Seven

Art as Philosophy

PHILOSOPHERS and artists have, since the beginning, always been uneasy in one another’s company. For, while each aimed at the highest, each also suspected the other of some merit denied himself. Plato, according to legend, began as a dramatist but he met Socrates and tore up his plays, only to emerge again as a philosophical dramatist, where the conflict of passion and interest was transmuted into that of opposed theories. In the absence of the original plays, it is hard to judge whether this was an improvement or not. But from then on, insofar as a distinction was recognized between philosophy and art, philosophy was determined by the philosopher to be the winner. The philosopher could perceive the Real through the eye of reason alone; the artist was confined to making questionable imitations three removes from that reality. Knowing the Good, the philosopher was ideally destined to rule the state and guard its virtue and justice; the artist, on the contrary seemingly devoted to pleasure, was irresponsible, was a creator of poems that excited immoral or ungovernable passions, and worse, was careless of their effect. The philosopher could defend himself in argument, but the artist, knowing nothing of dialectic and definitions, substituted rhetoric and the charms of the imagination. Naturally he cut a poor figure indeed in argument. The philosopher could do by rule and reason what, at best, the poet did by gifts, inspiration, and a certain interior disorder. His greatest hope in his own unreliable and dangerous way was, as an illusionist, to touch off occasionally and unbeknownst to himself a deep truth, certifiable by the philosopher.

For Aristotle, while the scene changes radically, poetry remains a second-best thing; it is higher than history, for while history only tells us what was, poetry makes it probable; but science and philosophy win the day eventually, for they succeed in grasping the necessary.

Without retracing the history of philosophy, we see clearly that from the start philosophy took a keen interest in its rival, art; and it developed a variety of disciplines reflecting philosophically upon the arts, all lumped together here as “aesthetics” or the “philosophy of art.” The arts are examined and compared with other activities and objects, with regard to their natures, powers, origins, and effects moral and otherwise. Now, no doubt at all, something can be said under each of these heads; but in sum it all remains a philosophical rather than artistic performance, with philosophical rather than aesthetic ideals in mind. Even for Hegel, one of the last great aestheticians, while art could indeed express Absolute Spirit, alas it did so only in the medium of the imagination, and its final truth must be grasped by the philosophical idea. What is striking throughout is that the philosophy of art is itself three times removed from its proper subject matter; the work itself is primary; its critical interpretation comes next; and at last the philosophy of art works upon the deliverances of criticism.

Now some, feeling perhaps that the artist was being given a bum rap by the philosopher, attempted a closer rapprochement in the form of “philosophy in the arts.” From Santayana’s beautiful Three Philosophical Poets, through innumerable critical studies such as Sullivan’s on Beethoven, down to the latest college course in the subject, the philosopher now looks for philosophical meanings in the arts, most usually of course literature. And yet there is something profoundly disturbing about these efforts; what is it that the philosopher will recognize as “philosophical”? It will of course be some general statement expressing an attitude toward life, whether tragic or comic, about the condition of men, either always or just now, in a word, some contributions to a general philosophical theory of man, life, or recently even Being. Critics of an ethical cast of mind have a field day, since any human behavior can be thought of as having an ethical dimension; some have even supposed the artist to have ethical theories, but those theories are far more explicit in the correspondence or conversation of the artist than in his works. Again, one perceives the perpetual discomfort of fundamentally abstract minds confronting the dismayingly concrete and singular. In this vein “to be or not to be” is thought to be “philosophical,” while “my horse, my horse, my kingdom for a horse” is mere filler. Unquestionably such philosophers can frequently produce works of considerably higher value than some mediocre work of art upon which they are based; but the distance between the work and what is said of it remains infinite. The plot must be reduced to a skeleton; the characters are understood under general rubrics; and in the end we are left with a handful of conceptual banalities as the philosophy in the work. The work itself has long been forgotten or, worse, transformed into a preliminary pedagogical device to convey truths hardly worth mentioning.

So far, then, we have two attempts to relate philosophy and art: art as a subject matter for philosophy, or art as embalming some general philosophical truths. The rest of the chapter will develop the remaining possibility, neither the philosophy of art of which this essay is itself an example, nor philosophy in the arts, but rather philosophy as art, or, better, art as philosophy. And, to state my conclusions at once, they mean to affirm that works of art actually accomplish what philosophy only hopes to do, that art is therefore philosophy perfected. The tables should therefore be turned: philosophy even on its own criteria can be justified only insofar as it offers a concrete imaginative intuition measureable against those for which the arts are famous. And for this reversal, surprisingly, we might even share the company of some philosophers themselves, those as otherwise diverse as Schelling, Schopenhauer, Bergson, and Croce.

To defend this reversal I should first like to examine the medium of philosophical and scientific thought, and then the purpose to which the medium is put. As for the medium, philosophy, whatever else it is thought to be, offers itself as knowledge, and knowledge of a distinctive sort. It is, briefly, conceptual, propositional, and argued. A philosopher who lacked concepts or propositional theses or, worse, who spoke without argument, not to say wrangling, would be reclassified by the dean, as well as his colleagues. But this medium of discursive thought is put to some distinctive purpose: the philosopher hopes to know something final, comprehensive, and ultimately true, not just any little thing. Let us look at both the instruments of knowledge and its purpose in turn.

First the concept. Obviously not any mode of apprehending something is conceptual. The concept or the idea is a distinctive mode of apprehending things, and what it apprehends of things is equally distinctive. To look at a man, accordingly, is not yet to think him in the form of a concept, or example of a concept. It is simply to apprehend a singular individual. Perception, memory, imagination all share this particular feature, to wit, they are modes of apprehending singular things and their singular activities, and therefore can be called modes of “intuition” The concept is therefore something distinct from intuition, and Kant contrasted them in his famous remark: “Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Only their marriage was productive of knowledge; yet there is room for a skeptic to doubt the fruitfulness of a marriage between blindness and emptiness. And if the concept is indeed empty, is intuition blind? But intuition in the first place is a mode of apprehending; to intuit, to see, imagine, remember, is precisely to apprehend something, and a “blind intuition” is as good as none at all, nor does it need the empty concept superadded to it in order to perform that which it does in its own right quite adequately, namely, to see something.

If, then, it is obvious that intuition in any of its modes does indeed offer us an apprehension of something and not nothing, what on earth does the “concept,” or idea of that thing already apprehended intuitively, add? Traditionally it is taken as adding the dimension of universality, and I have no reason to quarrel with this interpretation. If intuitively I see a man, I do not yet have a concept of him. If I then form an idea or concept of him, “humanity,” I have abstracted from the singular presentation, this man, that which is of universal coverage, humanity. Humanity is, then, what the concept apprehends of this man by noticing in the singular object only that which could be predicated of other singulars. It should be noticed that the universal is achieved by an act of omission or, as Kant had it, “emptying.” I empty from my mind all that which individuates this man from that man, or, which is the same, I abstract from the singular or refuse to notice that in the singular which singularizes this man from that. And it should be noticed, Hume to the contrary notwithstanding, that what is now left before the mind is not a faint image of this man, or a composite photograph of all the men I have seen or heard about, but a new object altogether, a concept, which can be understood as an ideal entity accompanied by a rule for its exemplification. The new ideal entity, while not an image, is related to intuition by way of omission and formalization. It omits everything not duplicable in the intuition, and transforms it thereby into a universal form. The conceptualization of the world therefore adds not a whit to it, restricts its attention to its duplicable features, and formalizes it. Now this is essential to any philosophy that aims at universal statements; but since it is a subtractive mode of apprehension, it must from the concrete aesthetic standpoint be regarded as a radical impoverishment of what is available. What is already available is the intuited concrete, with both its singular and unique aspects, as well as its capability of being formalized, if anyone should wish to do so. In a word, we have Hamlet, and not Man, nor a prince of Denmark but this singular caught in his singular situation, making his singular decisions, and suffering his singular death. Now while any of this could serve as an example of precisely that universal of which it is an example, it is hard to see to what profit. The singular unrepeatable aspects of singular lives are what the arts are admirably equipped to show; what might be called the “existential”; the conceptualization of the existential is but a questionable flight from it, one which moreover can only be proven correct or incorrect by a return precisely to that intuited from which it took its flight. The possession of the concept or definition was much prized from antiquity on; it gave the philosopher eyes to see beyond the immediate, into the timeless, placeless beyond; this was his “higher truth.” Plato expresses admiration for Thales, for falling into a well while looking beyond at the stars. But if the concept can indeed blind us to what lies before our feet, what it offers, if not exactly stars, could be nothing but what we already see, turned into what we do not, in a word, an existential disorientation.

But concepts are designed to be elements of propositions. Science and philosophy therefore pride themselves upon their ability to make assertions that are either true or false; and, as tradition has it, neither concepts by themselves nor intuition by itself can make an assertion. Hence they are not true, since truth resides in propositional judgment or statement. To see a man is certainly not the same thing as to form the judgment “that is a man.” And it follows at once that the truths of science and philosophy cannot be painted, narrated, or played upon our violins. And it is supposed to follow that what is played upon the violin, since it makes no assertion that is true or false, has no serious relation to truth. But perhaps this should be reexamined. I shall use the terms “judgment” and “proposition” here as more or less interchangeable.

The judgment or proposition, like the concept, is a distinctive mode of thinking, so distinctive that perhaps it escapes our attention how rarely we form any such thing. The judgment aims at saying something true about its purported subject. It is not an exclamation, invitation, or expression of subjective feeling, but an assertion that something objectively independent of either me or my judgment is such-and-such. It is a declaration about something or other which is as it is independently of my judgment. The judgment says, “It is so.” No mere experience says of itself, “It is so.” It just shows something as so. On the other hand, Beethoven, who doubtless never heard of this distinction, didn’t hesitate to write a quartet, in which the music was to go from “must it be” to “it must be,” although at the present point it could be argued that even this much must be said in words; or was it also in the music? If truth resides in the proposition or judgment, what sort of truth is it whose exclusive home is there? Is truth to be denied to the arts by virtue of the fact that in their capacity of showing us something they refrain from the propositional judgment that it is so, let alone of offering us the opportunity of verifying any such judgment?

The declarative judgment, in which truth is supposed to reside, is inherently objective. By that I mean that the proposition declares that what it proposes is true of something independent of the proposition, some fact. The proposition is not true in and of itself, but of something else, and by virtue of an external relation usually called “correspondence.” Hence no inspection of the meaning of the proposition will be sufficient to determine whether independent fact is what the proposition says it is. I am referring here obviously to what are called “synthetic, a posteriori” propositions, that is, propositions about the contingent features of the world. Analytic propositions, which seem to be true by definition or which simply explicate the meanings of the concepts composing them, are not propositions in this sense; at very least they raise the question whether they are about anything at all independent of the meanings involved. Whether they are also true of independent reality in its necessary features is a question we can leave aside; I believe it to be the case, but to argue the matter here would be to no particular present point. In any event, analytic propositions do not require empirical verification, and do not express contingent or factual features of an independent reality. The mathematician performs no experiments or observations, and contents himself with the phenomenon of internal meanings. Whether his truths are true of everything or nothing we shall leave open for the present.

Ordinary factual propositions that purport to be true, then, are true of something else, something independent and objective. Further, the declarative proposition makes its declaration to a peculiar aspect of ourselves, in effect, to some “anybody” in each of us, what the Germans call Bewusstsein uberhaupt, that aspect of the thinking mind which, being exclusively directed to the truth of objective reality, is neither me nor you, but a logical function in which we share equivalent and replaceable roles. For Kant it was the transcendental unity of apperception, or for Husserl, the Transcendental Ego. Hence declarative propositions, if they are true at all, are true for everybody; their truth is measured against the fact, and not myself, my feelings, my life. For either a mathematician or a chemist to say that something was true for him and him alone would be for him to confess that he had not yet achieved an objective truth, and that instead he was confessing something about himself, perhaps nothing more than a hunch that his proposition was true. Science is objective in two senses: it is about an independent fact, and it is true for everyone, whether he likes it or not.

If soem such thing is how it stands with propositional truth, have we not already precluded the arts as a proper medium of it? To restrict ourselves now to the verbal arts, surely no poem makes any declarative statement about an independent reality whose truth must be compelling upon absolutely everybody. Although using historical materials for allusion, the play Hamlet most certainly does not make declarative statements about the independent historical Prince of Denmark, about whom relatively little is known, and of whom no one bothers to think while watching the play. And while Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is set in the early twentieth century, and is a fascinating source of clues and gossip about this or that historical character, it can and is easily read not as historical memoirs of the period, but as a work of art in which no character, including the narrator, ever lived or felt in precisely that way. It’s all “as if” memoirs, and so works may be historical or autobiographical in origin, setting, allusion; but it is exactly the transformation of those facts into the work which constitutes the art of the artist. Therefore, in experiencing the work we are far more like mathematicians engrossed in our own definitions and meanings than empirical scientists checking what is said against a reality available to us otherwise. There is no independent reality against which the work of art is checked for its truth; and in effect we are in a quandary just like mathematicians or logicians as to whether the word “truth” is applicable any more. About what are these works true?

The sentence in a work of literature surely never has the function of making a declarative assertion about facts that could be checked otherwise. On the contrary they are expressions not certainly of the artist, but of the content of the sentence itself. They bring to expression their own intuitional content, and do it in the clearest possible way. Compositions of sentences are compositions of intuitions, and the whole rings true when the whole is faithful to its parts, or is indeed the whole of those parts and no others. What Hamlet does is true to his character established that far; his character is true equivalently to what he does. The truth, then, of works of art is internal to them, or equivalent to their internal coherence. They share this ideal with logic and dialectic. The work is true to itself when it achieves not the artist’s personal aim, but the embodied aim of the work, which is to show or express some concrete imaginative reality to us. And since concrete reality is necessarily surprising, the ideal of coherence must not be taken as excluding it. Concrete, imaginative reality would be surprising indeed if it were not surprising. It would therefore be false to the singular individuals presented to us in literature if we considered them solely as puppets of some abstract ideas. Since that is not what they are presented as, to show them so would be an internal inconsistency, false in itself.

If the demonstrative proposition addresses itself to reason or to the universal thinker in each of us, the intuitive, expressive sentence does not. I think this point will become clear if we consider the sentence “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” as it might occur in a work of history, and as it might occur in a poem. In the work of history our attention passes through the sentence to the fact it describes and proposes. Neither the person of the reader nor the particular formation or quality of the sentence is at issue. The sentence serves as an instrument to point to something else. But the same sentence as it might occur expressively in a poem does not invite us to think of anything but what it presents and how it is presented. Further, while the barest experience would be sufficient to understand declarative sentences, when, in fact, the same content is offered to us for our intuition, it makes an appeal to the whole of our experience to render up that intuition itself. And consequently the reader of the poem is far more deeply and personally involved than the anonymous and replaceable reader of declarative sentences, no matter how complex they are.

The net result of which is that the declarative, propositional medium of philosophy is inherently disruptive of whatever unity or coherence truth might have. If the poem invites a unity of reader, work, and content such that at best they are hardly experienced as distinct, the medium of philosophy and science, the declarative sentence, demands a distinction between thinker, his thinking, and what is thought of—in brief, a built-in schizophrenia. And further, since these three can only be accidentally related, the kind of truth aimed at propositionally is an accidental, externally related composition which, when the worst is said, can hardly be of any value except that of expediency in life.

At this point we can be briefer about the third claim of the philosophical medium, to wit, that it at least can prove its propositional claims, while the helpless arts can at best show truth without proof or argument. The classic remark of Laplace upon seeing Racine, “Qu’est que ga prouve?” may be taken as archetypical. And let us agree that while in literary works of art we may find arguments within, when one character argues with another or with the gods or with himself, the whole taken as a work of art never argues that it itself is indeed true of anything, except on pain of changing its genre into history or science.

Why do philosophers argue? Charity forbids answering: to prove themselves right; we shall say: to prove a proposition true. True, that is, of an independent reality. Classically, propositions are either true in themselves, that is, self-evident, or proven true through other propositions, or proven true by consulting the contingent world in experience. Let us for convenience omit self-evident propositions; while I believe there are such, and that they need no further argument, still to argue that is already to put ourselves under other criteria. If propositions are proven true through other propositions, then we achieve that form of truth manifest in coherence, now the coherence of propositions. In demonstration, premises yield coherent conclusions. In dialectic, obscure or misstated propositions are developed into clearer or more coherent propositions by forcing the earlier into contradictions, later cleared up. Both of these forms of construction, demonstration, and dialectic are obviously directed toward coherence of meaning and propositional statement. So considered, none of the arts can offer anything comparable. But then, why should they? They needn’t prove anything about anything else, since they are not about anything else, and thus under no such obligation. Presenting their own unique reality in person, they can be blessedly free from anything to be superadded in the form of a proof. If philosophy could indeed show its own proper subject matter, would there ever be an occasion for proof? And so, instead of a merit, the need for proof must be considered an inherent fault, the consequences philosophy reaps for having abandoned reality in the first place via the concept. It all comes to a head with those miserable synthetic a posteriori propositions, always about the contingent factual world. True, philosophy isn’t even much interested in any one of them, although the theory of them in general occupies many. They preeminently are about the external world; and, as is notorious and obvious, they must all be confirmed by reverting to experience or intuition, helped out in some cases by empirical “laws,” themselves but summaries of more general experience.

Finally, to conclude, if such is its medium, what is philosophy’s end?There might be one point in its favor, namely, that it is invariably about ultimate things. Its aim is the Good, the One, God, Being-in-Itself, Absolute Mind, or today, abandoning these high subjects, at least about method or language, a surrogate absolute. One mark of such topics is that no matter how these ultimate things are conceived or alluded to, they have the general character of being transcendental, as Kant put it. They constitute in general the presuppositions of some domain of experience: ethical acts, meaningful statements, acts of knowledge, or anything at all. Now in their transcendental aspect, they at once remove themselves from the domain of the experienceable, and therewith, it might seem, from the domain of the arts. How could the arts, which succeed by expressing and showing, have anything to do with what in principle never shows itself but is always the presupposition of what does?

In other words, in the last analysis are the arts not engaged in a somewhat frivolous project of merely telling their own miserable little tales, showing visual compositions, playing tunes, and indeed what do these have to do with the serious concerns of metaphysics or theology? And let us throw out at once those allegorical works of literature or painting which directly name the transcendent, which either name or show us something called God, Mankind, Life, or even Being, in the person of some actor or chorus—the crucifixions, moral fables, nonobjective paintings of Being, etc., as well as the manifestos and confessions of the artists themselves which, superadded to the work, give us its “real meaning” evidently not sufficiently present in the work itself. All of that may well have other values, but it is not what concerns us here.

What does concern us is the question whether the transcendental concerns of metaphysics or theology can be adequately expressed by artistic shows; or, rather, whether they can be approached in any other way. And that question depends on how the ultimate concerns of philosophy are understood. This obviously is no place to attempt to sketch out anything new, nor do I have anything new to say. But, if I may allude to some historical philosophies with which I have moreover great sympathy, at least the outline of a solution might be made visible. The ultimate concerns of philosophy have received a number of names: with Plato, the Good; with Aristotle, Thought thinking thought; God throughout much of the Western middle ages; Substance with Spinoza, Absolute Spirit with Hegel, and perhaps this is enough to indicate some directions, without carrying it into more contemporary and controversial times. Now with such an array of conceptions, conceptions moreover that are not in the least identical, at least a few things are clear: either each names an entity individually distinct from the intuitable world and its things, or not. And, following Hegel’s formulations at this point, if the particular philosophy’s development considers that ultimate and transcendental presupposition as an entity, distinct from the world, it has at the same stroke turned its own viewpoint upside down; it simply has grasped of the Transcendental Presupposition, yet another individual entity. With that reversal, the transcendental term loses its presuppositional, grounding function and merely sinks to the level of a new and odd thing. Philosophically considered, we might consider it a category mistake; religiously considered, it is superstition and even blasphemy; aesthetically considered, it turns art into empty allegory and bombast. And so, if art looks impoverished at first glance by offering us merely the intuitable, philosophy when it retains its purity is in the same boat; philosophy cannot conceptualize the transcendental preconditions of the concept.

And so the transcendental in philosophy is badly conceived as another particular entity, an entity which has a peculiar ontological status, a name, and for which there is a direct cognitive or demonstrative access. Hence the extremely problematical character of such names as “the transcendent,” or questions as to whether “it” exists. No matter how much we talk, the ultimate truths or insights of philosophers remain unsayable.

And now the question remains whether the arts do not preserve a far more reasonable tact on these questions. Instead of proving that man, his language, his ethical and political concerns, his birth and death are all strange, and with that demonstration secretly destroying the strangeness, the arts show it. The curtain goes up, and we are invited to a spectacle not of Being, Man, Nature, or whatnot, but what all these concretely culminate in, individuals in action. The action is begun and ended with curtains, and we are not asked to intervene, criticize, or do anything but watch. The invitation simply to see without moral or other judgment is at the same time a request to occupy that transcendental standpoint philosophers have themselves always encouraged, to the extent that for Spinoza, philosophical blessedness began with considering men impersonally, precisely as lines, planes, and solids within nature. And if the phenomenologists want to see above all the pure phenomenon without presuppositions and doubtful beliefs, and if they ever should weary of repeating the phenomenology of perception, what better to perceive than the phenomena of ourselves; and who have done it better than the poets?

In a word, the concept is not necessary to see, intuition does it in a far richer way. The declarative proposition is not necessary for truth, but only for a limited form of it. The demonstration or proof may be necessary for empirical truths, but those truths have only the value of practical expedients. The logical medium of philosophy is dispensable for philosophy’s own aims which, in the long run, are identical with those of art: to see what is from a transcendental standpoint, but that means seeing, and for that purpose I believe the arts win the day.