Uniting / Divorcing Ethics and Aesthetics

Our informal exploration of aesthetics comes to an end with an in-depth look at Hume's Aesthetic Theory as outlined in the Treatise of Human Nature and other writings. I hope you've enjoyed reading. Stay tuned for more...

David Hume provides a strikingly similar account of how moral and aesthetic judgments are formed. While Hume’s aesthetic theory is incomplete, we can turn both to passages in the Treatise of Human Nature, The Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and his late essay “Of the Standard of Taste” to reconstruct an aesthetic theory with telling parallels to his moral one. This paper explores how Hume treats moral and aesthetic judgments analogously and hopes to explain Hume’s reasons for doing so.

Morality enables men to live peacefully with each other. The goal or purpose of art is less obvious. In attempting a comprehensive theory of human nature, however, Hume assigns a certain role to aesthetic judgment. The psychologist in him, however, makes Hume discuss taste to the absolute exclusion of ontology. In this sense, Hume’s concern for how aesthetic judgments are formed comes at the expense of a proper definition of art. Hume is up to more than simply accounting for human nature using the fewest possible terms. He regards aesthetics as a suitable subject for inquiry and his theory of human sentiment acknowledges art as a vital part for human nature.

The analogous treatment of morality and aesthetics imply similar views on both. What would motivate such an analogy between art and morality? Is it merely the general utility of human nature that suggests this parallel? Is the analogy between art and morality a complete one? Is Hume building a moral system on analogy to his aesthetic one; or is the relationship the other way round? The goal of this paper is to offer a plausible explanation of what Hume is up to suggesting and employing such striking analogies between ethical and aesthetic judgments.

Hume has been accused by some of confusing morality with mores and aesthetics with morals. Attempting an aesthetics of human nature, he has been accused of aestheticizing human nature. One such accusation is that Hume doesn’t tell the difference between moral and aesthetic values (think of example of being ashamed of a long nose). I will attempt to rebut such criticism and show that despite what might seem a potential confusion of aesthetic and moral categories, Hume does in fact promote a workable and robust division between aesthetics and ethics. My contention, however, is that by treating judgments of “moral and natural beauty” analogously, Hume actually is providing us a way of distinguishing between moral and aesthetic cases. In this way, he can be seen as responding to the age-old strife between art and philosophy that began with Plato and offering a possible way out.

Hume attempts to deal systematically with such a subjective discipline. He wants to show that both aesthetic and moral judgments, object and subject, share the same basis. He wants this in part because he care deeply about both morality and aesthetics, even if his aesthetics is incomplete. Still, Hume struggles and engages with the two in strikingly similar ways that I will examine below.

The aesthetic issue is troubling to Hume, who attempts to work it out systematically. However, his aesthetic theory is incomplete. In the Avertisement to volume one of the Treatise, he writes: “If I have the good fortune to meet with success, I shall proceed to the examination of morals, politics and criticism; which will compleat this Treatise of human nature.” (Treatise, p. xii) Criticism here means aesthetics. Another unfulfilled promise comes in the appendix, where he announces his intentions to consider “in what sense we can talk either or a right or wrong taste in morals, eloquence, or beauty” (Treatise, 3.2.8 547, n.1). Alas, we are never privy to such a conversation and must make do with the little that we have.

Hume holds that human nature is on the whole reliable and stable. This is the basis of his whole theory of human nature. This allows him to pronounce universality on issues of individual judgment and enables a standard. Since we are all fundamentally similar, our aesthetic and moral feelings will be similar. The axiomatic claim that the “minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations” is foundational to his whole philosophy.
In various places in both the Treatise and in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume defines his view of moral and aesthetic judgments on analogy with each other. Not surprisingly, given his interest in the “feelings and operations” of men’s minds, Hume proves a better psychologist than metaphysician. We will see this as we turn to examine his account of how aesthetic judgments are formed.

Hume’s famous pronouncement about reason being slave to the passions, bases our faculty for moral and aesthetic judgment in sentiment. Since reason depends on relations of ideas, it cannot be the source of morality, for this would mean that morality would be applicable to inanimate objects. “If these moral relations cou’d ever be apply’d to external objects, it wou’d follow, that even inanimate beings wou’d be susceptible of moral beauty and deformity” (Treatise, 3.1.2. 465). Hume escapes from what he considers to be an absurdity by grounding morality in sentiment, which is also the basis for aesthetic judgments, which apply to nature and to inanimate objects.

Hume consistently grounds both moral and aesthetic taste in sentiment. He writes that “all kinds of beauty, and tastes and sensations” resemble each other insofar as “our approbation is implied in the immediate pleasure they convey to us” (Treatise, 3.1.2. 471). The measure of moral and aesthetic beauty is the pleasure or disgust that it causes in the subject. In the case of art, Hume holds that the same quality of beauty can arise from multiple considerations of categories that inform our moral judgments: it sometimes be derived from mere species and appearances of the objects; sometime from sympathy and “an idea of their utility” (Treatise, 3.3.5, 667).

Before we turn our attention to these considerations, it is fruitful to point out a paradoxical claim that Hume makes about sentiments. While claiming that every pleasure is “of itself” equal, Hume also tells us that some tastes are more desirable than others (Gracyk, p. 186). The apparent contradiction inherent in this conviction is the basis for his later essay, “Of the Standard of Taste.”

In this famous and much-glossed essay, Hume argues for the possibility of aesthetic judgments. Everyone admits the variety of tastes. Yet, at the same time, people are equally convinced by their tastes. The paradox here is that all sentiments are equal and some art is better than others. Hume tantalizes us talk of a standard by which to judge art properly, since all definitions of beauty are vacuous. Such a standard is a prerequisite for all types of aesthetic judgment. However, Hume abandons the quest for a standard and instead ends up focusing on the criteria for a discriminating judge.

Hume’s definition of aesthetic experience is consistent with what he writes in the Treatise and the Enquiry. Basically, it is a matter of standing in relation to an object such that there is sympathy between your feeling and the form of the object. Here, as elsewhere, Hume insists that the capacity for appreciating beauty is innate: we’re naturally wired to find some things beautiful and others ugly.

The most famous portion of the Taste essay involves an episode from Don Quixote, where two wine connoisseurs are called on pronounce on the quality of a flask of wine. Though both are discriminating, they both identify different things. When the wine is poured out, both opinions are corroborated by the presence of the objects they identified. However, these extremely discriminating judges can only get it half-right. The point of this story as Hume retells it is that we can’t ever pour out the art to get a type of chemical analysis and to the bottom of things. The only objective basis for judgment we have is the ability to cultivate our sentiments and communicate our opinions.

The criteria for qualified judges that Hume does provide are rather vague and none-too-unexpected. These include delicacy of sentiment, practice, comparative judgment, freedom from prejudice and good sense (Taste, 145). The goal is to cultivate a “delicacy of taste,” where “the organs are so fine as to allow nothing to escape them, and at the same time so exact as to perceive every ingredient in the composition.” (Taste, 141)

Hume’s belief in the perfectibility of our faculties for aesthetic judgment, or at least, the striving to perfect such faculties, is somewhat at odds with his view on how we make moral judgments. The question of how these two relate has been a matter of much concern to many aestheticians. Can morality be cultivated the same way as taste? Though the issue is thorny, Hume does imply that we refine our moral sense by refining our taste in judging “of the catholic and universal beauty” and says that “a quick and acute perception of beauty must be the perfection of our mental taste” (Taste, 142).

One of the greatest difficulties about aesthetic judgments is that despite a common discourse, the “sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds” (Taste, 134). But while we tolerate such idiosyncrasy in art, we expect a greater conformity in morality, where the need for a common language for discussing values is more pressing.

The limits that Hume places on reason render it incapable of ever being an active principal. This active principle becomes the passions as regard the ethics. The consequence of holding this view – intended or not – is that a person without a capacity for pleasure cannot be a moral agent. While this implication is potentially troubling, it also discloses the premium that Hume puts on sentiment and, in particular, on beauty, that have led some to conclude that Hume is merely aestheticizing morality.

Reason, “the discoverer of truth or falsehood,” cannot cause morality, as an active principle can never be founded on an inactive one. “As reason can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it, it cannot be the source of moral good and evil” (Treatise, 3.1.1, 458). Shifting the base of morality from reason to sentiment seems more a logical consideration and less of an arbitrary one. Most unexpectedly, however, the chief sentiment upon which moral judgments are based is beauty. Along with its antithesis, deformity, beauty works analogously in forming both moral and aesthetic judgments. In accordance with Hume’s general theory of sentiments, beauty is said to reside in the judging subject rather than in the object or action being judged. Thus the phrase X is beautiful is mere convention; what we really mean is X causes a feeling of beauty in me. Hume’s starting point here is the unanalyzed fact that humans enjoy perceiving certain objects. Again, such a conviction befits a metaphysician who shows a greater concern with psychology than ontology. As such, we must remain satisfied with the theory that certain qualities of objects are naturally fitted to produce particular feelings in us, even though Hume never offers a systematic account of how this is supposed to work.

In other places, Hume makes the link between beauty and pleasure even stronger. “Pleasure and pain are not only necessary attendants of beauty and deformity, but constitute their very essence” (Treatise, 2.1.8, 299). He says this with regard to beauty construed generally, in both the aesthetic and moral senses. The implication here is that all objects and actions that provoke a response of beauty or disgust are liable to moral or aesthetic valuation. In a sense, he is suggesting that moral and aesthetic judgments are themselves implied by our responses to beauty. That this can be so is partially due to Hume’s inability to entertain a beauty that is purely disinterested (à la Kant) and unattached to a person, object or situation.

Hume suggests a similar treatment of moral and aesthetic beauty in order to arrive at correct judgments. He writes that moral beauty “demands the assistance of our intellectual faculty in order to give it a more suitable influence on the human mind” (EPM 1, 137 / 173). This sentence echoes Hume’s recommendations for qualified judges in the “Taste” essay in its insistence of the intervention of reason in order to broaden its effect. While the feeling of beauty is about immediate sense, morality – though grounded in sentiment – is about intellectual discrimination.

In the Taste essay, Hume admits the impossibility of defining beauty. It isn’t surprising, then, that the definition he gives in the Treatise isn’t all that helpful. In the Treatise he writes that beauty is “such an order and construction of parts” that “is fitted to give a pleasure and satisfaction to the soul” (Treatise, 2.1.8 299). In other words, beauty depends on the arrangement of the parts that appear in an idea. Here, Hume implies that beauty is relative to the object or event itself. Elsewhere, however, Hume in discusses painting stresses qualities of balance and proportion, without which a painting would convey painful ideas. This rather conservative analysis, while in keeping with the artistic conventions of his day, does not necessarily mean that painting that lacks a center of gravity or realistic perspective would be an aesthetic failure. Rather, Hume’s subject-based concept of beauty leaves no reason for us to deny that such a work could produce a feeling of pleasure in one for whom off-kilter compositions is a source of beauty. Hume’s subject-based theory of sentiments implicitly allows for evolving standards of beauty. Does Hume’s theory allow for a similar treatment of morality?

Though Hume does speak of “moral beauty,” he often sets up “virtue” as the ethical correlate to aesthetic beauty. “Virtuous” is the name we give to actions that provide satisfaction. Virtue has the power to produce love and pride, while its antithesis, vice, has the power to produce humility and hatred. This multiplication of sentiments can enter into our moral judgments.

Another base of both aesthetics and morality is pride. Beauty is a universal feeling that produces pleasure in the possessor. Distinct from hubris, pride is a pleasure associated with the idea of oneself and makes one become a source of pleasure to oneself (Treatise, 3.3.1, 627). This needn’t be vanity or hubris: rather, simple pleasure in one’s appearance or one’s possession is a sufficient base for the development of moral sentiments. According to Hume, when your own actions look good to you, this becomes a source of pride, and will inspire you to do more good. This rosy picture of human nature implies that we naturally enjoy performing good actions. Likewise in the case of aesthetics, the pride that one takes in one’s appearance or in the construction of a house lead to an appreciation of beauty in external objects not related to you.

Beauty and deformity, virtue and vice: these are hard and steady distinctions, founded in “natural sentiments of the human mind” which can’t be “controuled or altered by any philosophical theory or speculation whatsoever” (EHU, 8, 80 / p. 103). Thus, Hume sets up very solid, objective-sounding parameters for his sense-based moral and aesthetic theory. His instance that beauty always brings delight and deformity always pain in both “animate or inanimate object{s}” seems to clash with the aforementioned case that we used to illustrate how Hume’s theory can accommodate different standards of beauty (that is, unless we want to say that Beauty can ever stop being beautiful) (Treatise, 2.1.8 298).

In another sense, however, beauty is often relative and can please us in proportion to the favorability of its ends. For Hume, utility is both a moral and aesthetic quality irrespective of whether we actually make use of a given object (Korsmeyer, 207). Like in the painting example above, Hume links utilitarian beauty to formal design in discussing the “order and convenience of a palace” (Treatise, 2.1.8, 299). Hume contends that the palace should give a sense of stability, because otherwise it would merely produce uneasiness in the viewer. For Hume, the suggestion of inutility or operative deficiency is sufficient to influence our aesthetic and moral judgment. In the moral case, this would lead us to act in ways that maximize the benefits for others and ourselves. In the aesthetic case, the suggestion of utility can enhance the beauty we feel towards an object. This relative sense of beauty grounded in hypothetical use-value is one of the quaintest-sounding of Hume’s proposals regards aesthetic judgments. Still, it shows how committed Hume is to extending the analogy between these two cases and makes it more pressing to discover the underlying reason for such a sustained analogy.

Also standing behind our capacity for aesthetic and moral appreciation is sympathy. Sympathy with others brings pleasure and shows our concern for the wellbeing of society. Hume uses the term in an unconventional sense that implies an actual transfer of sentiments from one person to another in a profound and powerful way. The sentiments of others, he writes, can both oppose and encrease our passions. In like manner, we respond automatically to the beauty around us sympathetically and allow it to influence our aesthetic judgments. This raises, however, a perplexing question for the aesthetician: can we ever call the pain or pleasure that a work of art produces morally good or bad?

Having explicated some of the similarities between Hume’s treatment of moral and aesthetic judgments, we should point out the differences between these two types of decision-making. There is a famous quote from the Enquiry when Hume writes, “No man reasons concerning another’s beauty: but frequently concerning the justice or injustice of his actions” (EPM, 1, 135 / 171). This worry gets to the heart of the matter when we’re discussing aesthetic and moral judgments. It also connects to the “Taste” essay and Hume’s defense of the infinite variety of opinions. It also implies a related topic: could we train ourselves morally the same way Hume thinks we can aesthetically?

Before approaching that topic, we need to examine how moral and aesthetic judgments differ. Moral judgments are of greater immediate concern for society. But despite Hume’s admission that men reason about the “justice of [another man’s] actions,” the Hume of the Treatise writes that such judgments are “moral perceptions” rather than “conclusions of reason” (Treatise, 3.1.1 456). The approval and disapproval of character are just perceptions. In distinction, aesthetic judgments, which are of lesser concern to society, do not concern themselves with approval or blame, merely with the felt qualities of beauty that an object can provoke.

Despite this difference, though, Hume feels that we can refine our moral sentiments just like our aesthetic ones. The example he brings to illustrate this point is rather bizarre, He ends by saying that “the more we habituate ourselves to an accurate scrutiny of morals, the more delicate feeling do we acquire of the most minute distinctions between vice and virtue” (EPM, 5, 176 / 217). The language here is very similar to the description of “delicacy of taste” that Hume provides in the Taste essay. Perhaps this is to be expected as both aesthetics and morals depend on the “movement” or stirring of sentiments that are not any inherent qualities in objects but rather “perceptions in the mind” (Treatise, 3.1.1 469).

Thus Hume makes the case for this analogy between the aesthetic and moral cases by showing its logic, utility and elegance. To quote Densby Townshend, “Hume compares moral beauty to natural beauty and ends up with a theory that applies to both” (Townshend, p. 156). One curious side effect of his system, however, is that is becomes very difficult to imagine a morally good person who lacks good taste. On the other hand, Hume foresees a scenario in which the two senses are united: An individual who is both highly morally and aesthetically refined is able to separate out his moral and aesthetic judgments: By deploying both his superior aesthetic and moral judgments, a “man of temper and judgment” would be able to recognize the musicality of an enemy’s voice (Treatise, 3.1.2 472). This example will prove useful much later when we consider the potential confusion between art and morals that can arise as a result of Hume’s system.

Hume shows himself to be much better at psychology than ontology. He is not, however, entirely blind to matters of ontological significance. Hume’s system relies on an understanding of art that can only be concerned with objects, and a morality that is solely concerned with actions.* By bringing Hume’s moral and aesthetic schemes into a closer union, we can understand what exactly is motivating Hume to treat these two seemingly unrelated categories so analogously.

Under Hume’s system, can a work of art be considered morally good or bad? The musical enemy example shows that it is possible to separate out own moral from our aesthetic judgments: it does not, however, help us decide whether a work of art could be considered moral in the same sense that it might be considered beautiful. However, for all its parallels to the aesthetic system, Hume’s moral system is restricted to the realm of action. Even in the case in which a work of art could provoke a morally dubious action (and Hume is willing to allow such examples), it seems doubtful that the artwork itself could ever be labeled morally bad. The inherent inability or inaccessibility of moral categories to inanimate objects would insure that morality remains in the domain of action.

What then do we make of the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s proclamation that the 9/11 attacks were “the greatest work of art in the cosmos?” Is there something morally blamable about this type of aesthetic judgment? Or can we blame the composer for making an aesthetic judgment in lieu of a moral one? As we have seen, both moral and aesthetic judgments have an essentially sentimental basis. The musical enemy example suggests that Hume feels that it is possible have an aesthetic feeling of beauty and a moral feeling of deformity at the same time. The reason for this, Hume would conclude, is that you’re judging two different types of thing simultaneously. For all their implied similarities and common bases, aesthetic and moral judgments are two very different perspectives on human existence. These two sides of our faculty of judgment are analyzed analogously in a large cross-section of Hume’s writing. However, judging from the results of his own system, it appears that the philosopher is committed to keeping these two realms very separate. Art and action can move us strongly. This “movement” of our sentiments, regardless of the perceived similarities and proximities, is fundamentally different in each of these cases. The difference between morality and aesthetics is therefore a categorical one for Hume.

Hume admits that art can stir one to action in such instances when the moral sentiments are already excited. Furthermore, he acknowledges the power of art, “the raptures of poetry and music frequently rise to the greatest heights” and that cathartic power of poetry (Treatise, 2.1.1, 276; EPM, 263). But a violent reaction to a work of art remains aesthetic in nature. Such a reaction can never become moral. Even in cases when the emotional force of a performance would inspire someone to go out and commit a crime, Hume would resist connecting an immoral action to an aesthetic experience and label it a confusion arising from the conflation of objects and actions.

Hume illustrates these two sides to our faculty of judgment and a robust distinction emerges. We are moved by our sentiments to respond morally to a given situation or action. When an object moves our sentiments, however, the resulting response will be aesthetic in nature. The chain of analogous reasoning that Hume sets up between the moral and aesthetic cases is pretty suggestive of understanding both judgments as essentially the same power, just applied to different things. While this might appear at first glance to lead to moral and aesthetic confusion, it in fact provides a very compelling argument for the exact opposite: for separating art and morality. By doing so, Hume’s system can be harnessed to rid us of a slew of thorny aesthetics-related questions – Can the Mona Lisa be appreciated morally? Can abortion be judged aesthetically? – by insisting on a clean division between moral and aesthetic judgments.

On the second page of the Enquiry, Hume writes that the ancients “seem to consider morals as deriving their existence from taste and sentiment.” Hume says he wants to get back to such a view, which is opposed by the modern approach, where “metaphysical reasonings” and “abstract principles” have led to confusion on the subject of “the beauty of virtue and the deformity of vice” (EPM, 1, sect. 134). By examining ethics and aesthetics analogously, Hume is restoring this ancient link and providing a psychologically based explanation for our behavior and judgments as they relate to actions and inanimate objects. While he never works out a comprehensive aesthetic system, the same way he does for ethics, he uses his ethical theory to enrich his aesthetic one and grant the latter autonomy.

In attempting to explain human nature comprehensively using the fewest possible terms, Hume also wants to show that the same basic principles underlie both our objective and subjective judgments. Hume’s theory of judgments provides a way to sort our potential ethical and aesthetic confusions. Identifying the common traits that inhere in both types of judgments makes it easier to distinguish between the two. Hume helps eliminate the age-old suspicion of art operating clandestinely under the aegis of morality or immorality that caused Plato to expel the artists from his Republic*. By pointing out the common basis for these two types of judgments, Hume is revealing our mistaken reasons for wanting to conflate the two and giving us a way of differentiating between them. Once we recognize that the similarities in the structures of both these types of judgments can themselves lead to a confusion between aesthetics and ethics, we’ll know better than to ascribe moral judgments onto art and aesthetic judgments onto issues of morality. Acknowledging these commonalities has the effect of providing an argument for art as connected to life: aesthetic judgment is made the twin-sister of moral judgment where aesthetic judgments are object-based and moral judgments pertain only to action.

By basing both types of judgments in sentiment over reason, Hume’s analysis can help erase the false conflation of art and morality. Hume wants to preserve this fundamental distinction even as he insists on the structural similarities between moral and aesthetic judgments. These similarities pertain to beauty, utility and sympathy. By basing both judgment types in sentiment and passion, Hume is relating aesthetics and morality to experience and tangible results.

It is a fact of human nature that we all have the capacity for aesthetic and moral judgments, senses of artistic and moral beauty. Ultimately, we are left with the question of what role education and culture can play in the cultivation of a man’s aesthetic and moral judgments. Do we cultivate morals the same way in which we cultivate taste? Is a consequence of this system is that a philistine couldn’t be a moral person? The implication is yes, that we can refine the detection or stimulation of sentiments that stay the same. We need to recognize, however, the ontological differences. The capacity for making moral and aesthetic judgments is hardwired in us. Our moral sense comes more naturally because we act as moral agents all the time while we’re only aesthetic agents in the concert-hall or at the museum. Hume has some idea of human perfectibility. With sufficient training and practice, we can discern between good and evil, beauty and deformity, and aesthetics and ethics.

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Bibliography:

n.b – I have consulted two edition of the “Treatise.” Page numbers, where they appear refer to the Selby-Bigges edition.

Cohen, Ralph “David Humes Experimental Method and the Theory of Taste,” EHL, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Dec. 1958), pp. 270-289

Gracyk, Theodore A., “Rethinking Hume’s Standard of Taste” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 2. (Spring, 1994) pp. 169-182

Halberstadt, Willian H. “A Problem in Hume’s Aesthetics” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Winter 1971), pp. 209-214

Hume, David A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978

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Hume, David A Treatise Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Ernest C. Mossner. Penguin Books: Middlesex, 1985


Hume, David “Enquiry into the Principles of Morals,” in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988

Hume, David “Of the Standard of Taste” in Selected Essays, ed. Copley and Edgar. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998 (pp. 133 -153)

Jones, Peter “Another Look at Hume’s Views of Aesthetic and Moral Judgments,” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 20, No. 78. (Jan., 1970), pp. 53-59

Korsmeyer, Carolyn W. “Hume and the Foundations of Taste,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 1976), pp. 201-215

Sugg Jr., Redding S. “Humes Search for the Key with the Leathern Thong” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Sep., 1957), pp. 96-102.

Townsend, Dabney. Hume’s Aesthetic Theory. London: Routledge. 2001

The Well Announced Sound of the Stradivarius

Nelson Goodman and Theodor Adorno on the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic merit.

This paper uses the thought of Theodor W. Adorno and Nelson Goodman to elucidate the relationship between authenticity and aesthetic merit. While these are issues pertinent to all artistic media, my discussion with focus specifically on the example of music. Both thinkers address this issue from very different angles. Goodman commits himself to offering an ontology of art based on semantic considerations, while Adorno’s criticism is far more historically and socially rooted and takes more into account the reception of a given artwork. Goodman does not find any universally-binding link between the authenticity and aesthetic merit of a work of art. In distinction, Adorno’s entire discourse implies that the two are inherently linked. Where Goodman consciously resists making value judgments, Adorno expresses highly pointed and acerbic criticisms.
In “The Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” Adorno offers a critique of modern music and of the musicality of modern man. It is debatable whether Adorno is entirely sincere in his sweeping condemnations as the polemical force of his rhetoric can obscure his message. For the purposes of this essay, I will engage seriously with Adorno’s criticisms as if they are meant in earnest. To my mind, the specificity of his targets and the stringent application of Marxist and Lukacsian ideas suggest that Adorno is offering more than a caricature of an arch-conservative stance.
Though Adorno rarely, if ever, speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric implies a discourse of authenticity that will allow us to link his essay to Goodman’s. In fact, we can read Goodman on fakes and forgeries as a response to Adorno’s discussion about the pernicious effects of modern musical practices on the ontological status of musical works. Goodman would find Adorno’s view of arrangements as instances of musical fraud aesthetically unsatisfactory. We can view his chapter on Art and Authenticity as his attempt to arrive at a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between originals and copies.

There are two parts to Adorno’s essay. In the first, he addresses the adverse changes is music and musical performance in modern times. In the sequel, he addresses the reception of such music in a world where the arrested development of the human ear prevents sophisticated listening. Adorno addresses such issues as the shrinking repertoire of music that is found on concert programs and the fetishism attached to particular voices and instruments, the tyranny of the Maestro and the fetishization of concert tickets. All these lead to a “mistaken view of art” that turns the audience into consumers who react, the same way to “Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or to a bikini” if at all (p. 278).
One can read a discourse of authenticity into a great deal of what Adorno writes about mass music and how it is received, but there are a few points where comparison with Goodman seems especially fruitful. These include Adorno’s discussion of musical arrangements and the barbarism of perfection; additionally, Adorno’s discourse of authenticity implies an ideal listener who could detect the authenticity or fraud of any performance.
Arrangements, Adorno writes, have pretensions to authenticity and can confuse the public in its approbation of art. The “vulgarization” of music spread by popular arrangements has “colonized large areas of music” (p. 281). Arrangements create a false totality and promote the reification of a musical work by taking “the reified bits and pieces out of their context and sets them up as a potpourri. It destroys the multilevel unity of the whole work and brings forward only isolated passages” (p. 281). Adorno’s analysis shows that he is unwilling to accept popular arrangements as works in their own rights: merely as bastardized musical commodities. He links the popularity of arrangements to the popular demand that musical works be appropriatable. This, however, is an insistence runs contrary to the music’s nature for, “A Beethoven symphony as a whole, spontaneously experienced, can never be appropriated” (p. 281).
Most strikingly – and puzzlingly – Adorno suggests that the vulgarization of music can actually affect its ontology. He asserts that “the works which are the basis of the fetishization and become cultural goods experience constitutional changes as a result.” This is a move that Goodman would resist entirely, since he separates the theory from the practice of art. Adorno discusses these changes in heavily-valenced language: “They become vulgarized. Irrelevant consumption destroys them.” The false totality that is created by over-exposure stands in for the true “organization of the whole” that the listener fails to grasp. In this way, the internal structure of the musical work is threatened by reification. The incorrect reception and appropriation of art can, therefore, be harmful to the artwork itself. This point helps explain Adorno’s insistence on authenticity as a marker of aesthetic merit (p. 281).
At the other end of the spectrum is the ideal performance whose pretenses to authenticity contribute to music’s reification. Adorno analyzes the “iron disciple” of ideal performances. He compares this “new fetish” to a perfectly-oiled apparatus that produces mechanized accounts of musical works that are devoid of meaningful content. “Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification.” He sums up his analysis as follows: “It presents it as already complete from the very first note” (p. 284). Here, the exaggerated claim to authenticity affects the aesthetic value of the performance. The barbarism of perfection with its exaggerated claim to authenticity is inimical to the aesthetic value of the musical work.
The stance and tone that Adorno adopts throughout the piece often implies an ideal listener (the author, perhaps) who is able to appreciate the music stripped of its fetish-character caused by reification. One could level an elitist charge against Adorno for holding that the “capacity for conscious perception of music” was “from time immemorial confined to a narrow group” (p. 286). This notion implies that there are “authentic” and “inauthentic” modes of listening. Adorno perpetuates a view where the authenticity of art is bound up with the availability of qualified critics that resist the regressive listening that affects the collective ear of society.
While Adorno allows a glimmer of hope for the future (with Schoenberg, Webern and the Marx Brothers), his general tone is one of pessimism. He writes that “as a result of the displacement of feelings into exchange value, no demands are really advanced in music anymore” (p. 290). This type of point is very different from many earlier one. Instead of telling us what art is, he is telling us what art no longer can be. We’ve come to accept the barbarism of perfection and the vulgarity of arrangements so uncritically that all that we can accept are substitutes for genuine works of art. “Substitutes satisfy their purpose as well, because the demand to which they adjust themselves has itself already been substituted.” Here, Adorno links the false demands of capitalism to the false substitutes of mass music.

We find a very different view of the relation between authenticity and aesthetic merit in Goodman. Unlike Adorno, Goodman is concerned with theories of ontology rather than modes of reception. He resists the notion of an ideal listener and that a work of art’s reception can result in “constitutional change.” He is entirely opposed to Adorno’s notion of such change as brought about when art becomes a cultural good. Unlike Adorno, he thinks that modes of reception can never alter the ontological status of an artwork. He would also object to Adorno’s claim that music has become “vulgarized” through arrangement and the barbarism of perfection.
While much of Goodman’s discussion of Art and Authenticity is devoted to painting, Goodman asks what it might mean to produce a forgery in music. Goodman answer constitutes a discussion of authenticity, aesthetic merit and purity of performance that hearkens back to Adorno’s essay. Goodman’s discussion about fakes and forgeries vis-à-vis painting shows the difficulty of basing aesthetic judgments on arguments about authenticity. For Goodman, one need not imply the other: it is perfectly reasonable for a fake or copy to have a greater aesthetic impact than the original on which it is based. This is very much in contrast to Adorno, for whom authenticity is directly linked to aesthetic merit.
Goodman holds that aesthetic experience depends on more than what merely meets the eye. A work of art carries with it the entire history of its conception and production, including non-visual qualities that can make an aesthetic difference in how we come to appreciate or understand a given work of art. Goodman’s insistence on taking into account a work’s history and non-visual qualities, leads him to conclude that “a forgery of a work of art is an object falsely purporting to have the history of production requisite for the (or an) original of the work” (p. 122). The case is somewhat different when we turn to music, which Goodman says cannot be faked in quite the same way as painting.
Goodman distinguishes between autographic and allographic art. Autographic art is art were the difference between an original and a forgery is significant, such as in painting. However, in allographic art, such as music, the difference between an original and a forgery is not intrinsically significant (p.113). Goodman tries to get at a more nuanced and sophisticated account of the relationship between these two types of art. He suggests that all art started out as autographic and certain genres became allographic by developing a language or notational system in order to transcend the limits of the individual and of time (p. 120). While it makes little sense to speak of a forgery of a Beethoven symphony, Goodman allows that a performance of Beethoven’s fifth can be said to be inauthentic is if contains a false note or is performed by a fraudulent musician or a fraudulent instrument.
Both Goodman and Adorno use the Stradivarius as illustrative examples of their theory. In discussing the fetish attached to voices, tickets and instruments, Adorno writes about how an audience “goes into raptures at the well-announced sound of a Stradivarius or Amati” (p. 277). For Adorno, the “cult of the master violins” illustrates how the fetish character of musical performance makes “conscious perception of music” impossible.
Goodman is up to something very different when he brings in his own Stradivarius example to illustrate what a forgery of a musical performance might look like. The hypothetical he presents is of a performer claims falsely to be playing a Stradivarius. Such a performance would count as a forgery, “not of the musical composition, but of a given performance or class of performances” (p. 118). But on the next page, Goodman reminds us “not to confuse genuineness with aesthetic merit. That the distinction between original and forgery is aesthetically important does not mean, as we have seen, that the original is superior to the forgery” (p. 119). In other words, to base aesthetic judgment solely on a work’s authenticity would be as wrong for Goodman, as going into raptures at the well-announced sound of the Stradivarius would be for Adorno.
Goodman provocatively asks about the status of a musical performance that contains one wrong note. Can this be said to be a genuine or authentic instantiation of the composer’s idea, and hence, a genuine performance? Though Goodman admits that conventionally we would affirm this suspicion, the theory complicates matters. Goodman uses the example to pose an aesthetic conundrum and show how “ordinary usage gets us quickly into trouble” (p. 186). Since a performance of a musical work is an instantiation of the composer’s musical idea made intelligible through a series of notational markings on a score, a performance with one wrong note could not, theoretically speaking, be considered an authentic instance of that work. Hence, “Beethoven’s Fifth” would become “Beethoven’s Fifth plus an extra G flat.” Goodman maintains this position so that Beethoven’s Fifth cannot morph into Three Blind Mice via a success of tiny alterations, à la Sorites’ Paradox (p. 186).
Undercutting – or at least complicating - the possibility of authenticity in musical performance is the example of musical conventions such as cadenzas and figured bass. In these instances, nominal musical notation serves as a basic guideline for musical performance (p. 184). Goodman throws this our way in order to remind us of even the difficulty of making judgments regarding authenticity in the first place, even before we begin to judge a music work for its aesthetic merit. Thus, he provides a compelling justification for divorcing questions of genuineness from questions of value.
In fact, Goodman allows that a technically incorrect performance of a musical work could in fact be superior to a technically perfect one. “An incorrect performance, though therefore not strictly an instance of a given quartet at all, may nevertheless – either because the changes improve what the composer wrote or because of sensitive interpretation – be better than a correct performance” (p. 120). So thorough is the line that Goodman draws between authenticity and aesthetic merit that he allows an ontologically non-genuine instantiation of a musical work to be the aesthetically superior one.

What accounts for the fact that these two thinkers are at opposite ends of the interpretive spectrum is the vastly different natures of their projects. While Goodman offers up ontology of art in semantic terms that will be universally binding, Adorno has a very definite target: music made vulgar by commodity fetishism and by reification. And though Adorno never speaks in terms of forgeries and fakes, his rhetoric abounds with concepts such as “purity” and “vulgarity,” which implies a latent discourse of authenticity.
Goodman’s analytic approach shows the problematic nature of value theory. His discussion of autographic versus allographic art can be helpful in trying to differentiate ontologically between various genres but is thoroughly impotent as far as making judgments is concerned. Adorno, on the other hand, provides us with a radical and perhaps overstated case for supposing that the value of art is bound up in the authenticity of the artistic product.
Whereas Adorno constantly asserts that the commoditized musical product is a debased aesthetic work, Goodman tirelessly advocates separating value judgments from questions of authenticity. Thus, when Adorno writes that “appearance is no longer valid as verification of essence” it is in a spirit of disenchantment (p. 285). Goodman agrees with Adorno that it is impossible to verify art’s essence via mere looking or listening: he just doesn’t think it’s a bad thing.

Bibliography:

Adorno, Theodor W. “The Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening” in Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism (pp. 270-299)

Goodman, Nelson Languages of Art (pp. 99-123, & 177- 192)

Art and the Public

We now leave the Frankfurt School with their irritating insistence on a connection between art and politics, and journey to the purely aesthetical concerns of Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty.

Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty both reject the Romantic notion of the artist summoning up his private ruminations and reflections to share them with the world. In his own way, each thinker postulates a communion that occurs between the artist and his public. Both advocate breaking the barrier between artist and public and allowing the public to have a hand in the creation of art howbeit in very different ways. To understand their arguments, it’s essential to understand that both hold art has little to do with mimesis. As Merleau-Ponty writes: “Art is not imitation, nor is it something manufactured according to the wishes of instinct or good taste. It is a process of expressing” (p. 17).
Merleau-Ponty also sees art as essentially a communicative enterprise. In the prologue to Sense and Non-Sense, he writes: “[T]he work of art begins to transmit an uninterrupted message.” But it becomes clear that his views on the matter are a far cry from Collingwood’s. “But the meaning of the work for the artist or the public cannot be stated except by the work itself: neither the thought which created it nor the thought which receives it is completely its own master” (p. 4). Thus, there is no message standing behind the artwork that can be divorced and independently toted around. The proof is in the pudding.
Who’s an artist? “The artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most men take part without really seeing it and who make it visible to the most ‘human’ among them” (18). Again, we detect the quasi-religious register of what he’s saying. The communion undertaken is almost mystical in its effectiveness and uniqueness and ineffability. Regarding this transformative originality, Merleau-Ponty writes: “he speaks as the first man spoke and paints as if no one had ever painted before…‘Conception’ cannot precede ‘execution’….he returns to the source of silent and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas have been built in order to know it” (p. 19).
Collingwood lingers on Eliot and calls “The Waste Land” the one great English poem of the century. He even returns to it at the end of the book and his reading of the poem furnishes Collingwood an elegiac and powerful coda. Merleau-Ponty looks to Cézanne’s paintings for an explanation of his life and theory of art. He focuses on the artists constant doubts regarding the success of his art. For since he was not omniscient, how could he hope to create universally valid work that expresses the world? He essayed to encapsulate the whole of experience in a brush-stroke.
As an example of “pure poetry“The Waste Land,” as an example of “pure poetry” teaches us what art must contain if it is to rise above the levels of entertainment and magic. “It must be prophetic” in the sense that it tells the audience “the secrets of their own hearts.” Here, Collingwood shatters romantic notions of what art means to artist. In doing so, he brings art into a more kinetic and alive symbiosis with the audience. “What he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets.” Rather, the artist becomes the “spokesman of his community.” He is necessary because “no community altogether knows its own heart and by failing in this knowledge a community deceives itself on the one subject concerning which ignorance means death. For the evils which come from that ignorance, the poet as prophet suggests no remedy, because he has already given one. The remedy is the poem itself. Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (pp. 335-6).
On the one hand, the example he makes of the “Waste Land” shows that “pure” art acquires meaning when the prophetic potential of the poet is realized. Is this way, art functions – ought to function – as social critique. Thus, while Collingwood seems to ennoble the audience, he also diminishes their import. The prophetic function of the poet is part of what makes art “pure,” but it also deprives the public of any choice in the matter. The public remains an anonymous receiver of the poet’s condemnation and the cure. It’s tough medicine to swallow.
For Collingwood, then, the artist is to take on the role as a “public spokesman” who both diagnoses society and provides the antidote. The antidote is in the work of art itself. “Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of the mind, the corruption of consciousness” (p. 336). Art, thus, is imbued with a critical social function in Collingwood’s system. The implication of this interpretation is that the antidote to a dead society is more art. Collingwood makes art curative. Could there be a more direct interaction between art and audience?
Collingwood uses “The Waste Land” to show that art must become prophetic if it wants to be more than merely entertainment or magic. It must condemn and warn and tell the audience the “secrets of their own hearts.” Here, we learn that the artist must be a man of his time and it touch with his public in a way that puts him in position of prominence. This is very different from what Merleau-Ponty has in mind. Yet Merleau-Ponty would agree with Collingwood when he goes against the Romantic concept of the artist by saying that, “what he has to utter is not, as the individualistic theory of art would have us think, his own secrets” (p. 335).
To be certain, Collingwood allows that letting the audience share in the aesthetic experience is potentially enriching for a said work of art. Following from his earlier arguments, Collingwood writes: “The aesthetic activity is an activity of thought in the form of consciousness, converting into imagination an experience which, apart from being so converted, is sensuous.” This activity is one in which an entire community participates: the artist or collective of artists, all his forbearers and the audience. These relations “strengthen and enrich” his work. Thus the audience is “not merely receptive, but collaborative too” (p. 324). But as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty takes the idea of audience-participation much further, by postulating that the audience’s interaction with the artwork is essential if it meaning is to be revealed.
There is a striking similarity in the optimism of both Merleau-Ponty and Collingwood. Both feel that art is capable of transforming society. For Collingwood, this is a curative function that art performs through behaving like prophecy. For Merleau-Ponty, the example of Cézanne, succeeding despite all his doubts, gives man hope. We can win if we accurately measure our “dangers and our task.”
In discussing Cézanne’s project, Merleau-Ponty’s language has an almost-religious quality at times. In distinction to Collingwood, he considers art to express the ineffable. As he writes: “The meaning of a work of art or of a theory is as inseparable from its embodiment as the meaning of a tangible thing – which is why the meaning can never be fully expressed” (p. 3): “Cézanne felt powerless because he wanted to express everything and yet was not God, as not omnipotent. He wanted to ‘make visible how the world touches us” (p. 19). Furthermore, Cézanne was impelled to express the meaning that lay hidden in objects: “Cézanne merely expressed what they (the objects{ wanted to say” (p. 21).
As such, Cézanne’s paintings express something hitherto unsaid. “The painter captures and converts into visible objects what would, without him, remain walled up in the separate life of each consciousness: the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things” (pp. 17-18). This is a move that Collingwood seems to resist. Instead, he writes that the poet more generally represents an experience. “The poet converts human experience into poetry not by first expurgating it, cutting out the intellectual elements and preserving the emotional, and then expressing this residue; but by fusing thought itself into emotion: thinking in a certain way and then expressing how it feels to think in that way” (p. 295). The ideal state that we reach is the “total imaginative experience.”
Fascinatingly enough, in discussing the “total imaginative experience,” Collingwood – writing ten years before Merleau-Ponty - takes Cézanne as his exemplar: “Cézanne began to paint like a blind man,” and showed the world that painting wasn’t a visual art since “Man paints with his hands, not with his eyes” (p. 144). But while they both hold Cezanne in high esteem, their views on how the audience partakes of the aesthetic experience have some crucial differences.
Though he claims that it’s impossible to read an artist’s work off his life, Merleau-Ponty doesn’t go as far as some later thinkers will. Ingeniously, he says that instead of reading an artist’s works off his life, we read his life off his works: “If Cézanne’s life seems to us to carry the seeds of his work within it, it is because we get to know his work first and see the circumstances of his life through it, charging them with a meaning borrowed from his work” (p. 20).
Merleau-Ponty seems to afford the public more power and decision-making authority than Collingwood. By empowering the audience’s role for the success of the artist and the artwork, Merleau-Ponty situates the artwork halfway between the creator and the receiver. In contrast, Collingwood is content to let art be the intellectualizing of emotion, which therefore makes it possible for Eliot to so effectively communicate society’s own secrets to itself.
His project, therefore, to “make visible how the world touches us” amounts to another perspective on viewing the world, if one with a strong affinity to philosophy. Though Merleau-Ponty doesn’t explicitly advance a relation-theory between the two in this essay, his entire project for this essay can be interpreted as a move to turn art into philosophy: to derive a metaphysics from art. Indeed, the implications that art holds for him indicate that a metaphysics lies behind every theory of painting (too strong!). But whereas Merleau-Ponty endorses and works off of this linkage, (this is perhaps just an axiom of his) Collingwood – also aware of its force – attempts to differentiate art from philosophy.
Cézanne’s work is rich with interpretive possibility. It can have radical even cataclysmic implications: for instance revealing “the base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself” (p. 16). \This is the sort of radical meaning that a Cézanne painting can have and we understand. Art is far from impotent. As Collingwood says of the “Waste Land”: it expresses “the idea (not his alone) of the decay of our civilization, manifested outwardly by the breakdown of social structures and inwardly as a drying up of the emotional springs of life” (295), Merleau-Ponty finds similarly chilling meaning into Cézanne’s work: however, whereas it matters little to Collingwood whether or not this meaning is successfully communicated (it only matters what Eliot wrote with the intention of communicating), the artwork isn’t complete for Merleau-Ponty until its meaning has been successfully communicated.
A good reader or critic who follows the “obscure clarity” of a particular artist’s style, will discover “what the artist wanted to communicate” (pp. 19 -20). But he goes even further and suggests that the audience takes part in the work’s creation: “The painter can do no more than construct an image: he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives” (p. 19-20).
The most crucial point is that Cézanne for Merleau-Ponty isn’t the prophet that Eliot is for Collingwood. Rather, Cézanne is less of a preacher and more of a guide. The artist has been brought down to a very base, human level. Merleau-Ponty, therefore, is breaking from the Romantic tradition even more forcefully than Collingwood.
Where Eliot is a preacher, Cézanne is a visionary guide. In both of these cases, freedom is what allows the artist to communicate with his public. Furthermore, the logical consequence of this is that through the artwork, freedom is communicated to the public. By communicating freedom to the public, the artist endows them with the critical apparatus to appreciate his work. The relation between art and public couldn’t be more collaborative. “Yet, it was in the world that he had to realize his freedom, with colors upon a canvas. It was on the approval of others that he had to
wait for the proof of his worth” (p. 25). For Collingwood reading Eliot, the only option in the face of the death of civilization is to create more art. For Merleau-Ponty interpreting Cézanne, in the face of potential failure, the only option is to strive to create.

***

Bibliography:

Collingwood, R.C. The Principles of Art

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice Sense and Non-Sense

Changing Technologies, Altered Perceptions and the Call to Action

Yet again, an essay that deals with using aesthetic representation to achieve political ends. This time with technology thrown in.

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer take the developing technologies of film and photography seriously. Both thinkers find in these new media of technological reproduction the potential for a radical shift in thought and human perception. While Kracauer does inject some social criticism, the political content of his essay, “Photography” is tamer than the up-front, revolutionary attitude we find in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” Both thinkers give voice to epistemological speculations that accompany their assessments of technology in shaping and reshaping human perception and leading to revolutionary action.
Kracauer sees a dialectic operating between memory and technical reproducibility: “memory images are at odds with photographic representation,” as competing bearers of truth content (p. 50). In turn, photographic images have the power to create and shape memory. This is just one of many ways that technology threatens to alter perception. With photography “a person’s history in buried as if under a layer of snow” (p. 51). Photography’s increasing power to alter consciousness and perception, and its insidious wiggling into to the memory image, threatens to alter our perception for the worse, concealing and obscuring the true nature of things by insisting too strongly on their mere appearance (p. 51).
Having voiced this danger, Kracauer gangs up on the illustrated newspapers, in which he sees technology as changing people’s perception for the worse. The illustrated newspapers aim for “the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (p. 57 – 58). They represent reality “from every possible angle.” Kracauer is very mistrusting of this overabundance of images and disparages the illustrated magazines for their superficial depictions of reality, and the ascendancy of the spatial over the temporal. Somewhat histrionically, he claims that “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” thus articulating the danger that photography poses. “The spatial continuum from the camera’s perspective dominates the spatial appearance of he perceived object; the resemblance between the image and the object effaces the contours of the object’s ‘history.’” His conclusion is emphatically dire: “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against the understanding” (p. 58).
Nothing is innocent about these illustration magazines. Even the layout is reactionary, as the “contiguity” of images precludes the possibility of them penetrating consciousness the way memory does. The illustrated responds to the fear of death by representing the world as a “photographable present” that has been “entirely eternalized” (p. 59). If the illustrated magazines represent to Kracauer a counterrevolutionary mode of replicating and envisioning reality, the antidote is to be found in film. At this junction Kracauer’s tract, which started out as an innocent ontology of photography, gains the character of political manifesto.
With more than a little Romantic wistfulness, Kracauer discusses the role of the symbol in nature and how it is altered by representation. His conclusion rounds out a political theory. “No different from earlier modes of representation, photography, too, is assigned to a particular developmental stage of practical and material life. It is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production. The same mere nature which appears in photography flourishes is the reality of the society produced by this capitalist mode of production.” Kracauer’s conclusion is that photography needs to become progressive via film and play the “go-for-broke game of history” (p. 61). In contrast to the illustrated magazines, which are an analogue to the historicist film fantasy and seek merely to cheapen memory with a proliferation of images, film can alter reality by its fantastical techniques and elements. This is something that can be used for political ends.
The serious and progressive function performed by abstract, non-mimetic film is librating to the masses. “A consciousness caught up in nature is unable to see its own material base. It is the task of photography to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature. For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings.”
He addresses the ways in which photography has altered perception in such a way as can be harnessed for political ends. “Photography shows cities in aerial shots, brings crockets and figures down from gothic cathedrals…The photographic archive assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning” (p. 62). This “warehousing of nature” has the power to provoke “confrontation in every field.”
His hope at the end of the essay for film to carry on this go-for-broke-game of history is linked to film’s dream-like nature. “The capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film. This possibility is realized whenever film combines parts and segments to create strange constructs. If the disarray of the illustrated newspapers is simply confusion, the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of daily life become jumbled” ( pp. 62 – 63). Thus, Kracauer ends his essay by privileging montage and surrealistic proclivities in film. He revolts against the realistic and merely mimetic uses of photography, finding proto-revolutionary practice in abstract and artificial art. There is an interesting connection to the expressionism debate here. Kracauer’s position allies him with Benjamin in his essay.
Benjamin’s essay has a more overtly political intent than Kracauer’s. If Kracauer’s text starts from purely aesthetic propositions and then develops into a political project, Benjamin starts and finishes his essay with political proclamations, peppers the argument with various political observations and anecdotes, but nowhere develops a sustained political argument.
One key difference is that Benjamin plays closer attention to the mode of aesthetic reception than Kracauer. Benjamin attaches importance to the ways that technology has changed the reception of art in the modern age. He uses examples both of the photography and the gramophone: “The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room” (p. 103).
Benjamin is clearly less interested in offering a pure ontology along the lines of Kracauer. He analyzes the loss of the aura and diagnoses it as a social necessity. Technologically reproducible art loses its here-and-nowness and substitutes a “mass existence for a unique one” (p. 104), which is responsible for the decline of the auratic. In film, Benjamin finds both a desire and a promise to liquidate the traditions of a culture. A limitation of Benjamin’s thought is that he doesn’t consider the mirror image of this possibility: the creation of a new culture through propaganda.
Benjamin is more explicit that Kracauer in asserting the relationship between changes in human perception and social changes. To explain the decay of the aura, Benjamin looks for a “social basis.” The decline reflects the mass’ desire to “get closer to things” and “overcome each thing’s uniqueness” (p. 105). For Benjamin, technology can respond to social needs by altering perception. Reproducible art represents a social desire to find the sameness in what is unique; thus, he interprets technology as aligning reality with the masses and vice versa.
Tracing the social history of the photograph through the aesthetic movements of the 19th century, he discusses the crucial role that photography played in the formulating of l’art pour l’art by severing art from its basis in cult. With film, technology finds a way to reinvigorate art: film can re-enfranchise art and imbue it with political relevance and power. By altering perception based on social need, art is rendered serviceable to revolutionary goals. By making the masses aware of their own alienation and estrangement, film can become a powerful weapon. This means that film can become a powerful weapon. As he writes, film, which contains “new social opportunities, is being clandestinely exploited in the interest of a property-owning minority” (p. 115). The task is to wrest the cinema from this property-owning minority and harness it for revolutionary ends.
Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the “hitherto unimaginable spectacle” of film connects to Kracauer’s totalizing historicist cinematic fantasy. Benjamin discusses in detail the various film techniques that can alter our modes of perception, such as close-ups and slow motion, techniques which “bring to light entirely new structures of matter.” Of slow motion, he writes that it “not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them – aspects “which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.” The film-sphere resembles a dream; the camera discovers the optical unconscious. “This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (p. 117). This analogy between optical and instinctual unconscious is perhaps the strongest indication in the text of the radical and revolutionary potential film has for altering human perception.
Benjamin claims that film has affected a Fourth Copernican Revolution. He describes the unconscious eye of the camera as an instrument for collective dreaming. He is advancing a pawn on the chessboard of Kracauer’s go-for-broke-game. While Benjamin anticipates the dangers of technology in mass media, he sees positive uses for it; for instance; as “psychic immunization against…mass psychoses,” through practices like collective laughter. (p. 118)
Benjamin’s discussion of Dada as a forerunner of film shows that he sees film’s revolutionary potential residing not merely in its mimetic usage, but in its capacity for abstraction and surrealism as well. He applauds the aggressive assault and irreverence of the Dadaists, their “ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced” and their commitment “to outrage the public.” When Benjamin writes about the “successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator” he endorses montage for its revolutionary potential, much like Kracauer does.
My subject here has been how Kracauer and Benjamin envisage the political implications of the changes in perception that arise from new media and technology. For the purposes of this paper, I have concentrated on those elements of their arguments that directly pertain to the topic at hand, since neither Kracauer nor Benjamin offers a top-down, systematic argumentative chain, but rather a constellation of arguments that work with varying success.
It is remarkable how fresh these arguments sound even today. The passion and rigor with which they quarrel and theorize about these technologies would have you believe that cinema and photography had only recently been invented. In fact, both technologies had undergone significant and extensive experimentation and change by this time. And while some of what they say might strike us as backwards and wrongheaded, we can still learn a lot from them in our own over-technologized epoch. At the same time, we eagerly need the Benjamins and Kracauers of the present age to analyze and diagnose the effects and implications of art in the digital age.

Popularity in the Balance

With this post we say goodbye to the stuffy 1800s and turn to examine the Expressionism Debate between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht. This is, incidentally, the first essay were the connection between politics and aesthetics is made explicit...

Nowadays, “popular” is a dirty word. It signifies for us whatever caters to the lowest common denominator, appealing with cheap ease to our emotions. This distrust of the popular is hardly anything new. So it may strike us as peculiar to find Brecht and Lukács arguing heatedly about popularity, both as an aesthetic and a political category.

In Lukács’ essay (“Realism in the Balance”) and Brecht’s direct response, (“Against Georg Lukács”) emerge a debate about the nature of popularity in art that is itself a vehicle for revolutionary change. This paper examines Lukács’ notion of the “great social mission of literature” in relation to Brecht’s “aggressive concept of what is popular.” This debate amounts to more than a quarrel about tactics. Indeed, framed within the context of Lukács’ theory of literature and Brecht’s less systematic theories as a playwright and dramaturge, this popularity debate has implications about the nature and limits of art itself. We shall determine the issues on which these two thinkers most greatly diverge, on which they most closely agree and where they ultimately rest.

The ways in which both Lukács and Brecht define the limits of accessibility points to their
broader agendas. It isn’t merely that Brecht is willing to give the masses more credit while Lukács uses their simplemindedness to buffer his reactionary argument against Expressionism. Indeed, Lukács’ definition of the popular in entrenched is his theory of the supremacy of the realist novel. Brecht’s own views are part and parcel a reflection of his own agenda as a man of the theater first, and a Marxist second.

Writing in a broader context of revealing proto-fascism latent in Expressionism, Lukács distinguished between popular art and “genuinely popular culture” The art he sees as “genuine popular culture,” has an explicit link to the program of the Popular Front (p. 57). Genuine is used to distinguish revolutionary works from the merely popular consumables represented by the Krimi. The reason Lukács provides for drawing this distinction has to do with the current difficulty of defining the popular. According to Lukács, capitalism has introduced a feeling of political and economic uncertainty into the world and confused people’s moral and artistic judgments. The exact transformation is not really spelled out. In addition to the Krimi, he excludes contemporary fads in art from being genuinely popular. Rather, the only art that can become genuinely popular are works that live up to what he calls the “great social mission of literature.”

This mission forms the crux of his argument and follows from his general views on literature and ties into the simplistic binary he draws between Realism and Modernism. Only works that participate in Realism and Cultural Heritage can realize this mission. Thomas Mann is cited as an example of a genuinely popular author, an author whose tone and content…grow out of the life and history of [his] people.” Mann and authors like him “are an organic product of the development of their nation. That is why it is possible for them to create art of the highest quality while at the same time striking a chord which can and does provoke a response in the broad masses of the people” (p. 54).

Realism is seen first as a tool at keeping German literature alive. “Popular, realistic” literature of the past will need to come back into fashion in order for German literature to once again be relevant. He contrasts the broad sweep of the realist masters with the “one dimensionality” of the avant-gardists, and offers a none-too-concrete analysis of how realist literature points the way for the Popular Front.

A living form of humanism prepares [the masses] to endorse the political slogans of the Popular Front and to comprehend its political humanism. Through the mediation of realist literature the soul of the masses is made receptive for an understanding of the great, progressive and democratic epochs of human history. This will prepare it for the new type of revolutionary democracy that is represented by the Popular Front. (p. 56 -7)

In contrast to the “infinite multitude of doors through which entry in possible,” Lukács calls the avant-garde a “narrow doorway” though which only a privileged few can pass. “The broad mass of the people can learn nothing from avant-garde literature (p. 57).” As such, no matter how much it revolutionizes artistic form, it remains “devoid of reality and life” can never be truly revolutionary and hence, never genuinely popular. The “ordinary people who try to translate these atmospheric echoes of reality back into the language of their own experience” are left wanting.

Much of Lukács’ hostility to the avant-garde seems directed at what he interprets as elitism, since their work requires significant glossing. The genuinely popular, genuinely realistic novel that takes part in this “great social mission” requires no glossing. Art should reflect and make manifest the “correct dialectical unity of appearance and essence” (p. 33). “What matters is that the slice of life shaped and depicted by the artist and re-experienced by the reader should reveal the relations between appearance and essence without the need for any external commentary” (p. 33 – 34). The external commentary he refers to is the alienating or formalistic techniques of the avant-garde that will mask the manifest content. He is arguing for a popular literature with no latent content whatsoever, a completely transparent literature that can play a didactic and inspiring role in the development of world history. As such, “a trenchant analysis of the decadent manifestations of this period – political, cultural and artistic – is an essential prerequisite for any breakthrough to a genuinely popular culture” (p. 58). The word “breakthrough” as used in this context is crucial since it reminds us of Lukács’ overarching mission of creating a popular culture commensurate with party politics.

“Popularity is unpopular,” writes Brecht, thereby showing his ambivalence to the notion of popular art. Yet, after this initial and not-humorless caveat, he commits himself to a rather strict definition. We have seen a similarly ambivalent attitude in Lukács, when he speaks of the difficulties defining popular culture in late capitalist society. Yet Brecht is subtler in his assessment, since he acknowledges that the definition he uses is itself conditioned by the historical reality of his time. “Our concept of the popular refers to a people who not only play a full part in historical development but actively usurp it, force its pace, determine its direction…we have in mind a fighting people and therefore an aggressive concept of what is popular” (p. 80). Brecht furnishes us with a systematic definition: yet it is difficult to conceive of any work of art ever living up to the attributes he enumerates (see p.81).

Like Lukács, Brecht sees the need to meet the masses, to “speak their language.” “There is only one ally against growing barbarism – the people, who suffer so greatly from it. It is only from them that one can expect anything. Therefore it is obvious that one must turn to the people, and now more necessary than ever to speak their language” (p. 80). This formulation of a popular aesthetic actually implies a more participatory model (than does the Lukáscian formulation) while sharing Lukács concern for accessibility. (This comment seems both appropriate and reasonable in a way that an earlier admission about “stepping back into the masses” does not.)

Several important implications follow as well as a defense of experimental artistic techniques. “With the people struggling and changing reality before our eyes, we must not cling to ‘tried’ rules of narrative, venerable literary models, eternal aesthetic laws” (p. 81). Here, Brecht opposes the rigidity present in much of Lukács’ discussion; in doing so, he also shows his belief in new manifestations of the popular. For if representing reality in the Weimar Era means something very different from what it meant in the time of Balzac, the standards by which a work will be judged popular likewise change. He continues: “Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must also change” (p. 82). Thus, we see Brecht espousing and advocating a progressive view of the popular, one that is connected (still rather abstractly, it must be admitted) to the changing nature of reality and its modes of representation. The simple mimesis that might have proved adequate for previous generations is found to be lacking. Brecht asserts that recycling old styles and strategies would result not only in failure, but incoherence; “Were we to copy the style of these realists, we would no longer be realists” (p. 82).

Brecht gives the masses more credit than does Lukács. After citing successful usages of heightened stage techniques, Brecht boldly pronounces: “The people understand this” (p. 83).

Whereas Lukács asserts that the masses need the mirror held up to nature, Brecht writes:

“One can arouse a sense of outrage at inhuman conditions by many methods – by direct description (emotional or objective), by narrative and parable, by jokes, by over-and under-emphasis.” The modernist aesthetic does have something to offer the masses. It can speak their language. At the same time, Brecht admits that objective criteria for both popular art and for realism ought not to be considered as fixed variables; the distinction he draws at the very end between “being popular” and “becoming popular” is a direct response to Lukács’ reified notions of “genuine” popularity.

The revolutionary project of Brecht’s theater, which tries to make an audience think critically about what’s happening onstage, aims at similar goals as Lukács’ theory of popularity. The abyss that opens between their two views can be seen vividly in the ways they label their projects. The term “great social mission of literature” allies Lukács with an established realist cannon. Contrast this to Brecht’s “aggressive” notion of the popular. Where Lukács calls for order, classicism and a gradual coming to consciousness of historical determinism and the mechanisms of the capitalist apparatus, Brecht advocates revolutionizing the means of representation to match a changed reality.


Bibliography:

Jameson, Fredric, ed Aesthetics & Politics. London: Verso, 1977.

Wagner vs. Rossini: Round One - FIGHT!

We turn from literature and visual art to music for this next essay. It deals with Schöpenhauer and Nietzsche's philosophical reflections on opera.

Opera was the defining popular entertainment of the nineteenth century. An innovative multimedia spectacle, it flourished in various schools and styles, most successfully in the Italian bel canto tradition of Rossini and Donizetti and the French grand Opéra tradition of Meyerbeer and Gounod. Neither Schopenhauer nor Nietzsche can overlook the undeniable significance of the medium and thus, they both incorporate discussions of opera into their aesthetic theories.
Schopenhauer takes an overall positive approach to opera and notes Rossini as representative of the medium’s success. At the other end of the spectrum lies Nietzsche, who takes opera to be a destructive force, by its insidious nature positioned to abort the re-birth of tragedy in the modern age.
Both thinkers treat opera as a historically important phenomenon and allow their ruminations on opera to permeate, match up and play a vital role in their aesthetic theories: which both center in large measure around the status of music. Nietzsche accepts Schopenhauer’s theory of music as the supreme expression of Will, yet doesn’t share his philosophical forbearer’s rosy attitude towards opera: a genre wherein he finds the thorough debasement of opera by means of music’s enslavement to the word.

In § 52 of World as Will and Representation (Vol. I), Schopenhauer presents his mystical metaphysics of music. While he doesn’t necessarily privilege music over the other arts, he certainly ascribes enormous power to it and underscores the unique position it holds in the system of the arts. Central to Schopenhauer’s thought about music is the idea of the Will being expressed in its purest form through the abstract medium of music. He writes that, “music is by no means like the other arts, namely a copy of the Ideas, but a copy of the will itself, the objectivity of which are the Ideas.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 257)
It is characteristic of music to only express generalities and never particulars. Music can never treat of a particular pleasure or displeasure, but rather of feeling itself. In our desire to bring the will down to earth, we attach words and plot to music. The origin of opera, according to Schopenhauer, is our desire to relate the fundamentally eternal emotions of music to a particular sensation: “it arises that our imagination is so easily stirred by music, and tries to shape that invisible, yet vividly aroused, spirit-world that speaks to us directly, to clothe it with flesh and bone, and thus embody it in an analogous example.” (ibid, p. 261)
Yet, even in the newly-formed constellation of text and music that is born in opera, the libretti “should never forsake that subordinate position in order to make themselves the chief thing, and the music a mere means of expressing the song.” (ibid) Due to its transcendent and deeply metaphysical status, music always remains supremacy over the spoken – or sung – word.
Schopenhauer warns against music that follows after words too closely. Since music everywhere only ever expresses the “quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves,” music should steer free of the influence of particular circumstances and events. The “universality” and “precise distinctness” of music is precisely what allows it to become the “panacea of all our sorrows.” He writes that “if music tries to stick too closely to the words, and to mould itself according to the events, it is endeavouring to speak a language not its own.” (ibid)
It appears to be a real danger for Schopenhauer that music can get bogged down by trying merely to accompany plot. There is, however, at least one composer who has steered clear of this “mistake:” Rossini. Somewhat opaquely, Schopenhauer claims that Rossini’s music “speaks its own language so distinctly and purely that it requires no words at all, and therefore produces its full effect even when rendered by instruments alone.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 261-262)
Music’s power to illustrate plot effectively is part and parcel with its power to express “the metaphysical to everything physical in the world.” What Schopenhauer has in mind by such a statement is a conception of music as infinitely more than mere accompaniment or background music. He even suggests we could call the world “embodied music” as easily as we call it “embodied will.” Music so appropriately reflects and comments on being in the world that it adds heightened dimensions of clarity to existence. As he writes: “music makes every picture, indeed every scene from real life and the world, at once appear in enhanced significance.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, pp. 262 – 263).
Since he ascribes such profound metaphysical significance to music, Schopenhauer rejects out of hand all music that merely tries to imitate observable phenomena and to stir up the appetite. “All this is to be entirely rejected,” he writes in a discussion that parallels his earlier musings on Dutch paintings that merely make the mouth water with their depictions of prepared food. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 264)
Opera can be “expressive” only in those cases “when the composer has known how to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of will that constitute the kernel of an event.” Since both the perceptive expression (representation) and music (will) express the same “inner nature of the world,” the two can be linked elegantly in opera. (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 263) Still, music remains supreme for Schopenhauer, an “independent art” and “far from being a mere aid to poetry.” It is capable of achieving its ends “entirely from its own resources” and without needing recourse to verbal and dramatic effects. (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448) Indeed, Schopenhauer admits that lyrics are often little more that the expression of “silly and insipid verses.” But even when serious, words remain for music “a foreign extra of secondary value” (Schopenhauer, vol. 2, p. 448)
Something different is at work in an opera that is composed for a specific libretto. In these cases where the music is custom tailored, as it were, to a specific libretto, the music can provide, “the most profound, ultimate, and secret information on the feeling expressed in the words, or the action presented in the opera.” This discussion relates back to an earlier one about the metaphysical capability of music to provide “the thing in itself to every phenomenon.” (Schopenhauer, vol. I, p. 262 -263 and vol. II, p. 448-449)
Schopenhauer talks about the genesis of operas and the value accrued to music by the addition of libretti, which usually precede the music and act as “as a means for exciting [the composer’s] musical imagination.” While music expresses general sentiments, words can identify their objects, namely “the motives that give rise to that feeling.” (Schopenhauer, vol. II, p. 449)
Nevertheless, “the music of an opera” can be ”completely effective even without the text.” When, however, music is composed “with respect to the drama,” the music becomes the “soul” of the drama, “since, in its connexion with the incidents, characters and word, it becomes the inner significance of those incidents, and of their ultimate and secret necessity that rests on this significance.” (ibid)
At the end of the day, however, Schopenhauer still holds strong to the indomitable and irrepressible free force of music. Schopenhauer recognizes the “heterogeneous nature” of music and its “complete indifference to everything material in the incidents,” (which inspired man to create opera in the first place and places its value above that of the libretto) since the same music can be used to good effect in expressing varied and different situations. This consideration leads him to conclude that opera “never assimilates the material, and therefore, when it accompanies even the most ludicrous and extravagant farces of comic opera, it still preserves its essential beauty, purity and sublimity; and its fusion with those incidents cannot drag it down from its heights to which everything ludicrous is really foreign.” Thus, even the tritest and most banal of operatic subjects poses no threat to music, which is and shall always remain was it is most basically and metaphysically: a pure copy of will. (ibid)

Against this optimistic and non-threatening view, Nietzsche diagnoses opera as nothing less than a cardinal danger to the spirit of music out of which tragedy struggles to be reborn! In chapter nineteen of the “Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche disparages the “culture of the opera.” (The object of his critique is most probably the French Grand Opéra as it was for Wagner). The public enthusiasm for opera symbolizes the “innermost substance” of Socratic culture, whose rationalizing and enlightened attitude he sees as in direct opposition to the tragic condition that was borne out of the spirit of music. (Nietzsche, p. 89)
Turning briefly from condemning the modern age, Nietzsche speculates on the origins of opera in late Renaissance Italy. He is shocked that the same age that produced the “sublime and sacred” music of Palestrina produced the recitative style of stile rappresentativo, an “extra-artistic tendency” which he sees as the true origin of opera. The recitative is “extra-artistic” since it is intended for the listener who desires to hear the words amidst the singing: the singer “intensifies the aesthetics expression of the words” by “half-singing.” He calls it “unnatural” and “inwardly at odds” with the Appoline and the Dionyiac drives and say that one is “bound to conclude that the origin of recitative lies outside all artistic instincts.” (ibid, pp. 89-90)
Nietzsche claims that opera is an attempt to rediscover of the music of Ancient Greece and that the culture of opera perpetrates a myth of the rediscovery primordial human music: “Recitative was thought to be the rediscovered language of those original humans.” In fact, however, opera merely arose to satisfy an “extra-artistic need.” (ibid, p. 90)
This critique of opera (the representative art form of the late nineteenth century) is bound up with Nietzsche’s critique of the modern age. Opera is not the work of the genuine artist, but rather the Socratic individual: “Opera is born of theoretical man, of the layman as critic, not of the artist.” As such, the culture of opera is symptomatic of the modern world, which is built on predominately optimistic Socratic principles. The desire to make out the words is proof that for “un-artistic listeners,” the rebirth of music could only be expected through music in which “the words of the text governed the counterpoint as a master governs his servant.” For these un-artistic laymen, the “word was supposedly nobler than the accompanying system of harmony.”
The un-artistic laymen who created opera were “crudely unmusical” in their discussion of artistic terms and were incapable of understanding the “Dionysiac depths of music.” There is more than a little elitism in Nietzsche’s subsequent claims that the precondition of opera is “the idyllic belief that every man of feeling is actually an artist.” He calls this the “cheery optimism of theoretical man.” (ibid, 90-91)
By making every man of feeling into an artist, opera threatens to collapse the distinction between art and entertainment. The “Dionysiac depths of music” are no longer present. Opera becomes “un-tragic,” since there “the ideal is not felt to be unattained and nature is not felt to be lost.” The pleasure derived from opera bears little relation to the “elegiac pain caued by eternal loss” that tragedy evokes. Rather, as a product of pure entertainment, it presents the illusions of “eternal re-discovery” and the “comfortable delight in an idyllic reality.” (ibid, p. 92)
In opera, music – which is fundamentally the pure expression of will - is thus reduced to illusion and artifice. In consequence, Nietzsche is deeply pessimistic about this “art which does not originate in the aesthetic sphere” (since it privileges the word over the tone) and has “stolen into the territory of art from a semi-moral sphere,” and which “can only occasionally disguise the fact of its hybrid origins.” (ibid, p. 93)
Viewed in this light, opera becomes extremely problematic for Nietzsche and threatens even to abort the rebirth of tragedy in the modern age. “What will become of the eternal truths of the Dionysiac and the Apolline,” in the “mixture of styles” that is at the heart of “the stilo rappresentativo? – where music is regarded as the servant and the libretto as master, where music is compared to the body and words to the soul?” (ibid)

Nietzsche talks about the “fateful influence of opera on music.” Opera severs music from its Dionysiac origin and deprives it of its “true dignity, which consists in being a Dionysiac mirror of the world.” Instead, opera makes music into the “slave of the world of appearances.” It can do nothing more than “imitate the forms of the world of appearances and to excite external pleasure in the play of line and proportion.” This “pleasurable play with form” has succeeded in “divesting music with frightening speed of its Dionysiac purpose in the world.” He takes this to be representative of the “optimism” that lurks in the “genesis of opera and at the heart of the culture it represents” (ibid, pp. 93 - 94)
Yet he places hope in the German musical tradition and “the mighty, brilliant course it has run from Bach to Beethoven, from Beethoven to Wagner.” The towering figure of Wagner (and Schopenhauer as well) represents the “mysterious unity of German music and German philosophy.” And calls the “birth of a tragic age” nothing less that the “return of the German spirit to itself.” (ibid, pp. 94-95)
The Socratic optimism of the word is betrayed most bluntly by opera. Our modern view of life is without myth and guided by the concepts; art is debased to the level of mere entertainment. “Music and tragic myth both express, in the same way, the Dionysiac capacity of a people, and they cannot be separated from one another. Both originate in an artistic realm which lies beyond the Apolline; both transfigure a region where dissonance and the terrible image of the world fade away in chords of delight.” The music of Wagner in particular attempts to tap into the “primal pleasures” of the Dionysiac, and thus restore the tragic sensibility to music through the use of dissonance. It can be said that Nietzsche here privileges Wagner in a similar way that Schopenhauer privileges Rossini as the supreme of opera composers, albeit for entirely different reasons. (ibid, pp. 114 – 115)
Wagner’s utter rejection of the culture of opera in favor of rediscovered Dionysiac principles puts him at odds with the mainstream critics of his day. Nietzsche berates these “bad critics” who get as afar as “the entrance hall of musical perception” without reaching “the innermost sanctum.” He offers a mystical analysis of Tristan und Isolde to show how Wagner’s music dramas differ so sharply from the opera of his day. Here, the words and images are required to insure that the listeners don’t “suffocate as their soul attempted, convulsively, to spread its winds.” The “thoughts and words” are necessary protection against the “unchecked outpouring of the unconscious will.” With characteristic hyperbole, Nietzsche rhetorically asks in relation to Tristan: “How could anyone fail to be shattered immediately, having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will?” (ibid, pp. 100-101)

In has been the object of this paper to examine and contrast the role played by opera in the aesthetic theories of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Greatly impressed by the perfect fusion of word and melody that he finds in Rossini, Schopenhauer articulates an enthusiastic and positive account of opera where in which music always reigns supreme over the word. His assessment of the genre falls squarely with his general theory about music as the supreme expression of will. Under the great sway of Wagner, Nietzsche directs his attack against opera at the modern “opera culture’ that treats art as entertainment. He incorporates this attack on modern culture with his parallel project of defining and delineating the origins of Greek tragedy out of the conflicting drives of the Apolline and the Dionysiac: a task of philosophical analysis which is directed at bringing to consciousness the task of the modern artist in re-awaking in birth tragedy in a rational, “Socratic” world and society. In his final, mystical analysis of Tristan, Nietzsche’s philosophical debt to Schopenhauer is supremely evident. And although Schopenhauer would probably be flattered, he’d still prefer the Barber of Seville.

Mimesis of the Ugly

Aesthetics is alternately defined as the philosophy of art and the philosophy of the beautiful. But is there an aesthetics of ugliness too? The following paper explores what Aristotle and Lessing have to say on the matter.

How can one derive pleasure from watching suffering? How is the ugly transformed into the beautiful? What is the aesthetic impact of mimesis of the ugly, the horrific and the deformed? Can the ugly heighten a work’s aesthetic reception? In Aristotle and Lessing, we find a theory of the ugly in the service of art, along with concerns about built-in risks.

In his Poetics*, Aristotle lays the seeds for a discourse of the aesthetics of the ugly, which will bloom in the nuanced analysis in Lessing’s Laocoon**. Though Lessing expands this discourse to the realm of visual art; he remains very committed to Aristotelian principles. Like his philosophical forbearer, Lessing warns against the misuse and abuse of the ugly, the horrific and the disfigured. Like Aristotle, he makes room for the ugly in art, finding in art a cathartic power similar to what we find chez Aristotle. The ugly provides something similar yet different for both Lessing and Aristotle. For both thinkers, it can provide an indirect way to experience the horrific. For Aristotle, the experience of tragedy serves an exemplary function; for Lessing, art carves out a place where man can experience terror the horrors he dare not confront directly in the world.

The discussion of the ugly in Aristotle is imbedded in his wider analysis of tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy serves a very human function; through mimesis, tragedy allows us to understand the logic of an action and makes us virtuous citizen through catharsis.
In chapter four of the Poetics, Aristotle discusses the origin of poetry, while showing artistic invention to be a fundamentally human activity. He refers to morbid fascination:
“Mimesis is innate in human beings from childhood- indeed we differ from the other animals in being most given to mimesis and in making our first steps of learning through it – and pleasure in instances of mimesis is equally general. This we can see from the facts: we enjoy looking at the most exact portrayals of things we do not like to see in real life, the lowest animals, for instance, or corpses. This is because not only philosophers, but all men, enjoy getting to understand something, though it is true that most people feel this pleasure only to a slight degree.” (1448a: 4)

Aristotle links mimesis to our desire for knowledge, a desire so bottomless that it delights even in the ugly and rotting: in worms and corpses. “Exact portrayal” of the natural is how he views mimesis as operating. And while his theory of tragedy does contain more complexity than the merely imitative, imitation is the unshakable base on which the entire discourse is constructed. As such, it may not come as too much surprise that Aristotle feels ugliness – which is very present in the world – has a rightful place in mimesis. The guidelines he sets to tragedy have the effect, first and foremost, of providing a manual for constructing an effective drama; but they also provide a warning against a misappropriation of the ugly in art. In other words, Aristotle want to put ugliness in its right place.

Aristotle speaks of the six mimetic elements of tragedy: plot, character, verbal expression, intellect, spectacle and song writing. These first three are here of interest to us, and Aristotle discusses them all in one breathless sentence.

“Well then, a tragedy is a mimesis of a high, complete action (complete in the sense that implies amplitude) in speech pleasurably enhanced, the different kinds [of enchantment] occurring in separate sections, in dramatic, not narrative form, effecting through pity and fear the catharsis of such emotions.” (Poetics 1449b).

A thorough discussion of catharsis is beyond the scope of this paper, although I will make reference to it now and again. First, however, a word of explanation for the following terms: “complete action,” “speech pleasurably enhanced” and “pity and fear.”

By “complete action,” Aristotle means that the proper subject of tragedy is a “complete, whole action” that will make clear the nature of the characters’ moral choices. This completeness requires, by necessity, that ugly elements be exhibited. In plays like Oedipus and Medea, the actions which are the subject of mimesis – infanticide, incest – ain’t pretty. Thus, Aristotle is providing an justification for the horrific in tragedy. Certainly, this need not be made explicit on stage (i.e., Medea doesn’t need to chase her children around with an axe), but Aristotle is carving out a space for the horrific in art while at the same time remaining committed to the idea of art being in the service of the beautiful.

Equally influential for later theoreticians like Lessing, is the notion of “speech pleasurably enhanced” to smooth over the rough-spots in the drama. We find here a claim about the sanitizing role of art. Art can dress the ugly up, transform and transfigure it. It can provide its own unique vision of the ugly: pleasing to the eye and the ear. The case of tragedy, especially, illustrates that this is both a privilege and duty of art.

Pity and fear are the pleasurable emotions that tragedy aims to stir up. Ideally, these two emotions should be aroused directly by the mimesis of the action; when things occur “unexpectedly but because of each other” (1495a). The perfectly ordered and designed parts of such a narrative are the flipside of the ugliness and horror of the plot itself. Thus the tragedy gains in power from the ironic coexistence of beautiful form with horrific content.
Pity and fear can be aroused by peripeteiai, recognition and pathos. These first two, Aristotle calls the “most attractive parts of tragedy” since they are elements fundamentally of plot. The third source is pathos, which he defines as “an act involving destruction or pain.” In other words, pathos is the element in tragedy directly linked to the ugly and horrific. It is the domain not only of the poet but also of the stage designer, whose art “contributes more to the spectacle than the poet’s does” (1450b). But though fear and pity may be aroused by spectacle alone, he claims that it is more effective when the poet has a hand in it. Aristotle’s fear of a gruesome spectacle (think: a chamber of horrors) overwhelming the narrative and poetic elements of a production are undeniable. He warns that a misappropriation of the ugly will result in something “merely monstrous,” rather than genuinely tragic.

Through an analogy with painting, Aristotle advocates mimesis as a heightened state of imitation. When applied to the concept of the ugly in art, this analogy provides a rationale for the sanitizing effects of exaggeration in art upon the horrific.

“Since tragedy is a mimesis of people better than are found in the world, one ought to do the same as the good figure-painters, for they too give us the individual form, but though they make people lifelike they represent them as more beautiful than they are. Similarly the poet too in representing people as irascible and lazy and morally deficient in other ways like that, ought nevertheless to make them good, as Homer makes Achilles both good and an example of harsh self-will.” (1454b)

Like “speech pleasurably enhanced,” art is to soften and smooth over the features of true ugliness.

After discussing mimesis, pity, fear and pathos, we come to catharsis, which is the telos of tragedy. For Aristotle, tragedy serves a very human function; it allows us to understand the logic of our actions and makes us virtuous citizen through catharsis born of mimesis. Mimesis is of course the fundamental point of departure for art and tragedy. By making us aware of the logic of our actions, tragedy develops our virtue. As we have seen, the ugly can and often does take part in this project.

Much of Lessing’s discourse of the ugly in art maps on to Aristotle. Lessing quotes the passage in the Poetics where Aristotle talks about mimesis of the ugly and calls it “no argument in favor of the imitation of ugliness.” The dead bodies that Aristotle spoke of can excite terror that can heighten aesthetic sensation. “This terror, not their ugliness, may be made to produce sensations of pleasure through imitation” (p. 155). Lessing makes a distinction between the “ugliness” of the animals and the corpses and the “terror” that is excited through that ugliness. This may ultimately be a false dichotomy, but it serves Lessing well in his purpose, which is to show the instances in which ugliness may be mobilized by art to produce an aesthetic sensation. “Ugliness in itself can be no subject for poetry,” yet it can contribute to art’s overall effect.

“The poet can make ugliness his theme only because it acquires through his description a less repulsive aspect, and ceases in a measure to produce the effect of ugliness,” Lessing writes (p. 148). Art has a sanitizing effect on the ugly similar to the one Aristotle suggests when he speaks of “speech pleasurably enhanced.” The idea of art enhancing and transforming is pervasive throughout the Laocoon.

Lessing particularizes about art to a degree that Aristotle does not: discussing the ugly in relation to the built-in limitations of the mediums. In his lengthy exegesis on the Laocoon sculpture he discusses the limitation of the medium for exhibiting the ugly. At one point, he puts it thusly:

“If it be true that a cry, as an expression of bodily pain, is not inconsistent with nobility of soul, especially according to the views of the ancient Greeks, then the desire to represent such a soul cannot be the reason why the artist has refused to imitate this cry in his marble.” (p. 7)

This quote is all about the need to sanitize art by stripping it of its unsavory elements. “Pain, in its disfiguring extreme, was not compatible with beauty and therefore must be softened,” he writes. Had the sculptors depicted the scream, the statue would lack the “beauty which alone could turn our pain into the sweet feeling of pity for the suffering object” (p. 13-14). In other words, just like Aristotle’s over-zealous stage director, a more gruesome Laocoon, would have resulted in “mere monstrosities.” Ugliness, in other words, should always be deployed in the service of tragic beauty, and not for its own sake.

The suggestion that the ugly and horrific threatens and constrains the laws of the beautiful becomes central for Lessing. This is manifest in the example of the Laocoon itself and many other examples drawn from poetry, painting and statuary. How to deal with the ugly in the visual arts has to do with concealing the actual ugliness and relying on the imagination to fill in. The Pregnant Moment, the moment “most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow” arrives to solve this difficulty (p. 92).

Lessing illustrates this through the example of the Laocoon, as well as a painting of Medea at the moment just before her infanticide. “We anticipate the result and tremble at the idea of soon seeing Medea in her unmitigated ferocity, our imagination far outstripping any thing the painter could have shown us of that terrible moment” (p. 18). Through a veil of concealment, the horrific and ugly are amplified above and beyond what mere revealing could have accomplished.

The role of the ugly and the horrific is no doubt central to the power of the Medea painting. That this ugliness need be hidden in order to become manifest is seen by Lessing as another limitation of art in dealing with the ugly. It arises from the natural fact that the “poet shows us in the process of creation, what the painter can only show us as already existing” (p. 100). Aside from this example of being vs. becoming, there are further limits imposed by medium. Often, one need sacrifice “expression to beauty” and even “conventionality to expression” (p. 41). Lessing, like Aristotle, understands the value and instrumentality of exaggeration. These sacrifices are therefore forgivable and unavoidable, mimetically-speaking.

Throughout the essay, Lessing details the ways in which painting may make use of ugliness and deformity without offending or nauseating the audience. Ugliness and the horrific can evoke the ridiculous, the terrible and the fascinating (p. 156). When they do so, “they never arouse pure pain:” rather the bitterness is always mixed with satisfaction (p. 158).

Lessing concludes that it is possible for the poet to produce “mixed sensations” that can be “strengthened by the use of ugliness” (p. 161). At the same time, however, he wants to limit its role and scope. The ugly is a strong spice and the artist must take care not to overdo it: “Painting does not employ loathsomeness for its own sake, but, like poetry, to give emphasis to the ludicrous and the terrible. At its peril!” Lessing goes on to define this peril as a cheap sensationalist trick whose shock value wears off quickly leaving nothing but abject disgust, “loathsome in all its crudity” (p. 167).

This warning brings us back to Aristotle and his caveat against the stage designer hijacking a play. Lessing, no doubt, opens the door a bit wider for the ugly, horrific and loathsome than Aristotle does, but he will not lend it his unconditional endorsement. At the end of the day, both Aristotle and Lessing maintain a rather precarious stance towards the ugly in art. Though they both realize its instrumentality and utility in realizing the telos of mimetic art, they remain wary of whole-heartedly endorsing it. But their studies provide insights into the nature of art that complicate our ordinary concepts of the beautiful and the good. Through the analyses of both thinkers, we come to a position where we acknowledge the utility of the ugly for art, as well as its dangers.

For Aristotle, the ugly plays a crucial role in tragedy and the evocation of fear and pity. These emotions, brought about by peripeteiai, recognition and pathos, produce moments of catharsis, where the elements of tragedy culminate in a deep understanding of the logic of our actions. Tragedy can be seen as an attempt at making sense of the world and, in the process, of edifying the public. In more ways than one, the ugly takes part in this demystification and edification.
Lessing picks up and elaborates on Aristotle’s discourse on the mimesis of ugliness and its cathartic value. Although he contributes a much richer and more nuanced theory of the ugly, he can be said to still be operating very much in an Aristotelian framework. Catharsis is very much at stake in his assessment of art. Like Aristotle, Lessing sees art as a way of confronting horror indirectly. In this, he is much more explicit than Aristotle in this and treats the broad problem of the ugly more closely.

Who, indeed, would deny that, “things horrible are not wholly devoid of charm” (p. 165)?

Return to Aesthetics

We're jumping back in time and back to the Western hemisphere to reclaim aesthetics with Hegel, whose come to tell us that art is dead.

An End to Art?

150 years before Arthur C. Danto announced his “End of Art” thesis, G.W.F. Hegel made a similar proclamation. Neither of these two thinkers would go so far as to claim that good and worthy art isn’t possible anymore. In order to understand Hegel’s stance, it is necessary to put this view in the context of his entire project. What he means by saying that Art has come to an end is something like, “art no longer has the ability to represent absolute spirit.” We find Hegel articulating his view more explicitly in his Lectures on Fine Arts: “Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past” (Fine Arts, p. 10). Hegel gives a crude and incomplete account of his aesthetic theory in the Encyclopaedia, the one work to which we will confine the rest of our discussion.

Hegel considers Art one of the modes we have for expressing Geist, the absolute spirit that is both “implicitly existent and objectively self-unfolding” (Ency, 571). Art, he writes, is “the concrete contemplation and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal” (Ency, 556). It is important for Hegel that Geist can only express itself by externalizing and seeing itself in the world. Art is one such externalizing movement, and proceeds according to a dialectical progression, much like other historical phenomena. Part of what’s unique about art is the way in which it tries to bring absolute Spirit to consciousness. Art is “the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content – a mixture from natural and spiritual sources – can try to bring itself to consciousness” (Ency, 562). These “natural and spiritual sources” can be thought of as natural forms of representation, and inspiration (respectively).

Hegel divides art into three different conceptual stages (conceptual rather than chronological): symbolic art; classical art; and romantic art. Each stage shows art in some way struggling with the notion of how to bring Geist into the world.

In symbolic art, the content (meaning) of the artwork is distinct from its form and the incommensurability between the artwork’s form and its content, brings about a certain level of abstraction. Here , he names the artist’s theme as “abstract God of pure thought” which is unable to find coherent expression in the finished product (Ency, 561). An example of this symbolic art is architecture, where the function of the edifice bears only a highly abstract relation to its form. To illustrate the inadequacy of symbolic art, Hegel describes it rather desperately as, “a restless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its goal” (Ency, 561). The problem from which all this arises seems to be a primitive and limited understanding of Geist: “The meaning or theme thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious of itself, as free spirit” (Ency, 561).

Classical art, which is next in the progression, seems to be the stage favored most highly by Hegel. Although hardly the perfect medium for Geist’s gradual unfurling, Hegel finds much that’s commendable and beautiful in this stage of the development of art. At times, he even calls it simply “Beautiful art.” For instance, in expressing the thought that beauty is the form by which art expresses the absolute, he seems to have classical art very much on the mind: “In this ideal, or the concrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of the Idea, is so transfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone: - the shape of form of Beauty.” (Ency, 556)

The paradigm of classical art is Greek statuary, whereby the divine is represented through the human form. Hegel explains the rationale behind this: “For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material – (under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but – for the expression of spiritual truth – must use the given forms of nature with a significance with art must divine and possess. Of all such forms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeality and thus its visual expression” (Ency, 558).

The advantage to classical art over symbolic art is that it exhibits harmony between form and content. It’s limitation, however, is that as an essentially polytheistic medium, it can’t grasp at the unity of Geist. Thus, the “reconciliation” achieved in classical art between “the expression of the God” and “the enthusiasm” or “genius” of the artist may seem “self-confident” and “of good cheer” (Ency, 560-561). However, it fails to grasp at the true nature of Geist; its “depth” and the “sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence” (Ency, 561). As Hegel writes, Absolute mind can’t be made explicit via the nature-form: “In and to art therefore the spirit is a limit natural spirit whose implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in details, breaks up into an indeterminate polytheism” (559). Elsewhere, Hegel seems to be discussing classical art when he says, “Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self-consciousness of the free spirit – the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that gives utterance to itself alone” (Ency, 562).

Hegel calls the final stage in the development of art “romantic.” While Hegel may be said to consider the classical period as the aesthetic apex of art, romantic art is clearly the spiritual high point. It is in this stage that art becomes aware of its own limitation, namely that Geist is an abstract entity closer to thought than to the human form (the beauty of which was lauded so by the Greeks). Thus, in romantic art, “God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an external form, but as only finding himself in himself, and thus giving himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone” (Ency, 562).

Romantic art is thus conscious of its shortcomings, and for this reason it always removed from the spectator. Here, a new dialectic between form and content emerges. With media like music, painting and poetry, the content (the expression of Geist) becomes detached from its form since the hyper-conscious artist has doubts about the suitability of the form in expressing the content. Romantic art can only come about with an advanced understanding of Geist that acknowledges that absolute spirit cannot be captured fully by art. This runs contrary to the way we picture the relationship between form and content in symbolic art. There, the concept of Geist that the artist maintains is completely unbounded and vague. Having realized the incompatibility of “the Idea” with “the sensuous figure it appears in,” “Romantic Art gives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of beauty; it presents him as only condescending to appearance, and the divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it always disengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.” (Ency, 562)

Romantic art need not be overtly beautiful, since the artist understands the impossibility of ever adequately expressing Geist. This makes for a marked contrast to classical art, since here art can has given up hope of adequately representing the absolute: “Beauty in general goes no further than a penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle.” (Ency, 559)

However, this reflexivity has one negative consequence that propels art into crisis, only to hand over the task to religion, and then philosophy; it is a breeding ground for irony. Through the power of irony, art manages to disconnect from the world. An ironic attitude is symptomatic of an advanced consciousness who, failing to grasp the true nature of Geist, fashions himself into a cynical creature incapable of rendering serious observations and judgments, all under the pretense of sophistication. “Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself the emptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itself direction and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it – and, with the assertion that it stands on the very summit of religion and philosophy, falls back into the vanity of willfulness.” (Ency, 571)

The more we realize that Geist is far closer to thought than any object with material existence, the less reliance we place on sensuous forms to help us accomplish that recognition. This process, Hegel calls Erinnerung - inwardness and memory, and it is by this that Geist is able to retreat from reality in Romantic art. Poetry brings us out of the media of aesthetics and into ordinary speech and thought. It is thus the harbinger of religion, to which Romantic art eventually gives way. It is this transition from romantic art to religion that Hegel has in mind when he pronounces art at an end. Art comes to an end when it realizes its inadequacy for representing the “genuine objectivity.” As Hegel writes: “The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought – the medium in which alone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence – is still absent in the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness” (Ency, 562). Art will continue to happen; it’s merely that people won’t turn to art to see Geist reveal itself.

Since all along the goal of art (whether consciously or unconsciously) has been to represent Geist, there’s a sense in which art was always implicitly, indeterminately religious. As Hegel writes, “Beautiful art can only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, is not yet absolute” (Ency, 562). This makes the transition from romantic art to religion rather smooth. Eventually, philosophy takes over and brings to maturity, what “mere piety” could only hint at and represents the most radical externalization of Geist. The dialectical progression between art and religion has the consequence of lifting “religion away over its limitation” (Ency, 562). We get a similarly laudatory take on art in comparison to philosophy: “Beautiful art, for its side, has thus performed the same service as philosophy; it has purified the spirit from its thralldom” (Ency, 562). “The restricted value of the Idea,” which was first expressed in art, passes to the realm of religion, and then to philosophy. Art may have come to an end in 1830, but it persists in its chameleon-like behavior, by which it serves to edify faith, reason and spirit (Ency, 563).

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Bibliography:
Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts. Tr. by T. M. Knox. Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1975. p. 10
Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Tr. By William Wallace. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971. p. 293–297, 301–302

Experiments with Autobiography

For the next post, we travel farther East and forsake aesthetics near-entirely for a discussion of epistemology and historiography in Gandhi's "My Experiments with Truth."

This paper looks at Gandhi’s unique approach to the genre of the autobiography. In particular it examines how he responds to a general philosophical problem about the nature of autobiographies, as well as how his guiding principles in writing contribute to the ultimate purpose of the work. By analyzing the answers and principles Gandhi himself lays out in the work’s introduction, I will show how he reinvents the genre of autobiography to suit his own philosophical and spiritual purposes. In short, I will demonstrate the appropriateness of his method to the work as an intellectual autobiography and a guidebook for those questing after truth.

Gandhi wrote his autobiography while in his 40s, the full title of which is An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. This title provides us many clues into the unconventional nature of Gandhi’s project. One is immediately struck by the unorthodox use of the indefinite article, which the author employs in order to avoid sounding entirely-authoritative. Already with the first article, Gandhi is subverting the traditional notion of autobiography by labeling it something other than the definitive account of his life so-far. With Story, Gandhi hints at the both the narrative aspect of his account and the historical pitfalls of narrativity. In this, he seems profoundly aware of the artificiality and impossibility of presenting a life in a total and comprehensive account. Most fascinating, however, is the formulation, My Experiments with Truth, which implies that Gandhi doesn’t view life primarily as a causal chain of events (born in India → studied in Britain → went to South Africa), but rather as an attempt to reconcile oneself to (the divine] truth. The title also bears out what Gandhi expounds time and again in the book; he sees his life as a quest for absolute truth, where truth is defined as “the sovereign principle, which includes numerous other principles.” We clearly see this commitment to truth in the way he describes the purpose of the book: “[I]f every page of these chapters does not proclaim to the reader that the only means for the realization of truth is Ahimsa [non-violence, one of several virtues that Gandhi considers crucial to virtue], I shall deem all my labour in writing these chapters to have been in vain” (pp. 503-504).

That Gandhi’s work is unconventional can be seen by way of a brief comparison to two Western examples that inhabit opposite sides of the autobiographical spectrum. One the one hand, Gandhi shies from the sort of autobiography St. Augustine presents us with in his Confessions. In that book, Augustine relates his spiritual trials and tribulations that culminate in his conversion to Christianity (in a garden, no less!). The focus of the book is merely on Augustine’s encounters with religion and all other aspects of his life are dropped and omitted. While Gandhi’s book is likewise the record of a spiritual quest, how he conceives of his quest makes it an altogether different project; since the subject book and the quest for truth itself - which he can see manifest in everything – he excludes nothing from the equation, with the result that it is much more episodic than the Confessions. The episodic nature of Gandhi’s work feels closer to something like Casanova’s encyclopedic multi-thousand-page History of My Life. However, it needs little proving that Gandhi is somewhat less out to glorify himself and to boast than the Venetian lover is. Indeed, Gandhi is even somewhat ashamed of the fact that he’s been asked to write an autobiography. The way Gandhi combines the scope of Casanova with the spiritual purpose of Augustine makes Gandhi’s work utterly unique.

Another unique feature is that he is working in what is essentially a Western idiom. Early on – in fact on the very first page – he cites a colleague who objects to Gandhi’s dabbling in a Western genre: “Writing an autobiography is a practice peculiar to the West. I know of nobody in the east having written one, except those who have come under Western influence” (p. xi). This objection is trivial to Gandhi since he remains open to all types of truth from any source. But a far more serious philosophical objection about the nature of autobiographies anticipates and influences Gandhi’s own approach: “Supposing you reject tomorrow the things you hold as principles today, or supposing you revise in the future, your plans of today, is it not likely that the men who shape their conduct on the authority of your word, spoken or written, may be misled?” (pp. xi-xii). Gandhi finds this argument compelling and rejects the idea of writing a “real autobiography.” Instead he opts to details only his “numerous experiments with truth,” as his life consists of nothing but those experiments. He offers the following response to the above autobiographical quandary, in which he proposes an analogy between his own experiments and those of science: “I claim for [these experiments] nothing more than does a scientist who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them” (p. xiii).

To call life a series of “experiments” can also be seen as a way to simplify experience. Gandhi, concerned as he is in pursuing the quest for knowledge and truth, embraces simplification as it is allows him to focus on what truly matters in life: not who you are or what you do; but the ways in which you actively seek out truth. In this context, all the episodes of Gandhi’s life take on significance beyond being merely parts of his narrative. They are transformed from individual tales to backdrops against which his various experiments with truth take place. Though himself a highly engaging writer, Gandhi wants the reader to come away from his book with an understanding of what it means to pursue truth. This consideration naturally affects the way in which Gandhi narrates to us. Thus, when we read of his childhood marriage and later of his vegetarian activities, they are not merely tales of Gandhi’s life distilled for our enjoyment, but rather all episodes to which Gandhi has applied morals. All in all, he seems to take a very synthetic approach to all that he encounters in his life, weighing them against each other and opining this way or that depending on what his experience has taught him. On the whole, Gandhi’s point seems to be that the judgment counts more than the experience that precipitated it. Or to state the point differently, judgment - or ability to judge - is what gives experience meaning.

Gandhi sees the account of his own attempts at finding truth as something that could potentially help others on their quests. Gandhi feels that since the world is familiar with his experiments in the political sphere, it could benefit from learning of the “spiritual experiments” that have enabled those political experiments. And if he can show his experiments with truth to be of a purely spiritual nature, then he will avoid all accusations of self-praise.

His book isn’t merely about academic principles, but rather how to apply those principles practically. Thus, he proposes that his autobiography be read as a guidebook. “Let those, who wish, realize how the conviction has grown upon me; let them share my experiments and also my conviction if they can,” writes Gandhi (p. xiv). This purpose of the work is can also be seen in the uniform clarity and simplicity of style and Gandhi’s conscious choice not to burden it with difficult religious concepts. As he writes, “If I can narrate them in a dispassionate and humble spirit, many other experimenters will find in them provision for their onward march” (p. xiii). Still, he reminds the reader time and again not to take his conclusions as authoritative, but merely to regard his experiments as “illustrations.”

In order for his book to serve is purpose both as a philosophical autobiography and a guidebook for truth, Gandhi adheres to certain guiding principles of honesty, modesty (about himself and the quality of his judgments), and accuracy. He intends this to be a “warts and all” autobiography, as he writes: “I am not going to conceal or understate any ugly things that must be told. I hope to acquaint the reader fully with all my faults and errors. My purpose is to describe experiments in the science of Satyagraha, not to say how good I am. In judging myself, I shall try to be as harsh as truth, as I want others also to be” (p. xv). Gandhi’s concern for modesty is clearly seen in the conclusion of his introduction, where he speaks to the possibility of his ego creeping into the book from time to time: “If anything that I write in these pages should strike the reader as being touched by pride, then he must take it that there is something wrong with my quest, and that my glimpses are no more true than mirage.” He expresses his commitment to accuracy in the concluding chapter, “Farewell.” He writes, “I set a high value on my experiments…I can only say that I have spared no pains to give a faithful narrative. To describe truth, as it has appeared to me, and in the exact manner in which I have arrived at it, has been my ceaseless effort.” (503)

In this paper, we have examined how Gandhi redefines the autobiographical genre to suit his own spiritual and philosophical project as well as the sense in which the work may be considered his intellectual autobiography, its raison d’être being the illustration of one man’s journal towards truth rather than a simple first-hand account of a life-lived. Though hugely entertaining, Gandhi certainly intends it to serve a didactic purpose. It is thus crucial to understand that Gandhi intended his work as a guidebook to lead others on the path to truth. This can be seen clearly in comments he makes throughout extolling the virtues of Ahimsa (non-violence), Brahmacharya (self-purification) and Satyagraha (passive restraint), all of which he sees – as all truths are – as unified and inseparable. All of Gandhi’s experiments are about the pursuit of truth and revelation. This is no different as regards his experiment in autobiography: a work whose message can be summed up as follows: “Any number of experiments is too small and no sacrifice is too great for attaining […] symphony with nature” (p. 321)

Historiography, Epistemology and Religion in Ibn Khaldun’s “New Science”

Now we throw in some epistemology and religion to the mix, in order to discuss Ibn Khaldun's masterwork, the Muqaddimah.

This paper explores Ibn Khaldun’s attempt at creating a new science of historiography as it relates to his theory of knowledge. In what follows, I will address Ibn Khaldun’s approach to history and explore the epistemological features of his thought that would commit him to this view. Once I have done this, I will show how Khaldun has utterly transformed the meaning of history through this marriage of historiography with a religious understanding of human intellect.

The Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun’s prolegomena to history, is an attempt to get at the “inner meaning of history” (p. 5). As such, Khaldun devotes his energies to explaining the evolution and origin of political and social organizations, which he considers the proper objects of historical investigation (p. 35). This quest “involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things and a deep knowledge of the how and why of events” (p. 5). These, Khaldun feels, are issues that earlier histories have ignored. A lack of critical thinking is to blame for the overall failure of most historical tracts.

Throughout this sprawling and encyclopedic work, Khaldun criticizes past histories, which contain much information that is “remote from the truth. It is rooted in baseless and erroneous assumptions.” (p. 15) He also objects that history is frequently used for purposes of partisanship and that too often one finds the history of a specific dynasty, and that history is merely self-serving, for the purpose of glorification; in this, most histories are too narrow to be considered universal. Additionally, he contends that the character of a given historian can make him an unreliable authority.

Khaldun lambastes historians who “do not care to consider the factual proofs and circumstantial evidence that require us to recognize that the contrary [to what they are saying] is true” (p. 23) In order for history to become a true science, historians must start applying their faculties or reason and judgment to the evaluation of historical data.

After discussing all theses problems, Khaldun explains the task of his book, which stands as a corrective to previous historiography. ”In this book I lifted the veil from conditions as they arose in the various generations. I arranged it methodically in chapters dealing with historical facts and reflections. In it I showed how and why dynasties and civilization originated” (p. 7). Concerning a new method of doing history, he prescribes “numerous sources and much varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness, which lead the historian to the true and keep him from slips and errors.” (p. 11)

Khaldun’s chief innovation is in producing a guidebook for future historians; he therefore feels justified in calling his work “an exhaustive history of the world," Underscoring this notion is the fact that he dubs the book “A Book of Lessons,” rather than “A Book of Facts.” As he writes, “[The Muqaddimah] turns out to be a vessel for philosophy, a receptacle for historical knowledge.” (p. 9) Khaldun is highly aware of the fundamental novelty of what he’s doing, and calls it “an entirely original science.” (p. 39)

What, in fact, accounts for the newness of what he’s doing is the way in which he allows his theory of knowledge to guide his theory of history. His concern for the method of historical thinking as directly related to mankind’s capacity for critical thinking is seen in his notion of a “yardstick,” to correct the mistakes of past historians and prevent those of future ones.

[T]he normative method for distinguishing right from wrong in historical information on the grounds of inherent possibility of absurdity is to investigate human social organization, which is identical with civilization. We must distinguish between the conditions that attach themselves to the essence of civilization as required by its very nature; the things that are accidental and cannot be counted on; and the things that cannot possibly attach themselves to it…We shall have a sound yardstick with the help of which historians may find the path of truth and correctness where their reports are concerned. (p.38)

This view is reinforced by what he says about the mental abilities and types of knowledge historians must have.

“[T]he scholar in this field needs to know the principles of politics, the nature of things and the differences among nations, places and periods with regard to ways of life, character qualities, customs, sects, schools, and everything else. …His goal must be to have complete knowledge of the reasons for every happening, and to be acquainted with the origin of every event. Then he must check transmitted information with the basic principles he knows.” (p. 24)

Motivating Ibn Khaldun’s exploration of the inner workings of history is his view of human knowledge as a gift from God to mankind. But while he exalts human knowledge as capable of deriving philosophical systems of gnosis (in this case, history), he constantly reminds of the restricted scope of our understanding: For instance, when he quotes from the Koran, “God knows better. “And you were given but little knowledge” (p. 40). Among the things of which we can have no knowledge is the notion of “cause.” In connection with this, Khaldun actually admonishes us not to speculate on the nature of cause, lest it lead to heresy. (p. 249 – 250)

God has given mortals but little knowledge which we can in turn use to derive a system of guidelines to approach history with greater accuracy. With the understanding as our guide, we run less the danger of giving ourselves over to superstition and prejudices. While the facts of history will never be wholly accessible to us (due to the limited scope of our understanding), it is within out power to derive the proper way of doing history. Thus we find that Khaldun’s theory of human knowledge stands as the strong motivating principle for the creation of a system of historiography.

So now let us now inquire after the features of human thought that enable us to do history correctly. According to Khaldun, our intellect is not merely what distinguishes us from beasts, and enables us to form social organizations (x, 42). Rather, what he calls the “speculative instinct” allows us to make sense of existence through perceiving and apperceiving. As he writes, “[Speculative Instinct] consists of both perceptions and apperceptions…The end of the process is to be provided with the perception of existence as it is , with its various genera, differences, reasons and causes. By thinking about these things, man achieves perfection in his reality and becomes pure intellect and perceptive soul. This is the meaning of human reality” (p. 334). The implication here is that “intellecting” is somewhat on par with godliness as it can lead to “perfection.”

Lest we get too enthusiastic about the empowered capacities of our reason, Khaldun reminds us time and again of our fallibility (““God is the ultimate repository of all knowledge. Man is weak and deficient”) (p. 30). He is careful never to put human reason on par with divine revelation. All objects of historical knowledge require outside verification, in marked contrast with the Koran, which “is its own proof” (p. 73). Khaldun’s insistence on constant verification is geared toward making us aware of the gulf between divine revelation and the human intellect. That said, the notion that we can derive meaning in life through “perceiving and apperceiving” implies a link between human understanding and divine wisdom. We clearly see Khaldun agreeing with the idea that there is a prophetic element to all human reason when he writes, “We…were inspired by God. He led us to a science whose truth we ruthlessly set forth.” Any success that he meets in regards to producing a sound historical tract “is due to divine guidance.” (p. 42)

As concerns the functioning of the human mind, Khaldun connects the intellect’s quest for meaning with religious strivings.

[The soul] wants to be free from the grip of (the lower human) powers and the human kind of preparedness. It wants to proceed to active intellection by assimilating itself to the highest spiritual group (that of the angels), and to get into the first order of the spiritualia by perceiving them without the help of bodily organs…It exchanges all humanity and human spirituality for angelicality of the highest stage, without the help of any acquired faculty but by virtue of a primary natural disposition that God has placed in it.

Khaldun’s insistence on the realm of human intellect as connected to the divine is further fortified when we writes, “[T]he world of the intellect and the spirits is shared by us with the angels, whose essences are of the same kind as the essences of that world.” (p. 338)

Despite this link between the spiritual and the intellectual, there remain many limitations to what our minds can derive, just as there are many limitations on what can be derived through prophecy. Khaldun remains as skeptical of the supernatural element of prophecy as he is of the dubious methods employed by earlier historians. As he writes, “All [the] ways of perceiving the supernatural are based upon no proof, and are not verifiable” (89). Elsewhere he writes, “Things of the future belong to the supernatural and cannot be known unless the causes for their happening are known and we have trustworthy information about it” (p. 89).

This discussion of prophecy and its limitations underscore the reasons why we can never get a fully sound account of history. The proper way to go about doing history is to devote our powers of thinking and reasoning - powers that have a link to prophecy – to our best efforts. Since the human intellect is limited, all wisdom comes through the grace of God. As we can never get at the fundamental causes of things, the most effective way to go about historicizing is to turn our powers of reasoning to examine critically what historical knowledge we have so we have a “yardstick” for future generations of historians. This yardstick will do more than instruct us how to do history; in the quest for spiritual meaning that Ibn Khaldun has made of history, its implementation can aid one to “perfection in his reality.”

Three Contributions to a Philosophy of History

Continuing in a historico-philisophico-aesthetico vein, here's a paper that examines the responsibility of critics and historians using Wollheim, Popper, Berlin and Danto.

In “Art and its Objects,” Richard Wollheim writes that, “anachronism arises not when critics characterize the past in terms of their own day, but when in doing so they falsify the past.” Wollheim poses the question in regard to art, but we can apply it without much difficulty to the discipline of history. The philosophers Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and Arthur Danto all speak to Wollheim’s concern. The definitions they provide open up a conversation as to the proper domain of historical interpretation and its possible abuses. Considered together, these thinkers can be seen as making a valuable trio of contributions to a theory of historical interpretation.

Both Popper and Berlin formulate their philosophies of history in opposition to treating history like a science. Popper insists on history in the service of life, where it is incumbent upon every generation to reinterpret history for themselves. We can see his enthusiasm as a defense mechanism against historicist “misinterpretation,” of history as totalizing and objective. Berlin sustains the attack on historicism and speaks of the need for “sympathy and imagination” in order to engage in historical interpretation. He introduces a rumination on the role of language in history writing. Berlin’s semantic concerns anticipate Danto’s theory of narrative sentence with its insistence that language is always about interpretation. In demarcating the proper limits of historical interpretation and reinterpretation, Popper, Berlin and Danto tacitly assume that, philosophically speaking, we can know the past more perfectly than the present. We engage in historical analysis in order to escape the ignorant present.

In chapter 25 of The Open Society and its Enemies, Popper argues against viewing history as a natural science and advocates constant reinterpretation to safeguard against the dangerous “misinterpretation” known as “historicism.” Popper decries attempts to find eternal laws of historical development by which one can predict the future and holds any and all attempts at “objective history” to be not only flawed, but also dangerous. As he writes, “There can be no history of the past as it actually happened; there can only be historical interpretations, and none of them final; and every generation has a right to frame its own” (Popper, p. 255). He speaks of the possibility to having different yet complimentary viewpoints, “for since each generation has its own troubles and problems, and therefore its own interests and its own point of view, it follows that each generation has a right to look upon and re-interpret history in its own way, which is complementary to that of previous generations" (p. 254).

The danger with applying scientific techniques to historical thinking is the problem of misrepresentation. He traces this danger back to the logical positivists and talks of how their notion of progress in nature and science quickly spread to encompass other disciplines. Popper is willing to admit that, “history stands it a certain relation to science” and recommends we test our theories for falsifiable content. But he doubts strongly that applying scientific techniques will enable us to interpret history in a healthy fashion. "We see, therefore, that those universal laws which historical explanation uses provide no selective and unifying principle, no ‘point of view’ of history” (p. 252). Popper writes that history is by definition selective. This it appears in an inevitable result of the confrontation between infinite events and finite language: “In order to describe this infinite wealth, we have at our disposal only a finite number of a finite series of words” (p. 248). In history, we always take sides; we always have a point of view.

Interpretation is defined by Popper as a collection of facts that support a theory. Interpretations can never yield historical laws and Popper admonishes us to give up the "naïve belief that any definite set of historical records can ever be interpreted in one way only” (p. 253). He writes further, "“our only authority may give us just that information regarding certain events which fits with his own specific interpretation. Most specific interpretations of these facts we may attempt will then be circular in the sense that they must fit in with the interpretation, which was used in the original selection of facts. If, however, we can give to such material an interpretation which radically deviates from that adopted by our authority, then the character of our interpretation may perhaps take on some semblance to that of a scientific hypothesis. But fundamentally, it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that it is a very dubious argument in favour of a certain argument that it can be easily applied, and that it explains all we know; for only if we can look out for counter-examples can we test a theory” (253-4). Nonetheless, Popper is careful not to allow his pluralism cripple him against condemning the historicists, who he faults for setting out to find “the Path on which mankind is destined to walk; it is out to discover the Clue to History” (p. 256).

What do we expect from history? “We want to know how our troubles are related to the past and we want to see the line along which we may progress towards the solution of what we feel, and what we choose, to be our main tasks” (p. 255). According to Popper, we want knowledge of where we’ve been and indicators as to where we’re headed. History qua history has no meaning. It only assumes meaning when we interpret it. “Although history has no ends, we can impose these ends of ours upon it; and although history has no meaning, we can give it a meaning…it is we who introduce purpose and meaning into nature and into history.” In response to the historicists, Popper says, “History can’t progress, only we can.”

In his essay, “The Concept of Scientific History,” Isaiah Berlin writes that history is about ‘prediction and retrodiction’. Berlin lectures us on how to engage most effectively in historical interpretation. Theory confirmation is not the place of history. It is the disciple of inclusion, rather than exclusion. We look for differences, rather than similarities. Those patterns we perceive in history, says Berlin, are founts of knowledge. History is the discipline of generalization and selectivity. That said, Berlin is not anti-historicist to the extent of Popper and he reserves some kind words for Marx and Kant, whom he calls men of “deep insight and genius.”

Perhaps the most surprising element of Berlin’s analysis is his definition of history. He defines history as doing all we can to make the past make sense. In order to engage in true historical interpretation, though, we need an ample capacity of sympathy and imagination. “[W]e cannot evade the task of interpretation, for nothing counts as an historical interpretation, unless it attempts to answer the question of how the world must have looked to other individuals or societies if their acts and words are to be taken as the acts and words of human being neither wholly like ourselves nor so different as not to fit into our common past. Without a capacity for sympathy and imagination beyond any required by a physician, there is no vision of either past or present, neither of others nor of ourselves; but where it is wholly lacking, ordinary – as well as historical – thinking cannot function at all” (p. 44). This turn recalls Collingwood’s empathy theory to a point. Berlin seems to be painting in broader strokes by prescribing sympathy and imagination as transcendental preconditions for any sort of historical knowledge whatsoever.

The meaning of history for Berlin is much less grandiose than a Popperian injunction: “The immediate purpose of narrative historians (as has often been repeated) whatever else it may be besides this, is to paint a portrait of a situation or a process, which, like all portraits, seek to capture the unique pattern and peculiar characteristics of its particular subject.” (p. 31) Elsewhere he writes, “History is merely the mental projection into the past of this activity of selection and adjustment, the search of coherence and unity, together with the attempt to refine it with all the self-consciousness of which we are capable, by bringing to its aid everything that we conceive to be useful” (p. 41).

Like Popper, Berlin is fascinated by the relation between language and history. He speaks of how history requires that language aid it, and make it coherent and interpretive. He writes: “In a developed work of natural science…the links between the propositions are, or should be, logically obvious…This is very far from being the case in even the best, most convincing, rigorously argued works of history. No student of the subject can, I think, fail to note the abundance in works of history of such phrases as ‘Small wonder if, ‘It was therefore hardly surprising when,’ ‘The inevitable consequences swiftly followed,’ ‘events took their inexorable course,’ ‘In the circumstances,’ ‘From this is was but a short step to,’ and most often of all, the indispensable, scarcely noticeable and deeply treacherous ‘thus’, ‘whereupon’ ‘finally’ and the like.” (p. 21) These concerns anticipate Danto and his theory of narrative sentences.

While Arthur Danto’s essay Narrative and Style” is concerned primarily with art, we can easily apply what he says about narrative sentences to the realm of historical discourse. The main point is that language is always about interpretation. It stands to reason, then, that history, defined as a form of representation with the aim of bridging past and present, must rely on language to an extent unsuspected by Popper and Berlin.

Danto’s theory of narrative sentences is elaborated via a distinction between fixed causal continuity and an ever-changing semantic continuity with a deep interpretive element. Danto defines narrative sentences as “sentences by which an earlier event is described with reference to a later one, yielding thereby descriptions under which events cannot have been witnessed at the time of their occurrence, for whatever reason it is that their future was hidden to those who might have witnessed them” (Danto, p.201). In case we are troubled by the seemingly hopelessly anachronistic flavor of this language, Danto reassures us that “We have no difficulty with them, however, since their future is our past, which the narrative sentence serves to organize under narrative structure.” He further allows that certain narrative sentences can make claims on the future, without making historical claims. In order to make historical claims on the future, however, one requires either hindsight or revelation! As he writes, “The difference between a future we feel we have a right to expect and a future we have no right to expect and cannot even formulate, may merely be indexed to different levels of ignorance rather than difference orders of change” (Danto, p. 203).

Danto makes much of the basic narrative structure of history, contrasting it carefully with a causal chain: “There has to be a difference, one feels, between the end of a narrative and the latest link in a causal chain, even if the causal chain terminates with it” (p. 205). Danto draws our attention to the fact that “Historical knowledge always seems more than human knowledge” (p. 204). That this is so is testament to the incredible force of narrative. He writes that, “ends of stories belong to stories, not to reality” and quotes Carrier as saying “You can tell a story ending wherever you choose about whatever you wish.” The idea here is that depending on the goals we have in store for history, our starting and end points will be different.

Danto’s analysis of narrative sentences has telling implications for our understanding of historical interpretation. The very notion that there can be times in the present when we can’t utter certain sentences implies that all our interpretation must be, in a sense, reinterpretation. The moral Danto seems to formulate is that we can know where we have been, but never where we are.

While this seems a far cry from both the Popperian duty of “re-framing” history and infusing it with meaning, as well as the “prediction and retrodiction” of Berlin, we mustn’t see the move in Danto as removing history from the service of life. Rather, the narrative inevitabilities and constraints he illuminates for us are a further means of distinguishing between proper and improper modes of historical interpretation. Here a common goal emerges for this triumvirate of thinkers: to steer us clear of the error of misinterpretation and anachronism.

History's Blank Pages

I'm going to shift gears now. We turn slightly from aesthetics and towards philosophy of history to examine Hegel's metaphor of history's "blank pages."

In Carol Reed’s 1949 film, The Third Man, Orson Welles delivers one of the all-time greatest screen monologues to Joseph Cotton.

In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

While these lines are not lacking in humor, they raise a serious and legitimate concern for the philosophy of history. Harry Lime’s historical observation implies the following questions (1) What role does happiness play in the unfolding of history? and, (2) Is it not, in a sense, antithetical to greatness? In this essay, I will present G.W.F. Hegel’s position that happiness is irrelevant to history. I will then offer an alternate view that all of history is nothing but successive stages of happiness attuned to the perfection of contentment itself. I will argue for this conclusion via an analysis and rethinking of Hegel’s claims about the place of happiness in the scheme of historical development.

In chapter three of the “Introduction to the Philosophy of History,” Hegel claims “periods of happiness are empty pages in history, for they are the periods of harmony, times when the antithesis is missing.” This assertion must be understood in the context of his larger argument about the nature of historical development and his obscure teleology. The whole of human history is the history of the contradiction between universal order and individual chaos, or destiny versus the barbarism of mankind. Hegel argues against habit and routine and for dialectic. He feels that one must understand all phases of history in relation to each other, and appreciate conflict is a necessary – though not a sufficient – condition for progress to occur. The premises on which this outlook rests come from his notion that all history is, in fact, the history of struggle of ideas and their antitheses. The goal of metaphysics, as he sees it, is to understand this struggle.

The end of history, for Hegel, is the perfection of Reason, or Spirit, in the world. He considers it an a priori supposition, observable through the course of history that Reason is in the process of being slowly revealed to mankind. It is fitting that we should ask what practical good the unfolding of reason would have for mankind, whether it would produce lasting happiness. Though Hegel doesn’t really respond to this explicitly, I feel we must understand the Spirit arrived at self-knowledge as a time of true happiness brought about by the ultimate fulfillment of reason and liberty. Individual happiness, prior to this, is achieved through accommodating one’s existence to one’s particular character: that is to say, by reconciling one’s individual existence, which is arbitrary free will, with the universal essence, which is the substantial totality of things. This is the only sort of happiness Hegel feels we can achieve in our present state, one that is limited to the realm of private lives. (p. 33)

Another argument Hegel brings against happiness is based on the biographies of the great, “historical” men. These monumentally looming figures – Napoleon, Frederick the Great - who make history progress by bringing reason into the world, do not lead happy lives, nor is that their lot. Ruled, by their master-passions, they toil relentlessly and fall into obscurity once their goals are achieved. They are prophets of reason, meant to suffer for the sake of the truth it is their destiny to carry into the world. Hegel writes of Alexander the Great and Caesar, “[the] great men in history are those whose particular aims contain the substantial will that is the will of the World Spirit” (p. 32). These great actors are in touch with the Idea unconsciously and have “insight into what was needed and what was timely…the very truth of their time and their world” (p. 33). That this inner sense never rises to the level of consciousness is seen if how these men, who were called upon “to manage the affairs of the World Spirit,” worked to satisfy themselves. “Thus these men seem to create from themselves, and their actions have produced a set of conditions and worldly relations which seem to be only their interest, and their work” (p. 33). But despite operating out of self-interest and catalyzing history, great men cannot be considered happy. Hegel finds a “horrible consolation in the fact that these historical men did not achieve what is called happiness” (p. 33).

In response to Hegel’s views on the worthlessness of human happiness to history, several criticisms can be made about the premises and conclusions of his theory. Hegel doesn’t present us with a compelling reason why we ought to consider the middle step of synthesis irrelevant (except insofar as it becomes the subsequent thesis), where a temporary equilibrium is achieved. Antagonism is just as fleeting as happiness, and the tranquil synthesis rears its head just as frequently as its antithesis. Secondly, if Hegel’s interested in describing a historical process, why is he so coy about admitting that role that happiness plays in decision-making? Surely, the will to be happy drives human behavior much more immediately and clearly than the will to bring Reason into the world. The will to happiness is the most observable drive in human nature, into which is coded the desire for comfort and freedom from pain. We strive to actualize and perfect this in any way possible. It could be said that the driving force in history is the promise of greater happiness. Hegel is reluctant to understand the revelation of Spirit merely as the gradual unfolding of happiness because he wants to say that there’s more driving history than an eye to individual or general welfare and that history is actually interested in evolving in accordance with Reason. Obviously, this is non-falsifiable claim. To say that Hegel’s conception of historical development does not correspond with the real world would be arrogant, but he does seem to take his cues from areas anterior to concrete history, such as religion and art. There’s a sense that Hegel can be seen as hiding behind an analogy with art. In referring to the “empty pages of history,” he is using a literary metaphor that reveals a certain mode of thinking. Is he not comparing the historian’s craft to that of the novelist? If History is a great book waiting to be written, does not the historian read conflict into history in much the same way a playwright creates antagonisms on the stage or a novelist on the page? Lastly, in what position is Hegel to estimate how happy or miserable Napoleon’s life was? He assumes that happiness is opposed to antagonism by definition, and that conflict automatically renders the individual unhappy.

There is no compelling reason why we ought to regard happiness in history as merely stagnant, moments when the project of realizing Spirit were put on hold. We ought rather to see periods of great harmony as those wherein reason and freedom were achieved most fully. Periods of happiness are not the empty pages of history, but rather those epochs when reason is best equipped to know itself, and produces happiness in proportion to the amount of reason currently in the world. “Happiness” and “harmony” cannot admit of the antithesis, Hegel claims, and hence are not the proper objects of history. Au contraire, let us turn our examination to those moments of happiness to see how we can learn from them. Instead of studying the political upheavals and terrors of the Renaissance, why don’t we examine the political and social alliances that lead to tranquility in Switzerland for 500 years? Why shouldn’t this be a legitimate form of historical inquiry?

In The Third Man, Orson Welles is Harry Lime, a con artist who sells penicillin on the black market in post-war Vienna. Though hardly a da Vinci or a Michelangelo, he uses the Hegelian cuckoo-clock argument to rationalize his life based on violence and corruption. The argument for antagonism based on genius is a dangerous road to go down. Even those who find the argument intriguing must concede the possibility of buying into a Post Hoc Ergo Procter Hoc fallacy. In this instance, a rejection of Hegel restored philosophical dignity to the concept of Happiness and deprives the Harry Limes of the world of their intellectual ammunition.

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Bibliography:
Hegel, G.W.F., Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Cambridge, Hackett Publishing Company; 1988

Essays on Aesthetics: Part 1

Dear all,

In the next few days, I shall be posting a number of essays dealing with problems in aesthetics on this blog. I inaugurate this new direction with an essay about the Whistler / Ruskin controversy and the fascinating case of Hans van Meegeren. the I appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks,
-Adam

Artist vs. Critic

The picture that emerges from the Whistler / Ruskin and van Meegeren cases is one of a confrontational relationship between the artist and the critic. Is this relationship, by its very nature, adversarial? In this essay I will argue that to view this delicate and important symbiosis as purely adversarial would be limiting and unfair. I will argue that the critic, while often in conflict with the artist, is by no means obliged to take on a belligerent role vis-a-vis the artist. Rather, he must function as an intermediary between the artist and the public as a publicly elected arbiter of taste.

To view the critic merely as the artist's inevitable afterbirth is to imply a state of affairs where Ruskin can lunge at Whistler with a slanderous notice and van Meegeren can parry by turning out a fraud. To a certain extent, the critic and the artist need each other. Both have pretensions to a paradigm of taste; the artist seeks to create a work of beauty, and the critic evaluates that beauty. At stake here, is much more than an individual artist's reputation. The quarrel between artist and critic is in essence a debate over about ownership; both of the audience and of taste.
I will argue this through an examination of the Whistler / Ruskin and van Meegeren cases, both of which pose challenges to the fundamental relationship between critic and artist. I will round out my conclusion with insights from David Hume's essay on the "Standard of Taste" as well as Henry James' response to the Whistler controversy.

James Abbot McNeill Whistler would have us believe that the artist and critic are completely at odds. Chief among the critics' transgressions is the constant tendency of critics to moralize art. In his 10 O'clock Lecture, Whistler claims that nowadays "Beauty is confounded with virtue, and, before a work of Art, it is asked: what good shall it do?" (p. 30). One of Whistler's more outrageous claims is that criticism is less a means of evaluating art than a way for failed artists to gain intellectual ownership over an artwork erudite prose. On this point, Whistler writes that "[the critic] finds poetry where he would feel it were he himself transcribing the event...and noble philosophy in some detail of philanthropy ...meanwhile the painter's poetry is quite lost to him (p. 34)."

At bottom. Whistler holds that the only person qualified to judge an artwork is another artist. He imagines an age where the artist was able to channel their purely aesthetic message to the audience without the need of an intermediary, the dread critic whose influence "while it has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture...the work is considered absolutely from a literary point of view...[he] degrades art by supposing it a method of bringing about a literary climax (p.33)."

In addition, he lambastes the critic as performer: "Exhorting -denouncing - directing. Filled with wrath and earnestness. Bringing powers of persuasion, and polish of language to prove -nothing...Impressive - important - shallow. Defiant - distressed -desperate (p. 35)."

There are many ways to counter Whistler's rather paranoid claims. Perhaps none is more apt that Stuart Culver's analysis of Whistler's nemesis. According to Culver, Ruskin wasn't an across the board conservative, he just thought that Whistler's was a "decadent aestheticism that failed to be offensive in the correct, politically productive way (p. 42)" and in "outrageous defiance of representational standards" (p.43) . More broadly, Culver sees the whole affair as an outgrowth of Whistler misconstruing the critic's intentions: "Ruskin's mistake. Whistler believed, was to imagine that by teaching the public how to read moral allegories into paintings he could bridge the gap between the painter's intentions and the public's reception, (p. 46)" It's true that Ruskin was a particularly moral-minded critic. But extrapolating from this point to a general condemnation of criticism makes no sense.

Furthermore, we find ourselves faced with a formidable challenge if we try to resolve Whistler's desire to connect to his audience directly and his insistence on the autonomy of the artist. The logical extension of his autonomy principle was that "the very presence of the public or the critic in studios and galleries [was] a threat to rational composition, (p. 46)" For Whistler, autonomy seems to be synonymous with isolation.

Han van Meegeren took a similarly adversarial view of the artist / critic relationship. Unlike Whistler, though, his strategy for exacting revenge was to beat the critics at their own game. His extensive knowledge and familiarity of Vermeer's technique and themes enabled him to create a new period and style for Vermeer. In the words of one of the critics who testified at his trial, once "the Emmaus was declared authentic by world-renowned experts...the rest were linked in the same chain, (p. 95)"

By transgressing the critic / artist boundary, van Meeregen thought to expose the hypocrisy and snobbery of the Dutch art establishment, chief among them Dr. Brendius. Lessing contends that van Meeregen brought Holland's art critics to their knees by proving their judgments to be "historical, biographical, economic or sociological, instead of aesthetic." The conclusion van Meeregen wanted the critics to reach, namely that he's as great an artist as Vermeer, reflects an unsound reason at work. Nevertheless, the challenge he posed to the critics is valuable and provocative (p. 122). However, van Meegeren's own admission reveals that he was motivated primarily out of personal spite: "I had been so belittled by the critics that I could no longer exhibit anywhere. I was systematically damaged by the critics, who knew not a thing about art (p. 96)."

While one can view both Whistler and van Meegeren as performance artists who are reaching out directly to the audience for appeal, it's essential to remember that both artists had scores to settle. Thus both artists seem to act more out of anger and frustration than out of a serious desire to seriously question the role of the critic. The Whistler and van Meegeren cases are too personal to persuade, generating far-fetched arguments that cast the artist's sanity into doubt (consider Whistler's warped view of critic qua jealous artist).

Critics themselves, Henry James and David Hume help us understand why exacerbated artists challenge the artist / critic relationship in an effort to reach the audience directly. It is true that critics mediate between the audience and the artist in priestly fashion, ^-^ bridging the gulf between artist and public in order to deal with artistic distance. Based on what their testimony, it makes little sense to call the critic / artist relationship adversarial in any fundamental way.

In the "Standard of Taste," Hume suggests that we all would do well to be first-rate critics, as a refined taste leads naturally -according to the logic - to a refined sense of virtue. He holds belief in an "ideal" to which all criticism should aspire. He accounts for the diversity of opinion among critics and acknowledges that certain modes of critical inquiry are flawed On the first point, he is willing to acknowledge particular disagreements that exist among critics, saying
that though critics agree on the universal concepts we incorporate into our understanding of beauty: "but when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions. (Hume #2)." On the second point, he argues that we should be charitable with criticism whenever we encounter a principle that clashes with our aesthetic experience. In such a circumstance, we shouldn't blame criticism in general but rather "those particular rules of criticism which would establish such circumstances to be faults, and would represent them as , universally blameable. (#9)"

In answer to the question of why we need critics to begin with, Hume contends that, "when objects of any kind are first presented to the eye or the imagination, the sentiment, which attends them, is obscure and confused. (#18)" The notion that certain people are better and more qualified to form aesthetic judgments than others underlies the notion of criticism in general. How, then, should a critic comport himself? "He must preserve his mind free from all prejudice, and allow nothing to enter into his consideration, but the very object which is submitted to his examination. (#21)" Hume seems to set an impossibly high bar for the ideal critic, who must always view a more of art from the audience's point of view (this is especially important when viewing art from a different age or culture). It is from this identification
with the audience in addition to "strong sense united by delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison and cleared of all prejudice" alone that a critic can comprehend the "true standard of taste and beauty (#23) ." Thus, the critic for Hume occupies an essential role in society, by pointing the public towards the true and beautiful.

We find a similar idea by way of Henry James, whose notion of the critic in the modern marketplace is explained by Culver as "fundamentally sacrificial. It is his job to understand and experience for others too busy or too distracted to encounter art themselves. The critic is then the artist's exemplary audience and, increasingly, the public consumes only vicariously through him. (p. 46)"

This approach to the critic / artist relationship tears all adversarial notions asunder. This conception of the critic is the artist's ideal viewer may also raise questions about the accessibility and functionality of art. James is careful not to let his opinions on the role and purpose of criticism play too great a role in the greater meaning of art. He wants very much to grant art its autonomy. Towards this end, he writes: "Art is one of the necessities of life; but even the critics themselves would probably not assert that criticism is anything more than an agreeable luxury, something like printed talk" (p. 29).

James' insight in this matter is closely related to the Whistler / Ruskin trial and the two ideas about art and art criticism which it upheld: that you can have art for art's sake, but not criticism for its own sake; and that there are both legitimate and illegitimate modes of criticism. As the critic's function is to "master the practice of consuming art," the glance he casts in art's direction must be involving and detached, being that he is both an emissary of the public and, on a certain level, possessed of a keener sense of refinement and finesse.
In essence, Whistler and van Meegeren stage their revolts over a question of access. They represent artists who, fed up with critics opt to transgress boundaries and become performance artists in an attempt to communicate directly with the public. The belletristic nature of these cases is particular to the nature of the conflicts and to view the artist / critic symbiosis as purely adversarial is to do a disservice to a beneficial and essential relationship. For while Hume and James disagree on whether to consider the critic a necessity or a luxury, they both ascribe to him the responsibility and power to impart an appreciation of art onto the audience. If Hume sets an impossibly high bar for the true critic, this is because he considers a true critic to be as rare as he is vital. In the end, artist and critic alike need to answer to a standard of taste.