Life & Wisdom Quote by Max Eastman

To “cherish consciousness” is to treat awareness itself as the artist’s raw material, not just a tool for making pretty objects. Eastman’s phrasing is almost programmatic: art isn’t defined by medium or market, but by a moral attention to what it feels like to be alive in a particular moment. “Defining function” has the cool insistence of a manifesto, and “cherish” lands like a deliberate rebuttal to the era’s hard-edged ideologies and mechanizing forces. It suggests tenderness toward the mind’s fragility, the way perception can be dulled by routine, propaganda, or mass entertainment.

Eastman lived through the churn of industrial modernity, world war, and the political fervor of the early 20th century; he moved in socialist circles, edited The Masses, and later became a prominent anti-Stalinist. That biography matters: he’s not romanticizing “consciousness” as private daydreaming. He’s arguing that inner life is politically contested terrain. To cherish consciousness is to defend the individual’s capacity to notice, doubt, desire, and revise beliefs against systems that prefer compliance or stupor.

The line also carries a quiet provocation toward both aesthetic purists and agitprop literalists. If art’s job is to “cherish” awareness, then art that merely decorates or merely instructs is insufficient. The artist becomes a custodian of attention: sharpening it, complicating it, keeping it awake. In an age of slogans, Eastman stakes art’s value on its ability to make experience harder to flatten.