raw but sure material from which his work is to arise, that he is free in art but not in life.
The artist has a triple responsibility to the non-artists: (1) He must repay the talent which he has; (2) his deeds, feelings, and thoughts, as those of every man, create a spiritual atmosphere which is either pure or poisonous. (3) These deeds and thoughts are materials for his creations, which themselves exercise influence on the spiritual atmosphere.
Concerning the Spiritual in Art, a spectacular read in its entirety, is in the public domain and is thus available as a free download. Complement it with Tolstoy on emotional infectiousness and Oscar Wilde on art, then revisit the 7 psychological functions of art.
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