How art invented humanity

When early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images

Solar System (1876), a quilt by Ellen Harding Baker. Courtesy the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives

is a writer on art, culture, and philosophy. His essays have appeared in Daedalus, the Times Literary Supplement, the North American Review and Canadian Notes & Queries, among others. He is the author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice (2015) and he co-hosts the Weird Studies podcast. He lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.

Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia

These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.

Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity.

In 1819, John Keats completed ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, a poem that engages with ancient art in a totally different spirit from that of most modern archaeologists. Keats converses with the eponymous urn as though it were a living being rather than an object bequeathed to us by the dead, and this living being speaks in the language of beauty. Two centuries later, his conversation with the urn still leaves us with unresolved puzzles about the place of art in the world, most memorably with the closing words:

    When old age shall this generation waste,

          Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

    ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all

          Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

To modern minds, the idea that truth and beauty are somehow synonymous, that they might coincide at all, is likely to seem absurd. What do beauty and truth have to do with one another? If anything, isn’t beauty closer to untruth, given how frequently it deceives us?

A philosopher would answer that it depends on how we define our terms. The German filmmaker Werner Herzog, for instance, once defended his practice of staging or manipulating scenes in his documentaries by distinguishing two kinds of truth. The first is the purely factual kind that obtains when a statement corresponds to a state of affairs, as when you say ‘the crows are flying over the field’ because the crows happen to be doing just that. Herzog no doubt acknowledges the practical value of this kind of truth, but he holds it in low enough regard to call it ‘the truth of accountants’. The second kind is what he calls ‘ecstatic truth’. It is more interesting to him because it denotes what artists, poets and philosophers are (or should be) seeking. Ecstatic truth isn’t a label you slap onto accurate statements but an unrepeatable event that comes with the full force of revelation. It is new each time it occurs. There is something weird in it, something that evokes the mystery of existence.

Ecstatic truth takes us out of ourselves; it hints at an excess of meaning

Herzog’s two kinds of truth aren’t exactly opposed. Each depends on the other. In a parallel universe where facts are impossible to articulate – a universe too chaotic or unstable to allow for coherent statements – ecstatic truth would likewise be impossible to express. However, without ecstatic truth, no statement of fact would be worth making. Let me explain.

One of Vincent van Gogh’s last paintings, Wheatfield with Crows (1890), appears to depict – as the title suggests – nothing more fantastical than crows flying over a field at dusk. But there is such movement, such turbulence to the image that we resist the spoilsports who would turn up their noses, saying: ‘It’s just a bunch of crows flying over a field – big deal.’ If the painting can be said to be ‘making a statement’ at all, it is a statement pertaining to truth of a different order, and ‘ecstatic’ is one way to describe it.

Wheatfield with Crows (1890) by Vincent van Gogh. Courtesy Wikimedia

The word comes from the Greek ekstasis, ‘to stand outside oneself’. Ecstatic truth takes us out of ourselves; it hints at an excess of meaning, over and above what we might otherwise reduce to plain statements of fact. The image, ultimately, is a singular event that transcends any particular interpretation. It depends on there being an intelligible world in which crows are crows and fields are fields, but it also resists any reduction to those facts. Nothing, the picture says, is ‘just’ anything.

Today, many would argue that the ordinary ‘truth of accountants’ is more fundamental than ecstatic truth, which relies heavily on perception, interpretation and subjective feeling. Yet this misses the reality that art discloses.

The mystery isn’t what the crows and the field mean, but that they mean

Think about empirical science. In order to have it, we must believe that the Universe is intelligible in principle. Somehow, we humans have the cognitive equipment to think about the world as it is. We must be able to trust our senses enough to believe that the conceptual and mathematical ideas we derive from sensory experience can tell us something about what the world is like beyond sensory experience. The basic realism of science, then, rests upon the following claim: the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it, even though the facts themselves need not be plain.

The Planet Jupiter (1882) by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot. Courtesy the New York Public Library

Now, on the surface, this statement – ‘the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it’ – is an instance of the first kind of truth. That the Universe allows for factual statements appears to be a plain statement of fact: a truth of accounting. At a deeper level, however, it also exemplifies the second kind of truth, because there is no discernible reason why our universe must be so intelligible and so rationally ordered as to permit the existence of scientists and artists (let alone accountants). Any reason given would presuppose reason, and it is precisely rationality that is here to be explained. In other words, the very existence of the plain-fact universe is a mystery. More than........

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