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Can art lead us to virtue, or how has the European tradition led to the formation of political identity? Aristotle stated that art, as well as political practice, is an instance of imposition of form, that is, a formative activity. The decline of European arts then stems from the metaphysical divorce of the good from the true and the beautiful and by adopting ugliness and desecration almost as its final goals (cf. gr. miaron, “disgusting,” literally “dirty” or “polluted”). Aesthetic experience emerging from a representation of human action, however, can lead to virtue if (and only if) we learn to feel emotions rightly, that is, towards the right object, to the proper degree, and at the right time. Visual arts, music, literature, and drama especially, can contribute to the formation and education of mature citizens; a disposition to feel emotion correctly is essential to the development of a good character and eventually to forming political identity. Emotions have a cognitive component, but neither unrestricted emotionalism nor dry cognitivism is an adequate response to an artwork. The modern concept of aesthetic experience (that superseded the lost transcendentals of the good and the beautiful) is often too vague. Proper education is the key; both Plato and Aristotle see education in the arts in the realm of the political (Republic X, Politics VIII); educative entertainment (diagógé) is for the adults what play or amusement (paideia) is for children. Giotto represented virtues and vices in Padua in paradigmatic pairs, thus emphasizing (to a penitent viewer) an inevitability of his own existential choices. Both Dante and Shakespeare see their own art in relation to building virtue by providing a speculum virtutis et vitiis, or by holding, as it were, “the mirror up to nature,” that is, to the second human nature of becoming (not that of being). Our academic curricula teach students, at best, to force themselves to act justly, but in fact they long to act otherwise and then are frustrated; they are self-controlled (enkrateis) but seldom virtuous, i.e., becoming good by habitually doing good.
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