Seeing all things purely as symbols leads to a state comparable to schizophrenia, in which all things resonate with meaning yet nothing has a clear signification. On the other hand, to banish the symbolic in order to see all things merely as signs, as recommended by reductive materialism, is to remove the dimension of meaning from our picture of the universe. The resulting state of being is the moral abyss of the psychopath.

Today, the propensity to be affected by anything is often perceived as a weakness. Given that we are constantly besieged by aesthetic objects looking to manipulate us (advertising, rhetoric an all the rest), our reservations may be understandable. But unfortunately the guardedness that is so essential to our mental well-being in this media-saturated world also contributes to the rampant apathy that is frosting over the globe like the beginnings of an unprecedented psychic ice-age. Wherever apathy reigns supreme, the "strong" are those who can boast that nothing affects them. Numbness and dumbness become positive qualities, and any passionate engagement with life becomes a cause for embarrassment.

Beauty without symbolic depth results in ornament. Symbol without beauty results in psychoanalysis. Only when the two meet can we speak of art.

It is a strange thing to catalog the conflicting theories as to what the first artists thought they were doing down there in the caves, because the truth is that, to this day, we do not know why we make art. In the end, art may not be our invention at all. It may well have appeared in history as it does in the life of many individual artists:as an outside call, a sudden flash of inspiration, an inner wanderlust exerting such a powerfull pull that ultimately we would have to say that Picasso got it wrong: the early humans didn't invent art. Art invented humanity.

The characters we meet in works of art aren't people in the conventional sense but powers belonging to the aesthetic worlds that contain them. If anything comes first, it is setting and atmosphere, not character. You cannot take Macbeth out of the dank wilderness of the scottish moors, he is an aspect of his world, the expression of a place.