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Exploring the mind, body and soul connection in art

magnetic compasses. The pieces might not be exactly aesthetically appealing, but they do seem to create an environment or a shared experience as intended by the author. All that this means is that what can be called art includes just about any thinkable subject so long as someone applies him or herself to its development with the intention to make an impression of any kind on an audience.

Now that the word "art" has been defined, it is important to understand the second subject of this essay, the psyche. Author James Hillman engages in a rather interesting argument in his book Re-Visioning Psychology. Hillman outlines the fact that throughout time, the psyche- was taken out of psychology based on the grounds that objective or physical reality is the only concrete reality one can rely on and one's thoughts or the soul is a construct of irrationality. This is probably due to the fact that the psyche, or soul is an intangible term that cannot be measured in scientific terms and is thus disregarded as farfetched. Hillman argues that:

We have lost...the place of soul: a world of imagination, passion, fantasy, reflection, that is neither physical and material on the one hand, nor spiritual and abstract on the other, yet bound to them both... Psyche has its own logic-psychology-which is neither a science of physical things nor a metaphysics of spiritual things (68).

In other words, what Hillman is trying to convey is that there must be an acknowledgment of an inner non-physical world which goes hand in hand with the outer physical world. In fact, one could almost say that these two worlds balance each other out. This inner-world, as he argues, is the world of our thoughts, of the inner-voice that dictates what it believes to be right from wrong, the consciousness that determines what it believes to be beautiful and what is not in the outer world. This inner world might not be able to be measured through the scientific method, but it is more farfetched to deny that humans have thoughts than to admit that humans have them. What this psyche is composed of includes the subjective perception of the world, cultural values, drives, likes, and the many other elements that make up one single individual mind, or world.

How exactly is art a manifestation of this inner world? To explain this, the essay will be further divided into several sections. These sections include: technique and skill, subject matter as manifestation of perception, subject matter as manifestation of values,


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