Art and Morality

José Luis Bermúdez, Sebastian Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134738748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Art and Morality is a collection of groundbreaking new papers on the theme of aesthetics and ethics, and the link between the two subjects. A group of distinguished contributors tackle the important questions that arise when one thinks about the moral dimensions of art and the aesthetic dimension of moral life.The volume is a significant contribution to philosophical literature, opening up unexplored questions and shedding new light on more traditional debates in aesthetics. The topics explored include: the relation of aesthetic to ethical judgement; the relation of artistic experience to moral consciousness; the moral status of fiction; the concepts of sentimentality and decadence; the moral dimension of critical practice, pictorial art and music; the moral significance of tragedy; and the connections between artistic and moral issues elaborated in the writings of central figures in modern philosophy, such as Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The contributors share the view that progress in aesthetics requires detailed study of the practice of criticism. This volume will appeal both to the philosophical community and to researchers in areas such as literary theory, musicology and the theory of art.

Chapter 1 Ethics and aesthetics are — ?

Michael Tanner

My title is taken from the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein famously claims that ethics and aesthetics are one. I shall not be discussing his reasons for making this striking claim, the result as it seems to me, of a disastrous extrapolation, in ethics, from Kant’s already catastrophic transcendental moral psychology, where the source of moral value is placed in the noumenal will; and in aesthetics, an equally disastrous adoption, or adaptation, of Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s view of aesthetic experience as ‘disinterested contemplation’, and therefore removed from the causal nexus and any consequent practical concerns. In the Notebooks 1914–16, the entry for 7 October 1916 runs in part: ‘The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.’¹ The connection had not, at that time, become an identity, but it is clear in what direction Wittgenstein was moving, and how he would arrive – and not only from motives of maximum gnomicness – at his later formulation. Crudely speaking, the further you abstract yourself from particular phenomena, the easier it is to proclaim their identity. The merging, for one bad reason or another, of two of mankind’s most remarkable enterprises was common at the end of the last century and the beginning of this; and even so extravagant a genius as Wittgenstein was in many ways, some of them surprising, a child of his time, and in part a fascinatingly gamey mixture of fin-de-siècle Vienna and debut-de-siècle Cambridge.

Wittgenstein’s views on ethics and aesthetics have made very little impact, largely no doubt because it is so hard to determine what they are, itself a result of his reluctance to spell them out at any length. In discussions since the Second World War, the tendency among philosophers who have interested themselves in both fields has been much more to draw extreme contrasts between them, thereby harking back to Kant and one line of thought that issued from him; and it is largely the nature and validity of these contrasts that I shall be discussing, especially in relation to the concepts of autonomy, authority and principles as they occur in the two fields. This is, I realise, much-trodden ground, but not often well-trodden, so a fairly speedy synoptic traversal of it may still serve a useful purpose.

The most striking contrast between morality and art, as they are studied from a contemporary philosophical viewpoint, is the place that evaluation is often thought to occupy in relation to them. No one wishes to claim that it is out of place in morality: on the contrary, insofar as there is a widespread tendency to think of moral judgements as overriding, it is there, par excellence, that evaluation occurs; whereas aesthetic evaluation is regarded by many philosophers as at least suspect, at worst (or best, depending on your general outlook) impossible and this claim is sufficiently widespread to need to be taken seriously by an aesthetician.

One route to this contrast can be succinctly sketched as follows: moral judgements of particular actions, whether prospective or already performed, must always be based on principles, whatever status these principles are accorded. That is common ground among subjectivists, philosophers such as those who, while in fact espousing subjectivism, claim to be unable to understand it, objectivists and fashionably designated realists. But judgements of particular works of art are not based, or at any rate not in a similar way, on principles, and the relationship of what have often been called phenomenal properties to their aesthetic properties, and the further relationship between aesthetic properties and judgement of the works in which they are present, is powerfully disanalogous to the relationship between a description of an action and the moral judgement passed on it. And, this line of argument concludes, when the lack of analogy is adequately explored, it reveals that the whole notion of aesthetic evaluation is thoroughly questionable. In a paper which still commands a great deal of attention – thereby bearing witness to the primacy, in philosophy, of assertion over argumentation – Stuart Hampshire writes ‘The spectator-critic in any of the arts needs gifts precisely the opposite of the moralist’s: he needs to suspend his natural sense of purpose and significance.’² Though this and related claims in Hampshire’s paper have often been dealt with, it is clear that they retain an attractiveness, and the attractiveness is not wholly specious.

Perhaps the easiest way to elicit what truth there is in Hampshire’s paper, and to locate the cynosure of its confusions, is to list some platitudes about morality and art respectively. First, about morality: (1) The first point of moral principles and injunctions is to get people not to behave badly in certain ways of an obvious kind, and to behave tolerably in some elementary ways. Since it is necessary for the continuance of any society that people, e.g. refrain from killing one another, at least under most circumstances, and that they usually tell the truth and exhibit fidelity to contracts, there are some extremely familiar moral rules which are imposed on every member of society. (2) The worse an action is, morally speaking, the more it matters that it should not be performed: this is little more than a variation on (1). (3) The violation of these basic moral principles is only permissible if there is a strong conflicting principle which overrides the others. There is a certain amount of controversy about this – in other words, about which principles are the most basic; it is widely held that the judicial execution of an innocent man is not justifiable even if an enormous amount of good results from it, since that act will have poisoned the wells, as it were; and Anscombe thinks that sodomy is not permissible under any circumstances whatsoever; but that is something that distinguishes her from most contemporary moralists. (4) All moral actions are universalisable, that is, if action A is right for person P then ceteris paribus, any other person in relevantly similar circumstances to P should perform an action of type A. (Hampshire, it is worth pointing out here, is confused about this: he says that ‘anyone [. . .] who moralises necessarily generalises’,³ which is true if one recognises that generalisation, unlike universalisation, admits of degrees; if one doesn’t recognise this, as I think that, at least in this passage, Hampshire fails to, then one is likely to commit the Kantian error of thinking that moral principles are not only universalisable, but that they also generalise over all men, or all rational beings; a confusion that results in some of Kant’s most notoriously outlandish moral views.)

Now some platitudes about art and aesthetic judgement: (1) There are no obvious aesthetic principles or rules which can be said, in any serious sense, to be basic and useful. While it is no doubt wise not to write a piece of music entirely outside the pitch-perception of human beings, or to collaborate in producing a novel so long that even a speed reader would need more than the average life-span to get through it, these don’t occur to one as principles with which to equip the aspiring artist. (Nor do injunctions like ‘Be interesting!’) (2) Prima facie, while the worse an action is the more important it is that it should not be performed, and the harsher the judgement on its performance, the worse a work of art is the less it matters (and here it is clear that I do believe in the possibility of aesthetic evaluation). This point needs expansion: but the most common meaning I attach to ‘appalling work of art’ is that it is so incompetent as to be beneath notice. When Nietzsche rashly sent to Hans von Bülow his early orchestral composition, the ‘Manfred Meditation’, von Bülow wrote: ‘If you really feel a passionate urge to express yourself in music, you should master the rudiments of musical language: a frenzied imagination, revelling in reminiscences of Wagnerian harmonies, is no sort of foundation to build upon’,⁴ something that many late nineteenth-century composers might well have put up over their desks or pianos. That is the right note to strike with incompetent amateurs: but when von Bülow can’t resist adding ‘your Meditation, looked at from a musical viewpoint, is the precise equivalent of a crime in the moral sphere’, he is making a mistake, since, as he says at the end of the letter, ‘your music is not detrimental to the common weal, of course, but something worse than that, detrimental to yourself, seeing that you can find no worse way of killing time than raping Euterpe in this fashion’. But it is precisely what is detrimental to the common weal that is, par excellence, ‘a crime in the moral sphere’. There are, I think, at least two other forms of artistic badness (and here I disagree with Professor Beardsley who in The Possibility of Criticism⁵ thinks that there are only diminishing degrees of artistic goodness): the trivial and the corrupt, the latter naturally calling for critical exposure and denunciation. So the first two platitudes here concern lack of basic principles, and the unimportance of aesthetic badness in its commonest form. (3) While moral principles are employed both to prescribe and to judge actions, aesthetic judgements are chiefly made after the event; that is, there is at least one way in which the moralist has more urgent tasks to perform than the critic. (4) The way or ways in which aesthetic judgements are universalisable are much more complicated and obscure than those in which moral judgements are.

Moving on from these pretty obvious, though not sempiternal truths (some which seem very plainly correct to us would have been dismissed scornfully by many of our predecessors, especially, I think number (1) of the list of aesthetic platitudes), there is a further and crucial contrast to be drawn. While I can give you, as nearly as possible, a ‘purely descriptive’ account of an action from which you will be able to conclude that it was good or bad (ceteris paribus clauses being always remembered), I cannot provide you with a more or less purely descriptive account of a work of art from which you can conclude that it is good, though it seems more plausible to say that from such an account you can conclude that it is bad – a single note unvarying in any respect and lasting twenty minutes, for example. It is this feature of aesthetic discourse that Richard Wollheim, in the second edition of Art and its Objects, refers to as ‘a well-entrenched principle in aesthetics, which may be called the Acquaintance principle, and which insists that judgements of aesthetic value, unlike judgements of moral knowledge, must be based on first-hand experience of their objects and are not, except within very narrow limits, transmissible from one person to another’.⁶

It is at this point that my promised topics of autonomy and authority make their entry: for the autonomy of aesthetic judgement, if not that of ethical judgement, seems indisputable, granted the well-entrenchedness of the Acquaintance principle; it might, indeed be thought that the Acquaintance principle gave a more precise force to the term ‘autonomy’ than it would otherwise have, if one felt, as I do, that the concept of autonomy is less clear than its frequent unexplained use by philosophers suggests. One might try to make a point which, cursorily stated, seems perspicuous but becomes harder to grasp when one ponders it, in this way. Take the following three cases: the legal man; the moral man; and the aesthetic man. It is required of the legal man only that he does not infringe the law; his motives are irrelevant – he may well, like almost everyone, including to the scandal of his Cambridge friends, the saintly G.E. Moore, proclaim truly that he only pays income tax because he could be penalised if he didn’t; and similarly with many of the other laws he keeps on the right side of. If he does infringe certain laws, his motives may well be of interest in a court of law, but if he doesn’t, that’s all there is to it – he is a ‘law abiding citizen’, which is the most we can require of him in that dimension. The moral man is equally required, in the first place, to obey moral laws – and the first duty of the moralist is to ensure that people do. It goes without saying that motives enter in a much more intimate way in assessing someone as a good, moral man; but without venturing further onto the treacherous territory where this issue beckons, it can safely be said that many, if not most of the correct or good acts which people perform are not done from a sense of duty or conformity to, or reverence for, the moral law, nor does it seem desirable, in many cases, that they should be, but from habit, or the desire for the quiet life, or fear of disapprobation, or what Kant calls ‘pathological affection’. It is only in the framework of a fairly highly developed and sophisticated society that the motives for acting morally command much, let alone sovereign attention. Kant was a very unworldly philosopher.

The primacy of getting people to do the right things, or pass the right moral judgements, is connected, though not straightforwardly, with the transmissibility of moral knowledge, to use Wollheim’s expression. But the fact that I may lead a certain kind of life which at least enables me to get by morally, and that I can pass, with point, moral judgements on others for reasons other than the ‘correct’ ones, means that, at a surface level at least, sincerity and first-handedness of moral judgement are not universally required. The sheer fact that morality is necessary because of a conflict between what we would like to do and what we ought to do is enough to demonstrate that sincerity, though a crucial concept in ethics isn’t one that can be invoked in a straightforward sense. If one takes ‘sincerity’ in the most naive way, as a congruence between the inner and the outer life, it is precisely what we do not require much of the time. Of course, as we shall see, there is enormously more to sincerity than that glib little account allows, and it enters the moral life and our estimates of it at many points, but in its crudest forms it clearly can’t be called a virtue.

When we think of sincerity in morals, it is in the first place in relation to actions: in fact, in the case of many moral actions it may not be the obvious, or the most appropriate, word to use, and that may partly account for the use of the more fashionable term (at least in some circles) ‘authenticity’. Even then, however much ‘To thine own self be true’ is good advice, it is far from being as trite as many of the items on Polonius’ list are usually alleged to be. For a great deal of moral action does go against the grain, especially if one thinks of what people are morally obliged to say. There is a constant incipient conflict between the obligation to be truthful and the obligation to be a tolerable member of a social group, as Molière’s Le Misanthrope makes immortally clear – though perhaps that is more a matter of not being unnecessarily open than of actually lying. If it is felt that sincerity is not the important concept here, and that my introduction of it is a side-tracking manoeuvre in setting up contrasts between morality and aesthetics, I am halfinclined to agree; on the other hand, discussion of the prerequisites of being a moral agent can’t get very far without it; but as we shall see later, it is more of a moral ideal to be striven toward than a starting point of the moral life.

Finally, the aesthetic man; most of us are not, or not to any significant extent, aesthetic agents. And the question of sincerity in relation to the creation of art is hugely complex. In some cases it simply makes no sense to talk of works of art as sincere or not; in other cases it is possible to raise the question, but minimally relevant. And in a further group of cases it is a term that I, at least, feel compelled to use, while not regarding it as one of the ‘passwords’ of the intentional school, with which designation in the paper ‘The intentional fallacy’,⁷ Wimsatt and Beardsley contrive to give it an oddly conspiratorial air. While saying nothing detailed on that score, I will merely constate that categorically to dismiss the relevance of sincerity to the creation of art seems to me to postulate a clarity and clear-boundedness in our concept of art which I don’t believe that it possesses: and in particular a confidence in our placing of art in the spectrum ranging from utterances where sincerity is the prime requirement, such as private avowals of affection, and those where it manifestly plays no part, such as the recital of public notices in parks; a confidence which is quite misplaced.

As to sincerity in aesthetic judgement, however: while there may be all sorts of reasons for being insincere in one’s aesthetic judgements – moral reasons included, such as the conceivable obligation not to hurt the feelings of someone who has given one a bad painting as a present – there is simply no point, from an aesthetic standpoint, in being insincere in one’s judgements of works of art. This is a separate point from the Acquaintance principle: it is, in general, a necessary condition of making a sincere aesthetic judgement that one should have first-hand experience of a work, but it clearly isn’t a sufficient condition. For one may experience a work and recognise that it possesses properties that are approved by one’s friends or teachers or culture-circle and therefore pass on it what one takes to be the appropriate judgement, while actually feeling quite differently about it. And just as there is a great deal of cant about morality (about the congruence of motives and actions), so the extent of the genuineness of many people’s aesthetic reactions tends to be widely overestimated. There is a large body of works of art to which almost universal lip-service is paid, simply because people are afraid of departing from the authorised view of Shakespeare, Titian or Beethoven, unless they are determined to immortalise themselves as enfants terribles, like Shaw (on Shakespeare) and Stravinsky (on Beethoven, until very late in life). So sincerity in response to works of art demands first-hand experience of it, together with an honest report of what that first-hand experience evoked. But sincerity in moral judgement (as opposed to action) does not demand firsthand experience of what is being judged, but merely an honest reaction to it, even if the action or person being judged is only described, and not witnessed or encountered. And, in general, though a good deal of ‘insincerity’ in the naive sense that I have so far invoked is to be expected, indeed desiderated, in the moral life, sincerity of moral judgement is customarily required.

It seems that at this stage, the contrasts between the moral and aesthetic realms are not so thoroughgoing as they first appeared. And there is this further consideration: if one regards morality, at least at its basic level, as an enterprise to which a good deal of hypocrisy, bad faith and so on, are necessary, even if in principle undesirable, so one might regard the community of aesthetic judges (by which I mean nothing sterner than that group of people for whom artistic judgements are a serious concern) as one in which a fair amount of disingenuousness is also to be expected and even essential. Here I am taking it that, though a moral agent or judge is necessarily part of a community, while an aesthetic judge may be far more independent, individualistic, and possibly isolated, it is most profitable for the purposes of my discussion, and also most often the case, that he is a collaborator in a community of aesthetic judges. In such a community, which will involve many shared assessments and values as well as, initially and desirably, many disagreements, there will be a good deal of merely token assent and therefore insincerity. Nonetheless, I think there is a significant contrast between the moral community and the aesthetic community. While, in the moral sphere, we tolerate, because we have to, a great deal of insincerity, habit, and the commitment, in T. S. Eliot’s view, of the ‘highest treason’, which is ‘to do the right act for the wrong reason’, the artistic community can tolerate far less. A dislocation of more than a minor extent between aesthetic judgement and genuine aesthetic response rapidly renders the whole enterprise pointless; hence sincerity enters at an earlier stage in the aesthetic than in the moral life.

To make this clearer, it may be instructive to compare the early stages of moral and aesthetic education, as they are typically passed through. The first stages of morality are a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• International Library of Philosophy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Art and morality An introduction
• Chapter 1 Ethics and aesthetics are — ?
• Chapter 2 Art and moral education
• Chapter 3 Forbidden knowledge The challenge of immoralism
• Chapter 4 Make-believe morality and fictional worlds
• Chapter 5 Sentimentality
• Chapter 6 The concept of decadence
• Chapter 7 Critical conversions
• Chapter 8 Love in Wagner’s Ring
• Chapter 9 Moral depth and pictorial art
• Chapter 10 Kant and the ideal of beauty
• Chapter 11 Schopenhauer on tragedy and value
• Chapter 12 Tragedy, morality and metaphysics
• Chapter 13 Nietzsche’s artistic revaluation
• Chapter 14 Art, expression and morality