This Is A New Release Of The Original 1908 Edition.

From the stunning birth of art in prehistoric times, to the highly nuanced developments happening now, Evolution Through Art illuminates how art is the key component in our evolution as individuals and as a species. On this aesthetic journey, you will become familiar with how visual art taps into our mental potentials, inspires new and wondrous emotions, and elevates our perceptual awareness. Along the way, you will meet artists, such as da Vinci and Van Gogh, and learn how they contributed to the technology of the human soul. You will also meet aesthetic cynics, such as Kant and Duchamp, and understand how their work negates art. Finally, you will discover incredible living artists from different corners of the world who are picking up the noble banner of art and showing us the best of humanity.

Artisan of the Human Spirit

Artists today are at a crossroads. With funding for the arts and humanities endowments perpetually under attack, and school districts all over the United States scrapping their art curricula altogether, the place of the arts in our civic future is uncertain to say the least. At the same time, faced with the problems of the modern world—from water shortages and grave health concerns to global climate change and the now constant threat of terrorism—one might question the urgency of this waning support for the arts. In the politically fraught world we live in, is the “felt” experience even something worth fighting for? In this soul-searching collection of vignettes, Patrick Summers gives us an adamant, impassioned affirmative. Art, he argues, nurtures freedom of thought, and is more necessary now than ever before. As artistic director of the Houston Grand Opera, Summers is well positioned to take stock of the limitations of the professional arts world—a world where the conversation revolves almost entirely around financial questions and whose reputation tends toward elitism—and to remind us of art’s fundamental relationship to joy and meaning. Offering a vehement defense of long-form arts in a world with a short attention span, Summers argues that art is spiritual, and that music in particular has the ability to ask spiritual questions, to inspire cathartic pathos, and to express spiritual truths. Summers guides us through his personal encounters with art and music in disparate places, from Houston’s Rothko Chapel to a music classroom in rural China, and reflects on musical works he has conducted all over the world. Assessing the growing canon of new operas performed in American opera houses today, he calls for musical artists to be innovative and brave as opera continues to reinvent itself. This book is a moving credo elucidating Summers’s belief that the arts, especially music, help us to understand our own humanity as intellectual, aesthetic, and ultimately spiritual.

'To live in truth, to wish to be true in one’s whole being, will be the watchword of the future.’ – Rudolf Steiner In the midst of the lies and propaganda of the Great War, Rudolf Steiner struggled to convey the truths of the human spirit. The ‘truth’ asserted by partisan interests, he suggested, was invariably tinged with dishonesty – whether the outright mendacities of politicians and rulers (Steiner refers here to the machinations of the British Empire), or the manipulative techniques of secret societies, intent on securing and shoring up their own power. In relation to the latter, Rudolf Steiner highlights how, whilst we tend to reject overt authority nowadays, we succumb more easily to its covert forms in the ‘received wisdoms’ we often unthinkingly adopt. In seeking to help his audiences discern the spiritual struggle unfolding behind outer events, Steiner describes how the intrigues that led to the war were based on intentional deceit, which served hidden aims of which the public was mostly kept in the dark. In contrast to the divisiveness of untruth, truth is based on a realization of the interconnectedness of all things – of interdependence between the realms ‘below’ and ‘above’ us. The ‘I’, upon which all evolution on earth is predicated, signifies an overcoming of egotism and narrow interests, together with the imaginative embrace of all beings. Its spiritual reality – that descends to us from non-material worlds and towards which we evolve through earthly lives – is the epitome of truth. Amidst many other topics covered here, Rudolf Steiner speaks about The Qur’an and the Mystery of Golgotha; Henry VIII, Thomas More and the Church of England; the Jesuits and their State in Paraguay; Freemasons, esoteric symbols, and handshakes; Madame Blavatsky’s occult imprisonment by Anglo-Saxon brotherhoods; Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; and the occult literature of Papus and Lévi.

Provides a new understanding of Wittgenstein's discourse as an edifyng philosophy of culture, pursued through self-reflection. Investigates the conceptual underpinnings of culture, revealing them as shared expressive spiritual forms of life.

Exceptionally student-friendly, extensively illustrated, and engagingly thought-provoking, this one-volume historical survey of the humanities is accessible--and inviting--to readers with little background in the arts and humanities. Carefully balanced among the major arts, philosophy, and religion and finely focused on selected principal events, styles, movements, and figures, it brings the past to life by including authentic documents from daily life, comparative global perspectives, and examples from literature, philosophy, music--including the contributions of women and minority artists. For individuals waiting to discover the humanities' rich connections to their own

Whitley, one of the world's leading experts on cave paintings, rewrites the understanding of shamanism and its connection with artistic creativity, myth, and religion by interweaving archaeological evidence with the latest findings of cutting-edge neuroscience.

This is a book about art: what it is, and how it is related to human beings and to the natural world. It is an attempt to understand something of the relationship of these things to the Ultimate Answer, however one believes, whether or not one "believes" in anything other than the physical. At the same time I want to ground the subject here among us, where we all stand, where it belongs- in the "common sense." The book attempts to awaken memory of connections and continuities often forgotten in our irresistible human compulsion to analyze and categorize, to name and to isolate and measure in order to study and ultimately to control. It is about what you know and can't know, about what you forget that you know and what a computing machine can never know. It is about reality, and about our attachment to, and slavish respect for, what is said about reality by people who are judged to be "experts." Our arts are aesthetic, of the senses. We are nature, and we make the arts. We experience them. We "appreciate" them. We may then talk about them. But we forget or ignore the crucial kind of thinking that does not involve talk in symbols, either words or numbers. It is the thinking that produces insight, intuition, creativity. It allows us to appreciate humor, innuendo, metaphor, and also greatness in the arts.