Things are not good because we desire them; we desire them because they are good.
—Aristotle, Metaphysics
If virtue can be beautiful cannot the beautiful be virtuous? (This comes from reading Eco on Aquinas whom he quotes as follows:
...the beautiful and the good are the same in any subject. For they are grounded in the same thing, namely form, and this is why the good is esteemed as beautiful. They are different notions nonetheless. For the good, which is what all things desire, properly has to do with appetite. So, too, it has to do with the idea of an end; for appetite is a kind of movement toward an end. Beauty, however, has to do with knowledge, for we call those things beautiful which please us when they are seen. [ Eco, op. cit. p. 35 quoting Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 5, 4.]I am looking into this idea of the interrelation of the transcendentals (the Good, the True and the Beautiful) because I have long been uneasy with the idea that there is no connection between, for example, the engagement with aesthetic things, i.e. beauty, and the good generally. This is often cited as the problem of the concentration camp guards enjoying Schubert lieder in the evening and going out and gassing Jews the next day, to put it crudely. This is one of the things that, I think, leads us as a culture into a kind of dystopian way of looking at everything. Yes, the line between good and evil may run through every human heart as Solzhenitsyn said, but I still think that asserting that there is no connection whatsoever between aesthetic quality, i.e. the Beautiful, and moral quality, the Good, is simplistic. Perhaps it is a consequence of the Enlightenment idea of aesthetics, based on the idea of the exercise of individual taste. That takes us far away from Beauty as a transcendental quality. A merely subjective liking for Schubert is not inconsistent with your day job as a Nazi. Complicated, yes, and we have to look at the notion of virtue. But to me the idea that there is absolutely no connection between virtue and beauty is extreme. We are sold this in our popular culture, of course. The locus classicus is probably the scene in The Silence of the Lambs where Hannibal Lector enjoys listening to the Glenn Gould recording of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations before committing horrific crimes. Message: psychopaths in particular enjoy beautiful music. But isn't this quite unbelievable? Do murdering psychopaths really enjoy transcendental music? I doubt it, because psychopathy involves the inability to have empathy for anything.
…art does not proceed from the Things that man contemplates. It proceeds from men who contemplate Things.
--Maritain, Jacques. Creative Intuition in Art & Poetry (Kindle Location 465). Cluny Media. Kindle Edition.
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
—Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics
I have long had the idea that the practice of classical music (perhaps all music) involves the cultivating of certain virtues: discipline, industriousness, openness to experience, sensitivity to sound and to the effects of sound and so on. I have speculated before that you do not run into a lot of sociopaths in classical music circles (other than record company executives, of course) because the necessity of these virtues tends to cause them to self-eliminate. Recall that one of the qualities of a sociopath is that they cannot stand to be wrong, but must always find someone else to blame. This is related to narcissism, a frequent failing of our time. Sociopaths are deceitful and impulsive. At some point early on in every classical musician's life there comes a situation that a sociopath will find extremely hard to deal with. Imagine this: you are a music student and your teacher assigns you a piece, perhaps a simple piece by Bach. You go off to the practice room. There you are, all alone, just you, your instrument, a chair, a music stand and this piece by Bach. If you don't develop the focus and discipline to learn the piece, there is absolutely no-one to blame except yourself. You can try to blame the teacher or even Bach himself, but that's not going to go anywhere. So you will likely drop out of the music program in favor of a field where your lying and lack of discipline will not be a barrier to advancement. Something like politics, or business administration or journalism. Too harsh?
UPDATE: I replaced the Gould clip with one by Igor Levit because the audio quality was poor.
12 comments:
If virtue can be beautiful cannot the beautiful be virtuous?
Prudence is an ugly old maid courted by incapacity- William Blake
If we go the route of talking in transcendental terms it means that these are things that transcend our universe and inhabit a realm outside of it. There are such things but mainly in mathematics such as infinity. There is no way outside of math to conclusively describe such things. It is unknowable whether aesthetics also inhabits a transcendental realm that would also have applicability to our material universe.
If transcendental merely means universal in normal experience, I think we always have to consider the proverbial Martian or the android from the planet Zotar if we want to talk about universal judgments. What aesthetic judgments would they all agree on? If something is only viewed as a positive or good by humans then we are stuck with judgments assessed by consensus or personal qualia.
It is much safer ground to argue against the censors and tyrants that art has been valued by every human society past and present and those societies have always distinguished between levels of art. So if they want to ban art or assess it on non art factors they are going against the collective judgment of humanity. That is a more inclusive universal than others.
If we argue on transcendental terms then they can assert that their transcendental values are different than ours but just as or more true or alternatively that there are no transcendental values (atheism/Marxism). We have no way to rebut that except by returning to the collective judgment of humanity.
Bryan Townsend wrote:
"I have long been uneasy with the idea that there is no connection between, for example, the engagement with aesthetic things, i.e. beauty, and the good generally."
I believe we would be in real trouble if those concentration camp guards returned to their barracks after a hard day's murder of innocents and WROTE those Schubert lieders. As is, they consumed them and we are troubled that their humanity and their awareness did not widen to include pity and relief for their victims. Aren't we standing ground zero, here in the heart of the human condition? Art, especially music, in my life, seems to have held this promise of transport, wide horizons, oneness, expansiveness and possibility for all good things. Haven't great artists wrestled with this? Marlowe in Doctor Faustus, Goethe ditto, Thomas Mann in his Doktor Faustus. Closer to our own day the critic George Steiner spent his last decades trying to rescue the humanities from the shredding jaws of deconstruction theory (but really arguing for the transcendental power of art). Like you Bryan, I feel there is some connector among goodness, truth and beauty; yes it is just a feeling, and, no, feelings, unlike science, cannot fly us to the moon and back, much less across the Atlantic in 5 hours. Does that mean our feelings, when music or art transports us to another sphere, are false? Illusions?
Maury, yes in order to talk about Beauty in music, for example, we have to resort to the notions of anagogical or parabolical representation.
Dex, yes, good point. My primary interest here is in the crafting of beauty. Few composers among the concentration camp guards, though there were some as prisoners--Olivier Messiaen, for example!
Yes, one of the promises of art is that it should open us to a wider world of beauty, humanity, understanding, empathy and so on. But our culture has seized upon the extreme view that art can either be equally accessible to the psychopaths among us, or is so autonomous of human life that it exists in another universe.
I think that the problem might stem from taking aesthetics from the wrong end: instead of from the idea of the crafting of art according to principles of proportion, integrity and clarity, we look at it from the end of the judgement of taste. And taste, like feeling, is inherently subjective.
Further: Don't we have a faulty notion of moral agency when we somehow count it as a failing of Schubert that the concentration camp guard listened to his lieder then went out the next morning and supervised the killing of Jews? To be consistent, wouldn't we also accuse the gramophone manufacturer and whoever built the easy chair? They all contributed to the pleasurable evening of the guard? Shouldn't we instead place all the blame with the guard himself, the real moral agent here? It is he who failed to understand the humanity of the music and proceeded with his horrible task. How can this failing be connected with Schubert?
Time for me to ask the question that shows how dumb I am: who or what theory is blaming composers (or all artists) for the extreme moral failings of some awful human beings?
Very good question! The two places where this issue has come up most prominently were some of Alex Ross' columns in The New Yorker. If you search my past posts for "Alex Ross" you might come across examples. Second, right here in a recent post about a new collection of essays by Richard Taruskin. The post is: https://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/04/all-kinds-of-brows.html
If you read the comments you will see one from Prof. Taruskin himself. Let me hasten to say that what he was protesting was the tendency of people promoting classical music to claim a higher moral position. As he says: "My question is whether I am entitled by my love for it to regard myself as a morally superior person." And the answer is no. In this and some other subsequent posts I am opening the question up to the relationship between aesthetics and morality more generally.
Read that whole post for the background. It seems to me that in the desire to ensure that classical music lovers claim no undue moral quality, we may going too far.
I think we should stop taking disingenuous comments from censors and tyrants as serious arguments. Classical music is targeted not because there is any inherent difference in the kind of associations it has from any other music. It is targeted because it is weak and therefore an easy way for such people to make ideological and rhetorical points.
A few years ago a friend sent me a link to a silly clip of Putin singing Fats Domino's Blueberry Hill. Have you seen any of these critics saying that the music of fats Domino is now suspect and should be viewed as immoral, politically incorrect or evidence of the patriarchy? Well of course 60 years ago they did say such things about rock or R&B but never mentioned the camp guards playing Schubert. What happened was that pop music became stronger and classical music became weaker. Wweak things are attacked for obvious reasons.
Shifting topics to pop music, I've noticed that journalists and contributors to venues like LitHub can talk about how "we" are responsible for R Kelly's alleged abuse of girls, whether or not the mass of us who 1) hated R Kelly's music and 2) never liked him as a person based on reports of his conduct can't realistically be held responsible for a star-status that was given to him by his fans, by the music industry on the production and promotion side and, as well, by journalists.
In that way it would hardly matter if classical music became more popular and had more than roughly 1 to 2 percent of the marketshare in commercially released music. That far Taruskin's criticisms of post-German Idealist art-religion in a Romantic cast is something I can simultaneously be completely sympathetic to but about which I can also say "so what?" I don't say that latter because I don't care about the arts but because I would venture to say the abuses and systemic problems in classical music are not necessarily worse than what can happen in athletics (I have the Rachel Denhollander memoir on what happened to her as a gymnast, which I haven't worked up the nerve to read yet) and cinema (Weinstein et al).
If, on the other hand, there are complaints made about sexual stereotypes and violence in African American popular song forms (whether ragtime or rap) it can sometimes come up that this may be due to racism. No doubt it is in some cases, but Scott Joplin complained about how vulgar the lyrics for ragtime songs all too often were.
I actually read Puritans for fun and personal interest so I get, I really do, the appeal of wanting good art to be made by people who are trying to be good people. We don't have to rehearse the shortcomings of that approach in political terms, do we? :) Taruskin's approach of separating the quality of the art from the quality of the person enjoying the art seems like a sensible approach to me. The problem is that even if we "solved" that problem it would not make classical music less marginal or elite, no matter how many colors of the rainbow are involved. As the late George Walker put it, classical music has always been elite music made by elite musicians for elite audiences. If that's the case then the bad faith is on the part of those who question canons in stance but whose aim is to establish new canons at a practical level. Can we be sure, for instance, that Michael Jackson was less antisocial in his overall conduct than Beethoven? I don't quite see how that could be proven at this point. If anything the star system, whether stars as artist or athletes or sports teams (i.e. Michael Jackson, Lance Armstrong or the Penn State team) seems to open up about the same level of exploitation as has happened in highbrow arts.
I.e. it would be nice if artists were scrupulous people but singling out the fine arts for being full of evil bros on the part of people who dig pop music and sports or cinema of any kind can seem like pots calling a very small kettle black, to sum up the gist of Maury's comment.
Messiaen was not a prisoner in a concentration camp but in a POW camp. While Messiaen did experience discomfort and cold, his POW camp was not at all comparable to Nazi Germany’s concentration camps.
Anonymous: yes, you are absolutely right. A POW camp was a very different thing from a concentration camp. Then there is the case of a place like Theresienstadt, a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto known for its cultural life.
Bryan I agree with your observation that the mental effort and focused attention and senses around learning music has a healthy effect on the mind. Obviously the contemplation of beauty and any personal journey in its direction is not enough to abolish the moral imperfections and inconsistencies that are inherent to humanity.
It also seems true that Beauty and Truth are somehow of the Good, even if referring to distinct and therefore different aspects that can at times be considered in isolation and experienced without the comforts of those other aspects. Obvious examples would be when we learn the truth about something very bad, or hear beautiful music while grieving loss.
At risk of bringing down the intellectual level here by venturing an opinion not backed by famous philosophers or sophisticated critics, I'll just say that in a world where both joy and pain are real,,at least we can hold onto aspects of the Good even in situations where the pain and even evil are found.
Thanks, Will. If nothing else, I think this post and the attendant comments have at least highlighted why we might have a tendency to feel good about loving classical music and extend that into feeling superior. Not justified, of course.
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