Feeling, Art, and Sustainable Civil Society

The publication in English of Marie-Louise von Franz’s last lecture on civilization and the feeling function comes at a moment when we face a future imperiled by violence and ecological upheaval. This article explores the connections between developed feeling and the role of art in the articulation of values. The author argues that a sustainable civil society depends upon our capacity to see ourselves as interdependent in a nonhierarchical web of living systems comprised of individuals, each a part of the whole. Tracking the emergence of empathy and aesthetics from embodiment, this article suggests that art nourishes the education of feeling and the articulation of what is good and right. Art and beauty foster the emergence of moral imagination, which is the ultimate achievement of the differentiated feeling function.