Francisco Goy Historically Civilized Man

The idea of abstract concepts has tantalized man since he gained some sense of consciousness; indeed, the cave paintings in Lascaux symbolize early man’s desires to understand his concrete world through abstract constructs. The scholarly interpretation of the Lascaux paintings is that early man worshiped the animals and by painting, he was thought to invoke its powers. The significance of this scholarly approach is that those scholars were evaluating and interpreting the paintings with their own cultural biases, which means that historically civilized man paints to memorialize or find a way to worship abstract concepts through a tangible medium, such as art., which many find on walls. Of course, there are many ways to interpret art, “a moment’s
725), but an artist who uses his art to bring consciousness of issues forward into his patrons or public, facilitates conversation, which can lead to a conversation about assumptions and perspectives. Francisco Goya was such an artist. His works in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were depictions of his assumptions in conjunction with his reflections of his reality, “Problem posing involves making a taken-for-granted situation problematic, raising questions regarding its validity,” (Mezirow, 1991, p. 105); Goya reviewed the problems of man and his country in his work and challenged his viewers to confront their assumptions. Goya’s, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (see figure 1) provides different perspectives on a society that is caught on the precipice of change, reason, and romanticism. “This can be read both as an endorsement of rationalism and as a warning that the surrender of reason can result in disorder and misery. Or it can be seen as a sign that the faith in reason to solve human problems had ended only in creating nightmares” (Fleming, 1991, p. 466). This etching, along with many other Goya works, create a sense of discomfort or trigger a sense of anxiety in the viewer, from which he can avoid or become aware, which begins the transformational learning process (Mezirow, 1991, p. 147). Art can also act as Parker Palmer’s third thing: “Rightly used a third thing functions a bit like the old Rorschach inkblot test, evoking from us whatever the soul wants us to attend to” (2004, p. 93). In the case of art, it invites the soul to speak, which can invite the mind to listen and eventually achieve