I. What Human Beings Are
Human beings are spiritually and physically the children of the gods, and may become gods.
Each human being has a stewardship of mind, heart, strength, and might.
Mind is what and how one thinks and believes.
Heart is what and how one feels and chooses.
Strength is what and how one acts with one’s physical body.
Might is what and how one affects other beings.
Each human being who learns to love God with all of his heart, might, mind, and strength, can become as God is.
II. Human Learning: Epistemology
Each human being has two possible modes of learning.
1. One can learn physically, from other human beings: horizontal learning.
- a. One can learn from human beings who learn from God.
- b. One can learn from human beings who know not God.
2. One can learn spiritually from spiritual beings: vertical learning.
- a. One can learn from God (personal revelation) about all things.
- b. One can learn from Satan (personal revelation) about all things.
III. Human Beliefs: Metaphysics
What one believes about God, man and the universe sets the stage for all that one believes can happen in mortality.
What one believes can happen sets the limits as to what one can do.
IV. Human Actions: Ethics
Every person’s beliefs cause one to think there are better and worse ways of acting in this world.
How one acts is governed by one’s beliefs as to what acts are worthwhile.
V. Human Religion
The pattern of how a person learns, feels, chooses, acts, and influences others is his religion. (Everyone does something with his heart, might, mind and strength.) Habits=character=religion.
Churches are institutional forms of religion. Not everyone has a church, but everyone has a religion.
Everything one does is a demonstration of one’s religion.
VI. Skills
Skills are the learned patterns-of-action of a person.
One’s education or development is best gauged by the kind, number, and degree of refinement of one’s skill learning.
One’s religion is clearly exhibited in the skill applications one uses to meet the opportunities of daily life.
VII. What is art?
Art is both a process and a product.
Process: Every human skill is an art, a technology.
The arts which were practiced in the courts of Medieval Europe are now called “fine arts.” But there is no defensible line of demarcation between fine art and practical art.
Product: The products of fine art are called “art.”
The products of the practical arts are often called “artifacts.” Unfortunately, this historic division of art into two kinds has fostered a cultural and social schism. Some people feel superior because they deal with “fine art;” and most others are made to feel inferior because they deal only with “practical arts.” That division hides a very important truth: The work of every person’s hands can be honorable. Whether that work is honorable does not depend on whether it is fine art or practical art.
VIII. What is the connection between ethics and art?
A person’s art (process and product) is a clear and direct expression of his/her ethical commitments and metaphysical beliefs. In other words how and what a person does in the work of his/her life is a direct result of that person’s religion (not his church, but his personal religion).
If a person’s religion commits him/her to service to others, it leads that person to learn and practice skills which benefit others.
If a person’s religion is the worship of selfishness, he/she will do little for others but will pursue the consumption of wealth with great skill and perhaps with much learning.
IX. What is beauty?
The arguments as to what beauty is are thousands of years old and have made no identifiable progress in that time.
It seems likely that what most people call “beauty” is simply that name which they give to things that they like, want, or appreciate; beauty is thus a form of “good” for them. Is there a meaning for “beauty” which corresponds to “right?”
What a person calls beautiful or ugly is another clear index to his/her personal religion. Have you noticed that calloused hands are usually ugly to people who don’t like to work with their hands? And have you noticed that what is beautiful and desirable in clothing is almost always socially determined? A person’s religion takes a public bow whenever that person makes “value” statements such as what is and is not beautiful.
X. Which is more important in art, form or content?
This is a question which reflects a preoccupation with “fine art”; only there can art form be relished apart from content. Would a chair be beautiful if it collapsed and caused you serious injury? In practical art the content (function) is necessary, but the skill that produces good function also produces good form. In fine art some think they are being very (“upper”) classy by ignoring content and concentrating solely upon form or technique. However, they would be first to criticize a plumber who had masterful technique but who used newspapers for pipe in their home.
Rather than worry about form versus content, every artist would do well to concern himself first about what is the right thing to do, and then do that right thing with consummate skill. Then would the world be better off indeed.
XI. Is art communication or expression?
This is another question which arises out of the preoccupation with fine art. It can only be asked about art which is essentially useless.
All practical art must render service. It must communicate or translate need into satisfaction. Only in fine art can the artist be so contemptuous of others that he cares not a fig if he communicates with them. But note that such a one usually wants to be paid for “doing his own thing.”
Art which does not focus upon communication, upon translating need into satisfaction and appreciation, is art which reflects the religion of selfishness.
XII. Who can judge art?
We need to decide if we are talking about process or product to answer this question.
Judging the process, the skill of an artist, can only be done by one who is himself well-skilled or who has close and wide observation of the better practitioners of the art. There is something objective about skill, about what a person can and cannot do well.
Judging the product, the “good” of the artistic production, leaves everyone to himself, for this value is always personal, a function of present desire. It is the tendency of the world for those who are able to judge the process effectively and accurately to also place themselves as experts on product and to proceed to tell everyone else which artistic productions they should and should not esteem. Such easily turns to priestcraft.
Who can judge the “rightness” of art? Who could rightfully pronounce such judgment?
XIII. What is the place of art in civilization?
Observation of the art of a people, all of their arts of every skill, and concerning both process and product, gives an index to their civilization. The more moral their endeavors and the more skillful their execution, the higher, the better, the nobler, is their civilization.
Zion cannot be established in the absence of good artists and good art. When everyone in the society sees the need of producing good things, moral things, and doing it well, all for the welfare of one’s neighbors, then Zion is nigh.
To establish Zion, a people must believe that all work is equally honorable if it is a right thing to be doing. Doing well at any task is as noble as any other if it is what the individual is supposed to be doing to fulfill his stewardship.
One reason Zion is not yet upon the earth is because art, all art, has not yet found its proper place and function in the lives of those who call themselves Latter-day Saints.
XIV. What of Plato’s triad of “the good, the true, and the beautiful”?
Platonic thought makes the good, the true, and the beautiful all one thing, different names for single identity: The greatest idea. In the Platonic hierarchy of the Forms, the final idea or form is at the same time truth, beauty, and goodness.
In a world where men only approximate truth, where good is what they want, and where beauty is attributed to something because it pleases them, each individual person’s truth, beauty, and good, may indeed coalesce, but each person will have a truth, beauty, and good, different from every other person.
In a Restored Gospel frame where truth is the mind of God, where good is what is “right” in His eyes, and beauty is the holiness of the implementation of his right and truth, then indeed the three are one and they also become the same for everyone who lives the Restored Gospel.
A (non-exhaustive) Taxonomy of Human Arts (Skills)
An important index to the culture (civilization) of a group is which people (e.g., all or some) within the group master and employ such skills as the following.
Heart: Feeling Arts
| Type | Description |
| Empathy/Sympathy/Compassion: | Ability to sense what others are feeling and then to feel the same way. |
| Pain tolerance: | Ability to allow pain to work its beneficence without seeking to mask it. |
| Self-motivation: | Ability to generate out of one’s own desires sufficient impetus to gain a goal. |
| Purity of heart: | Ability to discern the needs of others, with no admixture of selfishness. |
| Spirituality: | Ability to detect and identify both the Holy Spirit and the evil spirit unerringly. |
| Discipline/Control of appetites: | Ability to avoid interference of personal need or desire in learning and executing a regimen. |
| Judging/Evaluating: | Ability to establish “good” and/or “right” for any object of attention. |
Might: Social Arts: (Based upon communication)
| Type | Description |
| Motivating others: | Ability to turn the personal desires of others into an impetus to achieve a common goal. |
| Social graces/Manners: | Ability to follow a protocol to eliminate unpleasant surprises in social interaction. |
| Organizational management: | Ability to coordinate the activity of many persons in achieving a single goal. |
| Friendship/Enmity: | Ability to produce and maintain warm/cold personal relations. |
| Love/Hate: | Ability to sacrifice for/injure another person. |
| Priesthood/Priestcraft: | Dispensing truth and light to others with/without true authority and without/with remuneration. |
| Mentor/Master: | Guiding the skill development of another person with/without their consent. |
| Disciple/Slave: | Receiving a regimen from another person with/without one’s consent. |
| Business (buying, selling): | Exchange of goods for mutual benefit. |
| War/Assault: | Forcible attempt to deprive another group/person of some good thing they possess. |
| Diplomacy/Negotiation: | Verbal attempt to deprive another group/person of some good thing they possess. |
| Training: | Ability to change the reaction patterns of another person to what the trainer desires. |
Mind: Intellectual Arts
| Type | Description |
| Philosophy: | Asking questions which help to elicit understanding/comprehension. |
| Science: | Production of peer-acceptable descriptive assertions about the natural world. |
| Scholarship: | Creation of imaginative accounts of events of distant or past times out of record evidence. |
| Mathematics: | Creation of systems of order, pure and applied. |
| Engineering: | Ability to achieve specific goals using current technology and limited resources. |
| · Physical: | Creation of plans or physical objects and processes to achieve a physical goal. |
| · Social: | Creation of plans for social processes to achieve a social goal. |
| · Legal: | Creation of plans or pathways and legal barriers to assure legal attainment of client goal. |
| · Medical: | Creation of diagnosis and plans to attain a desired somatic state. |
| Thinking: | |
| · Perceiving: | Identification of sensory phenomena. |
| · Comprehending: | Relating some idea to a matrix of relevant ideas. |
| · Systems: | Creating special relationships of ideas to achieve a personal or social goal. |
| · Deduction: | Deriving necessary conclusions from given premises in accordance with given rules. |
| · Induction: | Creating assertions about whole populations on the basis of evidence of samples. |
| · Adduction: | Creation of premises from which a given assertion may be validly deduced. |
Strength: Physical Arts
| Type | Description |
| Walking/Running: | Ability to change spatial deployment of one’s person as desired. |
| Carpentry: | Ability to deploy wood (plastic materials) to create larger structures. |
| Music: | Ability to create patterned noises. |
| Observation: | Ability to achieve extrapolable data from sensory perception. |
| Experimentation: | Observation of results of a change deliberately introduced into a controlled situation. |
All: Arts which inherently involve heart, might, mind and strength simultaneously.
(Every art involves heart, mind and strength.)
| Type | Description |
| Learning: | Achieving desired changes in habits of one’s own heart, mind and body. |
| Communication/control: | Achieving desired actions in another person. |
| Righteousness: | Achieving the action patterns of a god through communication with God and becoming a disciple of God. |