Author’s note: This is something I’ve never published before. This is the paper that got me kicked out of my graduate philosophy program and cost me my degree. It’s a solid sixty pages, and the formatting hasn’t transferred that well. But if anyone is interested, here it is.
The Moral, the Aesthetic, and the Condemned
The Intersection of Art and Ethics in Greek, Yoruba, Nahua, and Our Own Present and Future Society
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. Our World
A. The Essential Conflict
B. The Essential Difference
C. The Culture War
D. The Importance of the Arts
2. The World of the Greeks
A. Understanding Plato
B. The Power of the Poets
C. Principles in Poetry
D. The Road to Purgation
3. The World of the Yoruba
A. The Language of Truth
B. The Face of Beauty
C. The Outcast
4. The World of the Nahua
A. The Slippery Earth
B. Flower and Song
C. Teacher of Faces
5. A World of the Possibilities
A. What We Have Learned?
B. What It Might Cost
C. What We Might Gain
Bibliography
Introduction
In this essay you will find a basic overview of five cultures: first, the one that we live in; second, the culture of the Greeks of Plato’s day; third, the culture of the Yoruba of Africa; fourth, the culture of the Nahua of Mesoamerica; and fifth, the as-yet unknown culture of our own future history and what it could—and maybe should—become. These cultures, in particular their philosophies in regard to the intersection of art and morality, are our texts. In that sense our point of entry into the topic of this essay is anthropological. We are asking ourselves what answers these peoples gave to some of the essential questions about the nature of aesthetic value and what we can learn from those answers.
There are some very important difficulties one faces when studying the philosophies of other cultures, particularly those whose ways and ways of thinking are especially alien to us. Undeniably, they engaged in certain practices and held certain beliefs which we find it hard to identify with in our society. Their language is also very difficult. Even with practice most people mispronounce most of the words. It is also a difficulty that, because European civilization conquered or colonized their civilization, we today have a complex of attitudes and beliefs engendered in us through our historical participation in that act. On the one hand, we may have certain prejudices: we may take a patronizing view of their beliefs, skewed and sometimes whitewashed by our sense of “conqueror’s guilt” and our tolerant multiculturalism. We may also make the mistake of thinking that we know more about them than we really do, since we are acquainted with some of their history and their later descendents.
Either of these tendencies might evoke a polite, indulgent interest, but not the sort of serious, objective consideration that is needed in order to truly understand someone’s beliefs and take them seriously. With the Greeks, the Yoruba, and the Nahua, I think it is important to enter into the discussion keeping in mind that their beliefs represent real, living, competitive options. We must consider that there is a real possibility that there is truth in them. We need more than the museum-curator attitude of the scholar who dissects and puts fascinating curiosities on display and more than the museum-goer attitude of the multiculturalist, who bends a tolerant and skeptically indulgent gaze on such interesting curiosities. We need to study them as believers.
If we, as a culture, do not feel the threat that Plato represents to our way of life and our beliefs, we are not taking him seriously enough. The same holds true for the Nahua and Yoruba. When we behold the rising specter of Nezahualcoyotl, the philosopher king of Texcoco, and imagine him rising to rule our own society, we must react either with love and open arms or with hatred and utter rejection. We must either accept his claim to authority or reject his right to rule us. These things simply refuse to fit nicely into our current schema. They will burst it like new wine in old wineskins. They refuse utterly to be merely tolerated, particularly in the arena where we will see them doing battle: the realm of the arts.
There is a further question of approach which comes up in connection with the study of the philosophies of people such as Plato, the Yoruba, and the Nahua. Our style of analytic philosophy, with its methodologies, traditions, categories, and technical terminologies, does not always apply very well to their styles and conceptual frameworks. Yoruba and Nahua conceptual categories are quite different from our own and no not recognize such divisions as metaphysics, ethics, logic, and epistemology, nor do they make use of symbolic logic in explaining and arguing for their ideas. Nahua methodology generally rejects the use of analytic-style reasoning. For them the language of metaphor is the best medium for philosophy.
The Yoruba have no technical terminology to speak of. Virtually all of their philosophical discussion takes place at the level of ordinary language and discussion. Throughout all three traditions you will find complex philosophical ideas being explained in terms of the conditions of yams, bird feathers, and dogs. To attempt to force these ideas into a highly analytic framework is to risk damaging and misinterpreting the ideas.
Even Plato gives us some trouble. For all of his use of argumentation and his championing of refined philosophical discussion, very few people these days choose to express their ideas in the form of amusing and often poetically written dialogues. How are we to bring together these radically disparate traditions in a way that makes them all comprehensible and is amenable to philosophical analysis without compromising the conceptual and methodological self-identities of the parties involved?
In the interests of avoiding this problem, I have tried to stick to a few primary texts and authors whose writings, I feel, preserve the thinking and approach of their subjects. I have also tried, in my own writing, to give a picture of these philosophies which we will be able to translate to our own experience without forcing it into our style of modern philosophical analysis. By and large, I have tried to avoid using technical philosophical language and attempted to stick to the level of ordinary language and discussion, the style favored by our subjects, except where I thought such use was necessary or helped to provide a bridge between our thinking and theirs. For, though one finds very few or no cases of intersecting definitions, there are plenty of conceptual similarities, similar mental pictures, which we can compare between them. Words, ideas, and backgrounds may vary, but one can often find concepts that play similar roles or which have a similar structure across cultural boundaries.
This style of approach, focusing on ordinary language, metaphorical understanding, and practical readability is, I think, also important for dealing with the particular subject matter of this essay: the arts and morality. In general I prefer to use the term “morality” rather than “ethics” because it has about it the suggestion of something universally human, rather than a philosophical specialization. My use of the term “the arts” is also meant to suggest something universal, rather than a specialized segment of the artistic community. Morality is something common to us all insofar as we are humans and we think and act, and art is something common to us all insofar as we are humans and we possess the creative imagination and aesthetic appreciation. Our language and our focus, then, needs to be directed at what is common: common moral principles and common aesthetic experience, popular culture and public controversies seen from a philosophical standpoint. It is my hope that by studying these phenomena we will gain a greater understanding of the operation of art and morality in our culture and, perhaps, some insight into what role philosophy should take in it, and in its future.
Our World
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” – John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
The Essential Conflict
“And let us further say to her, lest she condemn us for harshness or rusticity, that there is from of old a quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”– Plato, Republic X
Throughout the ages, from the very earliest beginnings of philosophy, there has been a great conflict raging about the relation between art and morality. In the very earliest hour of intellectual thought, in the very pages of the Republic itself, the controversial specter of censorship rears its ugly head. And, if we are to believe the quotation above, it has always been so. Ethics and aesthetics, though only just being born as conceptual categories, are already set in opposition to each other, the freedom of one imperiled by the forcible dominance of the other. There is, we are told, no room for the freedom of the arts in the Republic. The city is not safe with poetry free within her bounds, and neither is our soul.
This lack of artistic freedom has often been a stumbling block to those people living in our modern age who try to read and understand Plato’s great work. Many react with shock, some with incredulity. How can the great master of philosophy, who was himself raised with the words of Homer upon his lips from babe to man, how can he callously throw out the very pinnacle of culture, his own culture, the lifeblood of the Greeks, and say to the greatest writer of the ancient world that there is no room for him in his new Jerusalem?
This is a question that philosophy professors are always having to answer, or trying to answer, for their students. And the students try to understand. Perhaps it was simply a perversion caused by the particular climate of culture and ideas at the time. Surely, if Plato was alive and writing today, the more generous-minded say, he would not come to that conclusion. They put it down to an anachronism and try to focus on the more positive and appealing aspects of Plato’s great work, or at least allow themselves to forgive him this fault.
But this early foray into moral censorship of the arts was not to be the last carried out by a self-appointed guardian of society. Throughout history, this issue has come up again and again. From iconoclasm in the 700s and 800s among the Byzantines to the banning of Of Mice and Men and Doctor Zhivago in the last century, the battle goes on and on. Music, plays, movies, books, sculptures, dances; the list goes on and on. All of these artistic forms have faced censorship, all have faced moral criticism, all have come under scrutiny. Even today, it goes on. Oprah, a powerful voice in American culture, recently aired a show that questioned the moral culpability of rap music in normalizing misogynistic speech in popular culture. In the art world, a sculpture entitled “My Sweet Lord” that was supposed to be put on display for Easter was removed because it depicted an anatomically correct Jesus made entirely out of chocolate, which many people objected to. Though perhaps more political concession than an ethical one, such an example of conflict is, in the end, rooted in a belief that the aesthetic can and maybe should be forced to give to give way before moral considerations (such as whether it wrongs someone, according to our own modern sensibilities, in which the greatest sin and worst injury is to be offended).
Throughout history there have been people who, on a very basic level, believed that art, in the general sense, is dangerous and needs to be controlled. It needs to be subjected to standards of control; it needs to obey ethical standards of conduct. And where it is deemed perilous, it needs to be suppressed.
Books are still, on occasion, banned from certain venues, even as certain people (usually people of a certain age) are banned from certain venues. Why? Well, it depends on whom you ask, but someone will surely tell you that it is for the moral good of the parties involved. This is nothing new, as we have seen. Art, including popular art and entertainment, has been around for a very long time, and many peoples and nations before us have seen fit to ask moral questions and make moral demands of the aesthetic. The important thing to realize is that it is an old battle. Philosophy and the arts have often come in conflict in the past. And it is in the areas of ethics and politics (ethics writ large, Aristotle might say) that philosophy most often runs afoul of aesthetics. This is where the old battle is fought, between these two things. Between the arts and metaphysics, perhaps, there is not such an essential conflict, nor between the arts and logic or the arts and epistemology. But in this area the conflict is certainly and obviously there. For Plato, such a conflict was inevitable; it was a battle that had to be fought and could not be avoided. But was Plato right?
The Essential Difference
“ ‘It may be true, as Curtius has said, that; the modern world immeasurably overvalues art.’ Or it may be that the modern world is right and that all previous ages have erred in making art, as they did, subordinate to life…. Or, again, a middle view may be possible; that works of art are in reality serious, and ends in themselves, but that all is lost when the artists discover this, as Eros fled when Psyche turned the lamp upon him. But wherever the truth may lie, there are two things of which I feel certain. One is, that if we do overvalue art, then art itself will be the greatest sufferer…. The other is that, even if we of all generations have first valued art aright, yet there will certainly be loss as well as gain.” – C.S. Lewis, Selected Literary Essays: 1956 “Sir Walter Scott”
There is something unusual about our own society. One can see it in the reaction of young students to the censorship of Plato. Many of us simply cannot comprehend why Plato would advance such a doctrine. We cannot understand or condone book burning or censorship or iconoclasm. We do not believe in the repression of artistic exploration. It is not simply that we don’t agree with it, we find it hard to countenance the very legitimacy of the reasoning behind it.
In fact, we often find such powerful reactions to poetry and drama, such as you see in Plato, almost laughable. The whole thing seems ridiculous, incomprehensible. It is tilting at windmills. It is not reasoning at all. It is foolishness and oppression. It is close-mindedness and bigotry. Plato wants to censor the rhymes children sing on the playground. Iconoclasts want to destroy a beautiful carving, nothing more than a block of wood or stone, it’s only sensational feature that someone has done something impressive in shaping it to resemble a face or a cross. Conservative religious groups want objectionable parts edited out of their home DVDs and refuse to allow participation in the twin evils of dancing and rock music (the former a practice the directors have sued to put a stop to, on the grounds of artistic violation). Concerned librarians want to ban a book simply because it contains a few common profanities and ends with the mercy killing of one character by another. What exactly is the big deal, we wonder? Why does Plato take the arts so seriously and want to subject them to so much moral scrutiny? Why are there still people around who want to do the same thing?
In raising such questions, we reveal the fact that our society, in its elevation of freedom and, in particular, freedom of expression, is actually quite unusual. We are, in many ways, quite different from other cultures and the cultures that came before us. The idea of artistic genius is peculiar to us moderns, the children of the Romantic movement. The idea of the artist as an independent agent and self-contained authority by virtue of his special gift would seem quite strange to the Greeks, for whom the poet was but the servant and voice of the Muse. Even in later societies, the artist’s work was subordinate to the needs of the state, or the desires of the people, or the needs of the craftsmen. The main role of art was either decoration (entertainment, fun) or the imitation of Nature (in both the physical and non-physical aspects, the communication of moral laws and precepts and religious concepts). In all cases, the artist was more a species of servant rather than a prophet. We could never bring ourselves to censor the voice of genius. And yet Plato, as we shall see, was willing to censor even the best and the brightest of his culture in the Republic. Our society is a late bloom on the tree that springs from ancient Greece, whose lifeblood teems and flows with the words and ideas of the Republic, yet the very soil from which we sprung has become alien to us.
In our society, art holds a place of veneration and privilege which is unique, and, as I will show, unusual. It is not that art has never been revered before. The Greeks loved the aesthetic, in all its forms. For the Nahua people of Meso-America, art was more than representation, it was truth. It was being. For the Yoruba people of Africa, art is a beauty that can capture all that is best about something. Yet, though all of these wildly differing societies from the far-flung corners of the world and of time venerate art and have a long history of its production, none of them has produced anything like the artistic products or artistic attitude of our own society.
There have, of course, been many stories told of the artistic history of our society—how it came to be and how it differs from all that came before it. That is the province of historians, and it is their tale to tell and to interpret. I do not pretend to be a historian. Nor do I choose to swear my allegiance to any particular formulation of the events given by any specific person. But some kind of background is necessary, and some kind of understanding is needed. So rather than going into a lengthy history on art and the previous and current attitudes toward it, I will try to stick to an examination of the basic facts, the results, so to speak, that are plain to see in the here and now. We cannot track all the growth of the plant, but we can at least examine the blooms it has produced, and that should tell us something of what we need to know.
There is no shortage of examples. In our age, art has taken on its own life, its own purpose and reason for being. It has broken free of the causes and uses which it once served as a tool and defined itself as its own independent value, with its own set of rules and privileges and purposes. The artist no longer lives only to serve the engineer or the churchman. They serve him and he judges them, looking down from his own independent sphere of creative exploration. And we are making more art every day. Our art now ranges through all types and categories, from the commercial to the experimental to the polemical. We are the progenitors of a mass of art of more kinds and genres than could ever have been imagined by those who preceded us. In music alone, we have more choices of different artists and different kinds of music than the Greeks, who long ago teased out the mathematical intervals of consonance, giving us the supreme gift of tonality, could ever have conceived of in their wildest dreams.
There is so much variety in art, in fact, that it is difficult to say anything about it generally. Yet, among this plethora, by picking carefully among the many genres, we can find the curious examples of artistic products and attitudes toward the aesthetic which set us apart as a people. These examples will help serve to illustrate our unique revolution in the art world. As a whole, they represent a complete departure from all previous schemas for understanding the nature of art forms and for dictating their content.
In 1953 an artist named Rauchenberg bought a pencil drawing by a famous abstract expressionist. He carefully erased, signed, and then exhibited it under the name Erased De Kooning. In 1917, Duchamp created his revolutionary piece fountain, which consisted of a commercial urinal mounted as a sculpture, challenging the idea of what sculpture even was. Other artists have followed Duchamp’s example with other pieces of “found art,” exhibiting everything from two basketballs floating in a tank of water to two melons, a bucket, and a cucumber on a mattress and a glass of water on a shelf labeled as an oak tree. Andy Warhol is well-known for recreating Campbell’s Soup cans and other commercial objects, virtually indistinguishable from their supermarket counterparts. Robert Ryman has produced paintings in which the entire canvas is painted white. In the world of performance art, Paul McCarthy famously performed a naked act of physically and sexually abusing himself with hot dogs in the 70s as part of an art video. Other performance artists have done similar things, defying all traditional ideas of what performance art consists of, from simulating sex acts to shooting live birds to self-crucifixion.
In music, John Cage’s famous 4-33 consists of total silence for four minutes and thirty three seconds. He and other composers eschewed the tonal structures of the Greeks and composed pieces of atonal music and “chance music,” whose notes were determined by such methods as the rolling of dice. The same curiosity of purpose and contradiction of traditional conceptions or formal identity also extends to more industrial products. In the world of architecture you do not have to look far to find buildings with staircases leading to nowhere and walls and ceilings purposely designed to distort your perspective and confuse the senses, to break down all your necessary conceptions of space and arrangement. As for poetry, it too has defied all traditional conceptions of form standards of content. C.S. Lewis once said of modern poetry that, “I do not see how anyone can doubt that modern poetry is not only a greater novelty than any other ‘new poetry’ but new in a new way, almost a new dimension.” (Selected Literary Essays: 1955, “De Descriptione Temporum”)
The list of unusual specimens goes on and on, from random objects (and sometimes no objects) exhibited as sculpture and empty frames as paintings all the way to such provocative displays as the 1993 exhibition Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, which featured synthetic excrement, dismembered sexualized mannequins, and photographic compositions such as Cunt Scum that blurred the line between obscenity and art. These are the more extreme examples of the aesthetic in our society. But they are also famous examples, works of great acclaim and success. They are also distinct from much of the artistic product of our culture in that they are not examples of so-called “commercial art”. They are works that are solidly within the domain of higher and purer Art (with a capital A). They characterize the unique artistic climate of our time.
It is not that some of them are obscene or violent that is interesting. Violent art and sexualized art have been around for a very long time and are quite ordinary. However, though violence and sexuality have been around for a long time in art, the modern successors to such works of antiquity as The Cattle Raid of Cooley are not the avante garde artists and novelists but rather, as Thomas Cahill once noted, the writers of Hollywood blockbusters and the authors and illustrators of comic books, who hold up for our admiration, titillation, and entertainment hordes of lantern-jawed heroes who cut their way through endless waves of enemies and scantily-clad seductresses whose natural endowments are only matched by their proclivity for sexual intrigue. What we experience in modern works of violent and sexualized art is not mere pornography or blood and guts entertainment, it is an aesthetic and philosophic redefinition of the standards of taste. It is a challenge and an exploration, not simply pleasurable indulgence in vice. If it were so, it would be considered low-brow entertainment, not high-brow art, and it would certainly not be exhibited in your metropolitan art museums. Its display of vice is, rather, indicative of a great philosophic and cultural significance.
It is not, I repeat, the supposed moral abasement in some of the examples of modern art that makes them noteworthy. What is interesting about these many, many examples of unusual modern artistic endeavors is simply their overwhelming uniqueness in relation to the rest of art throughout history and the unique way in which we treat them. Nothing like them has ever been produced before. They are distinct and unusual, and so the civilization which created them and approves and supports them must also be distinct and unusual. Let us go on to examine then how we and our art are so distinct.
First, ours is a society that uses art specifically for manipulation. In saying this I am referring less to highbrow art than to another, more pedestrian branch of modern art: advertising. Advertising is almost entirely an artistic endeavor, its aims accomplished through artistic means. Admittedly, this is a far cry from “art for art’s sake,” but art is a vast and many-headed beast. Advertising is one of the most popular, well-known, and lucrative applications for art. We know that you can influence people’s perceptions and choices through art, and we use it specifically to manipulate people in these ways. It may be easy for philosophers to discount the impact of art in this area because they themselves don’t pay any attention to advertising (probably because they know it’s manipulative experience), but it is because they are philosophers that they aren’t affected. Most people are. Advertising works. Just ask any well-paid advertising agent (and believe me, they aren’t hard to find).
Second, art in our society does not have to conform to a universal standard of intelligibility (which cashes out as reconcilability). It is an interesting fact that modern examples of the arts may have difficulty standing the test of time through the centuries and across cultures, because they may not be recognized by future discoverers as art. It is a special and unusual characteristic of some of our art that they may not be distinguishable to someone from another place or time as objects of art. Someone, years later, might find Duchamp’s urinal or Warhol’s can tucked away in an attic or buried in a vault, as other great works have been found, and not even recognize them as art. This fact alone, that our art is so unusual that it may not even be recognized as such by other cultures, is an important fact that cannot be underestimated. It represents a key epistemological and stylistic break.
Third, art in our society does not have to conform to a cultural (limited, common to our society) standard of intelligibility. In a perplexing twist, our own society, though it allows the artistic world its sovereignty and supports it by its taxes and attendance at public displays, sometimes questions whether the products of that world are, in fact, art. Sometimes we ourselves do not recognize the art that our own society, under our auspices, has produced. We could find these masterworks in our own attics and not recognize them. Surely, this is a strange situation. Art in our society does not meet our own general standard of intelligibility.
Fourth, art does not have to meet normal societal standards of significance. It is a smaller, less-sensational point that activities, objects, and behaviors which would be deemed insignificant in normal life are given special treatment and attention if they are labeled as art. A chunk of wood in an alley or a man sitting on a railing for an hour would hold no particular significance in the realm of ordinary society. But nail it to a wall, make that man a graduate student in the arts, perhaps tack on some sort of explanation, and you have a work of art. Modern art, such as a white canvas or a silent symphony, does not need to obey the conventional rules of the understanding of significance. Art which we would have trouble distinguishing from the dabblings of a 4-year-old does not have to obey the conventional rules regarding the significance of the dabblings of a 4-year-old.
Fifth, art in our society does not have to conform to any normative (generally held) concept of identity. Not only do we seek to allow artistic expression unfettered by ordinary cognitive and moral restraints, but artists will not even be held back by any conception of a normative definition of art itself (thus the white canvases, silent music, and empty pedestals that future societies will one day fail to recognize). “Truth” and “nature” are the domain of invention, not imitation.
Sixth, art does not have to conform to normal societal standards (common to other areas of human endeavor) for conduct. One of the most interesting features of the aesthetic in our society today, is the incredible amount of ethical freedom granted to the arts. For all we talk about censorship, we are perhaps the most permissive, unstructured, and unrestrained civilization in history with regard to art. One reason we talk about it so much, perhaps, is because it is such a deeply held belief among us that freedom of artistic expression, complete freedom, is an essential and important right in a proper society.
This point actually breaks down into several points which we will get into more as our discussion homes in on this subject. They are:
Fifth², art does not have to conform to normal societal standards for good conduct.
Sixth, art does not have to conform to normal societal standards for legal conduct.
Seventh, art does not have to conform to normal societal standards for culpability (responsibility in producing actions, including in others).
That is a list of some of the points that define the peculiar role and definition of art in our society. The freedom of the arts is, as I say, exceptional (though of course the artists are always seeking more). And it is the moral freedom that is most important to us in this discussion. Under the auspices of the arts you can see and do things which would never find acceptance in general society. Things that would never be allowed as public behavior are permitted simply for the reason that they are art. The works of Chris Burden are an excellent example. A performance artist who often pushes the limits of legality and, many would say, good sense, he finds acceptance and even fame (and money) for his behavior just because it is “art.” Our society allows it—along with many other examples of behavior that would be repressed or punished if not done under the flag of art.
Though occasionally criticized and occasionally dancing along the line of legal repercussions, he has overall been tolerated and even applauded for producing works which have involved putting himself, and sometimes others, in danger. Burden’s 1972 piece TV Hijack, where he held a TV show host captive with a knife, represents a kind of triumph for the freedom of the aesthetic. Under any consideration of normal behavior, it was illegal. And yet the rules of ethics and morality within governed society were suspended and Burden was found innocent for the act of terrorism because the act in question was an example of art. Such a thing is incredible, and yet it was perpetrated by twelve ordinary citizens.
In more common but less sensational cases one can find the same sort of principle in action. Violence and threats toward people, particularly toward law-enforcement officials and women are frowned upon by our society. They are a cause for legal consequences and punishment. But in the broad realm of art such things are permissible (as in the case of so-called “gangsta rap”). If you said some of the things they say in music to women or policemen in ordinary society, you would probably find yourself in a courtroom. But not in this case.
The recently screened movie Hounddog made waves at the Sundance Film Festival for its portrayal of the rape of a 12 year old. Normally, that is not something you can do, not just in real life, but on celluloid. It violates child-pornography laws. But by using technique to create the illusion (not that it would matter if child pornography was also a product of editing techniques) and more importantly the overarching argument that the rape is part of a work of art, the producers were allowed to screen it. There’s no need to multiply examples. Performance art, and even ordinary art and sculpture, as well as music and movies can all provide a wealth of cases. The key fact is that, across the board, activities which would be frowned upon, censored, or punished in normal society have diplomatic immunity as a result of being art.
A lot has also been said about the bad effect of music (and other forms of art) in shaping the actions and attitudes of the people that partake of them. Copycat crimes, inspired suicide, the violent influences of video games, the communicating and reinforcing of negative social ideals resulting in verbal and physical abuse and personal and sexual misconduct—all of these topics have come up in the past decade and artists have come under fire (from the new Platos). You would have to look hard to find anyone willing to hold the artists actually responsible, though, especially in a legal sense. The most hotly criticized artists are often the recipients of great commercial and critical success. The closest we have come to real action on this issue is the censorship of cigarette ads, which we recognized as being targeted toward influencing youth in a negative way. (Cigarettes are an unusual exception, though, to the rule. People who are thoroughly liberal and non-moralistic will heartily condemn smokers with all the hellfire of a tent preacher.) In general, though, we do not support the culpability of art in promoting bad behavior (even if we do acknowledge its effect we won’t hold it responsible).
These are the moral freedoms of art, then: freedom of conduct, freedom of legality, and freedom of culpability. In art, you can express, depict, and participate in behaviors which you would not be able to engage in, in normal society. You can say things you would not otherwise be able to say. Even forbearing legal remuneration, you would at least expect them to suffer moral analysis and social condemnation. But, far from being frowned upon, we show our approval through the money we spend to read novels, see movies, attend plays, and study artworks that depict socially deviant behavior and values. It seems normal to us, but that is because we are who we are. We are a society who has granted art a radical and expanding freedom unlike that of previous societies. And we pride ourselves on it.
It is difficult, of course, to say anything in general about what our society believes about art. We’re extremely diverse and many of us don’t agree with one another. That is why we have relied so far on examples of products and acts rather than philosophies of production and meaning and morality. Ours is a free society (a phrase with many meanings). One popular meaning of that phrase is that we are not patriarchal, we do not have a governmentally enforced standard for how you have to think and talk and act. And this is our strength and our weakness. Being free has many benefits. It also allows many mistakes. It is freedom for good and for evil, for order and for chaos.
It would be wrong to think, though, that we don’t have any philosophical/ethical outlook. This is a free democracy, not anarchy, not the absence of government, and there are limitations and responsibilities even as there are freedoms. We may be free, but we’re not wholly free. Not in our behavior as citizens, not in our behavior as part of a community, not in our teaching, not in our performance of our jobs, not as parents, not as pet owners, not as wives or husbands. In all these areas there is at least some form of cultural or legal accountability. If you act a certain way or do certain things you will be subject to the censure of your peers or, worse, the censure of the law. However, when it comes to art, we grant it a freedom we do not grant to other domains of behavior, and to artists we grant a freedom we do not grant to other people.
Of course we cannot give artists total carte blanche to do whatever they want, but in general we seek to achieve the maximum amount of freedom possible without actively endangering the public or starting a riot. As a governing body, the keeper of the rules and precepts of just and right governance, our own government’s approach is, for the most part, summed up in the words “hands off”. Where it does become involved is mostly as an arbitrator between parties of differing tastes and beliefs who want the guarantee of being able to pick which things they want to experience and which they do not. But there is almost no real moral censorship. If you want to create it, you can, and if you want to look at it, you can. And it is in your government-sponsored libraries, museums, and schools that you’ll find it.
Of course, there have been societies before which did not object to art which promoted such things as violence, slavery, misogyny, and the like, but generally this was because the societies themselves did not object to these things. If a warrior on the frieze of a temple is portrayed gloriously eating the flesh of his enemy, it is because that is an approved or allowed behavior within that society. What is unusual about our society is that we allow art to glorify behaviors which our society does not generally approve of, and we allow it to attack structures and behaviors which our society does generally approve of. It is not simply that art is involved in the ongoing ethical and political dialogue of our society, it is, in many ways, above it. It is outside it. It speaks to our society, but we do not often speak back.
If we do speak back, it is only with our acquiescence to its demands, which we show in the massive retails of box office receipts and the sales of popular literature and music, and our dutiful attendance at the art museum and popular shows. We pay to have our boundaries pushed, our sense of taste and meaning challenged; we pay for a glimpse of a realm where the rules of human life and our society no longer apply. Art serves, not as a support for or reflection of our society and its ideals, but as a contrast to it. It is this strange disjoint, this peculiar moral freedom, which is interesting about us.
The conclusion is that art operates under a special set of rules in our society. It is not restrained by conventional rules of behavior, meaning, or substance. It is, to a radical degree, free to do what it wants, say what it wants, and be what it wants, independent of the conventional rules present in society (especially where it is generally free from concerns of commercial success, i.e. pleasing the masses, but even that which pleases the masses is often at odds with these rules; ideas in art, as in other areas, trickle down from high to low). Art has its own pole star in our society. In its most refined forms it does not need to make room for the needs and concerns of politics or common ethics or human sensibility and taste. It is an act of pure expression, pure creation. It is a world unto itself whose rules may have no room for those human conventions mentioned above that we bring with us into the gallery. We do not understand or approve Plato’s violent fascistic reaction to poetry. We are quite willing to make special exceptions in our laws and in our standards of conduct to exempt that which is considered art. And this is the peculiar state of art within our society.
The Culture War
“…the way we define art has the power to shape our culture.” – Charles Colson, How Now Shall We Live?
Some of us may recall an incident that occurred some years ago at about the same time as the LA riots, in 1992. Dan Quayle gave a speech that was forever to haunt his political career, and that is probably one of the main things people remember about him today. It was a long speech, almost forty minutes, during which he talked at length about the “poverty of values” which he said played such a key role in the development of such a situation. But the part that really made headlines was his indictment of Murphy Brown, a fictional TV character, for promoting negative social values.
Commenting on the problem of social degradation, Vice President Quayle said that, “It doesn’t help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, high-paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and just calling it another lifestyle choice.”
The collective reaction, both of the public and of the media, to this statement was quite exceptional and is, in my opinion, highly illuminating. What was the reaction? Outrage. Anger. Ridicule. In some cases agreement. In other cases sheer incredulity was more the rule. Among a vast section of the public, there was a general feeling that there was something silly about the whole thing. Dan Quayle was getting all worked up and censorious over what—a TV show? Almost instantly, Quayle found himself the butt of every joke in primetime television, from Leno to Letterman and beyond. The amount of mockery and political backlash he suffered cannot be underestimated. In particular he found himself under attack by the electronic media, perhaps because, he later speculated, they felt that he had attacked “one of their own.” Yet he never issued any retraction of his statements in that speech. Even ten years later, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, he upheld his remarks and said that he wouldn’t have changed any of them.
It’s not as if these remarks came out of the blue for Quayle either. He had also criticized the gangsta rap movement, arguing, much like a modern Plato, that Tupac Shakur’s debut album 2pocalypse Now had no place in our society. And if Dan Quayle had had the power of the philosopher kings, no doubt he would have seen to it that it found no place in our society. But, if he had tried to take the action he so clearly thought should be taken, what would have been the result? We can see the answer quite clearly in the fact that Tupac Shakur’s debut album led to a very successful career in gansta rap for the artist (before being shot for times and dying of respiratory failure in 1996). Our society would never have accepted such control. Dan Qualye criticized it, and we ate it up.
Now, these remarks may seem a long way from a philosophic discussion of the conflict between ethics and aesthetics, but in fact they go right to the heart of the matter. The poets and playwrights of Plato’s day were to the Greeks as Hollywood and primetime are to us. Perhaps this is even more true today than ever before, as our society evolves away from being a literate culture toward being a more media-driven culture, where the primary texts are not read but are seen and heard on video and in music and on the worldwide web. Unless forced to, most people will never even crack open a book by Plato, but they will all have been to see the most acclaimed Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows, even as an ancient Greek might not have studied the teachings of Heraclitus but would surely have seen the latest production by Sophocles. If Sophocles were writing today, no doubt he would be taking home first prize at the Sundance Film Festival or at Cannes, much as he won the acclaim of the top honors at the theater festival of Dionysia.
So let us put aside the notion that, in dealing with contemporary examples of a leader of the people raising questions of ethics with regard to modern media, we have left the realm of the ancient conflict between poetry and philosophy. The placeholders are different but the formulas are, so to speak, the same. When Dan Quayle raised his famous objection to Murphy Brown and decried the publishing of gangsta rap, he was casting his lot in the old quarrel between ethics and aesthetics. He was reaffirming that the conflict still existed, that it still mattered, and that whatever anyone else thought, he wanted to fight in it—archaic, fascistic, and overdramatic as it might seem.
What is interesting, and this brings us back to our earlier discussion of the unique role of art in our society, is the reaction he received. In some ways, I am less interested in the general reaction and the results of his overall message so much as the specific psychological reaction to his particular attack on Hollywood.
In many ways Dan Quayle was successful. His speech, as a whole, got people talking and arguing about family values, which was his goal. Pro-marriage, pro-family, and pro-fatherhood programs came into existence partly because Dan Quayle got people thinking and talking about the need to engage with the issue in American society. And yet that ten-second sound byte will forever haunt him with infamy, forever bringing up a basic psychological reaction that is, on the whole, affronted, incredulous, and disdainful. In a word—negative.
This holds especially true for anyone who was or is themselves a part of the entertainment and media structure that Dan Quayle was criticizing. Many of the rest of us have that same impression of Dan Quayle as a joke, because the media establishment passed it down along to us. We’ve heard the jibes, we’ve seen the cartoons. We’ve listened to the amusing anecdotes and associations. And we assimilated them. Dan Quayle is a joke. Much like Plato easily becomes a joke, an ancient Quayle wanting to sit down with a stack of poems and a black marker to purify the cultural library. The only thing that keeps them from being a threat, rather than a joke, is the fact that we don’t have to take them seriously. Dan Quayle doesn’t have the power censor Tupac or Murphy Brown. If he did, if we were really threatened by the prospect of a real philosopher king like Plato, he wouldn’t be so funny any more. He would be a danger.
What the reaction to Dan Quayle shows is a response in both spectrums. In a large sense, he isn’t taken seriously at all. He’s a joke. The very fact that the vice president would spend his time chastising and warning us about sitcoms and pop music is ridiculous. But he’s still the vice president. He’s a man with power and influence. Like it or not, a lot of people are going to hear his words. And some of them might agree with him. And the idea of a real philosopher king with a real power over the arts is not something that anyone, from the sitcom writers to the advanced gallery artist, wants to think about.
The point is, that it is curiously taboo for a leader of our modern-day polis to involve himself in the criticism or otherwise moral regulation of the arts. We’re not serious about policing the arts the way he seems to be. And if he is, we’re serious about resisting him. It is part of the American spirit. Such moralizing is objectionable and lives to be mocked on Saturday Night Live along with other such “Rock music is the Devil!” foolishness. Parents may have some right to control what their children watch, but we don’t want a paternalistic government controlling what we watch or read or listen to in the privacy of our own homes, and especially we don’t want it telling us what we can or cannot paint, can or cannot compose, can or cannot perform. Freedom is our watchword. And it has served us well.
And yet, as I have said, we grant an unusual level of freedom to art. Art in particular must be free. Completely free, the artists would argue. That is part of what we believe is necessary for art to flourish. And the question we must at last raise is—why? Where did these beliefs and attitudes come from? Are they the right beliefs? If we do grant art an unusual privilege and freedom, are we right in doing so? There’s something strange in the fact that we are not even willing to countenance Dan Quayle’s statements regarding a fictional character. There’s something odd in the fact that we find them laughable, and if we take them seriously, it is only to take them seriously as a threat. Is there room in an enlightened society, a society that really cares about and wants to support the arts, for someone like Dan Quayle, for someone like Plato? Can any sense be made out of such a position?
In a nutshell, I think that the answer is yes. I think that the reaction we had as a nation to Dan Quayle’s criticisms of Murphy Brown says something significant about our nation and our beliefs. In another society people might not have agreed with him, but they would at least have recognized the legitimacy of the question. Yet we have defined art and its role in society in such a way that to raise such issues as he did made him instantly into a laughingstock and a crank, or an authoritarian. And though the clock has turned many a revolution since the days of Plato, we must not confuse ourselves into thinking that progress is measured simply by how far one has got into the calendar. The conflict between ethics and the arts, between philosophy and poetry, is still a live issue. It’s something we have to face.
The Importance of the Arts
“Let me write the songs of a nation; I don’t care who writes its laws.” – Andrew Fletcher
“In the case of man, that which he creates is more expressive of him than that which he begets. The image of the artist and the poet is imprinted more clearly on his works than on his children.” – Nicholas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man
The main questions before us then are how to understand the role of art in our society, how to understand the role of morality in art, and how we should approach the issue of morality and art in our society. In particular, do we have anything to learn from someone like Plato, who believed that ethics should take a very active role in the arts, and is there room in our society for someone like Dan Quayle, who brings the Platonic attitude back to us in this latest iteration of the old conflict?
Art is something essential to humanity. It is one of those essential mysteries whose nature has always been a bit of a conundrum to us, not because it is so far off, but because it is so close. It is so much a part of who we are that it is hard to step back and get a proper look at it. As Dorothy L. Sayers says, “Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which that ‘image’ of God was modeled, we find only a single assertion, ‘God created.’ The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things.” (The Mind of the Maker, 22)
Art and the aesthetic are facts of human life, in whatever form they may take. In our culture art has a very powerful role. It ranges in varieties from the elite to the commercial, in kind from visual to olfactory, in medium from celluloid to clay. It touches every human being in some way. No one can escape the arts without abandoning our culture altogether. They are everywhere. They’re in your house, in the library, in the museum and in the theater, in the park and on the radio, in your stores, in your clothes, in your schools and hospitals. They’re clinging to your heels as you enter this world and singing you farewell as you leave it. We love art. Allan Bloom once said, “Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.” (The Closing of the American Mind, 68) We cannot live without art.
Being so universal in presence and influence, it is not surprising that certain people who are concerned with the governing of society (or the self) are concerned about the role of ethics in the arts. And, in many ways, we have taken ethics out of the arts. Ours is not an especially patriarchal society. It is very permissive. And yet even though rules and codes which we do have we have made special exceptions for in the case of works of art. Even in our own lives this is true. Things we wouldn’t want to see or wouldn’t be interested in seeing or wouldn’t approve of seeing we might go to see if they were displayed in the Tate Museum. Art is special. Not simply because it has a point to it but because of the way it affects us.
The power of art is almost magical. This is a theme we will return to later when we analyze to Plato’s discourse on poetry. Our art has the power, as the quote listed at the beginning of the section says, to tell us who we are. It reveals the inner imprint of our thoughts and our being. It also can change who we are. In keeping with the quote by Anthony Fletcher, Ravi Zacharias agreed that: “My own experience testifies to the impressions carved upon my consciousness by popular music. Beyond that, such music accorded me the privilege of identifying with the expression of shared sentiments.” (Can Man Live Without God, 3)
That is part of the function of art, to engage us and make impressions upon us by means other than plain verbal or written communication. And it is terribly difficult to guard against. As C.S. Lewis said, “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.” (An Experiment in Criticism, 19)
Art isn’t something that a society simply produces. It is something that expresses and shapes the very culture it is a part of. As Francis Schaeffer said, “The mass of people may not enter an art museum, may never read a serious book. If you were to explain the drift of modern thought to them, they might not be able to understand it; but this does not mean that they are not influenced by the things they see and hear—including the cinema and what is considered ‘good,’ non-escapist television.” (Complete Works: The God Who is There, 40-41) The point which he is trying to make in this passage is that the arts are the means by which the greater part of the population participates in the historical process of philosophy. They are the medium through which the common man experiences the drift of thought and the transformation of beliefs and values. It is no coincidence, as Peter Kreeft mentions in his The Best Things in Life that “social and political revolutions have usually been preceded by musical revolutions….” (99)
Frank Zappa once criticized this idea by observing, “If lyrics make people do things, how come we don’t love each other?” but it’s possible that he was forgetting that art expresses our desires as well as conditioning them, and that not always honestly. As a whole, though, art is very culturally powerful. If you want to affect people’s perceptions of an issue, often the best thing you can do is write a screenplay or a song about it (embarrassing as this is to us philosophers). Positive and more pervasive portrayals of homosexuals in TV and movies doesn’t simply reveal a growing tolerance for the gay lifestyle, they created it. If you want to make people think that something is okay, there’s no better way to accomplish it than to make it look okay. Brokeback Mountain did it for homosexuality, Million Dollar Baby for euthanasia, Cider House Rules for abortion. You don’t need a study to discover it, all you need to do is talk to people, either the people who made it or those who watched it. These are some of the more interesting (and successful) cases because the behaviors portrayed positively in them are not necessarily the accepted values of the society in question, and yet the dramas themselves were accepted.
Everyone uses this method of communication and defense, of course, to promote their ideas, from Existentialism to Environmentalism to Capitalism to the love of kayaking. Why do you think so many artists are in the pay of marketers? It’s part of how our society works. But it’s amazing to realize just how powerful it is. It is not simply an expression—art is a force. And when it has the power of critical approval behind it, the elite of the art world, we are compelled to pay attention. Going back to some of our earlier examples, not a lot of people’s tastes run to white canvases and piles of artificial excrement, but under the recommendation of the ubiquitous “art critic” we will give them our attention and the recognition that is the right of all great art. That’s how powerful a force the sanction of Art (big A) is.
I want to reiterate for one final time that I am not making a case against the kind of influence that art has on people. The point is not whether art has a good or a bad moral influence on people (and surely it has both). The point is that it has a powerful influence. It is one of the largest cultural forces in our society, along with the media and public education. These are the institutions that shape our society. And yet, though it has influence over our society, our society (it’s leaders in particular) does not exercise much control over it.
Even as a philosopher writing in the subject area of aesthetics, what are the chances that the artistic world will sit up and take note of what I say? And if I approach them with some arguments based on my philosophizing that say that I have the authority to put some moral controls on them, what do you think they will answer me with? To even suggest philosophical control over their art would be to threaten their place as free agents, expressing and creating as they see fit. It would be to clamp a lid down on the evolution and development of the arts, to strangle them and cripple the service they provide for society.
It is a hard position we have maneuvered ourselves into. We believe that art should be free, but art is one of the great governing influences on our society. How can we have good government if we exercise no control over one of the greatest educative institutions? How can the state have good politics if it cannot control its ethics (to use the Greek ideas)?
That, to some degree, covers the role of art in our society as well as giving an introduction to the subject of ethics in art. Art is, in many ways, the lifeblood of our culture. It is the carrier for what flows from our hearts and the medium of that which feeds and transforms the body. And, though we have, to a large degree, separated ethics and aesthetics, we can see now that they are still closely related. The question remains then, whether art will control ethics or whether ethics will control art. Faced with the problem of how to further illuminate the relationship between art and morality and what possibilities might exist for reevaluating and restructuring that relationship, it is my opinion that we should turn away from our own society and try looking at other cultures. The question of how art and morality should interact is a tough one, and we need to hear arguments and examples from several different perspectives so we can more easily see the different pictures and approach the issue from an “outside” perspective. In this manner we may find a way, or at least see a few of the possibilities, to escape our quandary.
When faced with a difficult problem, sometimes the best thing to do is to look at it from a different angle. Of course, it is hard to find any single culture whose views on art can provide all the perspective we need. What we need, in the interests of the goals of this discussion, is a group of cultures who all have formulated definite views on the relation between morality and art and come up with a solution for how they should interact. By examining how they handled the issue, we may learn something about the problem and how we should handle it.
The three cultures which I have selected for this purpose are: the Greeks, the Yoruba, and the Nahua. All three of these cultures hold or held very strong beliefs about the intersection of morality and art. All three have highly artistic cultures, and each esteems art in a slightly different way and to a different degree. Between them they represent the philosophical belief systems of the Mediterranean, Africa, and Meso-America, a very diverse group whose traditions are estranged almost completely by time and space. At the least, we shall have a diversity of choices. It is my hope that, by looking at their answers to the same three questions: how to understand the role of art in society, how to understand the role of morality in art, and how to approach the issue of morality and art in society (ethical control over the aesthetic), we will be able to uncover some worthwhile ideas and possible solutions to the problem of how to negotiate the conflict between the two domains of the ethical and the aesthetic.
The World of the Greeks
“Why, when, I said, the multitude are seated together in assemblies or in courtrooms or theaters or camps… and with loud uproar censure some of the things that are said and done and approve others… with full-throated clamor and clapping of hands, and thereto the rocks and the region about re-echoing redouble the dine of censure and praise. In such a case how do you think the young man’s heart… is moved within him? What private teaching will hold out and not rather be swept away by the torrent of censure and applause, and borne off on its current, so that he will affirm the same things that they do to be honorable and base, and will do as they do, and be even as they?” – Plato, Republic VI
Understanding Plato
“It sometimes happens in the history of the written word that an important work of literature carries a title which does not accurately reflect its contents.” – Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato
It was with Plato that we began our discussion, and so now it is to Plato that we return. We owe much to Plato. Either we owe him thanks for being the first person to put this conflict into words, the first to offer us freedom and a way out of the trap, or we owe him much enmity for first opposing that which should never have been opposed, the father of the repression and censorship of the modern totalitarian state. He might be one of the founding fathers or he might be the father of Stalinism.
As I said at the beginning, it is often hard for modern readers to understand Plato’s objection to the freedom (and even the existence) of poetry in the ideal state. Part of the problem, no doubt, is cultural, a failure to understand what poetry represented in Greek society and what philosophy represented. It’s hard to understand the response half of an argument if you have never heard the original position it was meant to be a response to. Another part of the problem could be a failure to understand the nature of the Republic and what problems its arguments are really trying to address. It is also possible that Plato, for all his genius, was biased and went a little too far, blowing certain things out of proportion for reasons relating to his own psychology.
It is quite unusual, a modern reader might think, that in a book that most people assume to be a political treatise on the ideal state, only a small number of pages are devoted to economics and social infrastructure, and page after page after page is dedicated to the role of the arts, in particular poetry. And we start to wonder whether we have another Dan Quayle on our hands, a politician who, instead of spending his time dealing with the important issues that actually involve doing something for people and improving the state, spends his time wildly and unreasonably attacking the latest pop song. The topics you find in the Republic are quite unlike those that you would find in any modern discussion of politics or modern political treatise, completely unlike, in fact. Quite likely, we would dismiss him as an ignorant amateur or a fanatic, someone who has no idea what the real issues are or how to handle them.
But we owe Plato some respect. All of western thought owes him a debt. So, for the moment, let us put aside our feelings and opinions of the current day and try to see things as they might have been seen by an ancient Greek. Let us see exactly what this proto-Quayle thinks he is about, and why.
In order the understand Plato’s ideas about the conflict between philosophy and poetry, we need to adjust our thinking. We need to put on special glasses before we can see the text the way it is meant to be seen. To accomplish this purpose, I can think of no better text to turn to than Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato. This book covers exactly the topic we have been talking about: the attack on poetry in the Republic. The book as a whole is highly informative, but we do not have time here to cover everything that it has to say. As for understanding all the complexities of Plato’s theory, that would best be gained by taking a class in the subject. Instead, I will try to boil the picture that Plato gives us, informed by the background and analysis provided by Havelock, down into something that clearly addresses our three primary questions.
The Power of the Poets
“Now therein of all sciences is our poet the monarch. For he doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way, as will entice any man to enter into it.” – Sir Philip Sidney, “The Apology for Poetry”
For the ancient Greeks, the greatest and most pervasive incarnation of the arts is in poetry, and its champion is Homer, greatest of all the bards. Even Plato himself is not immune to the powerful pull of the Iliad. In fact it is especially because he finds himself unable to resist the charms of Homer that he is so adamant about censoring him (Republic X, 607).
The poets, and by this name we sum up many different practitioners of the arts from playwrights and lyricists to Homer himself, were a major force in Greek culture. Poetry in this case is more than poetry, and we are not merely talking about the form of putting rhyme and meter to the spoken words. It is the whole aesthetic experience. Homer may be the best at plying the aesthetic trade of evoking the aesthetic experience, but it is the whole of art that Plato is concerned about. The poets, as a whole, are a threat to the state and to the soul. “For if you grant admission to the honeyed Muse in lyric or epic, pleasure and pain will be lords of your city instead of law….” (Republic X, 607a5-6)
The attack of Plato, then, is not to be underestimated. It is not directed toward something specific, toward a particular incarnation of art, a specific form that he didn’t like, much as a religious group may approve one style of music and condemn another. His attack on the poets in his own society is akin to attacking the whole of art in ours. Critics (and wayward friends) have, of course, tried to water down and reinterpret this attack, as Havelock says, to make it more amenable to modern sensibilities (Preface to Plato, 7). Of the different strategies taken, a few are worth mentioning. One is to argue that “the programme of the Republic is utopian and that the exclusion of poetry applies only to an ideal condition not realizable in the recognizable future….” (PTP, 7) Another is to argue that Plato’s attack was in fact directed toward a very specific fashion in the literary practices of the time. The third is to argue that the experience that Plato is attacking is confined only to drama of a certain kind, and not to poetry at such. All of these responses ignore significant statements in the text, however, such as the passage quoted earlier. The last, Havelock argued, is the most understandable defense, since several of Plato’s speeches seem to target an interactive group experience that we find primarily in stage performances.
But Plato clearly has no small target in mind, nor is he trying to advance anything so small as a minor and timely piece of literary (or artistic) criticism that will soon pass and be forgotten. Plato quite happily lumps in painters with poets as creators of phantasms, nor does he confine his criticism of poetry to one poet or another but takes in everything from the epic poetry of Homer to the lyric poetry being recited by your neighbor.
This is where we have a hard time sympathizing with Plato. In this case he has simply gone too far. Earlier, in book II, he proposed a program of broad censorship of the arts for moral reasons, and here, though we do not agree with him, we can at least understand his prejudice a little. Later, this part of the text will be very important for us. But for the moment we’re still trying to understand what made Plato go so far beyond anything we could ever have imagined in suggesting the complete removal of the aesthetic from human experience. It’s not simply the content but the medium itself that bothers him. It is a hump we simply have to get over and something we simply have to explain before we can go any further, and we aren’t going to solve the problem by trying to argue that it doesn’t exist, as the defenses above tried to do.
The problem, as Havelock neatly puts it, is that we have misunderstood the nature of the Republic. Its name, perhaps, has confused us; perhaps our own conception of the aims of philosophy has confused us. The unusual and revealing thesis which Havelock propounds is that the Republic is not strictly a political work, nor even a philosophical work in the specialized sense, but it is a social and cultural work. The Republic is a revolution in the conception of Greek society and the means by which it defines and propagates itself. It is, in essence, a criticism of a society ruled and driven by the arts.
It is hard for us, who have long been a part of a literate culture, to understand the power of poetry in an oral society. The Greeks were, at this point, still essentially an oral culture, as are all of the cultures which I am going to address. Theirs was still a culture whose world was dominated by the influence of the arts. For, in an oral culture, the arts are the great vessel of transmission for values and information from one generation to the next. The poets are the educators, the historians, the entertainers, the keepers of colloquial wisdom, the communicators of ethical ideals, the guardians of truth, the preservers of religion, and the teachers of metaphysics.
The Iliad, for example, is more than just a story. It is Greek history, it is an exemplar of Greek culture and Greek spirit. It is a religious document rife with doctrine and the proper forms of religious ceremony. It contains the heroes and the gods, the exemplars of Greek society. It contains the words and phrases—all the myriad tricks of poetry—which allow oral texts to be memorized and passed on to future generations, because they cannot be written down. The Greeks do not simply read their stories or tell them, they live through them, they become one with the experience of the characters, and in doing so they are able to remember and transmit and keep alive the great tales of their ancestors. The Iliad and the Odyssey are less Gulliver’s Travels than they are the Bible.
And Plato wants to make some changes. The well-governed society cannot, he argues, be ruled by poetry. The essential challenge, as it is put before Socrates in the dialogue, is to uncover the principle of true morality (just governance of the soul). As in other dialogues, he is trying to get beyond mere examples of things, such as piety, bravery, knowledge, and the like, to get at its abstract essence, the thing which determines all cases. Plato is not ultimately concerned just with the particular good or bad effects of a particular piece of art, he wants to examine the principle by which they are governed.
And this is a unique kind of enterprise. As Havelock says, “Such a pure morality has never before been envisaged. What Greece has hitherto enjoyed (says Adeimantus in a passage of great force and sincerity) is a tradition of a half-morality, a sort of twilight zone, at best a compromise, at worst a cynical conspiracy, according to which the younger generation is continually indoctrinated in the view that which is vital is not so much morality as social prestige and material reward which may flow from a moral reputation whether or not this is deserved.” (PTP, 12) And for all these things “they cite the poets as witnesses, with regard to the ease and plentifulness of vice….” (Republic II, 364c4-5) “What… do we suppose is the effect of all such saying about the esteem in which men and gods hold virtue and vice upon the souls that hear them… flitting, as it were, from one expression of opinion to another and inferring from them all the character and the path whereby a man would lead the best life?” (Republic II, 365a3-8)
There is, in other words, something fundamentally broken about the Greek educational system. And the problem is, not only that the poets are communicating false values, but that the arts as a ruling power in shaping society naturally lend themselves to the special sorts of problems Plato is concerned about. Part of the problem, for Plato, is that the arts have the power of authority through the power of their medium, without having to actually earn or prove their authority. “Music,” as Peter Kreeft says, “is more powerful than reason in the soul.” (The Best Things in Life, 99) We are all vulnerable to the power of the Muse, especially when we are in the hands of a great practitioner. “Do not you yourself feel her magic and especially when Homer is her interpreter?” Plato says (Republic X, 607c7-d1). Even the great philosopher himself can hardly resist her. This kind of powerful, self-authenticating authority is dangerous.
The arts also have the additional problem related to their self-authenticating authority. There is no control over them, no unity, no guiding principle. The arts will do the work of philosophy, dispensing truth and values to the masses more effectively than philosophy herself, but without any accountability, without the philosophical process. One of the great missions of Socrates as we watch him throughout the dialogues is the exposure of ignorance, his ongoing quest to reveal that those who confidently dispense wisdom and hold authority in the polis do not, in fact, possess wisdom. At the very best, they have a few fractured pictures of what goodness and knowledge and piety and courage are. But what they really are, what the true essence and principles are, the true heart, they know not. They have no idea. And as long as you are only bandying about with incomplete pictures, pictures which often contradict and undermine one another, you’re at the mercy of pleasure and pain, as Plato puts it. Your mind and soul will be pulled hither and thither by the visceral reactions that the competing poets can so skillfully produce, with no guarantee that the best feeling will win out.
To focus in on a particular Platonic problem, the arts suffer from being examples of mimesis (appearance, illusion). Plato had a lot to say about mimesis. The concept is complex, but the key consequence is that art is able to produce appearances without having to produce substance. In fact, Plato’s concept of mimesis reveals an epistemological bias against the art of representation as such; whether it copies well or copies poorly it is one step further from reality rather than one step closer (the deepest reality being the principles, the essences, the forms behind everything). One could imagine then, why Plato does not want poetry and the mimetic arts to be the basis of the Greek social encyclopedia, as Havelock calls it. As a text for the education of a society, it simply doesn’t meet the standards Plato is reaching for, standards which we have inherited through the academic establishment and that began with Plato’s own Academy. We have standards for history and physics and psychology that far exceed those of Oliver Stone’s JFK or Hesiod’s Theogeny. Imagine if JFK were the principle (or only) means by which we preserved our knowledge of those events. Imagine if the soul of our metaphysics were preserved for posterity by means of I ♥ Huckabees.
This gives us some idea of why Plato attacks his subject so strongly. And even though we may be tempted to think that it is a very specific historical problem, it is also a general problem. Poetry does not have the problems listed above because it is Greek poetry. It has these problems because of the nature of poetry (art) itself. The reason that it is so important to Plato and that he tackles it the way it does is that it has grown to become such a particular problem in his society. The problem is general, arising out of the nature of the things concerned (art, philosophy, ethics, politics), but the case is specific. In the case of the Greeks, the problem has reached a specific point of advanced development. Socrates and Plato have arisen as the doctors, the revolutionaries (often seen as cranks by their own society) who want to change things and have pushed the matter to the point of confrontation with their own resistant movement (the philosophers). And, though they weren’t entirely successful, the time was right for a change and the balance of power began to shift.
The apparatus of civilization, the laws, traditions, beliefs, and values of a society, always require embodiment in “some verbal archetype,” as Havelock says (PTP, 41). They require some sort of statement, “a performative utterance on an ambitious scale which both describes and enforces the overall habit pattern, political and private, of the group.” (PTP, 42) And art, if you will remember our earlier discussion, does this. It both expresses and influences. It has the power to affect, influence, even control culture. The question is: who is going to control art?
Principles in Poetry
“Without the cooperation of the sentiments, anything other than technical education is a dead letter.” – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
When was the last time you cracked open an ethics textbook and saw a major section on art? How about even a minor section? A passing mention? Such things are not common. And yet certain odd people, political leaders and philosophers, fanatics perhaps, such as Dan Quayle and Plato and Peter Kreeft and Charles Colson keep bringing them up. Ethics and art in bed together. Having learned what we have of Plato, it becomes easier to see why he thought the ethical and the aesthetic were so closely related. The arts have a power over our souls. In the absence of formal ethics, art will do its job. Even in the presence of formal ethics and philosophy, art will continue to do their job. Philosophy is everywhere in art. And, though often unconscious, its power over our ideas and values is not a power limited to art only in the society of the Greeks. Especially on young minds, as Plato points out, its power is palpable.
The question we must find ourselves facing, within our society and within our own souls, is not simply who will control art, but who will control us? Will we “take captive every thought and make it obedient” as Saint Paul says or will we be conquered by the sweet songs of the Muse? We now have some grasp on how Plato perceives the role of art in society, and so now we must pass on to see what he has to teach us about the role of morality in art and how art and morality should interact in society.
Part of the problem with the arts, as Plato sees them, is that they do not give us a very good picture of morality. They give a picture, to be sure, but not necessarily a good one. As we have already discussed, Plato is unsatisfied with the ability of the arts to communicate the deeper truths (as a result of their mimetic nature). But he is also concerned with the particular pictures that art gives us. As we have seen, he clearly thought that the messages disseminated by the art of his own society to be decidedly negative. What does a reader (or listener) learn from experiencing the tale of the Iliad? That the gods are capricious, that their favor can be bought, that the world is an unjust and tragic sort of place, that one is better off breaking the rules if one can get away with it, that virtue is a difficult and often unrewarding ideal. If these ideas take root in a young mind they will greatly alter the person’s future behavior. You will end up with people such as Socrates sometimes encountered, people “continually conditioned to an attitude which at bottom is cynical.” (PTP, 13)
These sorts of messages and these sorts of results were, apparently, quite common in Greek society, if we are to believe the Republic. The sentiment expressed by the ring of Gyges argument, that on the whole if people could get away with doing wrong they certainly would is meant to be taken as commonsense. It is Plato who goes against the grain and surprises us by arguing that it’s better to do right, no matter the consequences.
Such “bad morals” are pervasive in Greek art, apparently, as Plato has no trouble coming up with examples, though they are not recognized as being “bad morals” by the people who imbibe them. One has to be in a certain frame of mind even to notice them and to trace and judge their effects. And though Plato may be in that frame of mind, most people are not. No doubt he would have no trouble finding a wealth of similar examples in our own art. In Plato’s time, Greece art enjoyed a special freedom from ethical and philosophical interference because it was, so to speak, in charge of the values, laws, and conventions of society. In ours it enjoys this special freedom because it emancipated from them. It has, so to speak, struck out on its own. Long dominated by the successors of Plato, it has at last achieved an independent voice and influence again, retaking its place in the world by means of its own defenders, the Anti-Platos. Though the historical backgrounds are different, there is something in the Greek situation at the time of Plato that we can relate to.
Now, admittedly, Plato does express some willingness in certain parts of the Republic to tolerate the arts. He has an idea of a kind of art that might be okay, an art which is, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “the handmaid of religious or at least moral truth.” (Letters, 16 April 1940) This concept will be our lodestar in our exploration of what good art might look like to Plato. For Plato, the core of good art is going to have to be located in some concept of inner (and perhaps moral) truth.
This concept of good art as needing to be essentially “true” or “moral” in some sense is going to be one of the key ideas that we encounter throughout our examinations of Greek, Yoruba, and Nahua philosophy. For all three of them, the concepts of aesthetic beauty and moral goodness are going to prove to be fundamentally inseparable. Already we have gained some idea that Plato believes this to be so and why.
Art, as we have seen from the Greek perspective, does more than just delight; it instructs. Perhaps not always by purpose, but it inevitably bewitches the soul and inculcates the ideas present in it. Therefore, Plato says, if we are to make use of it, it must be art of a special kind.
First and foremost, it must be true. False art can never be good art. And “Hesiod and Homer and the other poets… methinks, composed false stories which they told and still tell to mankind.” (Republic II, 377d3-5) This is the indictment that Plato lays again and again at the doorstep of the poets, that what they tell is false, that their stories are not true, that the poets are not, in fact, the fountains of truth and knowledge. Much as Plato would like to give Homer his due respect and admit him into the state, he cannot, because “it would be impious to betray what we believe to be the truth.” (Republic X, 607c5-6) And the truth about Homer’s poetry is that “we must not take such poetry seriously as a … thing that lays hold of the truth, but that he who lends and ear to it must be on guard fearing for the polity in his soul….” (Republic X, 608a5-8)
Now, returning to the question, addressed in book II, of what sort of poetry would be acceptable in the ideal state, what sort of poetry would be “good,” we find ourselves at an impasse with Plato, for we do not agree with his values. Plato only wants to admit poetry that is true. But of course most of art is not “true” in any particularly scientific sense. Naturally, when you come down to it, JFK and Anthony and Cleopatra and Moby Dick and The Last Supper aren’t true. The first two aren’t historically accurate. They’re art, they’re screenplays and plays. They depict people saying and doing things that, really, they didn’t do. Moby Dick is a work of fiction, a fable. None of it is true, in a sense. The Last Supper isn’t a true and accurate picture. That’s not what it was really like, that’s not what the people were really like. It’s a false picture of the event. Our great artists, like Homer and Hesiod, “compose false stories.” And it seems mad to us to condemn and sweep away our greatest masterpieces and artistic geniuses, as Plato seems willing to do with Homer and Hesiod, his own culture’s great artistic geniuses. These standards of his will crush and strangle poetry and the arts. Forget creation and invention and reimagination, from now on the arts will be nothing but the fancy tool of the scientific educators of the academy for use on those whose brains are too soft to ingest real, factual knowledge.
This accusation has some grounding in truth, and to some degree it represents the difference between us and Plato, and between Plato and the Yoruba and Nahua. For Plato, poetry is on the lower end of the scale of methods of communication, while dialectic and prose are higher, whereas for the Nahua art is the peak, the highest and best form of communication, the ultimate picture of truth rather than a simpler and fuzzier picture of truth. But such a harsh characterization is a little unfair to Plato and fails to understand him fully. For one thing, we have to give credence to the context, to the difficulty and complexity of the shift in thinking that he was trying to accomplish. There is also, I think, more to be said on the subject of what exactly he means by “truth.”
In fact, Plato himself, describing the kind of good art that will exist in the ideal state, admits that there are two species of tales (the term seems to broadly include all kinds of artistic invention, including music). There are false tales and there are true tales. “And education,” Plato says, “must make use of both….” (Republic II, 377a1)
This is quite a shocking revelation, given what we were just saying about him. How then are we to understand this passage? In fact, Plato goes on to say, education must make use of the false tales first. Of all the things taught to young minds, they should be the first thing imprinted on them, before anything else, before the training of the body by gymnastics and the training of the mind in discourse. How then and why are these “false tales” accepted into the social structure of the ideal society? Shouldn’t Plato be especially on guard when it comes to the young, whom he admits are the most vulnerable to false pictures and deceptions? Doesn’t he himself say of it that “the beginning in every task is the chief thing?” (Republic II, 377a10-11) How then could he stumble and allow in corruption at the most important moment in the shaping of a person’s soul?
The most illuminating thing that Plato says in these passages is his comment that, “we begin by telling children fables, and the fable is, taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also.” (emphasis mine, Republic II, 377a3-5) This is the clue to our answer. Plato is using a deeper and more complex idea of “truth” than we first believed. His shows this by making a distinction between the sense in which the fables are false as a whole—they are inventions—and the sense in which there is truth in them. This offers the first chance of hope for us that our great art and literature will not, as a whole, be condemned to the flames under Plato’s regime. He has something other than the elimination of all fiction and imagination in mind. He’s not simply talking about historical accuracy. In fact, he’s looking for a deeper sense of truth.
In fact, mere historical truth might not be enough for Plato to justify its propagation as art (or good art). The standards we were considering above as the principles for art in his totalitarian oppressive regime would not have pleased Plato any more than they pleased us. They would, he would agree with us, be shallow and indiscriminate and arbitrary. They would not accurately pick out good art from bad art. They would result in the commission of much good art to the flames and the allowance of much bad art to the public sphere. This conception of truth is not what Plato is looking for.
So what is Plato looking for, then? The answer is that it is some kind of “inner” truth, the truth that exists within an artwork when the work itself is not, as a whole, true. Good art is true in the sense of being true to its subject matter, to the universe and moral truth as a whole, rather than any particular instance of occurrences. Plato is still a Platonist. He doesn’t want truth to limited cases, he wants truth to principles. He wants an art, like an ethics, that aims at adherence to the deep inner forms of reality, to the essences.
This concept is simple, in a way, and yet it is very difficult to comprehend. We need to work to wrap out minds around it and shift ourselves away from our contemporary conception of truth. In a shallow sense, we may understand what Plato means by saying that a story can be untrue in itself and yet contain truth as a jello can contain pineapple. Is that what it is then, a suspension of bits of truth in a wobbly transparent medium? Does the presence of pieces of truth justify having a false medium?
On the whole, I am tempted to say that it does not, not in this simplistic sense. Plato said, after all, that the whole of the tale was false, and yet it contained truth. In order to preserve the first part of the assertion we have to dismiss the idea that the truth of the tale consists in a differentiation of parts (the jello doesn’t conform but the pineapple does). Rather, the key differentiation that Plato is interested in must be between different senses of truth. It is not simply that one part of it is true and another part is not, rather, in one sense it is true and in one sense it is not. It is a particular kind of pattern, rather than a recipe, that is important.
The important distinction of senses of truth is the distinction between accurately relating what someone, Homer for example, has said about the gods and what someone should say appropriately about the gods. The truth that is important is the truth of the content of something with regard to the nature of its object. What is important is that you have pictured something as it should have been pictured. All other considerations are secondary. Good art discloses the forms, it obeys and reveals the principles of higher truth. Good art is true to its subject matter by saying of it that which is appropriate to the reality of its nature. It is not true to it by saying what we feel about it, but what we ought to feel about it, no matter the case, no matter the form. “The true quality of God we must always surely attribute to him whether we compose in epic, melic, or tragic verse.” (Republic II, 379a8-10)
It is important that we turn aside for a moment to note that Plato is not going off in an entirely different direction with his aesthetic theory. For us the core of aesthetic value has long been considered to be beauty (though it may not be any more; still, among the average citizens it is). Plato is still interested in beauty. He simply has a different way of judging it. Truth, in a sense, is beauty for Plato. All things converge in the form of the good, the bright sun of the abstract realm. In it, truth, beauty, and goodness are all one. And so, in a good work of art they too are one. It is true, it is good (and good for us), it is lovely, for the truth is, by nature, beautiful (and good for us). There is no separating the three. A good artwork shows us the truth of goodness that is beauty. It is perfection and harmony, it is godliness and glory. It is fine. The perception of beauty is the heart’s response to the goodness of truth and the truth of goodness. Beauty is like the halo of light around the sun or the bloom of youth upon the face of the young, as Plato might put it. That point having been made, let us return to this odd idea of truth which is goodness in art.
Because this is another area of major conflict between our society and Plato, the sense in which art is true to its subject matter, we must take a moment to iron out and grasp hold of this idea, lest we fail to comprehend it or pass over it in our dissatisfaction. The best way I can think of illuminating the idea in simple terms, comprehensible to us today, is to turn to Peter Kreeft’s distinction between the two ways in which a piece of music may be honest. Since his writing is easy to understand and speaks for itself, I will simply transpose a selection from his book The Best Things in Life, which is itself a Socratic dialogue focused on the best way to pursue health of the soul and the good life. Some people may find the ideas in it reminiscent of Alan Bloom’s attack on rock music in The Closing of the American Mind, which it preceded, another Plato-informed book about the problems with our culture. Kreeft, though, I think, sees more clearly to the heart of the matter and the truth that it is the principles, the inner truth, that matters more than the medium (Bloom shows a particular favoritism toward classical music and against rock music, I think). He also captures the modern spirit, which disagrees and fails to understand Plato’s concerns, well.
We enter the dialogue between the parties, Socrates and Felicia, just as Felicia has agreed that music affects the soul, mainly, rather than the body.
S: Then good music would be music that makes the soul better, that is, more harmonious, and bad music would be music that makes the soul unharmonious.
F: The first part’s O.K., but not the second. There’s no evil music.
…
S: Which of the two premises that lead to that conclusion will you deny, then? That music can influence the soul, or that harmony of soul is good?
…
F: Do you think only sweet, nice music is good?
S: Of course not. It is harmony of soul we are talking about, not just harmony of musical tone. There is no simple correlation between the two. And I do not mean by “harmony” merely sweetness. Sweet music, too, can cause disharmony of soul, for instance, weakness, self-pity, and narcissism.
F: What do you mean by harmony then?
S: Justice, right relation, fittingness, appropriateness. … We called it to kalon: the-good-and-beautiful, the noble, the fine.
F: So good music isn’t just harmonious music.
S: No.
F: Do you think there’s one best music for everyone?
S: No indeed. The music appropriate for a soldier would be different from the music appropriate for a poet.
F: Good. Well, rock is appropriate for us.
…
S: I see. I think I understand the music better now; it does seem to express and kindle those feelings. But others as well, less noble ones such as anger and resentment and self-pity and self-importance…. Or perhaps you think your music exorcises them… a spiritual purgation of emotions. … Well, I think I mean to ask three questions. First, do you admit that this music expresses these feelings that I have named? Second, do you think these feelings are good for you or bad? Third, do you think this music increases or decreases them?
…
F: Feelings aren’t evil. … We just want to express our feelings because we’re honest, and those are some of our real feelings.
S: Do you mean by “honesty” simply expressing whatever feelings you happen to have at the moment?
F: Sure. Isn’t that honesty?
S: A very easy kind. Do you consider this a virtue?
…
F: Well, what do you mean by honesty in feelings?
S: I think honesty with feelings means asking whether they are true.
F: True? How can feelings be true?
S: If I felt passionate love for a stone, would that feeling be true? …I should say that an honest feeling is one that does not lie about its object, one that is appropriate to its object. … I think if this music expresses loathing and scorn at such objects as life, or nature, or work, or reason, or order, or virtue, or authority, or any other great and good thing, then it is not honest. – The Best Things in Life, 103-106
Much of modern art is built upon the belief in the value of honesty, or “realism”, or genuine self-expression. Suffice it to say that Plato also believes in the value of honesty and “realism,” but honesty and realism of a different kind, honesty toward the subject, realism that reflects the deep truths of the universe (order, justice, purpose, goodness, beauty, and truth, according to him), expression of the eternal virtues and truths rather than mere self-expression. He doesn’t disagree with our assertion that they are valuable, only our definition of what they are. Plato is not, in fact such a bizarre creature with wildly different and incomprehensible doctrines and reactions to art from our own. A creature that did not understand the glory and lure of the aesthetic and of beauty would be incomprehensible to us; it would not be recognizable as human. The appreciation of the aesthetic is one of the peculiar features of the human mind that defines us and sets us apart. How could there be any understanding between us and Plato if he did not share our love of the aesthetic? What we understand now is that Plato did, in fact, feel the lure of the aesthetic. He did see the glory of the beautiful, enshrined with and yet inseparable from the forms of the true and the good. But his definition of art, his definition of goodness in art, and his definitions of honesty and artistic expression are different.
In fact, the dividing line between us and Plato may not be so great as we thought, perhaps no greater than the line between himself and the poets. The gulf which separates us is not an inseparable gulf of time but only a gulf of ideas and definitions. Nor would the change to his idea be a return to something archaic and outdated, to his mind. To him our current hegemony in the arts would seem only as a new iteration of the old administration, ripe for challenge by his own ideas. And so it has seemed to other modern-day Platos such as Alan Bloom, Peter Kreeft, Charles Colson, and Dan Quayle. These are not old, dead ideas, not battlefields long gone cold; they are live conflicts, new revolutions, ongoing challenges. We are not studying Plato because he is the past but because he is the great forefather and champion of one side of a discussion that is still going on today. This is why I think we are so justified in spending so much time on him. He is an articulate, relevant exemplar of a particular perspective that we need to learn to recognize and take stock of.
Even among the artists, the Platonists are still out there and still enjoying popularity, especially in the general market. And though our art has its own set of (somewhat divided) values and ideas about the nature of the universe and of art itself, the Platonists are fighting back, even if they don’t know that they’re part of Plato’s camp. Even among philosophers of aesthetics, one can find the old guard arising as a new and revolutionary camp. Mary Mothersill hit us with Beauty Restored in 1991. Eddy Zemach published Real Beauty in 1997. Both books are still being talked about and have gained a following. Both take strides away from non-cognitivist and subjectivist aesthetics and toward aesthetic realism, a road that leads inevitably to the reuniting of art with it long-estranged and demanding companions: ethics and epistemology.
The Road to Purgation
“Classical philosophy did not censor the singers. It persuaded them.” – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Now that we have gained a greater understanding of what “good” art is, in Plato’s opinion, we are better able to approach the matter of how he thinks art should be governed in society, how it should be treated, in other words, the third of our three central questions. Plato’s belief in the unity of beauty with goodness and truth, the unity of aesthetics with the rest of philosophy, means that all three must come into play when considering the role of art. We cannot judge its place simply as something that is (shallowly) aesthetically pleasing. We must search it and judge it by its deep beauty, its deep reflection of the fine, and accord it the respect due to a powerful mechanism of influence on human psychology.
The only way to handle such a powerful tool, Plato decides, is through widespread use of censorship. Poetry cannot be allowed to run loose. “Shall we,” Plato says, “then, thus lightly suffer our children to listen to any chance stories fashioned by any chance teachers and so to take into their minds opinions for the most part contrary to those that we shall think it desirable for them to hold when they are grown up?” (Republic II ,377b5-8)
No, such a thing cannot be allowed. “We must begin then… by a censorship over our storymakers, and what they do well we must pass and what not, reject. And the stories on the accepted list we will induce nurses and mothers to tell to the children and so shape their souls by these stories far father than their bodies by their hands.” (Republic II, 377b10-c4)
Bad art must be suppressed and good art promoted. Not merely tolerated, but promoted. Mothers and nurses, the principle vehicles of cultural transmission, shall be encouraged to pass on this good art to their children and charges. This is a significant act, as any good historian can tell you. Many great conquering nations have found themselves swallowed up and their cultures absorbed by the very people they conquered, overcome by the overwhelming force of the “mother tongue” that their foreign wives passed on to their children. Odd as it may seem, Plato is in fact showing a peculiar amount of respect for the arts. He does not think them merely trivial or useless. He takes them seriously, perhaps more seriously than many of us ordinary folks, who puzzle our heads over such a strong reaction what is “just a poem”, do. Plato does not deny the power of the arts. Corruptio optima pessima, as some modern Platonists are fond of saying.
Censorship, then, is the program to be undertaken. For, as Peter Kreeft says, “the individual has no inner censor against the power of music,” (The Best Things in Life, 99) (though Kreeft does not agree that the state should be given this job). This holds especially true for the young, Plato would say. The arts can have a powerful affect upon the minds of those who behold them. Therefore, for the good of the state, and also because we are obliged by the nature of art to make a distinction between apparently beautiful and really beautiful art, we must separate the sheep from the goats.
It is important to note that the choice to censor music is not entirely a politically motivated move. It is also personal (the polity of our own souls is at stake). And—this is key—we could not, in good conscience, approve to be true that which we know to be false, that the art which is morally corrupt and fundamentally untrue is beautiful. The good, the true, these things are by nature beautiful. But that which is neither good nor true yet appears to be so is simply presenting the illusion of beauty, and it is the solemn duty of philosophy to expose it. Fair and lovely as it may seem, we must guard ourselves, chanting over to ourselves the reasons that we have given as a countercharm to their spell (Republic X, 608a2-4), so that we are not deceived. “… for great is the struggle… a far greater contest than we think it, that determines whether a man prove good or bad, so that not the lure of honor or wealth or any office, no, nor of poetry either, should incite us to be careless of righteousness and all excellence.” (Republic X, 608b4-8)
Not only for the sake of control, but for the sake of society, for the sake of the individual, for the sake of the good, and for the sake of art must art be subjected to the censorship of philosophy. It is no small move for any Greek to make. As Sappho once expressed, to be unmusical was worse than being dead, for no one would remember you. Even Socrates, at the end of his life, was advised through his dreams to “cultivate poetry”. But whatever kind of poetry it might be, it must be poetry that is truly beautiful: the meeting place of beauty and goodness, beauty and truth—fundamental, essential beauty. “Real” beauty. That is the message of Plato. That he tries to solve the problem by the means of censorship is a particularity of methods, not of ideas, as we shall see. For many of his core ideas were held by (and are held by) others, others who agreed with his principles but not in the method by which they should be carried out, and others still who had never heard of Plato but shared his ideas and worked them out in their own way. It is to these latter groups that we will now give our attention. Now it is time to turn our minds to the study of the Yoruba.
The World of the Yoruba
“They [the onisegun, the sages] take care of the people. They prepare medicine for people. Second, they help persons and deliver them from the hands of their enemies so that they cannot harm them.” – quotation from the Yoruba, Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
The Language of Truth
“But if you have known someone who has been behaving in a truthful manner, if people are saying that he or she has done something bad, you may be reluctant to take them seriously because you have already accepted that he or she is a truthful person. Likewise, if someone is known for doing bad things and we hear that he or she is going good thing. You may not want to believe this.” – quotation from the Yoruba, Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Yoruba philosophy is not well-known, having suffered for a long time from the twin problems of being outshone by Yoruba art in the public sphere and being, largely, unwritten. For a long time, in fact, no one really even believed there was such a thing as “Yoruba philosophy”. But everyone has a philosophy, whether it is known or not.
We are lucky, in this day and age, to be able to find something out about Yoruba philosophy, thanks to the efforts of scholars in Africa, such as Barry Hallen, who have worked so hard to untangle the mysteries of a tradition that, even in our modern day, is still substantially an oral tradition. If, only a few decades ago, you had gone out looking for a book on Yoruba philosophy you would probably have come up with nothing. There are no manifestos, no masterworks; there is no scholarly tradition, no history of thought—no critics or reviewers or scholarly journals—only beliefs preserved in the minds and hearts of a people.
Because of this peculiar situation, an approach to Yoruba philosophy is going to be different from an approach to western philosophy. Every discussion must be an introduction; every thesis represents, to some degree, a guess, untested by time and unconfirmed by material sources. In some sense this presents a great difficulty. We are out of our usual waters. The style and traditions and mechanisms we are so used to simply don’t exist here. And yet it is also a great opportunity. For one thing, it allows us to approach philosophy in a more unfettered and primitive form. It gives us a connection to writers such as Plato, who lived in what was still the near descendent of an oral society, a time before philosophy was a “department” or a “subject.” In general, we will understand Yoruba philosophy better if we approach it more from the perspective of Plato and the interlocutors of Socrates than if we approach it from our modern western perspective. The text upon which I will lean for my quotations and for interpretation of Yoruba philosophy is Barry Hallen’s The Good, The Bad, and the Beautiful, which, as the title suggest, deals intimately with issues of aesthetics and morality in Yoruba culture.
The questions before us are, once again, what the nature of art is, how art and morality relate to one another, and how art and morality should relate in society. Yoruba art is, of course, somewhat different from our own, consisting mostly of sculpture and poetry traditionally, but not nearly so different as one might think, perhaps less different from that of our own heritage than some of the art of our modern society is from our own art of a hundred years ago. Part of the problem one faces in trying to communicate Yoruba beliefs and values is the problem of language. Our words are not the same, our history of terms is not the same. Yoruba words sometimes lack the preciseness which we are used to in philosophical terms. As such, it may be better to organize our thoughts along the lines of the analogical rather than the definitional in dealing with them. To elaborate, the word onisegun denotes something akin to “wise man” (medicine man, we would have said, not long ago) or “sage.” The definition of the word does not, in fact, match ours of “philosopher” in any simple way. And yet the onisegun has about him those qualities and those functions which are analogous to our understanding of what a philosopher is (in the old sense of the word).
Now, it may seem unusual to some to go looking for understanding of moral censorship of the arts, an idea caught up with our own history and entangled with the specialized ideas of our own philosophical tradition, in the traditions of a culture whose most basic concepts of truth and morality are very different from our own. It is my intent to show, though, that even among the different one can find something familiar and understandable. To begin with the different, we must first get a grasp on a few basic concepts in Yoruba thought.
The Yoruba cosmos is a complex structure consisting of gods and spirits and men and all kinds of other creatures, roughly divided into the physical/material realm and the spiritual/immaterial realm. At the back of it all is Olodumare, the creator, God (more in the Platonic sense than the Christian sense). In truth, though, both the seen and the unseen realms are inseparable and are one. Among the gods and spirits there are those who are helpful and seek to aid humanity and there are those who are hurtful and seek to undermine humanity. If not for the efforts of the benevolent forces, these malevolent forces would run the world aground and destroy humanity. This ongoing struggle between good and evil is part of the nature of the world, which we in our own world experience on a day to day basis.
Ori is destiny, a destiny that you draw at random then have to live with. In this world it is hard to distinguish whether what happens is due to your own choices, mistakes, abilities, actions, etc. or your destiny. That is why it is so important to have wisdom (ifa) and why those who practice ifa divination (such as the onisegun) are so important.
For a person, the head is the center, and Yoruba art typically depicts people with certain kinds of heads, representing their beauty and other symbolic qualities, such as “blueness”—mystical coolness. Moral character is denoted by the word iwa.
Where things become truly interesting and we begin again to approach the subject matter of our questions is in the Yoruba concepts of truth and beauty. In Plato we found ourselves faced with the mystical doctrine of the essential oneness and inseparability of truth, goodness, and beauty. Here, once again, we will find something similar. In Yoruba thought there is a close, even overlapping relationship between moral, epistemological, and aesthetic notions of the good. Truth, goodness, and beauty are not distinct, separate categories that you can divide from one another into neat compartments. They blend, they interrelate, they inform, they define.
O’oto, the true, is a tricky concept in Yoruba philosophy. Matters of truth are roughly divided into two categories: imo and igbagbo, roughly equivalent to “knowledge” and “belief”. Because their culture is an oral culture and there exist no independent resources or authorities such as books or filmreels, the only way you can really have imo is through firsthand experience. Seeing is believing. Unfortunately, there’s a heck of a lot out there that you and I will never have the chance to experience or prove firsthand. So a lot of the time we’re stuck with igbagbo. Certain kinds of igbagbo may be in-principle verifiable, but a good chunk of it isn’t, and you certainly don’t have time to go check up on every piece of information that comes your way. As a result, there’s a need for a major mechanism for justification in Yoruba society. Conventional methods simply aren’t available (and perhaps even we put too much trust in them). The Yoruba take a very practical and realistic approach to the problem. You really have no way to check on most of these things.
So where do the Yoruba turn in such a quandary? To morality. The Yoruba have a “moral epistemology,” as Barry Hallen puts it. In a world where you don’t have the opportunity to check up on everything your neighbor tells you, you judge whether you should believe him and the value of that belief by the virtue of their character. Are they a liar or are they a truth-teller? As a result, character, and the knowing of someone else’s character, becomes terribly important for everything you think or do. Even with firsthand “knowledge” there is a very personal component. Knowledge does not attain its high mark of quality by rising above subjectivity but by being subjective, or, where it enters into society, intersubjective and interpersonal. The Yoruba aren’t particularly concerned with the arguments of skeptics (there is no Yoruba Hume) so much as the fabrications of liars. The greatest threat to truth, even when dealing with firsthand experience, is lack of character. The world is full of liars. We may even lie to ourselves in interpreting what we see firsthand. Intent, as Ravi Zacharias once said, is prior to content. In a society where morality has died, how can truth hope to survive? For the Yoruba, there can be no separation between the truth and morality.
The Face of Beauty
“There are some people with good faces, but they are bad persons. And there are some with ugly faces who are good persons.” – quotation from the Yoruba, Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Good character is essentially important in all areas of Yoruba philosophy, in moral, artistic, and epistemic endeavors. The person who has good iwa (moral character) is a person who embodies the virtues of Yoruba life. He (or she) is a “cool” or “blue” person, someone who is calm and collected, who has a cool temperament and good judgment. He is dignified, royal, and kingly. He listens well and speaks well. He is careful, circumspect, and patient. He exemplifies the best and most beautiful character traits and ennobles and edifies those around him. For the Yoruba, character is a matter of the inner self, the heart, as we would say. It is deep, not shallow. As Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount, the Yoruba draw the focus away from actions and outer appearances and consequences settle it on the heart and mind of the individual. In order to assess character, we must look at the intentions of a person, whether they mean well or ill. A crooked person may go right and a good person may go wrong. The world is too complex a place in its workings to judge moral goodness simply by what happens. What matters is their iwa, their inner character. “It is the self which makes a man behave as he does. It is the self which makes a man behave in a good manner or a bad manner.” (The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, 87)
These sorts of values can clearly be seen in Yoruba art. Sculpture is the easiest example. They make the matter very plain. If you go to exhibit of Yoruba sculpture you will, without doubt, find yourself staring at the composed visages of a number of graceful black heads, perhaps adorned with a top covering of blue paint, serene and dignified. These sculptures are our first clue that we will not have such an easy time separating the answers to the questions “how shall we understand art” and “how shall we understand morality and art” as we are used to having. Far more than our society, perhaps even more than Plato and the Nahua, the Yoruba concepts of the good and the beautiful overlap.
In conversation the philosophers of the Yoruba switch quite easily between one term and another, almost as if the concepts of “good” and “beautiful” were interchangeable. To borrow Yoruba idiom, “character is beauty.” The word for beauty is ewa, which sounds very similar to iwa (character), with some reason. In fact, the most common use of the word ewa is in regard to humans, and not merely to denote their appearance. As Barry Hallen notes, “In virtually every account of the term… ewa or beauty as a physical attribute was rated superficial and unimportant by comparison with good moral character as a form of ‘inner’ beauty.” (GBB, 114-115) As the speaker Hallen was talking to noted, speaking of a handsome, aesthetically pleasing person with iwa, “he or she may not have a [good] moral character. The absence of [good] moral character (iwa) will spoil his or her beauty (ewa). … Beauty and character are mixed together.” (GBB, 115) As another speaker went on to say, “This is just like the yam we plant. Though the bark of the yam looks fresh, it has become rotten inside.” (GBB, 115)
Immediately, two things become clear about the Yoruba concept of beauty, first: that it makes a distinction between beauty of appearance and “true” beauty, second: that this “true” beauty has to do with the intersection of beauty with moral goodness. In these beliefs they have something in common with Plato, and also with the Christian and Jewish tradition, which may be something we can identify with. The writer of Proverbs’ “Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman who shows no discretion” (NIV Proverbs 11:22) and Saint Peter’s “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of the gentle and quiet spirit” (1Peter 3:3-4) bear a similar message to the Yoruba’s “A beautiful woman without a [good] moral character is of no real value. If she has beauty of the face and has no character—it is of no real value.” (GBB, 116) All three of these proverbs are speaking about people but the general principle holds true. Beauty is not to be predicated of that which lacks moral integrity and value.
The Yoruba, especially, are not ones to draw distinctions which will allow the arts to escape from this moral connection. In fact, it is a special point of their beliefs that the making of something by hands (the making of something by a person, which must apply to all artistic objects in some sense) is what qualifies it to be spoken of as having ewa. They don’t even bother to draw a distinction between objects made purely as works of art and objects that are simply man-made. As the saying goes, “There can be beauty on the farm because it is created by someone’s hand.” (GBB, 120) Especially if it is created well. “If they make for you the walls of a house, the one which is good—we say that it has beauty.” (GBB, 120) If it is a product of man’s hands, it can have beauty. In a sense, these things, because they are made, have a character. The word used, iwa, is certainly the same. “There are some cloths that are very good. We say that it has good character (iwa).” (GBB, 121)
Barry Hallen admits that it is difficult to make out exactly what the Yoruba believe about their sculpture, but it is clear that they have some of the same associations as some of the western art theorists we quoted earlier. The act of carving a sculpture is an act of creation, not unlike the way in which God creates and created man, but to a lesser degree. Dorothy L. Sayers would say that, in inventing the characters of a novel, a writer engages in an act of creation that is like a little mirror of the activity of God. The major difference is that the characters that God creates are not merely images which must be manipulated to give the semblance of life, they are really live things. The Yoruba believe something similar. The artist creates images that resemble people, but he cannot make the self. When he does create something, though, he imbues it with a new nature or character of his own creation that is different from that which it had as an unshaped object. How he accomplishes this is through an act of creative imagination (followed up by physical shaping of the object).
Of course the character which art objects have cannot be quite the same thing as the moral character of living persons because they do not have any actions or intentions of their own. And yet the moral character of the artist and the moral content of the work are essential to its nature. “The portraits drawn of Yoruba artistic values consistently link them with moral values.” (GBB, 133) When a Yoruba sculptor creates a carving, he or she is trying to embody those values. That is why we have so many carvings of those “blue” people. These images of beauty are images of the moral ideal and moral (and epistemological) virtue (for hand in hand with moral virtue goes epistemological credibility). That object represents the personage in which is united goodness, beauty, and truth.
Human behavior is the primary object of moral concern for the Yoruba, which may go some way to explain why they do not have quite the same concept of the moral status of artworks as we do. One might imagine, though, what their response to a more active display from an artwork would be, if, for example, one of their sculptures came alive in the manner of a film and began to act in ways that they would consider untrustworthy and non-beautiful. In this way we can imagine what their tradition would have to say about our art. Probably they would be more willing to assign it more distinct moral status. It is also not clear that they would make any distinction between the special actions of an artist such as an actor (or performance artist, or singer) which constitute their art and the morality of their actions in general. If someone got up on stage and began to sing a song which portrayed violence toward women or disrespect toward authority or self-absorption, or began to perform the part of a person who speaks falsely and rudely and engages in antisocial behavior, they might not excuse them on the grounds that the behavior in question was “art.” Such a reason would hold very little water with them. Even if it was art, it was bad art, for it had no inner beauty, no ewa. The artist is a bad artist, a bad creator. They are in line with the malevolent forces, the ajoguns, who seek to undermine and corrupt humanity. The things that they create are evidence against them. “Before you can identify a bad person you must see their acts. You cannot know them until you see ‘the work of their hands.’ ” (GBB, 41)
Whatever the case (and Yoruba art does include forms of performance art), for them art is a vehicle for moral values. Moral value is true beauty. To tie the various concepts together—beauty and goodness, persons and creations—attend the Yoruba saying: A man may be as handsome as a fish in water, but if he has no character (iwa) he is just a wooden doll. A doll looks human but is not; it appears beautiful and well fashioned on the outside, but it is just dead wood and dust inside.
The Outcast
“People sometimes say the enemy is outside the house, but ‘the person who will do bad things is inside your house.’ They also say that ‘a person is the enemy of himself; the people of your house are your enemy’…. Dangers are much more common at home. If they say that something is happening to the person, it has its source in his or her own household.” – quotation from the Yoruba, Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Unfortunately, a lack of proper examples makes it difficult to say what exactly the Yoruba solution to the problem of the conflict between morality and art is. Plato’s solution was state censorship. But the Yoruba have no “state” in the manner of the Greek city state or modern central government. They are a people group, traditionally tribal, with little in the way of “state” authority enforcing and transmitting their values. Whatever is happening seems to be happening by nature and habit, as part of a tradition. Nevertheless, let us marshal what we know.
Truth be told, we know quite a bit about how the Yoruba handle the problem of the conflict between art and morality. The truth is, it just isn’t much of a conflict for them any more. Morality has, so to speak, won the fight, and art is the handmaid of religious and moral truth, as well as being something pleasing to the eye. If there was a conflict, long ago, between a Yoruba Plato and a Yoruba Homer, it ended with Yoruba Plato’s victory and the redemption of the arts under the tutelage of the philosophers.
How the philosophers achieved their end, we cannot know, but we can be reasonably sure that it was the sages, the onisegun, who fought the battle and carried the victory. Whatever other functions they may perform, the onisegun are the doctors of the soul that Socrates once was to his people (though he was less respected for it). The onisegun are the enemies of the immoral persons. “The supreme deity has created them as ‘the persons to “repair” the town.’… They take care of the people.” (GBB, 102)
Their methods may be a bit different, but there is something we can recognize in these sages. They are the guardians of the well-being of their people. Not physically, but in a more psychological and spiritual sense. They weed out moral wickedness and hunt it down, seeking its cure or removal. They are doctors whose care is the well-being of the people. In a way, they are the philosopher kings of their culture.
It is the province, then, of such men to give judgment, if the case happened to come up, on the iwa and ewa of a person and their works. In such a case they are acting as the “experts,” advisors who can better evaluate and give judgment in tough moral matters. If there were a person out there who was producing artworks that were morally degenerate, that lacked iwa (and therefore also real ewa), presumably it would be incumbent upon him to point it out. Ideally, though, he wouldn’t need to. The idea of the unity of iwa and ewa should be so fundamental to people’s thinking (though obviously it isn’t, since they have plenty of problems with bad and deceitful people) that they would immediately recognize it as an inferior product. As Plato once said, they should simply laugh at it and pay no attention. It’s a rotten yam, a hollow doll.
In general society then, the principle method by which art would be guided/influenced by morality would be through censure. Shame, in other words. Infamy rather than enforced censorship. Rather than being exiled, it would simply be ignored. As I said before, the Yoruba would not be likely to make excuses for the exhibition of bad behavior, behavior contrary to the values of good society, simply because it was art. An act of illegality or nonsense or undermining of religious or moral truth would probably be regarded as just what it is and the person and their works recognized among society as having neither iwa nor ewa. Far from being respected or indulged, they would probably be ignored. That is the clear attitude of the Yoruba. If it’s not really beautiful—if it has no iwa—it’s worthless, no matter how amazing it looks. Bad art isn’t worth paying attention to. Such creations are perhaps the worst thing someone could create. A work that looks beautiful but communicates something bad, that lacks inner beauty, is not only aesthetically bad and morally bad, it is epistemologically questionable. Art communicates, expresses, and preserves ideas in an oral culture. What’s the point of preserving garbage?
It is also likely that our great artists, many of whom are not famous for being moral exemplars, would not impress the Yoruba. Such people would have no epistemological credibility in their culture. They would not be listened to. Nor would they believe that such a person could create a thing of goodness or beauty. Trees produce their fruit in kind.
In either case, the reaction to such artists and artworks as demonstrated a lack of conformity to philosophical guidance and values would be that people would “say of them”—their character would be made known among the people—and people would “not believe” and “not listen”—they would have no credibility and be ignored. Others in the culture, such as the onisegun, would warn and guard people against the bad artist. No scandal would attach itself to the affair, no outcry, no outright censorship. That is not the Yoruba way. But it is one of the responsibilities of aje—people with a special level of ability/insight/intelligence— to exercise their powers for the benefit of the community. This may include recognizing bad aje, people who use their gifts cravenly. Ordinary people may not be able to recognize bad aje; that is why the good aje must do what they can to help. “Extraordinary ability also demands extraordinary responsibility.” (Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft, 116) Gifted people, people with special abilities, must be called to a higher account, not freed from such accounts. Otherwise they take on the essence of the more commonly known translation of aje: “witch.” Corruptio optima pessima.
The World of the Nahua
“I love the sound of the mockingbird
Bird of four hundred voices,
I love the color of the jadestone
And the enervating perfume of flowers,
But more than all I love my brother: man.”
The Slippery Earth
“Where, oh my heart, is the place of life?
Where is my true home?
Where my true dwelling place?
I suffer here upon earth.
– poem of the Tlamatinime
The Nahua, like the Yoruba, are a people who, though their civilization and intellectual history are separated by time and distance from our own, have lives which touch our own. In the same way that the Yoruba were one of the largest people groups to be taken as slaves to the Americas and so form a large piece of the racial background for one of our largest minorities, the Nahua were the most numerous people group of pre-colonial Mexico, and their descendents form the background for another of our largest minorities. Their principal civilization, the Aztec Empire, is now gone, but the traditions of the Nahua live on here and there, where fate spared them.
The Nahua are perhaps one of the most interesting cultures to study from the aesthetic point of view. For Plato art was a powerful but less superior form of communication. He’ll make use of it and respect it, but he doesn’t venerate it. For the Yoruba art was an excellent way of expressing creativity and moral and cultural values. The ability to create art is a specialized skill and valued by the community, but it is ultimately inferior to God’s greater creative powers, a fine echo or tribute, but not quite as good as the real thing. For the Nahua, art is supreme. Life itself, the very movement of the universe, is a kind of art. Art is more than representation—it is presentation, it is a direct embodiment of what it figures. Art has the power to affect change; it is a source of causation. Art is the flowering presentation of Teotl, the sacred energy. If Plato valued art less than we do, the Nahua, quite possibly, valued it more than we do. In them we find an example of society where art was just as pervasive, the artist just as respected, the work just as valued as in our own society.
Having said that, there are great differences between how the Nahua treated art and how art was handled in their society from how it is handled in ours. These differences stem from their differing philosophies, their worldview, and their beliefs about how philosophy should inform aesthetics. In order to understand why they treated art as they did, we need to gain a basic grasp of how they saw the universe. As with Plato, giving a full explanation of their beliefs and the intricacies of their metaphysics and epistemology is too great a task to undertake here. Fortunately, the relevant parts of Nahua philosophy, their ethics and aesthetic theory, can be boiled down to a few basic concepts. My principal resource for my own understanding and explanation of Nahua philosophy is the work of James Maffie. Anyone interested in learning more about Nahua philosophy would do well to look up the entry he has written for the Internet Encyclopedia Philosophy, which gives an excellent basic overview of Nahua beliefs in all the essential areas. My own explanation represents, essentially, a selective summary of the summary that he would give you, coupled with my own interpretation of key concepts.
There are two essential concepts which one needs to grasp in order to understand Nahua philosophy. These are: the defining problematic concept of the slippery earth and the defining metaphysical concept of Teotl. All Nahua philosophy springs from the fundamental question, “How can humans maintain their balance upon the slippery earth?” This question is similar to that which Socrates often asked, “How can I live the good life?” The Nahua, like Socrates, were practical, ultimately concerned with the question of how we should live our lives and what the best way to live our lives is. In their view, the earth is a difficult and often painful place to live. Much of Nahua poetry reinforces this theme of the difficulty and suffering that one has to endure in life. The Nahua word for the surface of the earth is tlalticpac, which means “on the point or summit of the earth.” The image which it conjures is that of a narrow and dangerous path, the “straight and narrow” which one finds metaphorically in Western books like Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Lewis’ Pilgrim’s Regress, with dark chasms on either side into which one could easily plunge. Navigating life on earth is difficult and fraught with pitfalls which we, as humans, are wont to fall into. The great question before us, then, is how to maintain our balance upon that slippery knife edge, how to find the right path which will lead us through and keep us from falling.
So Nahua philosophy is essentially pragmatic in focus, like the teachings that we typically ascribe to Socrates. All of their further philosophical work and values are guided by this fundamental quest, the quest for a way. One of C.S. Lewis’ friends once reprimanded him for referring to philosophy as a subject. Philosophy wasn’t a subject to Plato, he said, it was a path. And that is how we should conceive of Nahua philosophy, as fundamentally oriented toward the goal of understanding how we should live our lives and providing us a path to doing so. Such an approach should sit well with those of us in America today, who are famous for being part of society that is, like the Romans, fundamentally practical. Pragmatism is, after all, the one philosophical movement our society can lay claim to have given birth to.
Unlike the American pragmatists with their “whatever works” attitude, though, the Nahua believed that there were fairly solid (if complex) answers to the question of how a person should live their life in order to achieve success and the good life. For answers in this area the Nahua, like most ancient societies, looked to the natural order of the universe. And the heart of this was Teotl. Teotl is, in a sense, everything. Teotl is the sacred dance, the unitary, self-renewing, self-transforming energy of creation. Creation itself is simply the expression of Teotl.
The Nahua view of the universe is ultimately one of dialectical monism (an essential unity which presents itself as a polarization of opposites, such as life and death, order and chaos, light and darkness; in other words, the yin-yang). Teotl is not personal or an agent, but Teotl is depicted as the sacred artist of the universe, whose artistry is the pattern for human artistry. This idea has some connection to the Christian and Yoruba concepts of God as artist and creator, but the activity of Teotl is conceived of as self-presentation, rather than presentation or the creation of independent objects. It is also important to emphasize that, though in some sense our experience of separation and duality in the world is epistemologically illusory (as in Taoism), our experience of it is ontologically real. It’s part of the expression of Teotl. In other words, the distinction is between the seen and the unseen, not between the real and the unreal. Human life is real enough. This earth is real enough. It is the artwork of Teotl, the “house of paintings,” as the tlamatini (sage) Aquiauhtzin once described it. Nezahualcoyotl, with whose words I began this section, once made this song about it:
“With flowers You paint, O Giver of life!
With songs You give color, with songs you give life on the earth.
Later you will destroy eagles and tigers: we live only in your painting here, on the earth.
With black ink you will blot out all that was friendship, brotherhood, nobility.
You give shading to those who live on the earth…
We live only in Your book of paintings, here on the earth.” (Romances de los senores de Nueva Espana, fol. 35r)
The way in which we express Teotl in our own lives is through the ideal of balance. “Balance” is what allows us to keep our footing while we walk the slippery slope that is the life of the earth. This concept of balance is not unlike Aristotle’s idea of the “Golden Mean”. It is a metaphorical concept, a picture, and if we are going to think about Nahua philosophy we have to think in pictures rather than definitions. Most of Nahua philosophy is expressed through art, through pictures. In their eyes, such metaphors and symbols would be considered closer, more accurate approximations or pictures of the truth than the descriptive prose we typically use in our philosophical discussions. To the mind of a Nahua, such language chops up what is really a unified whole, a being, a thing, which is better understood by being seen than by being picked apart by titles and definitions and premises and divided analysis. So we must train our minds to think in pictures.
It’s also worth noting at this point that the Nahua are more interested in what we would call “wisdom” than what we would call “knowledge.” As James Maffie puts it in his encyclopedia entry on the Nahua, “Knowing (tlamatiliztli) is performative, creative, and participatory, not discursive, passive or theoretical. It is concrete, not abstract; a knowing how, not a knowing that.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.4a) Apart from the moral and practical aspect of wisdom for the Nahua, which echoes the ideas to be found in the dialogues of Plato, knowledge itself has an artistic component. To some degree this shows the difference between cultures of the ordering of ideas. For Plato, the Yoruba, and the Nahua, there end up being no clear boundaries between the good, the true, and the beautiful. In the end, all three of them are part of the same one thing and may even be interchangeable as terms.
Different cultures may emphasize one dimension over the others, though, the one that they are most familiar with and which forms the biggest part of their mental outlook. For Plato, truth seemed to be in the forefront of his mind (even though the form of the good was the apex of his metaphysical theories). He wanted true knowledge, true morality. The unity of the three great aspects was expressed by him in his argument that there was a truth component to art(/beauty/aesthetic value). For the Yoruba, goodness seemed to be at the center, and their expression of the unity was in their revelation that there was a moral component to truth (and to art). For the Nahua, art is the focus, as we can see when they tell us that there is an artistic component to knowledge. Right human cognition (thinking, put plainly) is itself a kind of flowering, a presentation of Teotl. It is an authentic, genuine, faithful disclosure of Teotl. “By contrast,” says Maffie, “unknowing (illusory, befogged) cognizing is poorly if not wholly unrooted (ahnelli) in teotl. It is inauthentic, ingenuine, and undisclosing. Teotl fails to burgeon, flower, and faithfully disclose itself within such cognizing.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.4c)
The Nahua do not make any clear distinction between the way in which moral standards govern behavior and the way in which moral standards govern other areas of life, such as cognition or artistic creation. For them ethics, or morality, was a single point of view that informs and guides all dimensions of human activity. What we divide into the areas of thinking, politics, art, religion, moral behavior, the law, professional excellence, etc., they saw as one dimension. Good art, good thinking, good politics, good law, all of these were governed and judged by the same unifying moral principles. They did not carve the dimensions of life into separate compartments governed by different rules (which under Islam would be considered a kind of polytheism). Instead, recognizing Teotl as the guiding pattern for all (as the form of the good was for Plato) and the pattern for all balance, harmony, and success, they made it the single, all encompassing, infinitely diverse lodestar of all aspects of their society.
Despite this seemingly otherworldy approach to life on earth, the Nahua were terribly practical. If we have been imagining, by the association of such a kind of value with Plato and, later, Christianity, that the Nahua were interested in a moral law which was inherently idealistic and not focused on practical results, we are wrong. The Nahua were quite as pragmatic in their ethics as any modern political philosopher. The difference is, as I have said, that they thought that there were definitive answers, determined by the natural state of humans and the universe, to the practical question of how to live one’s life successfully.
In fact, we do even Plato and Christianity a disservice if we think there is no connection between their moral principles and a desire for practical results. Ideals may not always work in this complicated world, but they are meant to exist as the pattern for all joyful and blessed life, the pattern of the ideal state. The Nahua had no concept of punishment or reward in the afterlife, and they acknowledged that things sometimes went badly on earth. Yet they still believed that there was an ideal pattern which dictated our chances of success and happiness. This pattern is the “balance” we have been speaking of, the “middle good that is required” (tlacoqualli in monequi). The proper rewards of this balance are health, laughter, strength, sustenance, sleep, pleasure, honor, and respect. The proper rewards (inevitable results) of a lack of balance are disease, insanity, filth, deformity, hunger, sorrow, and suffering.
Flower and Song
“I choose the colors,
I mix the flowers,
In the place of beautiful new songs.
A polished jewel, a jade precious and brilliant Of deepest green, it is made,
A spring flower prepared to perfume the heavens.
To the place of rosy flowers,
Toward there I sing my song.
I am honored, I am made glad,
Chasing the much-prized flower, the aroma of the rose in the place of song.
So that with sweetness my heart is filled.
Wave after wave I send to buffet my heart.
I inhale the perfume; My soul becomes drunk.
I so long for the place of beauty.
The place of flowers, the place of my fulfillment.”
– Nezahualcoyotl
Now that we have a background against which to work, let us turn to the matter of art and morality. Art, as I have said, was accorded ultimate honor in Nahua society. “Flower and Song,” known to them as in xochitl, in cuicatl, is the category by which they describe the arts. The highest form of “flower and song” was the song-poem, such as those that I have quoted above. These poems, and the arts in general, possess the power of presenting Teotl to the world. These songs “are the highest form of human artistry and the finest way for humans to present Teotl since this activity most closely imitates and participates in Teotl’s own cosmic, creative artistry.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.4d)
This ability to participate in Teotl’s creative artistry was not limited to the great songmakers though. Work that we might consider commercial art or the work of artisans, such as goldsmithing and featherworking, was equally part of “flower and song.” All creative activities are examples of “flower and song.” The Nahua had a great appreciation for drawing and painting, as well as composition, springing from their belief in the power of picturing (even above words) as a way of presenting the beauty of Teotl. Actually, they considered painting to be a kind of language, a universal language that anyone, even someone who didn’t know the Nahautl language could understand.
The Nahua had a love for decoration and beautiful things, such as cut and polished jade and the plumes of the beautiful quetzal bird. Interestingly enough, though, they do not seem to have had a distinct sense of the aesthetic as a separate and distinct category. Rather, everything, including art, is understood through the defining question of how to maintain our balance upon the slippery earth and the sacred unity that is Teotl. Good art discloses Teotl. Bad art fails to do so. In fact, it is impossible to separate the questions of how art functioned in Nahua society and how morality influenced art. Morality is art. Art is morality. This can be seen in the Nahua description of moral uprightness as in ixtli in yollotl (“face and heart”). Beauty and goodness. Not as separate categories, but as one entity; true character: the beautiful, the good, the upright, the balanced, the pure.
The Nahua word for “good” meant “edible” or “assimilable.” By contrast, their idea of badness revolved around the idea of spoilage, something that had become rotten, something that decayed and had lost its order and structure. Such bad things are not edible. They will poison you. Good art will strengthen you. It will increase the beauty, balance, and harmony in you and in the world. Its beauty will inspire you and cultivate the goodness in you; it is faithful to Teotl (to the truth, the nature of the universe). Bad art is the work of the “carrion artist,” the one who confuses and deceives and makes opaque the nature of Teotl. He does not, as Plato would say, say of god those things which are appropriate to him. He has a wicked heart (the center of the self is the heart in Nahua thought).
Because Nahua art has such a powerful ability to teach us the nature of the universe and inspire right action in us, it is a powerful form of education. Art is the food for the soul, especially the young soul. The Nahua believed that we are all born with blank faces, as blank slates in other words, and by the influence of good teaching through the best of methods (the arts) that face could be shaped into a beautiful one; “face and heart”, true character.
James Maffie gives four qualifications for aesthetic value in Nahua art, bars it must meet if it is to be considered good and truly beautiful. First, creative activity and its products must genuinely and truly disclose Teotl. Second, “creative activity and its products are aesthetically valuable if and only if they contribute positively to the existing store of balance-and-purity in the cosmos.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.7) In other words, they themselves must embody balance and purity; they must be well-formed and well-made. Third, “aesthetically valuable creative activity and products must spring forth from a morally and epistemologically qualifed, ‘Teotlized heart’…. Fools and rogues are incapable of creating beautiful works of art.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.7) Fourth, aesthetically valuable activity and products must have the proper affects upon their audience. “Beautiful art improves and uplifts its audience psychologically, physically, morally, and epistemologically. It promotes psychological and physical balance-and-purity, moral righteousness, and proper understanding of Teotl, and consequently helps humans attain greater degrees of humaness and well-being. By contrast, ugly art promotes physical and psychological imbalance-and-impurity, immorality, depravity, misunderstanding, and ill-being.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.7)
These ideas, particularly about the necessity of epistemological and moral virtue in “really” good art and the negative epistemological and moral consequences of bad art, are very much in line with what we have already heard from Plato and the Yoruba. Far separated as they are, they begin to speak with one voice. Their reasons may be different, their entire cosmologies may be different, and yet they agree about the nature of art.
Teacher of Faces
“The wise man: a light, a torch, a stout torch that does not smoke.
A perforated mirror, a mirror pierced on both sides.
His are the black and red ink, his are the illuminated manuscripts, he studies the illuminated manuscripts.
He himself is writing and wisdom.
He is the path, the true way for others.
He directs people and things; he is a guide in human affairs.
Teacher of truth, he never ceases to admonish.
He makes wise the countenances of others; to them he gives a face; he leads them to develop it.
He opens their ears; he enlightens them.
He puts a mirror before others, he makes them prudent, cautious; he causes a face to appear on them.
He attends to things; he regulates their path, he arranges and commands.
He applies his light to the world.
Thanks to him people humanize their will and receive a strict education.”
– Codice Matritense de la Real Academia, translation by Leon-Portilla
In all three cases of these cultures, the wise men, the sages, the philosophers, seem to agree to a large amount about the overlapping nature of art and morality and the power of art over the human soul. Plato saw that overlap and power as a cause for conflict between philosophy and art. Art had, so to speak, got the upper hand and was disseminating truth and morals without having any real authority, without the direction of good philosophy. His response was censorship. The Yoruba did not exactly see this relationship as a cause for conflict, rather as a cause for discretion. Personal discretion, rather than state censorship, was their solution. What route did the Nahua take? Art was incredibly important for them. The repression of art was not an option; art permeated, and was meant to permeate, every aspect of their society. Art’s role in their lives, though, was too important to simply let the matter slide in the public sphere and have everyone practice their own personal discretion, especially considering the role that they believed art held, like Plato, in shaping the souls of the young.
Though the Nahua are, according to our survey, at the far extreme of the other end of the spectrum from Plato in the esteem in which they hold the arts, the Nahua come, in the end, to the same conclusions. Bad art, in the Nahua society, must be censored. Beyond being censored, it will probably be punished. Because there is no hard and fast line between art and life (living is a kind of art) and art and morality (art is a kind of moral action), a trespass in one area is essentially indistinguishable from a trespass in the other. If you commit a wrong act, like theft or murder or abuse, you will be subject to the law’s punishment. It will also be noted that your life has ceased to be a thing of beauty. You will have committed an artistic sin by ruining the work of art that is your life. A good heart is like a well-polished piece of jade, a carefully carved gemstone. A bad life is like a flawed and broken gemstone, a ruined and spoiled piece of art.
Conversely, if you create a bad piece of art, one which does not accurately reflect Teotl or contain and promote good character, you have yourself done something wicked. You have engaged in a morally and epistemologically reprehensible act. The fact that it is a work of art, an artistic act, doesn’t make it less serious or less likely to be punished than ordinary actions, rather the opposite. Artistic acts are more significant, more serious. They are the ultimate expression of Teotl that a person can engage in (or ultimate expression of the defamation of Teotl). So you have broken the moral laws in the worst manner possible, rather than in some removed way. Both actions and art constitute ways of directly increasing or decreasing the amount of moral goodness in the world. If your art is morally or epistemologically flawed it cannot have aesthetic value, therefore it will be rejected. It will also, for these reasons, be morally reprehensible, and so it will be purged. It is tlazolli: it is pollution; it is useless, disordered, worn out. Tlazolli is contagious. It is like a disease that ruins humanity. It has no place in society.
The Nahua, then, believed in the moral and epistemic control of art by philosophy. Art was not set free to define its own values in these areas. It had to answer to the universe, so to speak, rather than create its own, which is the defining characteristic of aesthetic theory in most ancient cultures (and several modern ones). Even though the Nahua, like Plato, embraced censorship as a means of guiding art and separating good art from bad, the mechanism by which they molded art into its proper, Teotlized shape was different. Plato put limits on the arts, and though he put them in a prominent place in shaping the young, older students moved on to more solid pursuits like mathematics and dialectic. The Nahua put no such limits on the arts, making them a necessary part of life and learning from beginning to end. You never reached a point in your life where a little more art wouldn’t benefit you. As you grew older and wiser you simply moved up to higher and better levels of art, better and better works as your ability to appreciate and comprehend them grew. If you were fortunate, you became an artist yourself.
In truth, everyone needed to become an artist in Nahua society, much as it is said in our own Greek-derived tradition that, in the perfect society, everyone must become a philosopher. Everyone’s life and every profession was a work of art and needed the same adherence to aesthetic and moral principles to flourish. Everyone needed harmony and balance in their lives to live them well and successfully, therefore everyone needed to be a philosopher, therefore everyone needed to be an artist. And this is one point of difference in technique between Plato and the Nahua, that for the Nahua the way to achieve excellence in art was for the philosophers to become the artists, whereas Plato said that, to the philosophers, as the founders of the state, “it pertains to know the patterns on which poets must compose their fables…, but the founders are not required themselves to compose fables.” (Republic II, 379a2-5)
“We are not poets,” said Plato (Republic II, 379a1). But the Nahua taught their philosophy primarily through the arts. Therefore, since the arts were the greatest tool and the philosophers knew best how poems should be created, it was only logical that the philosophers should become poets. The poem with which I began this section is one of the works of Nezahualcoyotl, a king and poet of the Nahua. His portrait can be found on the 100 peso note of Mexico, though he was of the Acolhua, not the Mexica. In his biographies he is pictured as something of a king David figure, a philosopher king who was revered as a man of wisdom and great poet, a great lawmaker and engineer and a powerful intellectual, founder of the golden age of Texcoco. His code of law, which separated leadership into different councils governing the different essential aspects of society (rather like our Departments in America), included such branches as the council of war, the council of finance, the council of justice, the council of culture, and the council of music. Historian Lorenzo Boturini Bernaducci described Texcoco during this period as the Athens of the Western world. Nezahualcoyotl also gathered other sages to him during this time, the tlamatinime, the wise men, the philosophers of their day, who are still known today for their poems.
Texcoco at this time, then, is the Nahua picture of the Republic in action. The tlamatinime, the philosophers, are key to the whole picture. Only they are qualified to cultivate wisdom in the people (which is exactly what Plato said). “In his/her capacity as educator, moralist, and role model—i.e. as “teacher of people’s faces” (teixtlamachtiani)—the sage is akin to an artist who skillfully shapes a formless block of stone into a beautiful statue. The sage shapes a child’s “faceless”, lump of human flesh into a genuinely human ‘face and heart’.” (Aztec Philosophy, sec.6) In the ideal society of the Nahua, philosophy and art will join hands and become one. Both will flourish and the people will flourish with them. Divided, art and the state will enter into tlatlacolli—decay, disorder, spoilage—and become tlazolli—useless, used up, unstructured. That is the Nahua picture of the relationship between art and morality in society.
A World of Possiblities
“In the choice between the somewhat arbitrarily distinguished realism and idealism, a sensible person would want to be both, or neither. But, momentarily accepting a distinction I reject, idealism as it is commonly conceived should have primacy in education, for man is a being who must take his orientation by his possible perfection. … Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are.” – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
What Have We Learned?
“I am a man as well as a lover of poetry: being human, I am inquisitive, I want to know as well as to enjoy. But even if enjoyment alone were my aim I should still choose this way, for I should hope to be led by it to newer and fresher enjoyments, things I could never have met in my own period, modes of feeling, flavours, atmospheres, nowhere accessible but by a mental journey into the real past. I have live nearly sixty years with myself and my own century and am not so enamored of either as to desire no glimpse of a world beyond them.” – C.S. Lewis, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, “De Audiendis Poetis”
By now we have had a trip down all the merry paths of the world. We have been to Greece, to the far-off homeland of our civilization, and back through Africa to the New World. We have seen the world through the eyes of men and women of other times and places and have, I hope, seen our own surroundings in a new way through their eyes.
The pictures that we have been given of the universe have been many and varied, and yet in a way they all spoke with one voice. That such a thing occurred is a matter for some surprise and a fact that we must take careful note of. As distantly removed from one another by space and by time as they were, yet these philosophers agreed with one another. As diverse as their attitudes and tastes regarding art were, yet they agreed with one another. As different as their backgrounds and their beliefs were, yet they agreed with one another. And though the language was in every case different, in every case expressed differently and through different mediums, yet they agreed with one another.
No historical connection is to blame; we cannot pin the responsibility for it on Plato’s influence on Christians, who went on to influence others and spread his backward ways and beliefs to others and yet others. What we have here is not agreement among close cultural brothers. We have scattered our seeds to the far ends of the earth and reaped the same crop in one. Whether that proves anything is debatable, but it goes a long way toward reinforcing the enormous singularity and radical nature of our own culture’s revolt against the traditional ways. We are very much alone in our revolt. Therefore we had better be able to back up our actions with some good arguments.
What, then, did we learn from our discussion? What were the points generally agreed upon? I have listed them thus:
- Art is powerful. Art has a unique ability to influence the mind and heart. It is one of the most powerful cultural and education forces in any society, whether it is recognized as being such or not. For the young its power is even greater because they have not yet developed their philosophical outlook through a personal and independent rational process. They are still malleable, and most of their worldview is still unconscious. Art as a source of unconscious, participatory philosophical indoctrination, then, has a strong effect on the training of their minds and attitudes. This classification of “young” may not mean only the temporally young either but applies just as well to the “young” in the sense Aristotle uses it in his Ethics: the psychologically and philosophically immature. This distinction then, applies to a very large segment of our society. Art is the way the common man or woman participates in the philosophical life of their culture.
- No shallow or isolated sense of aesthetic value or beauty is sufficient for “real” aesthetic value. In the calculation of aesthetic value, mere looking or seeming nice-ness is not enough. There is a division between the appearance of aesthetic value (psychological or perhaps physiological stimulation, emotional stimulation) and the substance of aesthetic value. Real beauty (shorthand for aesthetic value) exists, and it is something more than that. Succeeding at being trivially or shallowly beautiful is not sufficient for the ascription of real aesthetic value.
- There is a fundamental unity of beauty, goodness, and truth. One could also formulate this as a negative theory of the nature of aesthetics, that there is no singular, independent value which is solely and wholly “aesthetic” by which a work can be judged (assuming it is not trivially aesthetic, i.e. simply pleasant, with no further psychological, moral, or rational content). It is an interconnected whole. What exactly this really looks like is hard to say. It is, and for centuries has been, one of the great philosophical mysteries of life. But it is a mystery we deal with day to day in our ordinary lives.
- A failure of either goodness or truth negates the value of an artwork and makes it bad, however good it may appear to be. The mere ability to provoke a strong emotional reaction, even a positive emotional reaction, does not trump all other value considerations. Aesthetic value is not some magical value, miraculously independent of the others, where the other are not independent of one another. There may be a sense in which a work may seem good, but that sense does not constitute real aesthetic value if its cognitive and moral content is clearly bad. In some sense, it may be worse off for being so. You cannot simply parcel out or chop off pieces of a work’s content/value which are part of the nexus of its total aesthetic value.
- Bad art is not simply aesthetically bad, it is morally and epistemologically dangerous. Art is powerful, art has philosophical content (including moral and epistemological content), therefore art is never trivial. It may be trivially good, but it is never trivial. Art must be respected for what it is and taken seriously as a power for great delight and benefit or great misery and harm.
- Good art must be guided by the principles of true philosophy. Because art contains philosophy and has such power over people’s minds, it is important that it be guided by good thinking. Writers and filmmakers and artists are already the popular philosophers of our culture (and any culture), far more popular than any of the real philosophers. Therefore, if they are going to be engaged in this kind of casual, pervasive, and highly persuasive philosophizing, it is important that they be (or be guided by) good philosophers.
- It is the responsibility of philosophers to protect the people’s hearts from bad art and to help them be edified by the presence of good art. Philosophers have a duty that stems from the gifts and training they have been given. They have the ability to resist the basic psychological pull of art and independently judge it according to a higher standard. They have the ability to be true “critics,” able to benefit both art and the public. Therefore they have the responsibility to do so.
These are the basic points that we have heard reinforced through Plato, the Yoruba, and the Nahua. On these seven things they appear to agree. I do not, I think, need to go back to the first section of this discussion to make the point that our society, our artists, and our aesthetic theory do not generally agree with these seven points. At least, if we do believe them, we are not wholly conscious of that fact and our behavior does not reflect that belief.
What is not entirely clear at this point is what action should be taken in light of these seven points. Though we have a wider understanding of how numerous societies viewed the arts and the role of morality in art, and though we have some theoretical answers to the question of how the intersection of art and morality should be handled in society, we do not have any clear practical answer to the last question. Philosophers, like the government, have generally taken a hands-off approach to the arts in our society. We dabble around in theory and do a bit of art criticism, but we do not get our hands dirty, so to speak. Plato suggested that philosophers should become the rulers and censors of the arts, taking the bull by both horns. The Yoruba suggested that the philosophers should speak out and inform the general public of the untrustworthiness of bad artists. The Nahua suggested that the philosophers become artists themselves in order to further the production of good art and the repression of bad art.
The trouble for us is that modern philosophers are usually isolated from general society within the walls of academia. The general public does not listen to the philosophers, they listen to the artists, the lay-philosophers. To prove this you need only ask any person on the street how many philosophers they can name, especially contemporary ones and how many musicians, directors, and painters they can name. Or you could walk into an art gallery and compare the prices of the works with the cost of the average book of philosophy or the fees paid to authors and the circulation of a scholarly journal. There’s simply no comparison. Important as we may think ourselves, we have nothing compared to the power and esteem of the arts.
If we as a people are to give any credence to the idea of philosophical involvement with the arts, we must ask ourselves what sort of practical form that should take. More importantly, we must ask ourselves as philosophers if we are willing to engage in that kind of involvement. There are some major downsides to it. As we have seen from the earlier example of Dan Quayle, we are not likely to achieve fame, respect, and understanding from our society if we take the Platonic approach, much less compliance. The same holds true for the Yoruba approach. How many philosophers go on to become successful politicians or public opinion shapers? How many senators and how many Oprahs have we produced lately? The Nahua offer the option of becoming artists ourselves, becoming authors of popular novels, songwriters, painters, and scriptwriters. This might seem like a more appealing option, but it’s still a difficult one. Life is hard in the public sphere. The nature of the work necessarily means that we would not be able to confine ourselves simply to elite, exclusive, or academic work. If we’re to be of any service to the general public, we’ll have to deign to talk about and get involved in so-called “popular” culture and affairs. That, at least, is the pattern presented to us by Plato, the Yoruba, and the Nahua. But we’re not sure if we want to. We’re not sure if we can. We’re especially not even sure, at this point, that we should.
Let us then stop, for the moment, with this point. The practical question is not yet settled. We do not know yet how we should respond to the ideas of these cultures because we do not know yet whether we should respond to them. Several ideas, several possibilities, have been put before us. It is important that we weigh them before going on. It is time to test our first society and its vision against that of our competitors. In order to do so, we must weigh to possible risks and benefits of embracing some part of their vision of aesthetics. We have heard the justification for why philosophy should seek to gain influence over the arts. Now we must give the arts a chance to argue back for why they should be free from philosophical control.
What It Might Cost
“I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it too anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.” – Albert Camus, Notebooks.
“Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.” – Susanne Langer, “Mind, An Essay on Human Feeling”
“Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” – Oscar Wilde
“Shall I tell you what I think are the two qualities of a work of art? First, it must be the indescribable, and second, it must be inimitable.” – Pierre Auguste Renoir
“Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” – Oscar Wilde
“I belive in Michaelangelo, Velasquez, and Rebrandt, in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting…. Amen. Amen.” – George Bernard Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma
“Art inherit[ed] all the duties of the church.” – Jacques Barzun, The Use and Abuse of Art
It is only fair that the opposing side be given a chance to respond. In a way, the decision to exercise moral censure of the arts we are engaged in is rather like a trial. We have heard the statement of one of the parties, giving their version of the story. Then we heard the statements of three other witnesses, giving their competing accounts of the story. Now it is time for the response, the second response, and the closing statements. It is very important that our society be able to give a good defense of its view of art. After all, there are no less than three independent witnesses who disagree with our version of the story, and all their accounts by and large agree (making allowances for point of view). Not that these societies have the authority to pass judgment on us. But in our ongoing pursuit of the philosopher’s quest, to test and approve that which is truly good, it would be well for us to sometimes ask how we have got to where we are and whether we should be there.
The arguments, the historical processes, and the psychological reasons for why we are the way we are and why we believe what we believe in our society are, on the whole, commonly available, and you can get a good general idea of them from any basic course on aesthetic theory or art history. Some of these matters and their results we have already covered in an earlier section. In the interest of economy, we will not go back over them, nor will we go into further lengthy discussions over the ins and outs of historical movements in the arts, such as how we got from Gaugin to Cezanne to Picasso to Duchamp, or theories of aesthetics such as non-cognitivism and subjectivism. Instead, we will simply list some of the arguments our society might make in response to our three challengers and their list of seven. These are the defenses against the claim that philosophy should be able to exercise moral censorship over the arts.
- Art is sacred.
- Art is the great teacher of mankind.
- Art is a form of personal expression.
- Art is a form of catharsis.
- Art is not important.
- Everyone has different tastes; there is no agreement on what good art is.
- There is no normative definition of art, therefore there is no normative definition of good art.
- The philosophical freedom of art is its virtue.
- The domain of art is pure creativity, not imitation.
- Moral and epistemological repression of the arts will strangle their creativity
- There is a pure sense of the aesthetic which applies only to how a piece of art strikes you.
- There is a pure sense of the aesthetic which is independent of moral and epistemological considerations.
- If we deny that there are practical consequences for what your moral and epistemological beliefs are, art is not dangerous.
- Art is already controlled in our society by various forces.
- It is not possible to enact ethical control over the arts in our society.
Now, you could write an entire book explaining and refuting these objections. Instead, I will try very briefly to do both. Longer and better defenses can be found contained in the source materials referenced in this paper. In a sense, our job is not to refute them so much as to remind ourselves of the answers that our three subject cultures gave to them (or would give to them) in the earlier sections. Let us go through them, then.
Art is sacred. Art is the language of the gods or of the soul. It is too high and holy a thing to us for us to subject it to the rule of philosophy. This belief in the quasi-religious status of art is not simply a Platonic notion, but is one shared by many moderns who see art as the new religion of advanced intellectual society. The argument seems to run that there are some things that are too important to be interfered with (and some people whose work is too great to be questioned). However, the line of thinking that the more important something is, the less it needs to be treated carefully and with discretion does not follow common sense. After all, most people would not accept the reverse spectrum of the argument, that the less important something is, the more it needs to be treated carefully. You don’t put taboos on mundane things, you don’t monitor them carefully. You put taboos on sacred things and important things. You make rules about things that matter, not the reverse. The sacredness of art is just why it needs to be handled carefully and with discretion.
Art is the great teacher of mankind. Art is what challenges our minds and causes them to grow. It feeds out minds and hearts. To exercise ethical censorship (in the loose sense) over it would be to strangle its voice and impede our growth. The conclusion of this argument is debatable in the same way as the first. Art’s important as a teacher does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that it should be free and unmonitored. Public education is a great teacher, but we don’t let the teachers do whatever they please; far from it. If it feeds our minds and hearts in such an important way, we’re justified in asking what it is feeding them and why. Allowing them unquestioned authority wouldn’t be freedom, it would be carelessness, and quite possibly the end of freedom, for where education is unquestioned and held to no outside standards of veracity, it becomes indoctrination and oppression.
Art is a form of personal expression. To restrict art would be to put limits on free speech. There is truth to this argument, for art is a form of personal expression in our society (a shift in thinking from previous times). However, I do not think it is true that the nature of art is merely a form of self expression. As has been already shown, whether it is simply personal expression or no, it has a powerful effect on the minds of others. Also, it may be hard for many artists to maintain the claim that their works do not contain any referential content, any content pertaining to outside matters, matters beyond the artist’s own personal psychological and phenomenal experience. Art may be personal expression, but it is more than personal expression, both in content and consequences. Therefore it needs further consideration. Nor is it true that we put no limits whatsoever, especially when it comes to practical consequences, on free speech.
Art is a form of catharsis. It is a purgation of negative thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Once again, this may be quite true, but even if art is a catharsis, it is not merely a catharsis, and our participation in it seems to go beyond that. We do not simply get rid of garbage, we indulge ourselves in it. Art is very popular, including art that expresses negative emotions. Our attitude toward it not that toward waste; rather, there is a fascination, a Peter Kreeft says, a kind of fondling.
Art is not important. Art is simply entertainment, stimulation, a matter of personal taste and experience rather like eating (for enjoyment, not need). Now, this is a possible defense, but it is not one that most artists will be willing to retreat to, especially the idea that that the significance and value of art is no more than that of food. Most people don’t want to bring art down that far. But even if art was like cuisine, food still has an effect on the body. Our indulgence in it without an eye beyond our own enjoyment is part of what is killing us as a nation today and demolishing our health care system. People may eat for pleasure and like whatever they happen to like, but there are still general standards of taste determined by the nature of the creature that is eating it (we can’t taste air, we can’t chew plasma, we can’t digest plastic, we can’t survive heavy metals) and there are definite consequences that come from eating certain things. So rules still come into play.
Everyone has different tastes; there is no agreement on what good art is. The unwritten conclusion then is that disagreement precludes the possibility of a standard of taste or any normative definition of good art. This conclusion, though, does not follow, as has been pointed out before with moral relativism. Just because we disagree about the answer doesn’t mean there isn’t one. As for the disagreement of taste, it may be true that you like the taste of paint and I don’t, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t bad for you. The conclusion above is also not strictly true. There has been a lot of disagreement about individual cases and tokens, but throughout history there has been a fair amount of agreement about the principles. And it is the principles that matter. Setting a standard for good art does not necessarily entail making a judgment about which specific forms and kinds of art are good (such as, rock music is bad, classical music is good). A well-formulated general theory could be based on principles without having to give specific precepts of the kind that are being imagined. It is a pattern, not a “one true way” in the typally restrictive sense.
There is no normative definition of art, therefore there is no normative definition of good art. Because there is no fact of the matter about what art is, its nature, there cannot be a fact of the matter about what an example of good art is. How can you know what a good Gronkshlith is when you don’t even know what it is? This question has more bite for us moderns, and particularly for artists, philosophers, and aesthetes, than it did for previous societies. Our artists have worked hard to break down our definitions of art. Aesthetes have ingested it from them. Philosophers are aware of the many failed attempts on their own part to define art. This may not be enough of defense, though. Most people do seem to have a fairly clear idea of what, in general, is, even if they cannot spell it out exactly. It is a “standing concept” of the human race, Mothersill might claim. We understand it intuitively. How can you undermine what doesn’t exist, and even you have undermined it, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (see the last objection). But one might be able to get a moral justification for ethical control out of the arts without even needing to provide a description of its nature. You might get all you need to know out of a provisional definition of art as artifact, the created work of a person’s hands, and a practical knowledge of its social, psychological, personal, or political consequences. There are lots of things we don’t have perfect normative definitions of, or have conflicting definitions of, but we still deal with them.
The philosophical freedom of art is its virtue. It is the arts’ ability to operate outside the restrictions of normal society and other disciplines that makes it great. The fact that it is not tied down is what allows it to soar. The immediate question that arises in response, then is, soar to where? To what purpose? How can you define a virtue, doing well what it should be doing without reference to some outside point of reference? Why is it that art alone should be singled out from all the other areas of life, all of which have to bow to the demands of some kind of outside standard? Why should art get a treatment that is quite unlike that of anything ever known or practiced before in human history? Especially considering everything we have said about it and its nature and effects. Educators and scholars have to be held accountable that what they say is true and not fabricated. Doctors and psychologists have to prove that they know what they’re doing and that what they’re doing is going to help people, not hurt them. They have to obey the rules of medicine. Everyone has to obey the laws of society and what is considered acceptable and punishable conduct. Orators have to obey the laws and limits put on them by language. Architects have to obey the laws of physics and the rules of engineering. Pilots have to obey the rules of flight. It is only within the rules that things are even possible. If you ignore them you crash and crash hard. It seems strange that art, even though it shares many similarities with other disciplines and overlaps into many of these areas of life, alone does not need to obey the standards common to them all.
The domain of art is pure creativity, not imitation. The job of art does not consist in imitating nature, therefore it is not bound by them into obeying them or presenting them. Morality and epistemology have to do with nature, with standards for truth and behavior which are necessarily tied to this world. Art isn’t. It is pure creation, new creation, a separate sphere, therefore it is not subject to this one. In other words, artists are like little gods, and when we view their works we’re looking at something new. They do not have a responsibility to communicate moral truth or metaphysical truth (which are part of this world). They’re showing us a new truth. This argument could be countered by going back to some of the earlier cases and noting that, whatever the case, art still has consequences, even if it isn’t obligated to present (imitate) the truth or morality of this world to us. Another response would be to simply deny that art has the ability to create something wholly new and separate from the already created content of our own world. We aren’t, after all, God. The materials we use must come from this world, we ourselves and the perspectives we bring to creating and understanding art are things of this world. You cannot get away from it. As C.S. Lewis once said, no one ever invented a new value; they have only reimagined them.
Moral and epistemological repression of the arts will strangle their creativity. This is a practical objection, not a logical objection, for it has already been disproved by history that absolute moral and epistemological freedom is necessary for the existence of the arts. Art has flourished in societies with strong ideas of the moral and epistemological overlap with the aesthetic. Plenty of good art, in fact most of the great art, was create before we came along and cut the arts free from the umbilicals of philosophical control. There has been plenty of great art produced by Christians, Muslims, Nahuas, and Yorubas (to name a few). Sir Philip Sidney, in fact, in his defense of poetry, praised it most specially because it was the greatest and purest vessel of truth and virtue (he had a bit of Nahua in him). Even Gauguin in his Intimate Journals declared his belief that art needed philosophy and without it would lose its value. Rather than strangling art’s creativity, these ideals channeled it, providing it with focus and power. We cannot know for certain that the instatement of these ideals in art in our society will not strangle it creativity, so in that sense the objection holds. We don’t know for certain that we won’t be like Stalinist Russia rather than like the Nahuas. But we do know that art doesn’t have to be strangled by philosophy. It is not a necessary objection, and we have all the examples and information we need to prove that to ourselves and to attempt to ensure that it doesn’t happen to us.
There is a pure sense of the aesthetic which applies only to how a piece of art strikes you. This objection goes back to again to the first five objections we faced, particularly the fifth (art is not important). This objection is not quite the same in spirit, but it is similar in trying to avoid the introduction of moral and epistemological considerations by removing art’s status to some “purely” aesthetic realm separate from the others. Of course a theorist might not formulate this value as being simply a matter of pleasure, and much of modern aesthetic philosophy has been engaged in trying to figure out what this value is. There are several ways to answer this objection. One option would be to deny the basic conclusion and reaffirm the earlier contention (in 1-5) that, even if there is a purely aesthetic dimension to the artwork, the work is not “merely” aesthetic. Another option would be to agree that there is a pure sense of the aesthetic as this objection suggests, but that this represents only one dimension of its total aesthetic value (which includes aspects that relate to moral and epistemological values and not simply “trivial” aesthetic value). A third option would be to fall back on philosophical tradition and follow out all the attempts and failures at establishing such an aesthetic theory as this and the arguments against it given by people like Eddy Zemach. Any of these options might present a plausible solution powerful enough to compete with the objection.
There is a pure sense of the aesthetic which is independent of moral and epistemological considerations. This claim is similar to the preceding objection, but more specific and opens up a broader field. However, all of the three responses we just gave would suit it, with only minor modifications. For the moment, it is enough to say that the onus of proof is upon the objector, for his is the contentious claim. The jury is still out on whether modern philosophers of aesthetics can successfully formulate such a theory. The competing theories of our many other societies, which the objector is revolting against, have already been given and have been around, being put into practice, for a long time.
If we deny that there are practical consequences for what your moral and epistemological beliefs are, art is not dangerous. This is an objection to the fifth of the seven points of agreement. There are two ways of understanding it. The important question is why there are no practical consequences. One possibility is that there are no practical consequences in the sense that there are no measurably good or bad consequences, because there is no good or bad. If one denies the stick by which one measures, then one cannot distinguish a good stick from a bad one. If there is no fact of the matter about moral values or truth, and if there is no measure by which to determine success in life or cognition, then you cannot uphold the claim that so-called faulty thinking or acting harms you and is dangerous. This claim is fairly extreme, though, since it relies on moral and epistemological irrealism. But most people would at least like to maintain subjective realism, that there is a good-to-them and a bad-to-them, and a true-to-them (probably cashed out in terms of “I like” and “I don’t like”). But in that case I should say that your moral and epistemological beliefs matter more, not less, to your practical well-being. They become the sole determinant of it. At least, if there is an objective good-for-me, then it is possible for my awful tasting medicine to have affected me positively despite the fact that I have the belief and hold the value that it is bad for me. But if my beliefs are the only standard by which I can measure, then I am harmed. Things that affect my beliefs, such as art, are more dangerous, not less, for the harm I suffer or the good I gain is at the sole mercy of my beliefs (and the beliefs others might be able to force upon me). The second possibility is that beliefs do not matter because the structure of the universe is simply such that, no matter what we believe and no matter how it affects our actions, it won’t affect matters of how things turn out, good or bad. Since the only version of this depressing universe I can think of would be some sort of predestined world where God or fate rigs everything and we are simply passing through, impotent, and few people would be willing to believe in such a universe, I will let it lie.
Art is already controlled in our society by various forces. We already have controls over art. This is true to some degree. We discussed it in the first section. But the point we made was that, though art is not entirely free, it is substantially free. It may be governed somewhat by market forces, it may be restricted in what it can do, ultimately, by law, and artists may pay some attention to philosophers and social ideals and standards. However, this is nothing like the kind of ethical and epistemological standards we have been talking about. The one is more of a forced pandering to taste rather than submission to social and philosophical ideals, the other is a practical limitation on the actions of persons to preserve order, and the third does not consist of any sort of actual accountability or substantial socio-political authority. Art may be influenced, in the same way that I might read a book by Plato and decide to write a play about the social lives of Greek intellectuals in 400 B.C., throwing in some Platonic ideas along the way. But this process is quite different from the kind of influence we’re talking about. A teacher seeing a TV show about Buddhism and deciding to assign the class a reading on it is quite different from a teacher teaching a class on Buddhism and the school board checking to see that the standards of the curriculum were faithfully followed.
It is not be possible to enact ethical control over the arts in our society. Our society simply will not allow it. It does not fit with our beliefs to do such a thing. We do not agree with Plato, we no not share the beliefs of the Nahua, we don’t live our lives according to the teachings of the onisegun. Our picture of the world and our definition of art is different than theirs and we like things the way they are. We believe in our ways. The arguments may have sounded good, that way is perfectly fine for them, but it is not for us. Our society would never accept this kind of philosophical interference. We are free, we are open, and those are simply our values, end of story. We will not be lorded over or patriarchalized by anyone, not even what purports to be our better judgment. This is how we’ve cast our lot and we’re going to stick to it.
This objection is the “biggie” because it does not have any simple solution. Nor is there any perfect proof which can decide the case against it. I have saved it to the last for that reason. One of the main goals of this paper has been to persuade, to help us to see the issue from a different side, perhaps to see it in a way that will make it understandable and seem reasonable, maybe even commendable. But if we absolutely cannot make room for this other perspective, then we cannot. My final attempt, then, will be to take one last look at the issue and consider the possibilities. What case can be made that we could in fact allow this philosophical perspective of moral control over the arts into our society? How might it be carried out and how might it benefit us?
What Might We Gain?
“We are rulers, and we see that what men need most is good government, with freedom and order. But order puts fetters on freedom, and freedom rebels against order, so that love and power are always at war together. And the riddle that torments the world is this: Shall Power and Love dwell together at last, when the promised Kingdom comes?” – Dorothy L. Sayers, The Man Born to be King
“So as Plato, banishing the abuse, not the thing…, but giving due honor to it, shall be our patron, and not our adversary. For indeed I had much rather show their mistaking of Plato than go about to overthrow his authority….” – Sir Philip Sidney, “The Apology for Poetry”
The problems which may result from neglecting the rule of poetry and the possible reasons for encouraging it we have already heard from many mouths. The goal of all this was understanding. People often mock or fear what they do not understand. We were troubled earlier by the case of Dan Quayle, a modern leader in our society who deigned to criticize a fictional character and what he considered to be a bad movement in the music world. The reaction to his criticisms, you will remember, was twofold: mockery and outrage. In the first case, we couldn’t take him seriously; the whole thing seemed like a silly joke. In the second case, we recognized that, even if it was a joke, he did have some power and raised the possibility of ethical or government control of the arts, which we completely and utterly resisted. It was oppression, it was bigotry. The man was a dinosaur of bygone days and patriarchal regimes. In neither case was he given much of hearing. Whether we saw him as a crank or an oppressor may have depended on whether we were artists or philosophers or members of the general public, but almost all of us saw in one of these two lights.
In truth, may already be too late for Dan Quayle. He has already been judged by our society. But in him we recognize something that we have seen before in other men and women, an attitude and approach to the arts that it different than ours. And it is our duty, as philosophers, to test these reactions and see whether they were warranted, especially since the perspective in question is tied so intimately to our own philosophical heritage. And so we went back to those sources, those precursors, to see if we could understand them and understand the “old conflict” between philosophy and poetry. Our hearts could be softened toward Dan Quayle if we could come to understand why he believed what he did, the thinking behind the perspective that he represents. In this way we hoped to find out if these people are really just cranks and oppressors or if there are some real reasons behind their criticisms. So we went back to Plato, we went back to the Yoruba and the Nahua.
The two principle ideas we have been trying to test are those embodied in our reaction to Dan Quayle: one, that moral censorship of the arts is simply a form of personal prejudice and philistinism (Dan and Plato are just irrational poetry-haters), and two, that moral censorship of the arts is an attack against all art and will destroy it (you can’t censor art without ruining it through oppression). It is my hope that by this time we have successfully refuted, or at least challenged, these ideas. Plato has given us our most sophisticated explanation for why moral accountability of the arts is a reasonable and even necessary thing. The Nahua have given us our evidence that it is possible to make the arts subject to philosophy and still love the arts and have them flourish.
If we will but remember what we have heard, I think it will become clear to us that, whether we agree with Dan Quayle’s criticisms or not, he was making a most reasonable claim when he advanced them. Perhaps he was wrong about those particular cases, but that does not change the fact that the criticism he made was founded in a rational and legitimate philosophical perspective. We may not agree with his conclusions, but I do not think we can dismiss his perspective, which we have seen supported across the board by many different societies and thinkers as an important and developed platform for approaching the arts, as mere personal ranting or philistinism.
Seen from the perspective of the cultures we have discussed, which are (or were) very common views, Dan Quayle’s criticisms were perfectly legitimate. At least the ideas in them deserved a hearing. Even if we do not agree with them, even if we do not take action on them, we must admit that something significant has been said. In fact, there is something paradoxical about the modern reaction to the Platonic criticism, seen through the Platonist’s eyes. Though we take the freedom of the arts very seriously, its consequences we do not take seriously. We let everyone do as they please. From the Platonist’s perspective, if we really took the power of art seriously, we would want to guard it and monitor it. Supposedly, our hands-off approach is motivated by an abundant respect for the arts, and the censorious approach of the Platonist is motivated by disdain for the arts. But this is not how the Platonist sees it. “Surely you understand,” says Socrates in Peter Kreeft’s The Best Things in Life, “why we carefully censor and monitor things that are very good and have great power for good or evil, but we do not bother to censor lesser things. We monitor geniuses, lest they become brilliant criminals, and tigers, lest they become man-eaters, and bombs, lest they explode. But we do not monitor marbles or censor caterpillars or take great care with pebbles. The reason we censor music is that it carries a power far greater than that of a bomb….” (101-102)
So, from Dan Quayle’s perspective, the reaction he got was very confusing. In his eyes, he was only giving art the respect it deserved as a significant power and shaper of our society, yet one of the criticisms against him was that his “oppression” showed a disrespect for art. Even more perplexing was the other side of the attack against him, that his criticisms were simply silly, a ridiculous overreaction. So, from his perspective, he was being accused both of not caring about art and of caring too much about art. And what he was hearing from the other side was that art was sacred, and that art didn’t matter. Though to us his criticisms and his reasons for giving them didn’t make sense, to him they did. If you really cared about something and respected its power, you cared about its consequences and effects. You cared about what happened to it and what it did. As for us, we elevated art enough to declare its freedom sacred, but not enough to care about what it did. In other words, both sides were accusing the other of both caring too much and not caring enough about art. The arguments being used were similar but they were coming to different conclusions (if you cared about art you would set it free, vs. if you cared about art you would monitor it). What I have hoped to do here, at least, is to make the process by which the other side came to its conclusions understandable.
Let us then go beyond our knee-jerk reaction to Quayle and Plato and the Yoruba and the Nahua and their morality-infused art and consider what they have to offer us. The substance of their offer is twofold: the defense of art and the defense of society. The first consequence flows from the agreed belief that morality and truth are essential to the nature of aesthetic objects of value. Good philosophy defends good art, because really good art is art that reaches to a high plane of moral, epistemological, and aesthetic substance: deep truths about human life, powerful ideals and values, beautiful words and presentations. These artworks plumb the full depths of what the artist can be: prophet, counselor, teacher, hero, companion, decorator, enricher, historian, humorist, philosopher, creator, and friend. Good philosophy simply guides and channels art, it defends it against bad art and bad artists. To censor in this case does not mean to eliminate but to discriminate and educate.
The second consequence flows from the agreed nature of art as teacher and shaper of society. We accept its role as a powerful and most pervasive influence. But we do not wish to be ruled by chance, nor do we wish to have no idea of who the teachers are and no accountability for what they teach. Good philosophy, in keeping a watch over art, ensures that the influence it has over society is a good one (or at least limits its bad influence). Art will shape the minds and heart of the young and the immature, therefore, in order to have a good society where people are at peace and help and do not harm one another, we must have an eye to what is shaping them. Few greater influences on the character of society can be found. It would be a shame to ignore this one and a crime to let it do harm where it might be doing good. As Charles Colson said, “Good stories do what scolding or lecturing can never do: They make us want to be good. …children’s moral choices are based not on abstract standards of right and wrong, but on the people they admire and want to emulate.” (How Now Shall We Live, 452) Good philosophy’s job is to try to see that those children don’t all grow up wanting to be like Paris Hilton or Snoop Dogg. What kind of a societal nightmare would that result in? (The answer is that we are finding out.) If we want a better society, we need to encourage better stories.
Of course, everything depends on what form we allow the influence of philosophy to take. But the key matter is, if we can understand Plato (and Quayle and the others), then we can find room for them in our society. For we have these things in common: that we all value art and want to see it flourish, and that we all value society and want to see it flourish. If we can only bring ourselves to understand the position of moral criticism of the arts, we can make allowance for it as a legitimate voice in aesthetics and public affairs.
In my opinion, the final objection against moral censorship is one that cannot be wholly overcome. Our society isn’t Plato’s society, however many similarities there be between them. We aren’t the Nahua. We aren’t the Yoruba. And though the future is an open road with many possibilities, it does not seem likely that a culture as large and diverse as ours will undergo any major changes in that direction in the near future. We are not a socially, racially, or philosophically unitary people. We were born from a confederation of many. And both the population of our nation and the vastness of our art field have reached a size which makes the task of taking philosophical control over the arts a Herculean task. It would require more than a shift in thinking, it would require a revolution. And the philosophers themselves are too scattered and divided and shorn of their public influence to engage in such an undertaking.
For this reason, I do not think government censorship of the arts, direct moral censorship, is a viable option. Nor a wise one.
I would not call this a defeat, though, for the believers in philosophical and moral guidance of the arts. Change can take place quietly as well as dramatically. Simply because there does not seem to be room for the more extreme social version of moral influence over the arts does not mean there is no room for discussion. The important first step, the step which this discussion is aimed toward, is getting the moral/philosophical perspective recognized as a legitimate worldview in the public, aesthetic, and philosophical domains. Our society purports to be one of open discussion and influence. We just need to learn to recognize this perspective as another legitimate voice in the discussion and not as a threat to the discussion. It is also key, in some of these important areas, that we recognize that there is a discussion. The discussion of the role of morality in art, including popular art and culture, is a legitimate topic worth discussing. It is not simply bigotry or philistinism, it is a legitimate aesthetic, social, and philosophic topic.
The two key ideas that would most be worth reintroducing to the public mind, that the moralists would find most fruitful and essential, are the two we just discussed: the concept of the convergence of morality, epistemology, and aesthetics, and the active consciousness of the power of art. The moral aestheticists may not be able to rule, that tends to go to one’s head, but they can advise, and getting these two ideas into people’s heads would be a big step. It is at least in the interests of the philosophers to help people to become aware of the significance that art has in their lives and to learn to treat it seriously and reverently—to become philosophers themselves in this area.
The second logical step, if once this perspective can find legitimacy in the public eye, is to work it out practically. Direct social control is not a viable option. But part of the goal of our study of the three cultures was to show us that there are, in fact, many options for putting these principles into practice. Maybe heavy-handed censorship was never a good option. But there are others. If lovers of wisdom want to have a greater influence on art and on society, they could try branching out. Maybe more philosophers could go into politics (Plato’s suggestion). Maybe more philosophers should go into the field of public opinion shaping, writing popular books and hosting TV shows and writing columns and magazine articles for the public press (a modern version of the Yoruba method). Maybe more philosophers should become artists and painters and novelists (the Nahua suggestion). If you’re concerned that there isn’t any good fiction out there, why not try writing some? People have done it before. If the problem is that philosophers, moralists, and artists have become estranged, then the best solution is to reunite them. Not simply by having one control the other, but by having one become the other. Let the moralists, the politicians and opinion-shapers become good philosophers, let them become artists. Let the philosophers become good novelists and the novelists good philosophers.
That is the best solution I can think of. Philosophy is already happening in the arts; the best thing we can do is get in there and contribute to it. We must join in rather than stand separate, helping the artists to be better philosophers and ourselves becoming better artists. This arrangement will be to the benefit of all. It never hurts to have another cogent voice in the debate over art and society. It never hurts to have artists who have really thought through their work from an outside perspective and philosophers who have expressed their thoughts in an outside medium. As I said, we all believe in the importance of art and society and desire their flourishing. We should work cooperatively for those goals, then, not against one another. We may have different ideas about how those goals should be accomplished, but if we make room for the possibility of reasoned discussion, then those differences can be worked out. Otherwise, they will simply exist as threats to one another and will only find peace in complacency or in the exchanging of blows and an outright struggle for power.
This is one of the founding principles of our society, that differences can be worked out by words and reasoned discussion rather than blows, and it would be well for us to follow it. If we make an exception for art or morality, and say that they will not be part of this process, then incalculable harm will be done to both. Making art a god will only encourage it to become a devil, for things that are not everything only cease to be demons when they cease to be gods (as an author once said of love). Putting second things first will only ruin them with tyranny.
My conclusion, then, is that cooperation, rather than condemnation, is the proper relationship between the moral and the aesthetic realms. If we are going to have cooperation, we are going to have to be willing to listen to other people’s ideas and defend our own ideas. We are going to have to bring a little more philosophy into art and a little more art into philosophy. We’re going to have to see beyond when an idea was minted to the true value an idea, no matter who said it, how long ago, how different their perspective might be, or how aesthetically persuasive their words might or might not have been. We’re going to have to recognize the important and delicate role that art plays in shaping our society and take thought in our day to day lives and in the raising of our children how we ought to respond to it. No one is going to force us into it. We will not rule over art, not even for the best reasons, but neither will we be ruled by it without good reasons. But if we have learned to question, to recognize the movements of thought and opinion, to think about how we got where we are and where we should be going, then we will have learned something indeed. We will have learned how to bring philosophy even into difficult realms where aesthetics and morality intersect, into every bit of life. And that is the art of good living.
Bibliography
—Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York, NY.: Simon and Schuster, 1987.
—Burkhart, Louise. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1989.
—Colson, Charles, with Nancy Pearcey. How Now Shall We Live. Wheaton, Ill.:Tyndale House, 1999
—Hallen, Barry. The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful. Bloomington, IN.: Indiana University Press, 2000.
—Hallen, Barry. Knowledge, Belief, and Witchcraft: Analytic Experiments in African Philosophy. Stanford, CA, Standford University Press, 1997.
—Havelock, Eric. Preface to Plato. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1963.
—Kreeft, Peter. The Best Things in Life. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 1984.
—Lewis, Clive Staples. The Quotable Lewis. Ed. Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House, 1989.
—The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 1B. Ed. Constace Jordan and Clare Carroll. New York, NY: Longman, 1999.
—Maffie, James. “Why Care about Nezahualcoyotl?: Veritism and Nahua Philosophy,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 32:73-93, 2002.
—Maffie, James. “To Walk in Balance: An Encounter between Contemporary Western Science and Pre-Conquest Nahua Philosophy,” in Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding (eds), Science and other Cultures: Philosophy of Science and Technology Issues. New York: Routledge, pp.70-91, 2003.
—Maffie, James. “Aztec Philosophy,” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
—Plato, The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989
—Sayers, Dorothy. The Mind of the Maker. San Francisco, CA.: HarperCollins, 1987.
—Schaeffer, Francis. The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer: Volume One. Wheaton, Ill.: Crosway Books, 1982.
—Zacharias, Ravi. Can Man Live Without God. Nashville, TN: W Publishing Group, 1994.
—Zemach, Eddy. Real Beauty. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Making Nobody Happy 