How the modern human is looking to art
to give what religion no longer can.
For two thousand years, the West organised itself around a structure that told us why suffering mattered, what our lives were for, and where we were going. The structure is gone. The substitutes — politics, wellness, achievement, the right person, the right place — do not work. They cannot work. The function God served was not a function any external system can perform.
There is a third possibility. It is the subject of this book.
Three things art does
that nothing else does.
Art does not subtract suffering. It transfigures it.
Every other framework tries to reduce or eliminate the parts of life that are hard. Religion redeems suffering. Wellness optimises it away. Therapy processes it. Politics structurally addresses it. Art does something different. It looks directly at what the others are trying to remove, and gives it form. The form is what makes the unbearable bearable — not by softening it, but by holding it in a shape the human can contemplate.
Art does not seek meaning. It makes it.
Every other approach to the question of meaning is a form of seeking — looking for the framework, the practice, the experience that will deliver it. Seeking presupposes that meaning is already out there, waiting. Making does not. The artist gives form to formless material, and in the giving of form, meaning is produced. Where there was nothing, now there is a thing. The making is the meaning.
Art does not discover the self. It forges one.
There is no true self waiting to be uncovered. There is the material you have been given — a body, a temperament, a history, an unconscious — and the slow patient work of shaping it into a particular form. The self is what emerges. Not the self you would have predicted. Not the self you would have chosen. A self that did not exist before the work began.
Eleven chapters. One argument.
The book is short by design. The argument is not complicated. What is hard is the orientation it points toward.
Art does not subtract. Art transfigures. It looks directly at the parts of life that everything else is trying to eliminate, and it gives them form.
Every framework, every substitute, shares a common project: to reduce, manage, or eliminate the parts of life that are hard. Religion promises an afterlife in which the suffering is redeemed. Wellness promises a body in which the suffering is optimized away. Therapy promises a self in which the suffering is processed. Politics promises a society in which the suffering is structurally addressed. Each of these is, in its own way, a project of subtraction.
Art is different. The Greeks understood this. They knew, with a clarity we have largely lost, that life was fundamentally tragic. They had no Christianity to soften it, no Enlightenment, no consumer capitalism. They were looking, with eyes wide open, at a universe that did not love them. And they did not become nihilists.
They built an entire artistic form whose purpose was to look directly at the worst things human beings face and make them, through the alchemy of artistic form, into something that could be borne. Not by reducing them. By transfiguring them into something the human can hold.
The five voices the book draws on.
Where I draw on others, I name them. Where I stand on my own ground, I say so.
Take what is useful. Leave the rest.
- Promise that art will make you happy.
- Promise that art will give you certainty.
- Promise that art will save you.
- Offer salvation, enlightenment, or arrival.
- Pretend to academic rigour.
- Take the death of God lightly.
- Make one claim, and defend it.
- Take Camus, Nietzsche, and Jung at their word.
- Argue for a practice, not a belief.
- Locate meaning in the act of making.
- End at amor fati.
- Tell the truth about the cost.
What the early readers said.
A book about meaning that does not flinch. I read it in one sitting and reread it the next morning, slower.
Topp writes the way Cohen sang. With the seriousness of someone who has nothing left to lose by telling the truth.
I have been waiting for a book that takes the death of God seriously without sliding into either nihilism or therapy. This is that book.
Jay Topp.
Topp is a writer, entrepreneur and artist living between Buenos Aires, the Mediterranean, and Australia. He has spent the last seven years travelling and living across sixty-six countries — through the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas — and has made eight figures online.
It is his third book. But his first of this kind.