The School of Life

What Is Culture For

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Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for?

This book proposes that works of culture were all made, in one way or another, with the idea of improving the way we live. The book connects a range of cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas around love, work and society, and invites us to see culture as a resource with which to address the complex agonies of being human. It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.
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87 printed pages
Original publication
2020
Publication year
2020
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Quotes

  • Karyna Horthas quoted3 years ago
    We need culture around us because we are so poor at retaining our equilibrium and maturity. The best lessons are constantly draining from us. We must have the right songs, films, history books, plays and images to hand to keep us from succumbing to rage and error. Culture is our emotional apothecary, a storehouse of humanity’s finest bottled wisdom and compassion, with whose help we have the best chance of riding out our many inevitable moments of fragility and folly.
  • Karyna Horthas quoted3 years ago
    Works of culture can redeem us in a variety of ways, but we should never overlook the fact that they can do so only on one condition: that they are successful as works of art. It isn’t enough that they should badly want to help us, that they should have powerful intentions to be companionable, serene or inspiring. They must also be these things in and of themselves. In other words, they cannot be mere manifestoes or declarations; they must, in addition, be good art.
  • Karyna Horthas quoted3 years ago
    that the quality of designed environments matters because we are hugely vulnerable to the suggestions emanating from them about how we might behave, and more broadly, who we might be.

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