I teach arts policy, and so have my students read some of The Republic not in a “great books” way, but as an introduction to the eternal question of how we ought to evaluate art, and secondarily, how should we think about art and children’s education. These are challenging intellectual questions, but ones also that will be directly a part of their work, at least at a high conceptual level.
These are not “elite” students, so I feel pretty certain for the vast majority of them their parents couldn’t care less, although I agree it does grant a touch of cultural capital as well as (my concern) human capital.
But they enjoy it! It is provocative, a great way to introduce the big questions (they’ll also read Hume and Tolstoy on this along the way), and ideas that have not exactly faded, even if the cultural scolds in our midst haven’t read Plato themselves.
My understanding is most students are pretty excited to crack open these books and see what's inside them! I haven't taught them myself though so I'm not a hundred percent certain of that. Arts policy sounds like quite a field! What does that entail? Like, administering arts NGOs?
Partly that, but also the big granting agencies, whether foundations or arm's length councils like the National Endowment for the Arts or all the state and local funding agencies. And so the big questions that hang over us through the course are why would the state get itself involved in funding the arts in the first place, and, then, given your reasons, how should it go about it, what should it reward, what should it ignore, who ought to decide?
Maybe sometimes it's too easy to talk ourselves into "nobody reads X" any longer? I used to try to fend off Mencius Moldbug at my old blog because he had an idee fixe that no one read Carlyle, which was rubbish--but his political project required believing that no one did, so they didn't in his mind. On Plato, for example, there is this: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971769, but hardly only that.
Of course people read Plato. The best line in Succession is when the evil Republican candidate asks Siobhan "have you read Plato?" and she says "Yes, why?" And he's just flummoxed and changes the subject =]
A well thought piece, but then I am in the target audience and I will say that their I too much of a good thing. The Great Book curriculum is not enough.
Totally! I wouldn't send my kid to a school with a Great Books curriculum, honestly. Too fusty, too backwards-looking. People should have a mastery of both worlds, the world of yesterday and of today.
I think the classics as a path to power among the right wing is much older than you suggest, going back at least 20 years. Remember that in the mid-oughts gay marriage debate, the main secular "principled" argument against it was a natural law argument explicitly rooted in Aristotle and Plato - and honestly so weak that it was really just characterizing the Greeks' arguments as inconsistent with gay marriage and appealing to authority, rather than marshalling any genuine normative principle. (Perhaps my memory of the discourse is skewed here because Hadley Arkes, one of the main sources of this argument, was a professor at Amherst and dominated right-wing thought while I was there).
I think you're right that "woke" people haven't read Plato and Aristotle, assuming you're using the term pejoratively to refer to leftist illiberals. But that seems trivial, because I think illiberals of all stripes tend not to have read very much of anything. I can't think of anyone I know (or whose scholarly reputation I know) who has read deeply (not to mention broadly) and who I think of as illiberal in the language-policing status-game mode I know you chafe so much at. But also I'm on the east coast where that shit tends to get absolutely shredded by hard-nosed Alinskyites and policy heads.
Your observation on the connection between Great Books, nationalism, and the new elite seems sound to me, though I'm not as sure as you are that new elites will develop a consensus "birthright" canon in which they will be educated. It seems to me that left-wing elites do have an emerging philosophical canon in Marx and his modern descendants (i.e., David Graeber), queer and (particularly intersectional) feminist scholars, and scholars of race. But right wing elites have no such canon - at best they continue to have bastardized versions of the Greeks and Enlightenment scholars. It doesn't seem like that's changing any time soon, or that their canon will merge with leftist elites (for a while it seemed like there might be right wing gravity around Hayek and company, but I think that's been subsumed in modern rightist discourse). But also, as far as I can tell, with the possible exception of the universally reviled and also extremely NOT Benda-ist Ayn Rand, neither left nor right shows any sign of developing a body of literature to adopt as "their" great books.
I'm skeptical of your claim that your cultural knowledge doesn't shape your politics, and that there even exists any distinction between "public" intellectualism and "private." Obviously there's a distinction between public-facing communication and private thought, but I don't think one's thoughts about the world can be neatly divided into "cultural" and "political." Benda's argument (as you've described it, I haven't read him) seems untenable to me - I'm not a rah-rah post-modernist but in this case the post-modern critique that the private is public and vice-versa seems to me devastating, and nearly self-evidently correct. The distinctions between public and private, aesthetic and political, don't bear up under scrutiny; nor are they spectrums that only collapse in the middle. Rather, it seems to me obvious that, rather than dichotomies, public and private, aesthetic and political are just qualities that exist in varying degrees in people's lives and art.
So you're surely right that GB can be put to use instrumentally in public life as cultural capital. But it seems to me a mistake to try to wall off the aesthetic experience of a work from the vast realm of your experience of life - aesthetics just does not exist in a vacuum.
Which isn't to say that we can't say that a piece of art is bad for being too clumsy about its political agenda, or that it's bad to instrumentalize Great Books by treating them only as a path to cultural capital rather than as works of art. As to the former, clumsiness is bad aesthetics, generally, and preaching BADLY in a piece of literature or art tends to make it bad from an aesthetic perspective, even if it is propagandistically successful. As to the latter, I would say that as a matter of aesthetics a refusal to engage with a work as an aesthetic work is normatively bad, and might even root that argument in a Platonic/Aristotelian conception of normative value.
I think the post-modern critique does mean that merely HAVING a political agenda is NOT ground in itself for criticizing an aesthetic work on its aesthetics; a work is not gauche or low art just for serving a political purpose. I have a Soviet constructivist propaganda poster in a frame in my office; it seems to me obviously great art, regardless of its political agenda. Debs's famous proclamation that "While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free" seems to me plainly great art, not only because of its rhetorical beauty but because of the aesthetic power of the political sentiment expressed - solidarity is aesthetically valuable in the same way that racism is ugly.
I think I disagree that it's insulting to read contemporary works "sociologically," depending on what you mean. I mean I think it's insulting to suggest that one poet's work stands for the experience of all members of a racial/ethnic group, but I don't think that's what you mean. And I agree that it's insulting to instrumentalize such a poet's work by treating it as if its only aesthetic value is the insight it gives into the experience of some alien culture. (Interestingly, I don't think this is true if your purpose in reading the work is to study and learn about the culture, as a historian or sociologist might.) But of COURSE the powerful communication of a poet's experience or perspective is aesthetically valuable, and valuable in different ways to different readers. Someone with their own experience of the poet's culture might experience it as a beautiful expression of experience to which they relate; someone with analogous experience from a different culture might feel the same; and someone who has no similar experience in their own life might value the ability to vicariously imagine that experience. All of these seem like valid ways to read a work that don't pollute or insult the work or its author.
And you recognize that with respect to "classic" works, but why should that mode of enjoyment not apply to contemporaries as well? Why must contemporary poets be judged "on their merits vis a vis other contemporary poets"? What does that even mean?
Indeed, for most classics, I don't think there's any way to experience those works except in a postmodern collaborative construction of meaning way. As much as I appreciate Eliot as a critic I've never agreed with him about anything, and I think the idea that Eliot's reading of Virgil gives him an experience or encapsulation of Augustan Roman culture that isn't as much about post-War transatlantic culture as Roman is self-evidently absurd. Obviously Rome has something to do with the work, but consider the differing experiences of two readers - one steeped in Roman history and the classical antecedents to Virgil, and one who just knows Latin language. Both might appreciate the work in valid aesthetic ways, but it is impossible that Virgil will communicate the same "mature culture" to both readers. Eliot's insistence on the objective always makes me furious.
I know none of this is a particularly novel critique - you're familiar with post-modern criticism and seem stuck on modernist (and older) modes of aesthetic experience. I think you think post-modernism deflates art, and you aren't satisfied with the modes of appreciation the post-modernists have offered. Which is interesting, and I think you're correct that we ought to be able to say something about art that isn't a kind of existentialist and subjective shrug, and we ought to be able to have aesthetic experiences for ourselves and make aesthetic judgments that aren't just isolated and impregnable judgment-proof individual experiences. But to return to the moderns as if the post-moderns haven't absolutely gutted them seems untenable to me.
Works have politics viewpoints because authors have political viewpoints, but the integrity of the work is a result of hewing to its own logic and its own form. Any great author undercuts their avowed purpose as much as they support it. And there is no great author who can support an ideology unreservedly. That's what you learn from an encounter with great literature. Yes with words its possible to argue differently and to make the argument sound plausible. It's possible to SAY that Tolstoy supported some traditional Christian vision or that Edith Wharton was an antisemite. But when you encounter their work you know that the true picture is much more complicated. Similarly, no great author could unreservedly devote their skills to a national project--because if the ideology overrides the art, the art isnt great. Any Homer will always end up honoring the Trojans as much as he excoriates them, and condemning the Greeks as much as he extols them.
If you'll pardon me for saying it, the thing I and the moderns know that you and the postmodern do not is that you cannot consciously shape your art. You can only accept it or refuse it. Some artists clearly try to pick and choose what they wrote, or they try to guide their Muse, and the result amounts ultimately to a refusal. Art doesn't come from the conscious mind.
"The integrity of the work is a result of hewing to its own logic and its own form."
I don't think this is inconsistent with postmodern perspective, though I'm not sure postmoderns have much to say about the "integrity of the work" qua work, because their point is the act of reading is creative of the experience of art, and I think they would say that AS READERS it's pointless to treat the work as if its form and logic and other aesthetic qualities even exist outside the two-to-tango communication between author and reader. It seems to me that your statement, if true, is true from the perspective of the author - it's a statement about the act and meaning of producing art, rather than reading or criticism. I know the moderns would disagree and say the work exists in itself and its form and logic and meaning are all intrinsic to the work regardless of how readers approach it, but that's just an assertion made by TS Eliot and I don't think there's any reason to accept that assertion in the face of the logical arguments brought to bear by the postmodernists. The thing about the postmodern critique is that the critique is not an aesthetic judgment or offering; it's a philosophical one, an argument that what the moderns set out as aesthetic theory CANNOT be correct, even if you agree with the aesthetic and the judgments seem true to you, because modernist aesthetic theory is irreconcilable with things that are just facts about the world, starting with the subjectivity of the experience of literature by the reader and on from there. I don't really hear any response to that critique here, and though I'm sympathetic to the synthetic process of trying to resolve your intuition (and to some extent mine) about the value of art having at least some component that stands outside the reader-author dialogue and doesn't depend on the reader, I don't think it's viable to just take the stances the modernists take, wherein the whole realm of aesthetic judgment belongs to Eliot as "objective" arbiter and authority.
While I know you would expand the group of arbiters, I don't think you would dispense with them altogether, because in your mind there's something offensive about great art belonging in any nontrivial sense to whatever slackjawed stumblefuck manages to read the words. I understand the power of that intuition, and I think there must be some core truth to it; I think the modernists (and generations of critics before them) were refined and thoughtful aesthetes, and we would be unwise to assume there's nothing valuable in their theories. But I think the enterprise of whatever critical generation we're in now consists in discerning and refining what they were right about, using the philosophical insights of the postmoderns as a chisel to chip away false premises on which the moderns stood.
"There is no great author who can support an ideology unreservedly ... no great author could unreservedly devote their skills to a national project."
Respectfully, I think this is horseshit - it's either trivially true or wrong. If you're saying that ideology is intrinsically rigid and unnuanced and great art is perceptive and nuanced, (a) this seems to me less an argument that modernism is correct than that ideology as you conceive it is dumb; and (b) I think it's wrong to assert that all great art exists in the realm of nuance and self-contradiction and Tolstoyan perceptiveness about how complicated humans are. And though I share your fondness for that kind of literature, I think it's simple to disprove your assertion just by forcing you out of literature into the realm of visual art, where stylistic and aesthetic elements wholly disconnected from the nuance of the human condition are so much more common. And, like my constructivist poster, where there are many examples of great works that communicate explicit and not particularly nuanced political messages. To go back much further than the moderns, it seems to me that greatness consists in the sublime, however expressed; and I see no reason to think sublimity is inconsistent with ideology or any other element of human existence. To say that art cannot be great if ideology "overrides" it presumes that there exists a competitive relationship between ideology and sublimity, and I don't think that's really true. Sure, when bad artists write ideology they produce bad art; but for good artists it seems to me that politics, like any other element of human experience, can be consonant with the sublime rather than opposed.
I just finished reading the second in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series (which is wonderful, if you haven't read it you should, I think it will scratch both your great books itch and any nostalgia you have for sci-fi). Her books are deeply nuanced - the central theme of the book is the internal tension of being an outsider looking in on an empire that promises much more than your homeland, loving and hating it in equal measure. But I think it's pretty clear that the book has an anti-imperial political stance. Similarly, a lot of Mason & Dixon (one of my favorite books, and Harold Bloom's) is about the founding sins at the root of America; the book is no worse for its judgment on those sins.
If you'll pardon me for saying it, I think it's poppycock to say that you cannot consciously shape your art. I say you can't avoid it. You can no more exclude your conscious mind from your art than you can exclude your unconscious. You write while you are conscious, and you make deliberate choices from which it is impossible to exclude your intellect. Creation may be a mystical process - I wrote enough fiction back in the day to have experienced that kind of creative communion. But to impose a "conscious"/mystical dichotomy on the process is precisely the kind of unsustainable line-drawing the postmodern critique so devastates.
I think moderns want art to exist in a spiritual realm that is ultimately independent of our rancid, polluted actual physical human bodies and the ugly, intrusive physical world that surrounds them. And I just can't get on board with that - I'm a compatibilist at heart, and it seems to me a fundamental error to think that art can be valuable only if it exists in that independent realm. To me, sublimity is entirely consistent with and in fact consists in our actual, grubby, material, personal experiences of the world. The spiritual and material are not distinct and cannot be distinguished.
Rob, I'm a philosophical idealist. I believe that there are forms that have a concrete existence that is outside empirically observable fact. If you understand that, all my positions make sense. My views are the same as those of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer--an entire philosophical tradition
Respectfully, I also think you could be a little less verbose. Your wordiness reads to me as disrespectful. I make short responses to you that cut to the heart of your arguments, because I understand your core points and hope you can understand mine.
I don't mean it disrespectfully; I'm not a professional literary critic and it's been. While since I stretched these muscles, so the verbosity is me articulating my arguments for the first time and stress testing them. It's me that needs the length, not you, and I apologize. Also for, like, horseshit etc. - it's meant in a friendly and informal spirit of shared inquiry that takes for granted my respect for your thoughts, and I hope that came through. And like, you don't owe me a response, it doesn't bother me if you disengage if the argument feels like a hassle rather than something worthwhile.
I get your idealism, and I don't insist that everyone adopt the hard materialism I think is compatible with what's good in idealism. I just think the postmodern argument, which I think is correct, that what the work is depends on who is engaging with it renders untenable the idealist assertion of a single formal work existing outside of the reader. The classic idealists never had to engage with that argument, and I'm not aware of anyone who has reconciled the traditions in a satisfying way.
Maybe you just don't think the postmodern critique does pose an important challenge to the moderns, and so it isn't part of your project to synthesize or modify the moderns to meet postmodern theory, or argue against it, but to me it seems central to consideration of the relevance of GB, and if you disagree I'd be excited for your book to engage with it somehow, if even to set it aside for the main show.
What we are dealing with is the problem of universals. The idealists hold essentially the neoplatonist position, while the postmodern hold the nominalist position. The way Kant dealt with skepticism was by insisting that there was indeed a world of forms, but that it was unknowable. We could only know the world of appearances. The sole exception he made was that beauty brings us into contact with the world of forms.
As for the postmodern critique, I think you dramatically overstate the degree to which literary critics and philosophers have undermined the concept of an intersubjective understanding of beauty: the ability of people to come to consensus about the features of a text. Most of the critique of the concept of beauty has come from sociologists, particularly Pierre Bourdieau, who thought that the distinctions made by connoisseurs of high culture were entirely arbitrary and didn't conform to any increased pleasure from the object. He believed that people invented artificial distinctions merely to serve as markers of taste, and that the pleasure they took in high culture consisted, in anything, in simply feeling superior to other people who don't get it.
If that is what you mean by postmodernism, then I would say this critique simply fails to understand the nature of the aesthetic experience. By defining the aesthetic experience as being totally embodied, defining it in terms of pleasure and intensity, Bourdieu begs the question. If the aesthetic experience is only about pleasure, then yes the distinctions are meaningless. But actually it's the ability to perceive those distinctions that is the true nature of the aesthetic experience. It is the disinterested experience of the underlying nature of the object.
It's easy to not enjoy something, just as easy to not perceive something. People are free to not perceive that Proust's sentences are thrilling, rather than tedious. But if they do enjoy Proust, they tend to enjoy him in a given way. If I get together with a Chinese proust reader, we will likely both talk about the complex, shifting character portraits and relationships, because those are simply the beautiful features of the text. I have almost never met someone who liked something I liked for a reason that I couldn't perceive. Generally speaking, amongst those who like something, there is a fair amount of agreement about which parts are beautiful.
That is why literary critics and philosophers don't attack beauty, only philistines do. As such, when you say that there are empirical facts that idealism doesn't take into account, I don't really see what they are. Bourdieu has made the only objection that is at all reasonable (that high culture doesn't offer more pleasure than low culture), but I find the objection rather beside the point.
Idealism failed not because it was false but because as a political philosophy it was sterile. Kant's guardrails on human reason have held. While Hegel and Marx insisted it was possible to intuit the true essence of things, and so to turn human society into the perfect form of itself, the truth is that its not possible. We can perceive the forms, perhaps, but we can never really communicate them. That is why when Eliot tries to communicate what is so perfect in Vergil and how that perfection came about, he says stuff that sounds like nonsense. And yet...it is a fertile nonsense, precisely because we DO have the sense that an artwork can encapsulate an age. China has that sense with Tu Fu, just as Britain has it with Shakespeare. It gestures at how we experience the forms
As for why we cannot read a contemporary work sociologically--it's because our own era still exists as concrete fact, rather than form. Tang China only exists in the way we perceive it through concepts, so literature can summarize and encapsulate those concepts. The present world exists as concrete fact, and the relationship between fact and concept remains murky. I prefer to read contemporary works as indicative of the particularity of an experience, as possibilities, and not as being representative of a certain type of experience
Ah, I think I understand the problem - I've been imprecise and perhaps incorrect about what I mean by the postmodern critique; I've assumed someone must have articulated the critique I have in mind, which seems to me baby steps of inference and synthesis from a hodgepodge of people with whom I'm familiar, but even if that's so it seems not to be, like, the dominant strain of postmodern aesthetic ontology. I agree with you that Bourdieau, as described, doesn't present a powerful critique if one is already committed to the project of aesthetic inquiry. Will follow up by email.
What a gem, thanks Naomi. You may be speaking too much truth to be accepted in a court, I'm afraid. The writers that received money from the new courts all seem to start their career with long praises to the philosophy of the new rich.
Only way to speak truth in ancient courts was to be a jester - not an easy job, and then the new courts don't even seem to have that sense of humour.
That being said I don't think democracy is compatible with these new courts, and I do think it will win out in the end. Some arts may suffer from it but some will benefit.
There's a lot of debate back and forth these days about how compatible democracy is with hierarchy. I mean many societies that were much more stratified than ours were democratic--ancient Athens and Victorian England come to mind. But I'm not sure myself, to be honest, and I think it depends on technological change and the composition of the economy and the level of economic stratification and all kinds of stuff I know little about.
I agree that wealthy and powerful people have too little humor about themselves. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the Decameron, and how rulers today lack magnanimity--the ability to say "Oh wow, you got me!" It's kind of sad, because rulers modeled that behavior precisely because it showed the common touch--showed that they could take a joke and weren't insecure. Not sure why we don't really have that today.
Yes of course hierarchy is necessary. Most decisions must be centralised for any form of efficiency. Two criteria for how good a power system is are (1) capacity to put the most competent in charge for a given decision, and (2) its treatment of those with less power. On both counts dynasties have a pretty bad record. Skill does correlate with genes/upbringing for a generation or two, but not more; and inheritance leads to immiscible castes that can't feel empathy for the poor.
I like this piece, thank you.
I teach arts policy, and so have my students read some of The Republic not in a “great books” way, but as an introduction to the eternal question of how we ought to evaluate art, and secondarily, how should we think about art and children’s education. These are challenging intellectual questions, but ones also that will be directly a part of their work, at least at a high conceptual level.
These are not “elite” students, so I feel pretty certain for the vast majority of them their parents couldn’t care less, although I agree it does grant a touch of cultural capital as well as (my concern) human capital.
But they enjoy it! It is provocative, a great way to introduce the big questions (they’ll also read Hume and Tolstoy on this along the way), and ideas that have not exactly faded, even if the cultural scolds in our midst haven’t read Plato themselves.
My understanding is most students are pretty excited to crack open these books and see what's inside them! I haven't taught them myself though so I'm not a hundred percent certain of that. Arts policy sounds like quite a field! What does that entail? Like, administering arts NGOs?
Partly that, but also the big granting agencies, whether foundations or arm's length councils like the National Endowment for the Arts or all the state and local funding agencies. And so the big questions that hang over us through the course are why would the state get itself involved in funding the arts in the first place, and, then, given your reasons, how should it go about it, what should it reward, what should it ignore, who ought to decide?
Maybe sometimes it's too easy to talk ourselves into "nobody reads X" any longer? I used to try to fend off Mencius Moldbug at my old blog because he had an idee fixe that no one read Carlyle, which was rubbish--but his political project required believing that no one did, so they didn't in his mind. On Plato, for example, there is this: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674971769, but hardly only that.
Of course people read Plato. The best line in Succession is when the evil Republican candidate asks Siobhan "have you read Plato?" and she says "Yes, why?" And he's just flummoxed and changes the subject =]
A well thought piece, but then I am in the target audience and I will say that their I too much of a good thing. The Great Book curriculum is not enough.
Totally! I wouldn't send my kid to a school with a Great Books curriculum, honestly. Too fusty, too backwards-looking. People should have a mastery of both worlds, the world of yesterday and of today.
I think the Classic Books needs to be updated, but I also feel the the struggle to introduce a new concept should be taught.
I think the classics as a path to power among the right wing is much older than you suggest, going back at least 20 years. Remember that in the mid-oughts gay marriage debate, the main secular "principled" argument against it was a natural law argument explicitly rooted in Aristotle and Plato - and honestly so weak that it was really just characterizing the Greeks' arguments as inconsistent with gay marriage and appealing to authority, rather than marshalling any genuine normative principle. (Perhaps my memory of the discourse is skewed here because Hadley Arkes, one of the main sources of this argument, was a professor at Amherst and dominated right-wing thought while I was there).
I think you're right that "woke" people haven't read Plato and Aristotle, assuming you're using the term pejoratively to refer to leftist illiberals. But that seems trivial, because I think illiberals of all stripes tend not to have read very much of anything. I can't think of anyone I know (or whose scholarly reputation I know) who has read deeply (not to mention broadly) and who I think of as illiberal in the language-policing status-game mode I know you chafe so much at. But also I'm on the east coast where that shit tends to get absolutely shredded by hard-nosed Alinskyites and policy heads.
Your observation on the connection between Great Books, nationalism, and the new elite seems sound to me, though I'm not as sure as you are that new elites will develop a consensus "birthright" canon in which they will be educated. It seems to me that left-wing elites do have an emerging philosophical canon in Marx and his modern descendants (i.e., David Graeber), queer and (particularly intersectional) feminist scholars, and scholars of race. But right wing elites have no such canon - at best they continue to have bastardized versions of the Greeks and Enlightenment scholars. It doesn't seem like that's changing any time soon, or that their canon will merge with leftist elites (for a while it seemed like there might be right wing gravity around Hayek and company, but I think that's been subsumed in modern rightist discourse). But also, as far as I can tell, with the possible exception of the universally reviled and also extremely NOT Benda-ist Ayn Rand, neither left nor right shows any sign of developing a body of literature to adopt as "their" great books.
I'm skeptical of your claim that your cultural knowledge doesn't shape your politics, and that there even exists any distinction between "public" intellectualism and "private." Obviously there's a distinction between public-facing communication and private thought, but I don't think one's thoughts about the world can be neatly divided into "cultural" and "political." Benda's argument (as you've described it, I haven't read him) seems untenable to me - I'm not a rah-rah post-modernist but in this case the post-modern critique that the private is public and vice-versa seems to me devastating, and nearly self-evidently correct. The distinctions between public and private, aesthetic and political, don't bear up under scrutiny; nor are they spectrums that only collapse in the middle. Rather, it seems to me obvious that, rather than dichotomies, public and private, aesthetic and political are just qualities that exist in varying degrees in people's lives and art.
So you're surely right that GB can be put to use instrumentally in public life as cultural capital. But it seems to me a mistake to try to wall off the aesthetic experience of a work from the vast realm of your experience of life - aesthetics just does not exist in a vacuum.
Which isn't to say that we can't say that a piece of art is bad for being too clumsy about its political agenda, or that it's bad to instrumentalize Great Books by treating them only as a path to cultural capital rather than as works of art. As to the former, clumsiness is bad aesthetics, generally, and preaching BADLY in a piece of literature or art tends to make it bad from an aesthetic perspective, even if it is propagandistically successful. As to the latter, I would say that as a matter of aesthetics a refusal to engage with a work as an aesthetic work is normatively bad, and might even root that argument in a Platonic/Aristotelian conception of normative value.
I think the post-modern critique does mean that merely HAVING a political agenda is NOT ground in itself for criticizing an aesthetic work on its aesthetics; a work is not gauche or low art just for serving a political purpose. I have a Soviet constructivist propaganda poster in a frame in my office; it seems to me obviously great art, regardless of its political agenda. Debs's famous proclamation that "While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free" seems to me plainly great art, not only because of its rhetorical beauty but because of the aesthetic power of the political sentiment expressed - solidarity is aesthetically valuable in the same way that racism is ugly.
I think I disagree that it's insulting to read contemporary works "sociologically," depending on what you mean. I mean I think it's insulting to suggest that one poet's work stands for the experience of all members of a racial/ethnic group, but I don't think that's what you mean. And I agree that it's insulting to instrumentalize such a poet's work by treating it as if its only aesthetic value is the insight it gives into the experience of some alien culture. (Interestingly, I don't think this is true if your purpose in reading the work is to study and learn about the culture, as a historian or sociologist might.) But of COURSE the powerful communication of a poet's experience or perspective is aesthetically valuable, and valuable in different ways to different readers. Someone with their own experience of the poet's culture might experience it as a beautiful expression of experience to which they relate; someone with analogous experience from a different culture might feel the same; and someone who has no similar experience in their own life might value the ability to vicariously imagine that experience. All of these seem like valid ways to read a work that don't pollute or insult the work or its author.
And you recognize that with respect to "classic" works, but why should that mode of enjoyment not apply to contemporaries as well? Why must contemporary poets be judged "on their merits vis a vis other contemporary poets"? What does that even mean?
Indeed, for most classics, I don't think there's any way to experience those works except in a postmodern collaborative construction of meaning way. As much as I appreciate Eliot as a critic I've never agreed with him about anything, and I think the idea that Eliot's reading of Virgil gives him an experience or encapsulation of Augustan Roman culture that isn't as much about post-War transatlantic culture as Roman is self-evidently absurd. Obviously Rome has something to do with the work, but consider the differing experiences of two readers - one steeped in Roman history and the classical antecedents to Virgil, and one who just knows Latin language. Both might appreciate the work in valid aesthetic ways, but it is impossible that Virgil will communicate the same "mature culture" to both readers. Eliot's insistence on the objective always makes me furious.
I know none of this is a particularly novel critique - you're familiar with post-modern criticism and seem stuck on modernist (and older) modes of aesthetic experience. I think you think post-modernism deflates art, and you aren't satisfied with the modes of appreciation the post-modernists have offered. Which is interesting, and I think you're correct that we ought to be able to say something about art that isn't a kind of existentialist and subjective shrug, and we ought to be able to have aesthetic experiences for ourselves and make aesthetic judgments that aren't just isolated and impregnable judgment-proof individual experiences. But to return to the moderns as if the post-moderns haven't absolutely gutted them seems untenable to me.
Works have politics viewpoints because authors have political viewpoints, but the integrity of the work is a result of hewing to its own logic and its own form. Any great author undercuts their avowed purpose as much as they support it. And there is no great author who can support an ideology unreservedly. That's what you learn from an encounter with great literature. Yes with words its possible to argue differently and to make the argument sound plausible. It's possible to SAY that Tolstoy supported some traditional Christian vision or that Edith Wharton was an antisemite. But when you encounter their work you know that the true picture is much more complicated. Similarly, no great author could unreservedly devote their skills to a national project--because if the ideology overrides the art, the art isnt great. Any Homer will always end up honoring the Trojans as much as he excoriates them, and condemning the Greeks as much as he extols them.
If you'll pardon me for saying it, the thing I and the moderns know that you and the postmodern do not is that you cannot consciously shape your art. You can only accept it or refuse it. Some artists clearly try to pick and choose what they wrote, or they try to guide their Muse, and the result amounts ultimately to a refusal. Art doesn't come from the conscious mind.
"The integrity of the work is a result of hewing to its own logic and its own form."
I don't think this is inconsistent with postmodern perspective, though I'm not sure postmoderns have much to say about the "integrity of the work" qua work, because their point is the act of reading is creative of the experience of art, and I think they would say that AS READERS it's pointless to treat the work as if its form and logic and other aesthetic qualities even exist outside the two-to-tango communication between author and reader. It seems to me that your statement, if true, is true from the perspective of the author - it's a statement about the act and meaning of producing art, rather than reading or criticism. I know the moderns would disagree and say the work exists in itself and its form and logic and meaning are all intrinsic to the work regardless of how readers approach it, but that's just an assertion made by TS Eliot and I don't think there's any reason to accept that assertion in the face of the logical arguments brought to bear by the postmodernists. The thing about the postmodern critique is that the critique is not an aesthetic judgment or offering; it's a philosophical one, an argument that what the moderns set out as aesthetic theory CANNOT be correct, even if you agree with the aesthetic and the judgments seem true to you, because modernist aesthetic theory is irreconcilable with things that are just facts about the world, starting with the subjectivity of the experience of literature by the reader and on from there. I don't really hear any response to that critique here, and though I'm sympathetic to the synthetic process of trying to resolve your intuition (and to some extent mine) about the value of art having at least some component that stands outside the reader-author dialogue and doesn't depend on the reader, I don't think it's viable to just take the stances the modernists take, wherein the whole realm of aesthetic judgment belongs to Eliot as "objective" arbiter and authority.
While I know you would expand the group of arbiters, I don't think you would dispense with them altogether, because in your mind there's something offensive about great art belonging in any nontrivial sense to whatever slackjawed stumblefuck manages to read the words. I understand the power of that intuition, and I think there must be some core truth to it; I think the modernists (and generations of critics before them) were refined and thoughtful aesthetes, and we would be unwise to assume there's nothing valuable in their theories. But I think the enterprise of whatever critical generation we're in now consists in discerning and refining what they were right about, using the philosophical insights of the postmoderns as a chisel to chip away false premises on which the moderns stood.
"There is no great author who can support an ideology unreservedly ... no great author could unreservedly devote their skills to a national project."
Respectfully, I think this is horseshit - it's either trivially true or wrong. If you're saying that ideology is intrinsically rigid and unnuanced and great art is perceptive and nuanced, (a) this seems to me less an argument that modernism is correct than that ideology as you conceive it is dumb; and (b) I think it's wrong to assert that all great art exists in the realm of nuance and self-contradiction and Tolstoyan perceptiveness about how complicated humans are. And though I share your fondness for that kind of literature, I think it's simple to disprove your assertion just by forcing you out of literature into the realm of visual art, where stylistic and aesthetic elements wholly disconnected from the nuance of the human condition are so much more common. And, like my constructivist poster, where there are many examples of great works that communicate explicit and not particularly nuanced political messages. To go back much further than the moderns, it seems to me that greatness consists in the sublime, however expressed; and I see no reason to think sublimity is inconsistent with ideology or any other element of human existence. To say that art cannot be great if ideology "overrides" it presumes that there exists a competitive relationship between ideology and sublimity, and I don't think that's really true. Sure, when bad artists write ideology they produce bad art; but for good artists it seems to me that politics, like any other element of human experience, can be consonant with the sublime rather than opposed.
I just finished reading the second in Arkady Martine's Teixcalaan series (which is wonderful, if you haven't read it you should, I think it will scratch both your great books itch and any nostalgia you have for sci-fi). Her books are deeply nuanced - the central theme of the book is the internal tension of being an outsider looking in on an empire that promises much more than your homeland, loving and hating it in equal measure. But I think it's pretty clear that the book has an anti-imperial political stance. Similarly, a lot of Mason & Dixon (one of my favorite books, and Harold Bloom's) is about the founding sins at the root of America; the book is no worse for its judgment on those sins.
If you'll pardon me for saying it, I think it's poppycock to say that you cannot consciously shape your art. I say you can't avoid it. You can no more exclude your conscious mind from your art than you can exclude your unconscious. You write while you are conscious, and you make deliberate choices from which it is impossible to exclude your intellect. Creation may be a mystical process - I wrote enough fiction back in the day to have experienced that kind of creative communion. But to impose a "conscious"/mystical dichotomy on the process is precisely the kind of unsustainable line-drawing the postmodern critique so devastates.
I think moderns want art to exist in a spiritual realm that is ultimately independent of our rancid, polluted actual physical human bodies and the ugly, intrusive physical world that surrounds them. And I just can't get on board with that - I'm a compatibilist at heart, and it seems to me a fundamental error to think that art can be valuable only if it exists in that independent realm. To me, sublimity is entirely consistent with and in fact consists in our actual, grubby, material, personal experiences of the world. The spiritual and material are not distinct and cannot be distinguished.
Rob, I'm a philosophical idealist. I believe that there are forms that have a concrete existence that is outside empirically observable fact. If you understand that, all my positions make sense. My views are the same as those of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer--an entire philosophical tradition
Respectfully, I also think you could be a little less verbose. Your wordiness reads to me as disrespectful. I make short responses to you that cut to the heart of your arguments, because I understand your core points and hope you can understand mine.
I don't mean it disrespectfully; I'm not a professional literary critic and it's been. While since I stretched these muscles, so the verbosity is me articulating my arguments for the first time and stress testing them. It's me that needs the length, not you, and I apologize. Also for, like, horseshit etc. - it's meant in a friendly and informal spirit of shared inquiry that takes for granted my respect for your thoughts, and I hope that came through. And like, you don't owe me a response, it doesn't bother me if you disengage if the argument feels like a hassle rather than something worthwhile.
I get your idealism, and I don't insist that everyone adopt the hard materialism I think is compatible with what's good in idealism. I just think the postmodern argument, which I think is correct, that what the work is depends on who is engaging with it renders untenable the idealist assertion of a single formal work existing outside of the reader. The classic idealists never had to engage with that argument, and I'm not aware of anyone who has reconciled the traditions in a satisfying way.
Maybe you just don't think the postmodern critique does pose an important challenge to the moderns, and so it isn't part of your project to synthesize or modify the moderns to meet postmodern theory, or argue against it, but to me it seems central to consideration of the relevance of GB, and if you disagree I'd be excited for your book to engage with it somehow, if even to set it aside for the main show.
What we are dealing with is the problem of universals. The idealists hold essentially the neoplatonist position, while the postmodern hold the nominalist position. The way Kant dealt with skepticism was by insisting that there was indeed a world of forms, but that it was unknowable. We could only know the world of appearances. The sole exception he made was that beauty brings us into contact with the world of forms.
As for the postmodern critique, I think you dramatically overstate the degree to which literary critics and philosophers have undermined the concept of an intersubjective understanding of beauty: the ability of people to come to consensus about the features of a text. Most of the critique of the concept of beauty has come from sociologists, particularly Pierre Bourdieau, who thought that the distinctions made by connoisseurs of high culture were entirely arbitrary and didn't conform to any increased pleasure from the object. He believed that people invented artificial distinctions merely to serve as markers of taste, and that the pleasure they took in high culture consisted, in anything, in simply feeling superior to other people who don't get it.
If that is what you mean by postmodernism, then I would say this critique simply fails to understand the nature of the aesthetic experience. By defining the aesthetic experience as being totally embodied, defining it in terms of pleasure and intensity, Bourdieu begs the question. If the aesthetic experience is only about pleasure, then yes the distinctions are meaningless. But actually it's the ability to perceive those distinctions that is the true nature of the aesthetic experience. It is the disinterested experience of the underlying nature of the object.
It's easy to not enjoy something, just as easy to not perceive something. People are free to not perceive that Proust's sentences are thrilling, rather than tedious. But if they do enjoy Proust, they tend to enjoy him in a given way. If I get together with a Chinese proust reader, we will likely both talk about the complex, shifting character portraits and relationships, because those are simply the beautiful features of the text. I have almost never met someone who liked something I liked for a reason that I couldn't perceive. Generally speaking, amongst those who like something, there is a fair amount of agreement about which parts are beautiful.
That is why literary critics and philosophers don't attack beauty, only philistines do. As such, when you say that there are empirical facts that idealism doesn't take into account, I don't really see what they are. Bourdieu has made the only objection that is at all reasonable (that high culture doesn't offer more pleasure than low culture), but I find the objection rather beside the point.
Idealism failed not because it was false but because as a political philosophy it was sterile. Kant's guardrails on human reason have held. While Hegel and Marx insisted it was possible to intuit the true essence of things, and so to turn human society into the perfect form of itself, the truth is that its not possible. We can perceive the forms, perhaps, but we can never really communicate them. That is why when Eliot tries to communicate what is so perfect in Vergil and how that perfection came about, he says stuff that sounds like nonsense. And yet...it is a fertile nonsense, precisely because we DO have the sense that an artwork can encapsulate an age. China has that sense with Tu Fu, just as Britain has it with Shakespeare. It gestures at how we experience the forms
As for why we cannot read a contemporary work sociologically--it's because our own era still exists as concrete fact, rather than form. Tang China only exists in the way we perceive it through concepts, so literature can summarize and encapsulate those concepts. The present world exists as concrete fact, and the relationship between fact and concept remains murky. I prefer to read contemporary works as indicative of the particularity of an experience, as possibilities, and not as being representative of a certain type of experience
Ah, I think I understand the problem - I've been imprecise and perhaps incorrect about what I mean by the postmodern critique; I've assumed someone must have articulated the critique I have in mind, which seems to me baby steps of inference and synthesis from a hodgepodge of people with whom I'm familiar, but even if that's so it seems not to be, like, the dominant strain of postmodern aesthetic ontology. I agree with you that Bourdieau, as described, doesn't present a powerful critique if one is already committed to the project of aesthetic inquiry. Will follow up by email.
What a gem, thanks Naomi. You may be speaking too much truth to be accepted in a court, I'm afraid. The writers that received money from the new courts all seem to start their career with long praises to the philosophy of the new rich.
Only way to speak truth in ancient courts was to be a jester - not an easy job, and then the new courts don't even seem to have that sense of humour.
That being said I don't think democracy is compatible with these new courts, and I do think it will win out in the end. Some arts may suffer from it but some will benefit.
There's a lot of debate back and forth these days about how compatible democracy is with hierarchy. I mean many societies that were much more stratified than ours were democratic--ancient Athens and Victorian England come to mind. But I'm not sure myself, to be honest, and I think it depends on technological change and the composition of the economy and the level of economic stratification and all kinds of stuff I know little about.
I agree that wealthy and powerful people have too little humor about themselves. I wrote a post a few weeks ago about the Decameron, and how rulers today lack magnanimity--the ability to say "Oh wow, you got me!" It's kind of sad, because rulers modeled that behavior precisely because it showed the common touch--showed that they could take a joke and weren't insecure. Not sure why we don't really have that today.
Yes of course hierarchy is necessary. Most decisions must be centralised for any form of efficiency. Two criteria for how good a power system is are (1) capacity to put the most competent in charge for a given decision, and (2) its treatment of those with less power. On both counts dynasties have a pretty bad record. Skill does correlate with genes/upbringing for a generation or two, but not more; and inheritance leads to immiscible castes that can't feel empathy for the poor.