What We All Know, What We All Forget: The Arts, Nature, and the Human Spirit

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.