THE ALTERED SOUL
Essay by Gordon Farrell
(Continuing the discussion that started in my last column, “Towards the Art of the Game”…)
The best way to articulate the connection I see between art and narrative is to explain how art can be understood as a sort of movement of the human soul.
This is an idea that has engaged great thinkers for centuries.
It started with the Greeks, who were fascinated by the notion that individual human beings can take action to change the world they live in. In their view, we do not live at the mercy of fate or the gods. Instead, we are partners with the gods both in shaping the world, and in shaping our own fates. Greek obsession with the concept of action turned out to be one of the great cornerstones of Western civilization, and the idea that ordinary men and women can do things to significantly alter the world is one of the central cultural beliefs of the West.
We alter the world when we build things. We alter the world when we vote. We alter the world when we apply scientific method to the development of military tactics. Don’t believe me? Go ask the Spartans.
But when we create art, we do more than alter the world. We alter our souls.
As you might well suspect, there is a fascinating journey to be traced from this idea that leads right to the development of video games themselves. Video games both dramatize the way that we alter the world through action, and simultaneously create the illusion for the player that he or she is producing change. In a sense, video games are the ultimate celebration of the notion that what I do matters in the world. Victory or defeat hinges on the actions I take.
The Greeks called the notion that we can alter the world praxis – a word that can be translated as “practical action.” I intend to make some comments about that notion in later entries. Right now, though, I want to focus on a more elusive type of praxis:
The praxis that occurs in the human psyche when we are in the presence of art.
In ancient Greek, “psyche” means “soul.” And in the 4th Century BCE, Aristotle wrote at length about the fact that art produces praxis in our psyches. When I talk about the ways in which video games can touch our souls, I mean it in Aristotle’s sense of the word.
When we are changed by art, our psyche moves from one state to a new state — a new condition. The 19th Century Greek scholar Samuel Butcher called it a psychic energy working outwards. Or, as another scholar summarized it, “praxis in art is the movement of the psyche towards what seems good to it.”
And so we arrive at this notion that art is movement.
Movement of the human soul.
The idea didn’t die with the Greeks. In the 1st Century BCE, we find the Latin philosopher Horace talking about the way in which art changes us. “It is not enough for poems to have beauty,” he declares, “They must have charm, and lead the hearer’s soul where they will. As men’s faces smile on those who smile, so they respond to those who weep. If you would have me weep, you must first feel grief yourself.” Horace’s ideas about aesthetics played a prominent role in the formation of Western art, especially during the European renaissance. Some of his practical advice now seems unnecessarily stiff, but the core idea remains:
Art must change us.
If it doesn’t, it fails.
And, as Horace warns, “the Romans, in boxes and pit alike, will raise a loud guffaw.”
At the end of the European middle ages, Dante picks up this theme in his essays. He called the effect that art has on us “a movement-of-spirit,” a movement he thought should be in the direction of Christian godliness. The 19th Century romantics were so impressed by the power of art to “move” us, the romantic philosopher Auguste Schlegel used the term “artist-philosopher-genius” to refer to the men and women who create art.
In the modern period, Wassily Kandinsky addresses the idea of art as movement as well. In “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” he wrote: “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 thought and purpose… this need to move ever upwards and forwards, by the sweat of the brow, through suffering and fear.”
Like Aristotle, Kandinsky saw an exact correlation between the experience of art, the experience of the soul, and the experience of life. He argued that life is a movement upwards, towards but never fully achieving the spiritual completeness for which we yearn. True art mirrors this journey and at the same time produces the same experience in the soul of the viewer.
This movement occurs in all art. Aristotle called it “action” — or, in his language, “praxis.”
20th Century classical scholar Francis Fergusson describes Aristotle’s position in this way:
Poets, like painters, musicians, and dancers, Aristotle says, all ‘imitate action’ in their various ways. By ‘action’ he means, not physical activity, but a movement-of-spirit, and by ‘imitation’ he means, not superficial copying, but the countless forms which the life of the human spirit may take, in the media of the arts: musical sound, paint, word, or gesture… all the arts, in some sense, imitate action.
But in “De Anima” and “Poetics,” Aristotle goes even further. He actually maps out in narrative terms the journey on which art takes us.
Because when we understand it to be movement, we can see how art reflects the dynamics of narrative. It is narrative that encapsulates the experience of movement. I know this seems a stretch but bear with me for a moment…
Art may affect us suddenly, spontaneously, and intuitively.
A narrative may effect us suddenly and spontaneously as well.
But narrative has a twin sister, as it were, a prosaic Clytemnestra to the divine Helen. And the second aspect of narrative is that its core elements can be extracted and laid bare to the intellect.
Scholars have argued for centuries about the qualities of art that affect us so powerfully. But narrative has been analyzed many times over and its component parts are well understood. In its second, more prosaic incarnation narrative is logical and organized.
Thus, narrative provides us with a map into the soul of art itself.
Art is mysterious.
Narrative allows us to understand the mystery.
The two, though possessing some opposite qualities, are inextricably connected. I believe the close link between them can help explain the way in which games become art.