Response by Julian P. Steptoe to: ART, INTELLECT AND SOCIAL INTERCOURSE

It seems to my intellect to be a work of art with broadly functional social applications. A self is a closed system of artistic and intellectual intercourse, the art being formed of materials provided by nature and the intellect observing in attempt to understand. By itself, this process produces creation for enjoyment.

In society, this process is shared, communicated, discussed, and diversified. The sharing and diversity are artistic elements while the discussion and communication are intellectual.

Necessary or prerequisite to social formation, indeed, characterizing societies, is the artistic formation through manipulations of natural elements, or physical attributes, into channels of communication and forums for discussion, each self's being composing and bearing a prime agent of physical expression, its voice. Alone, this voice is simply the mind's intellectual catalyst for the artistic production of body in physical resonance. This resonance is the health, spirit, or respect which manages the artistic production and adheres to the intellectual voice.

Resounding beyond the closed system, the voice is a calling, and resounding in another intellect, it is communication. Resounding on another body, it is either an image or a touch.

Without resonance, the voice is a reach of words which find no world, no place where words are landed. Word is material which the intellect can grasp, then upon the voice, rest. The bodified self, of the central artist says, "I am created (or) creative." The peripheral intellectual, or understood (understanding) self, or audience, says, "I observe creation, creativity, (or) art". The artist offers expression to be understood by the intellectual, the most refined forms being in the roles of player and critic, respectfully.

The last sentence on page one of your brief treatise...

"While the artist can be satisfied even if his product is never successful financially or beyond a very small group of as few as one, that being himself, the intellectual produces with an audience in addition to himself in mind whether or not that audience exists at the time of production."

however, exposes the interdependency of art and intellect, because the artist must intellectually regard the product for satisfaction and the intellectual must artistically produce an item regarded by an audience.

The most universal example is God as Intellectual Artist and Nature as the intellectually regarded Art, the audience being part of the created art and being contributing artists in the ongoing production.

Curiously, this revelation explains that God (Nature) is the artist whose creation is intellectually regarded by Man, in the ultimate, but soley intellectual, separation between intellect and art which in the creation are actually entertwined and interdependent.