Love, the Law of Life

To make life truly pure, passionate love emerges. Who will deny that love is a human art? Passionate love is the creation of life, the ecstasy in response to the highest. There are many, therefore, who think that all the partial arts were created for the sake of love. Nothing reveals so clearly as love what the Art of Life is. All the partial arts are absorbed by love. Importunately love demands the effort of young life. Nothing other than passionate love is in itself aim, happiness, and consummation of life’s purpose.

To this day in Japan passionate love has been persecuted by our national morality. The Japanese national feeling, which has set duty to family and country against human feeling, has tended to regard love as impropriety, as opposed to duty. The tendency is a result of the extreme persecution to which love has been subjected in the struggle for existence during a period when freedom of life and of art were not permitted, and no aim other than fighting existed. Under such conditions life itself becomes an accursed thing. The effect of this constant external oppression has been that morality as the Art of Life—the glorious art which makes passionate love, social love, and the love of humanity fundamental—has not been accorded recognition.

But morality is in truth an inner development. The progress of this inner power is itself an aim: the ego makes the decisions and the ego creates. This power which enables the ego to make its decisions and to create the new self within, is love. Both passionate love and sacred love are at once the inner satisfaction of the ego and the creation of the content of the ego. In themselves these are aims.

Passionate love is the perfect Art of Life. But it would be a huge mistake for us to suppose that passionate love is the final Art of Life. For even though one has no experience of passionate love, one’s life can be intrinsically a joyous art. Many fail to grasp this truth. Every art of the past shows that lives which did not experience passionate love were nevertheless, when lived in pureness, in themselves marvelously joyful. The birds of the Amazon country, though pursued by enemy birds, forget their distress as soon as they fly away to other parts.!. For life itself is throbbing activity. It is said that when men mount in airplanes several thousand feet up in the air, they spontaneously begin singing and their faces are lighted with smiles. So should it be with the life of humanity.

This adoration of life appeared in ancient ages under the name of religion. Through it all, the primitive sense arts were born. The earliest songs were hymns, the earliest paintings were religious. The first music, the first drama, the first sculpture, were created in the presence of the gods and idols and expressly for their sake. The temple festivals were celebrated, employing the sense-arts as expressions of life—all offered in adoration to the deities.

The more intense the subjectivity of an art grows, the more intricate become its canons and rules. The arts of architecture, sculpture, music, and the drama, which ought to be understood by the generality of people, must, while observing the principles of sense-psychology, keep in mind the psychology of the crowd. But, on the other hand, since this approaches general life, there must be sought therein an outlet for man’s life. Therefore, while religion must be considered to be the art of the complete man, it must inevitably be the synthesis of the partial arts.

Schopenhauer and Hartmann, Holding curious ideas regarding art, have said something to the effect that since beauty is the thing which temporarily saves unredeemable human life, art is of the nature of a salvation whose ecstasy is religious. Their statements are interesting, but paradoxes enter because they think of human art and life as separate entities. For how can art even temporarily save human life which is unsavable? And how can the essential elements of ecstasy be discovered in music—the highest art, according to Schopenhauer —when music is not the art of the whole man, but a partial art? Only in life itself can these elements be found. Are there not in life, even if but few in number, these elements which must be saved? Schopenhauer | forgot that the partial is only a fraction of the whole.

In early ages when man was sensitive to the urge of the life that pulsated within him, he knew no distinction between life and art. Art was but one of the fragments of life activity. Religion was its whole, its foundation. But man’s development has been fragmental, and in our modern civilization religion and art are divorced, as are also goodness and beauty. And many folk who specialize in the beautiful create their sculpture, their paintings, and their music solely to appeal to the senses.

The content of the beautiful, however, is forever developing; and penetrating more and more deeply into man’s nature, its sphere enlarges, until all of life becomes artistic contrast. In other words, many of the ideal arts—poetry, romance, certain forms of music— when they are modes of regarding Nature, are religion intrinsic.

Furthermore, for us the time has come when we see the sense-arts and the ideal arts each as directive, not of what may be termed a synthesized art, but of the different units of life. Thus, if any of the primal elements of beauty, or rather those elements which can deepen beauty, or (from the subjective standpoint) become beautiful, still remain in this salvationless life of man, we may consider that the life which contains art is in itself salvation. And art, then, is religion— the adoration of salvation.

Education is the realm of life which has best embraced the understanding of the Art of Life. In Life Art, if morality is the architecture, passionate love the painting, and religion the music, then education is the sculpture. No more fascinating sculpture exists than education. Its material is the child, its chisel the teacher, its spirit love. What a profound time-sculpture it is! Spirit is transmitted to spirit, soul to soul, and within the lump of clay the very breath of God enkindles life!

Man is at present awakening gradually from the age of the partial sense arts to the art of ideas. All painting—futurist, cubist, post-impressionist—points in this direction, all awakening from sense to a higher subjectivity. It is the effort through objective symbols— color and outline—to tell forth the urge of the life within, the effort to project before the senses a life which is super-sensual. It is the endeavor to hear the movement of the mystery of life in plants, in animals, in inanimate Nature, in light, in the face of man, in the stream in the dead of night; the effort to retrieve through the super-sensual power of ideas the connection between Nature’s vanished life and the inanimate; the effort through the new sense, that of ideas near to Divinity, to remold the ugliness of objectivity into forms of beauty.

This potent art will leap forth from canvas and claylump, and impress a fresh mould upon living flesh. The partial arts of the old forms will then furnish the symbols for expressing the Art of Life, and supply the arrangement of the terms in the given equation. But this alone will be without import. Just asa meaningless musical tone may become the symbol for an idea, so painting, romance, architecture, nay, each of the partial arts has, together with its own aim, a certain transcendent meaning. This higher meaning is first bestowed in the Art of Life. That which is confined to itself does not develop. That alone grows which has transcendent import, and this growing entity is life.

The Art of Life has aim and transcendent meaning. In passionate love this is most clearly seen. For it is in itself an aim, and has the higher mission of perpetuating racial life.

To the saying, “Art for art’s sake,’ I have no objection whatever. It is not different from saying, “Light for the eye,’’ and the creation of beauty for the eye according to the canons and rules is something to take joy in doing. But, advancing a step further, we must inquire what relation exists between the partial arts and the art of complete life. There is a saying, ‘‘Man sacrifices virtue for a beautiful woman.”’ It is just as if we should say, ‘‘Sacrifice an ear for an eye.’”’ And from the partial, relative point of view, I see no reason for objecting to this position.

Yet, in addition to visible beauty there is the far greater beauty of the whole individual, and the most mistaken notion possible is the idea that in goodness there are none of the elements of beauty. If there bea beauty which it is impossible for us to approve of, it is for the reason that there is in it that which endangers the foundations of the very reality of the beautiful.

~ We must, then, consider the origin of beauty and the reason for its emergence. It is relatively easy to account for the origin of goodness and truth, but the origin of beauty is not easily to be ascertained. Why does the beautiful exist? Some would explain its origin by the argument for utility. For example, they attempt, in explaining evolution by sex selection, to show that beauty had its rise through the desire for color. Others, from the standpoint of the absolute, endeavor to show that beauty is the fitting of the relative peg into the fixed hole of absolute value. But why should beauty alone be absolute, and goodness and truth relative? In fact, beauty, as distinguished from goodness and truth, is bound by more numerous objective limitations and rules. And this fact furnishes the reason for men thinking that in beauty there is a latent absolute quality. But there is no reason why beauty alone should be absolute. Only life is absolute. Beauty varies relatively to the variation of life.

If I am asked, then, why beauty has been placed in the content of life, I reply with the only possible answer, that beauty is of the very essence of life. For life is fascinating, life is itself beautiful. Life is worth living for life itself, and possesses beauty as a formal value. An absolute value is one which has the power to provide its own content forits own sake. In absolute value the unlovely is remoulded into the beautiful. For, to the Almighty, all things have the same value as that which we call beautiful.

This, then, is the reason why, in a relative world, beauty alone is regarded as having a nature close to the absolute. With this only, life is well worth living.

With this only, where life is worth living, partial values emerge, and the life which takes these fragmental values and fits them as a mosaic within the complete man, may be said to be a beautiful life. Here “art for art’s sake” is born. Since with merely this, life is worth living, art is employed in utilitarian fashion as the tool of sexual desire.

But the essence of beauty lies simply in its power to reveal in a relative world the uniqueness of life itself. It is as if, on the long road to the absolute, flowers are strewn about some of the mile posts.

Life is intrinsically worth living. It is beautiful and to be desired. And as it draws us onward, it becomes the means by which we are, as our lives are prolonged, unconsciously ushered into life’s freedom.

The doctrine of evolution regards beauty as the tool of sex-selection. But beauty did not emerge entirely for the purpose of sex-selection. Beauty existed before selection, and came to be utilized by selection. In connection with sex-selection this truth may be maintained.

Beauty is attached to the content of life itself. Life has employed the process of selection in order to lift living things to this point, and endeavors to lead beauty on to the realm of freedom where it may be enjoyed unrestrictedly.

Life itself is beauty. Beauty and life appear to be separated because life is relative, just as in the relative order reality and value are apparently separate.

To those whose selfhood is not established beauty is bestowed entirely in objective forms, but to those whose ego is established it is bestowed as an inner creation. That is, beauty, just as goodness, flows from the objective into the subjective world. This is the mode of the evolution of beauty, paralleling the evolution of love. Nay, in the Art of Life, love itself is the content of the art.

If we can understand why love has been bestowed, we shall know why beauty has been given. Love is the content of life. There is no loveless life. It is only in a relative order that love and life appear to be dissociated. Life is in itself an aim, and even when the aim is perfected life still remains. That which is in itself an aim is love. In other words, beauty and love are one and the same in essence. Beauty is the form seen objectively, while love is the form viewed subjectively.

Where there is no love there is no art. Love reveals the life of the Absolute. Where absolute life is revealed, there absolute beauty, also, is revealed. The sole road leading to beauty is love. Mount up the ladder of love! For at the top is the throne of God.