John Cage: Art Without Ego
John Cage made art a spiritual practice.
His methods involve releasing control to unlock deeper creativity.
Practising them gives you access to the abundance that the ego obscures.
In this article, I’ll outline Cage’s philosophy of art, his key practices, their psychological and spiritual implications, and more.
First, some context.
Who was John Cage?
John Cage was an American composer and music theorist. He was also a pioneer of indeterminacy, the practice of leaving elements of a piece of music to chance operations. A leading figure in the post-war avant-garde, Cage was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, his reach stretching far beyond music.
From a young age, he challenged convention. Upon seeing his college classmates all reading copies of the same book, he chose to read the first book in the library written by an author whose name began with Z. He went on to receive the highest grade in the class, and became convinced that the institution wasn’t being run correctly. Cage had initially wanted to become a writer, but dropped out of college believing that it’d be of no use to him.
Cage’s approach to creativity is fascinating. His art shatters rigid categories and eludes our attempts to classify it. He used chance, Zen Buddhism, and non-intention to escape the confines of his mind and make truly original work, unconstrained by the limits of his ego.
The inspiration for his core philosophy can be traced back to the late 1940s.
Cage’s core philosophy: Escaping the ego
The role of Zen Buddhism and Eastern philosophy
Around the late 1940s, Cage attended lectures by D. T. Suzuki, a Japanese Buddhist scholar.
Suzuki drew a circle on the blackboard, sectioning off a small part of it with two parallel lines. The full circle represented the vast range of the mind, while the thin part sectioned off between the lines represented the ego. Suzuki taught that the ego can either cut itself off from the big mind or open itself up.
The ego and art
Your ego cuts you off from the abundance of the world. It determines what you pay attention to and limits your creative capacity.
In creative practices and your wider life, the decisions you make reflect your likes and dislikes. Your intentions, no matter how subtle, influence the shape of your work, so that nothing you produce is entirely free of their mark.
Great art can arise from these conditions, but it’ll always carry the traces or constraints of the mind that produced it.
Cage’s approach
Cage understood that our likes and dislikes in particular cut us off from the vastness of the big mind and contract our perception. Any art created from the ego is bound to suffer the bondage of its limitations.
Cage wasn’t interested in art that revealed the self of the creator, claiming ‘personality is a flimsy thing on which to build art’. Instead, he strived to escape from the ego.
Cage’s methods: Chance operations and non-intention
Inspired by his studies of Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism, Cage began to practise non-intention and chance-controlled music as a way of circumventing the ego in his work.
Cage flipped coins and used the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, to make compositional decisions, freeing himself from his own preferences.
He described using ‘a multiplicity of questions’ rather than making choices, stating ‘I have tried in my work to free myself from my own head’. Marcel Duchamp had a similar idea of ‘forgetting the hand’ – that is, forgetting habitual ways of doing things and turning them over to chance. Read my article on Marcel Duchamp to learn more.
Such methods free the artist from their own taste so that what arises doesn't carry the familiar traces of the artist's self. Eluding personal choice, chance operations offer pathways into new worlds that aren’t determined by likes, dislikes, and other egoic elements. They yield a new kind of vision, opening us up to the abundance of the world that the structures of our psyche obscure.
Cage likened his methods to meditative practices, aiming to 'open the doors of the ego' to turn it 'from a concentration on itself to a flow with all creation'.
One of his aphorisms – ‘not things, but minds’ – reflects this. The traditional idea of an artist is someone who creates things – paintings, pieces of music, sculptures, and so on. Cage was more concerned with the state or quality of mind that loosened the boundaries of what constitutes art.
Practising non-intention and chance operations is a way of opening the mind and cultivating a kind of mental engagement with the world that doesn’t differentiate art from non-art. It is in this mental engagement, not the art itself, that the artistic experience lies.
Such awareness can transform ordinary experiences into more conventionally ‘artistic’ ones. Cage described how his mode of perception edified even the sound of refrigerator drones:
'I spent my life thinking we should try to get rid of them … What has happened is that I’m beginning to enjoy those sounds, I mean that I now actually listen to them with the kind of enjoyment with which I listen to the traffic. Now the traffic is easy to recognise as beautiful, but those drones are more difficult and I didn’t really set out to find them beautiful … They are, so to speak, coming to me.'
In this state of open awareness, even the most conventional sounds are recognised as beautiful.
Artistic implications: Redefining art and its boundaries
Consciously or not, we distinguish between art and non-art, music and noise, and so on.
The shrill ringing of a mobile phone or the ruffling of sweet wrappers at a classical music performance will soon provoke a reaction from audience members, their shared belief in the boundaries of art and non-art clear.
In such an event, we make distinctions between essences and accidents – the things that belong and the things that don’t. The music the band performs is the essence of the art. Audience chatter is an accident – a disturbance that happens to coincide with the ‘true’ event. If it could be removed, the musical performance would be better off.
This is the byproduct of making any category. The minute we define something, we establish its essences and its accidents, what belongs and what doesn’t.
Cage’s conception of art
Cage defined modern art as that which cannot be disrupted by non-art. Where the classical sensibility separated art and non-art elements, Cage created spaces for them to connect.
When things that have been kept apart are allowed to meet and interact, it’s almost inevitable that something interesting or new will arise. When audience chatter or the sound of rain on the theatre roof aren’t differentiated from the performance, we have a kind of ‘happening’ that isn’t confined by traditional definitions.
This is a result of Cage’s cultivation of mind – his mental engagement with the world that didn’t differentiate between art and non-art. The idea of opening up the ego to turn it 'from a concentration on itself to a flow with all creation' mentioned earlier can be applied to the work of art itself. The more porous the work, that is, the less defined its boundaries, the more it begins to resemble 'something that might have happened, even if the person wasn’t there'.
Examples of Cage’s work
Cage’s approach and philosophy towards art are probably more famous than any of his actual work. However, notable examples include:
4′33″ (1952)
4′33″ is Cage’s best-known work. It’s also one of his most controversial and misunderstood. The composition is 4 minutes 33 seconds of ‘silence’. Musicians performing the piece do nothing other than be present for the entirety of the performance.
In 1952, Cage visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University. The room was so fully padded that it was said to be absolutely silent. However, while in the room, Cage heard two sounds, one high and one low. The technicians informed him that these were the sounds of his nervous system and circulating blood.
From this point, Cage became interested in the impossibility of science, preferring to think of intended sound and unintended sound.
4’33” is an invocation of the quality of awareness that recognises the elements that conventions obscure. Lewis Hyde describes the piece as a 'structured opportunity to listen to the unintended sound, to hear the plenitude of what happens'.
Cage thought that the audience at the premier had missed the point, claiming:
'What they thought was silence... was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.'
Here, Cage explicitly states that ambient sounds contribute to the composition. This idea marks the genesis of noise music, where distinctions between musical and non-musical sounds are dropped.
4’33” embodies the egoless and accidental elements of Cage’s philosophy. It also reflects the idea that artistic experience is an element of the mind, rather than a result of the artefact involved.
Its beauty lies in its capacity to open the creator and audience to the world.
Music of Changes (1951)
Cage used the I Ching to compose Music of Changes, a groundbreaking piece of indeterminate music for solo piano. He would ask the book questions about various aspects of the piece – sounds, durations, dynamics, tempo and densities – and use the answers to compose. Cage wrote Music of Changes in 1951, and would use the I Ching for the majority of his compositions from then on.
The chance operations involved freed Cage of his personal tastes, resulting in a piece that could never have arisen under the conditions of the ego.
Sonatas and Interludes (1946 - 1948)
From 1946 - 1948, Cage composed Sonatas and Interludes, a cycle of twenty pieces for prepared piano and one of Cage's finest achievements.
Cage began working with the prepared piano in the 1940s. This involved placing objects on or between the piano's strings to alter the sound. The adaptation is typical of Cage's philosophy of exploration, allowing him to introduce non-conventional sounds and blur the lines between music and noise.
While more structured than his later indeterminate works, the compositions still used mathematical structures to limit choice elements.
Beyond art: Psychological and spiritual dimensions
Psychological implications
All structures guard against change, aiming to replicate their ideas and perpetuate themselves through invariance. The ego is no different, shame and fear arising as a protective layer when thoughts or actions transgress the boundaries of the constructed ego.
An approach that opens the border of a structure, whether in creative practices or at the level of the individual psyche, is guaranteed to have a disruptive force that will create new connections.
Cage’s work demonstrates how inviting ambiguity and accident into a composition expands or dissolves its borders, leading to true change. It mirrors psychological growth, which comes with an acceptance of chance and uncertainty and a willingness to let go of the need for control.
Spiritual implications
Cage used explicitly spiritual language to describe his methods, embodied in his desire to open the ego to 'a flow with all creation’. His methods have an overt spiritual component, opening up the practitioner, and possibly the audience, to the plenitude of the world that habitual ways of being hide.
His use of non-intention and non-attachment in art are common spiritual practices of mitigating the rigid self, reducing suffering, and cultivating a presence that’s better aligned with the fundamental impermanence of being. You can learn more about similar concepts in my articles on emptiness, non-self, and nondual awareness.
Embracing accident, change, and impermanence, and weaving them into his worldview, Cage aligns himself with key Buddhist doctrines. By blurring lines – between art and non-art, music and dissonance, and so on – Cage invites us to see all elements as part of a larger whole. Narrow categories of thought dissolve in this wholeness, emblematic of a meditative or spiritual experience.
Cage’s legacy: Artistic and philosophical
Cage has inspired countless acclaimed musicians, including Brian Eno, Radiohead, and Aphex Twin. But his influence stretches far wider, and his true legacy is his philosophical approach to art and life.
Two quotes from Experimental Music, his 1957 address to the Music Teachers National Association, capture the crux of Cage’s artistic and philosophical legacy. First, discussing new, experimental music, Cage declares:
‘For in this new music nothing takes place but sounds: those that are notated and those that are not. Those that are not notated appear in the written music as silences, opening the doors of the music to the sounds that happen to be in the environment.’
‘Sounds’, for Cage, encapsulates the totality, overriding binary ways of thinking about music and noise. His idea of sounds not notated appearing as silences takes the open borders of a piece of art as a given, acknowledging the inevitability of chance and accident impinging on notated sounds. Artistic borders are artificial, Cage says, and allowing what’s outside to seep through the pores will enrich and enliven any work.
He goes on to outline his philosophy in more detail.
‘And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.’
While framed as an approach to writing music, this serves as well as an approach to life. ‘Purposeful purposelessness’ and ‘purposeless play’ are common spiritual metaphors for the cosmos, and reflect the absolute chance of Jacques Monod.
Music, and life itself, have no real purpose. But their lack of a distinct goal doesn't render them insignificant. Instead, they're all the more significant, for they're self-justifying.
Cage stated ‘the highest purpose is to have no purpose at all’ as it ‘puts one in accordance with nature, in her manner of operation’. Alan Watts draws similar comparisons between music and life or existence in general. For Watts, music is pointless play – not something to be understood intellectually, but experienced directly. Life, too, unfolds all around us spontaneously. Our attempts to order it, understand it, or judge it – all actions of the separate self – cause us to miss the beauty of the whole.
Both Watts and Cage recognised the discursive mind as the barrier to this type of awareness, the former claiming that ‘when our intentions go down to zero... suddenly you notice that the world is magical’.
Cage’s methods highlight a way to access the magic that is always there, in art and in life
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