To live a happy life, we need illusion.
From Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Husserl we have learned that reality is elusive and unattainable; from them we picked up that we will never be able to know things as they really are. As humans, we need art because our will to truth is more important than what is true. We need art to cope with the struggles and demands imposed on our weak minds by contemporary life. We need art to save us from the truth because absolute honesty can lead us to nausea and suicide. We need art because the only counter-force against truth is illusion.
Art is a mindful illusion.
Jaime Correa's "When I close my eyes I hear John Cage's 4'33""
Illusion challenges the offensive essence of neo-liberal economics while standing in frank opposition to acceptable values of truthfulness. Like many of the philosophers of the enlightenment and the modern period, I am convinced that art and creativity are two of the most important sources of higher-order lessons about how to make a better world for ourselves; from artists we can learn how to make things beautiful, desirable, and attractive, when they are not; from artistic creators, we can discovered formal models for the development of analogous techniques that could be deployed beyond art, and into the life of buildings and cities.
Artistic illusion has the capacity to turn us into poets of our own lives; and, when it does, our lives blossom with character and style.