Frozen Coachman: Some Reflections on Art and Morality

Author: Raymond Tallis

Translated by Wang Liqiu

Tolstoy told the story of a theater where a lady was weeping over an imaginary tragedy on the stage. At the same time, in the cold wind outside the theater, a real tragedy is happening: waiting for her on this bitter winter night, her old and faithful coachman is freezing to death. The gist of the story is obvious: art does not necessarily make people behave better or make people more considerate of others.

This split between consuming art and promoting good behavior infuriated Tolstoy, in What Is Art? , he savagely attacked what he perceived as a contemporary reduction of art to a mere pastime, entertainment, or opium ethos in the service of the leisure class. On the contrary, he asserted that "art should be an organ as beneficial to the life and progress of mankind as science." He believed that art, at the most essential level, is an activity through which man uses his own Emotions experienced, to "infect" his fellow man. The purpose of aesthetic form is simply to ensure that those emotions are transferred effectively. We should judge art on both the efficiency of eliciting emotions and the quality of those emotions themselves. Great art must be accessible to all, meaningful to all, appreciated by the peasantry and appreciated by the leisure class, and it transfers the emotions that make human beings fraternal.

By applying these criteria, Tolstoy rejected most of the art recognized by his contemporaries: not only did he deny the works of Baudelaire, Wagner and Ibsen as art, but he declared that the works of Beethoven, Bach and Pushkin were Most works fall into the category of bad art. And, by simple and popular standards, his own unparalleled novels—whose greatness lies, at least in part, in the complexity, ambiguity, and variability of their characters—are of little value.

The views of Tolstoy in his later years - sharply opposed to the beliefs he expressed with the same passion in his earlier years - are all the more disturbing in that they come from a supreme practitioner of fictional art. In "What is Art? , we identify the ancestors of the doctrines that have contributed to hundreds of mediocre, state-sponsored novels in a centralized system; , political correctness against counter-revolutionary forces cut out from models - aesthetics lifted above Pasternak and Mandelstam. Tolstoy's standard of literary greatness would of course lead to some great revaluation: after all, Barbara Cattelan's vast works are of course more vulgar and more explicit than, say, War and Peace A typical example of the good and the bad.

Tolstoy's beliefs about the nature and purpose of art are too hastily been dismissed as the growing madness of his later years, as he moved from the genius artist Tolstoy to the Tolstoy the Tolstoyan. ) part of the depravity to pass away. But even so, the belief that literature can and should have a positive moral impact is stubborn. The opposite view - exemplified by Wilde's assertion that "there is no such thing as a moral book or an immoral book. Books are either well written or badly written. That's all." - can still shock those who even He is not a member of the cultural political commissar of a centralized state.

Some critics have argued or hoped or imagined that literature could promote public morality; that the representation of the artist could free human society from the domination of greed, tyranny, cruelty, selfishness, self-interest (vested interests), fear, obedience, etc.; by evoking an oppressive conscience And by helping the oppressed realize their power, art can accelerate reforms or revolutions that end oppression. Others stress that literature promotes the function of private morality by improving our awareness of others, our sense of others, and our ability to empathize.

Not only critics, but artists themselves believe in, or dream of, a morally useful art. For Kant, the real poet is "those whose misery is also their misery, and which does not reassure them." And this is a sentiment shared by many contemporary artists. Indeed, Martin Seymour-Smith identifies the Kunstlerschuld, or the artist's sin, as the occupational disease of modern poets and writers who fear that "literature does not serve a useful function but a selfish one."

These claims, representing art that is politically involved, are easy to refute. History has shown that literature is as incompetent as music in the face of tyranny and terror. Auden's assertion that "poetry changes nothing" has been empirically proven time and time again throughout the twentieth century. The eloquent righteous indignation of great, humane writers has been, and is, in vain—not to mention the fact that many great artists are not on the side of the angels.

One should not be surprised at the political ineptitude of art. Rigorous, careful, accurate, and a focus on reproducing things with precision, make the artist unsuitable for the kind of crude, direct, often one-sided, often simplified, and often dishonest communication that is the most Effective. Great art doesn't simplify things, it complicates them. The artist's deepest hope of seeing the whole picture undermines his polemic: seeing all aspects of things is the true glory of art, but also its utilitarian flaw. The field of public discourse is too superficial for the artist to use his strongest tricks in it. In the world of marches, public rallies, and news editing, his or her voice is no longer a special voice, but just another voice. And, in that regard, a rather weak voice. You can't cut down a tree with a scalpel. The history of British politics since 1979 has shown that the influence of one Sun editor to shape public opinion is as great as that of a thousand, say, David Hale's politically involved plays. Also, outside the realm of aesthetics, artists have no particular authority nor professionalism—a point that is illustrated by the terrible misjudgment of those artists who intervene with passion. Pound, Selina, Brecht, Gorky, and other artists of their rank all directly or indirectly supported the Great Terror. In the end, art takes time to create, and it takes time to enter the public sphere; so art always comes too late, too slowly, to intervene decisively in a specific, moment-to-moment situation.

In short, good art—sophisticated, satirical, self-questioning art—is weak propaganda, just as good propaganda (which broadcasts cheap wisdom) is bad art. This is not to say that arts should not be politically angry: they can flow naturally from their broad horizons. Rather, that anger, that wide horizon, while adding to the inherent value of the artwork, does not give it external strength; they can be counted as part of its internal moral texture, but not externally moral force. The morality of art lies not only in its form, but also in its content, not only in the distribution of light and shadow, but also in what it displays under the light.

There may have been a time in the past when art, and literature in particular, was less powerless; a time when popular literature was new, and the political liberalism and artist awakening associated with it (artists Breaking away from the hierarchy in which it occupies an auxiliary, subordinate position creates a favorable context in which protest literature not only has a broad audience, but is also able to influence the minds of those who can change the world. If ever there was an era—the golden age of Dickens and Uncle Tom's Cabin, so to speak—it is now over. This may be partly because the mass media has taken over most of the research and protest functions of art these days. The arts have lost these functions, just as they have lost their responsibility to convey practical messages—they have lost the dimension of agricultural poetry. What poetry can effectively increase our awareness of atrocities in Bosnia, Iraq, or Rwanda today, and our ability to reduce them?

Many of those who are willing to admit—however regretful about it—the inability of art to influence the course of public events still hold on to the notion that literature, at least in the private sphere, is a beneficial moral force. Of course, literature can better inspire the behavior of ordinary individuals, even if it cannot transform into power-mad tyrants, corrupt institutions, and those with vested interests that support them. But this influence is not effected by direct exhortation either. Art may be more influential in raising moral awareness than Tolstoy in What Is Art? The sermons, language, and plain story that are seen as examples of good art are much more subtle. By showing us how people are destroyed by others, how they corrupt, and how they influence each other, literature—say, the novels of Henry James—does not increase our sensitivity to the needs and vulnerabilities of others, by expanding our Nor can literature open us to a deeper, richer and more authentic human relationship, an imaginary grasp of their lives—letting us understand how they were made and destroyed.

I can't think of any empirical data to support the above claims. It is impossible to study, and has not yet studied, the effects of (art) on individuals or readers of particular works, or on their accumulated reading experience. Therefore, all claims about the morally beneficial effects of art must be based on an a priori assumption, and there are many reasons to believe that this assumption is fundamentally false.

First, as that Tolstoy story aptly illustrates, the conditions under which one consumes art and—whether as a consumer or a producer of art—into the business of art itself are likely to be detrimental to the rather than reinforcing moral beliefs. In order to give art the attention it demands or deserves, we need to take back the attention that has been taken away from everyday life, including those of our afflicted compatriots—say, the frozen driver. Consumers of art want in the first place to be undisturbed, and so they also set the conditions for that consequence either explicitly or structurally (libraries, theaters, galleries, studies with shelves full of books). As George Steiner put it in response to an interviewer's question about why a country of dichter und denker (read and think) would allow the horrors of Nazi Germany to happen: "We love our texts, so weeping in the streets We like to hear fictional crying more than sound."

Second, the values that art promotes have nothing to do with the moral values of everyday life (and to describe those values as the basis for a "deeper" morality is to beg the question); for example, art promotes form-related values Aesthetic value goes beyond "pure" utility—that is, by "pure," assuming that you are not disturbed by hunger, oppression, or pain—for example, to preserve and celebrate past experiences for their own sake. Art also generates its own secondary values—the value of the connoisseur, the perpetrator of art, and the value of the scholar. The corruption implicit in these secondary values is illustrated in individuals whose reading makes them eager to demonstrate their erudition; for example, the present man who is fondly recalling Tolstoy's famous account of the freezing-to-death coachman The story of a writer who does not learn from it, but only uses it to support some kind of argument about the relationship between art and morality.

Third, the way situations and dilemmas are packaged and presented in art is completely different from the way they are presented in daily life and before our eyes. The life recounted is inevitably different from the life experienced itself. Even the most sobering, least sensational stories have elements of the opera, and thus fail to prepare one for the grim reality of everyday life, for that signal and noise fly together (in part because, in the real world, at least there are preparation for a world where twenty stories are happening). Thus, we could even argue that extensive reading of great novels may corrupt one's ability to judge and deal with others. The characters that accompany us in our own lives can seem tedious, mean and, above all, vague compared to the characters that are deftly drawn on the page. Nor is it likely that the emotions we feel in literary characters whose lives are presented to us as a whole, both inside and outside of literature, contribute to our emotional education or to train us in how to cope real humans. In any event, as Whitehead points out, the emotions found in art are largely “emotions cultivated for emotions.” If the essence of sadness lies in the separation of expressed emotion from the commitment to action, and of imaginary responses from much of reality (in which one is compelled to act), then art, this "independence of the will to act on it" , the contemplation of the object (that is, thinking only about one thing, without any involvement with the will or will to act on it)" is a typical sadness. The truth is that art is first and foremost a spectacle, or it is first and foremost an operation that reduces the world to a spectacle. Of course, representations based on the scale and ambition and complexity of the novel are bound to develop detached, spectacle elements within us. Even novels that are not intended to be jewels to be thought of in an abstraction of the world, but rather to be the lens through which we see the world more clearly, are weak moral engines. Tolstoy's expectation - "that the emotions evoked by art will pave in the human soul the path that our actions naturally follow" - seems a pious hope: no matter how great, sincere, moral or Sincere art is impossible.

So far I have assumed that the emotions that literature evokes are inherently good. But that may not be the case. Even identifying with characters who have endured injustice or some kind of ordeal can be masochistic in some way. The whims of suffering injustice and the subsequent justification (the latter with a completion that is only possible in the world being represented) are ubiquitous in literature—in The Winter's Tale, in Salvation Opera and The same goes for Westerns. Such sentiments are naive and, so to speak, corrupt, mischievous, dreams of gratification and moral revenge. Of course, literature can also generate darker emotions.

Perhaps the influence of good art is more indirect than considered here. Robert Frost is known to say, in response to an interviewer's assertion that "art is only good if it causes action", Robert Frost said, "How long after that action is art-induced? "However, this assumption—that art may have no direct beneficial effects, but may lead to such consequences indirectly (the whimsy that poets are "unrecognized, legislators of the world")—at best It can only be a guess. As soon as we start thinking about indirect and long-term effects, we enter the realm of total uncertainty. Chaos theory teaches us that causality in complex dynamic systems—what system can be more complex than the interactions between books, readers, and their worlds—is unpredictable and untraceable beyond just a few steps in the causal chain .

The assertion that art has moral influence—the power to improve public or private, individual or collective behavior—seems to have no basis. So, is art therefore worthless? Should the government stop funding the arts since it doesn't make people better citizens? Should parents stop their children from reading great literature, since literature doesn't make them better in private life? of course not. While art may not make individuals morally better, it gives them more choices about what the world might mean, and thus broadens and deepens their lived experience. Although art cannot change the course of history or make it better, its representation of the horrors and magnificence that has happened in history redeems them in a small sense, if only in hindsight: Art does not help people intervene in the world, but it can witness the world and be loyal to the world. Indeed, without regard to terror, art is empty and trivial; and in the experience of great works of art there is an element of suffering. A masterpiece is a place where many different, one-sided meanings come together and synthesize into a whole; it is a utopia of consciousness where the broken and fragmented things of life come together again.

In saying that an old pair of shoes is also more useful than Shakespeare's oeuvre, Nabokov - who was the first to discover and proclaim Tolstoy's genius - is not condemning art, but clarifying it function. In a utilitarian world full of practical needs and practical morals, the role of art is insignificant. Its real realm is the kingdom of ends: it speaks of the ultimate purpose of life, not the means to secure it (comfort, safety, and freedom from need or terror). Art has an inner morality, although it has only a slight external moral force. This is evident in the incomparable novels written by Tolstoy himself. These novels illustrate the world in terms of purpose and justice, and with imaginative magnanimity, touch upon the conditions of men and women in the world, bringing together the great facts that surround us—that we are not accidental, that we are not fleeting Yes, we also make the world our own, anyway—connected to the tiny facts that hold us back. In this way, with greater awareness, we can turn the temptation that leads us to believe that this will translate into an impact on practical morality—an impact on behavior in the public and private spheres—into a greater sense of responsibility for practice. Rich and profound understanding, and overcome this temptation by recalling the weeping lady in the theater and the driver who froze to death outside the theater.

Note: Translated from Raymond Tallis, "The Freezing Coachman: Some Reflections on Art and Morality", in The Raymond Tallis Reader, chapter 14. The reflections on drama added later are omitted.

First published on WeChat public account " AoAcademy ", 2017-07-22. The translation is for study and exchange only. Reprints must indicate the relevant information and source. Please do not use them for commercial purposes.