All artists want to believe that they can say anything at all through their chosen medium. This is why painters like Picasso believed that, by developing an appropriate language of metaphors, a picture of the internal man becomes possible. I believe this is a delusion, and that the only form of communication that has any chance of getting to the bottom of things is philosophy in an enlarged sense that includes all the social sciences. The vanity of artists may also be why Plato hated them — despite being himself a great dramatist.

I don't mind art that is merely decorative, but I dislike artists who can't create anything even remotely pleasing and who don't even try to say anything about our world — people such as Jackson Pollock. How is a consumer nourished by his self-indulgence? The Greeks laughed at such people. We make them rich and famous.

You can more easily see the limits of artistic expression in music. I am as sensitive to the value of music as anyone. I play the violin and have composed dozens of baroque studies. But as much as I crave the tingling that goes up my spine at the end of the cadenza to the first movement of Brahms' Violin Concerto, I know that this pleasure is visceral and not an intellectual statement, so to speak, about the world we live in. It simply replicates a natural feeling that we are capable of having in that world. It's harder to see how mute drama can also be, but for me the difference between drama and philosophy is that dramatists often like to fool their audiences and don't always come clean about what they really think. That's okay if you're trying to avoid being burned at the stake, but you can't accuse Aquinas of obfuscation.

I know that the 19th and 20th century bravely trumpeted its discovery of the "inner man", the sometimes lost individual who was trapped by conformity in a system he neither made nor understood. (Think of the plays of Ibsen.) But as someone who has been a psychological counselor successfully getting people to overcome exactly these problems, I know only too well how easy it is for people to make excuses to explain why they can't rise above their social oppression and become free. The hippies of the 60's tried to give us a living example of what it might mean to be free (or at least unfettered), but we all know that most of them eventually succombed to weaknesses of the flesh or of the mind and that the ones who are still alive no longer believe in much of anything. I would say that I was the last of the hippies if I didn't know so many other people who also flatter themselves with that ironic moniker.

Just to muddy this picture a bit, I want to say that I do respond to what you might call "depth portraiture" (that which tries to depict the inner man) when I'm more comfortable with the metaphors than I am with Picasso's (or Van Gogh's). For example, Francis Bacon's 1953 "Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X", a violently grotesque interpretation of Catholic pomp, seems an incisive caracateur of the sort of man who becomes less himself the more his office consumes him. You can see a similar treatment in George Grosz' Ecce Homo, and in the cartoon caracateurs of politicians that appear each day in newspapers around the world. So, yes, I have to believe this "Dorian Grey" metaphor communicates something universally understood.

Anyway, I think that Freud did great harm to what became known as "depth psychology" (which differentiates between the outer and the inner man) by enlarging upon and "patenting" the old notion of an "unconscious mind". Frankly, this phrase is so misunderstood by the public at large that I find it utterly useless in everyday discourse. Our intellect is constantly active in ways that don't involve memory, but a truly "unconscious consciousness" would be an oxymoron, no? Instead I distinguish between mental processes we focus our active attention upon vs. those we don't — and don't need to remember. Does tying our own shoelaces require an "unconscious mind"? No, it TIME MAGAZINE: You started a biography of Picasso but didn't finish.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: To me, it just wasn't a very interesting life. Yes, he changed his female companionship periodically, and he painted a lot of paintings, but he really didn't do much.

— doesn't. Nor does wanting the world to be a better place and dedicating one's life to that goal.

There still exist countless victims of this oxymoron in the form of superficial folks with loose change in their pockets who are still looking for the right psychoanalyst to finally find out "what makes them tick". Thanks to Freud, many of these assume that they "really" want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers! Others assume that psychiatry has a drug for every social malady. (My friend has written a book called which I always recommend to these people.) As Socrates told us, "the unexamined life is not worth living". And as subsequent centuries have born witness to, anyone can examine their life and achieve greater understanding of the world and mastery of their circumstances. All that is needed is ambition and a bit of independence. Of course it helps when some of these souls lift up their heads, rise to their full stature as men, and set a public example for the rest of us.