MARGOLIS—The Definition of Art

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

---

[137]

Part Two

The Definition of Art

...

The trouble with any effort to fix the basic category-term, "work of art," is that it will depend on what counts as an aesthetic point of view.

But
what counts as an aesthetic point of view cannot itself be decided by some simple inspection of actual usage.

Philosophers seem to decide,
more than to find,
what the boundaries of aesthetic interest are
...

Furthermore,...
the "aesthetic" tends to ignore the distinction of art as such—whatever we may choose to feature in speaking of art:

even its history as a specialized term has only an uncertain linkage,
systematically,
with the nature and appreciation of art.

To make the definition of "art" depend on how we specify the meaning of "aesthetic,"
then,
is inevitably to invite a measure of conceptual disorder.

So then let's define them independently of each other
??
:^/


Danto and friends insist that art no longer has anything necessarily to do with the "aesthetic," and perhaps never did
;

but
they cannot show that people do not proceed aesthetic-ally any-way
;

or,
they can show only that there are some people around who do not proceed this way,
while some others clearly do.


Taking Danto's bait (and inverting his peripeteia),
let's define as "aesthetic"
any view per which
Danto's indiscernibles
are
well and truly indiscernible.

Any such view is thereby stipulated to be "aesthetic,"
no matter its other corollaries.

One kind of "aesthete," then,
is simply a consequentialist
who prefers the consequences
of the aesthetic view
to those of the conceptual view.

The further this kind of aesthete is privileged
to observe the Consequences of Conceptualism,
the further their mere consequentialism hardens
into a bedrock morality.

And
it is surprisingly easy for them
to avoid
learning anything about Indiscernible Objects
that would crack the aesthetic edifice.

This aestheticism is not difficult.

What is difficult? Mastering the principles and codes of extra-aesthetic discernment.

(Pardon me for deciding. How much finding entitles a man to make his own decisions?)

[138]

... It has been argued, for instance, that works of art exhibit only "family resemblances" or "strands of similarities" but not essential and distinctive properties common to all admitted instances.

The question is a vexed one,
because it is not entirely clear
what sort of initial restrictions
may properly be placed
on the collection of things
for which this claim, or the counterclaim,
could be confirmed.

i.e.
If the whole problem
is that we lack
a Definition of Art
from the start,
then
we cannot exclude (or include) anything
from (in) the family;

and then,
ranging freely,
we will always be able to find
(we will eventually be found by)
some instance in the collection
which is totally "related"
but does not in the least
resemble.

Hence, if no restriction is allowed, it would seem trivially true that no definition of the required sort could be put forward,...

And
if an initial restriction is allowed,
will it be
a logical or an empirical matter
that a definition of the required sort cannot be found?

The question at stake is not, specifically,
the definition of art
but
the eligibility of the effort to define art.

...

Still, if "work of art" is a basic category-term, its importance probably is to be located elsewhere than in the presumed effort to discover its essential conditions (which may, nevertheless, remain legitimate). ...

Morris Weitz's Matchette Prize essay (1955) ... represents a turning point in aesthetic theory precisely by raising a "meta-aesthetic" question. But as with so many parallel efforts in other fields, it proves to be extremely difficult to separate sharply "object"-level questions and "meta"-level questions,...

... The nature of Weitz's demurrer is rather less obvious than may at first appear.

Weitz seems to press the point that

if it is to be provided,
a definition of art
should identify
what is
really essential to it,

what its necessary and sufficient conditions are.

Apparently, a definition can be provided "for a special purpose," but this, Weitz believes, is not the same thing.

Well, reading closely and shooting from the hip . . . Weitz's term "honorific definition" suggests quite specifically and un-demurly just what the "special purpose" of certain writers has been: to "honor" their own experience of art, not to define some collective experience. That is the really pernicious thing about the hunt for a definition: self-dealers can always find one! Self-dealing is a special purpose which readily reveals effective strategies for its own achievement. It is all but instinctual, or perhaps it is literally that.

Of course we probably should have some "purpose" in life; and, following the "instincts" again, maybe it is actually impossible not to have purpose, in some sense or other, even if this intensifies our existential dread rather than resolving it. By all means, discover your purpose, the one that (probably) you have had all along but had never stopped to consider and/or could not articulate explicitly. As Becker says, bringing tacit purposes to consciousness is both hazardous and necessary. Self-dealing will almost certainly turn up among them! But then you know! And then you can . . . revise your Aesthetic Theory accordingly.
; ^ )

[139]

... Are there any definitions
that do not serve a special purpose?

Good
question.

...is it the case that serviceable definitions must, and must be supposed to, capture the real essence of what they characterize?

I haven't the slightest clue what a real essence might be, but on the surface, yes, this does seem rather important!

It is in fact a feature of the more recent, changed reception of definitional requests (for instance, in the account provided by Hilary Putnam) that we may characterize the distinctive traits or conditions of art without pretending to fix its essence

I'm revisiting this interlude mostly in the interest of completeness; the above is really NOT what I want to be occupied with right now!

What is distinctive? This seems like every bit the vexed   question as any other posed here, because here too there is a certain absoluteness about the request. To hold otherwise, again, after one set of absolute criteria (necessary and sufficient) has already been abandoned by the side of the road would seem to really beg the question. (And, it's clear that much of the bitterest disputation in Aesthetics follows from precisely this inability to agree upon the "distinctiveness" of various aspects of art from various aspects of literally everything else in life and experience.)

To settle on a definition without fixing the essence seems merely to pass the buck. What am I missing here? Technical usage? Intraprofessional subtext?

[without pretending to fix its essence] or without insisting that empirical definitions be addressed to real essences.

I don't know what empirical definitions are. Definitions arrived at via direct experience? More likely he means: arrived at via "empirical inquiry" or "empirical investigation," which is (to this layperson) a deceptive euphemism and seems really to refer to the pooling of "experience" at scale, among myriad specialist investigators, in order to check their work. I call it a "deceptive euphemism," then, because these "empirical definitions" are not actually available "empirically" to laypersons, nor even (perhaps excepting some very basic physical science) to individual researchers; the nonspecialists of the world just have to learn that if some pool of "empirical" authority dictates to us, e.g., that in the far north, where there is snow, all bears are white, then we should (must) believe exactly what they say. I suppose this is how we end up with the fruit/fruit salad joke about tomatoes? The "empirical" work of plant scientists and that of chefs lands on different "definitions." This is frustrating, yes; but I have to admit, I'm not sure what "essence" a tomato could have apart from named and discrete human endeavors; and since the tomato is implicated (more or less happily!) in several such endeavors, then even in that sense it still has no single essence. This breaches (finally) the limits of my Antihumanism! And of my Eliminativism! It aligns me with Danto on certain issues. But now, leave this blog immediately and navigate to any boutique grocery or garden site: learn there for yourself that "tomato" does, also, seem to be very much the "open concept"! So, in the end, Weitz's demurrer does appear to me rather more obvious than it does to Our Man here. Given our respective credentials this seems like bad news for me. But that's the point of the exercise.

...Arthur Danto's paper "The Artworld" (1964).

...Danto does not disqualify definitions but rather shows why it is that ... the inventive possibilities oblige us to keep adjusting...

He hints at a difference
between
physical nature and human culture
and
he introduces,
without development,
what he calls the "'is' of artistic identification."

...we may suggest, here, ... that definitions may serve only to fix ... the normal or central instances.

...definitions fix only the nominal, not the real, essences of things;...

It is entirely possible, therefore, that works of art that are somewhat deviant relative to the standard cases can be admitted as works of art
and
can be admitted to have properties quite different from those focused by our definition, without contradiction at all.

Well sure, if that's how we choose to define definition.

But what use could mere nominations such as these possibly have if we already know (purportedly) what is normal?

It is only when such discrepancies begin to take on a systematic importance that earlier serviceable definitions will have to give way:

Right . . . because mere normative thinking cannot be of use systematically.

Dare I say: art is not systematic, but analytic philosophy is! (Or it is supposed to be.)

... This explains in a sense the tolerance that is possible in speaking of driftwood, readymades, l'art trouvé,...

Not at all! There's not actually very much tolerance of Duchampianism in this world. Duchampianism is not merely somewhat deviant from Aestheticism, it's full-stop anathema. Something else is going on here. Something else is going on with us, the subjects, if not also (actually) with the objects. I think Danto is going to win that part of the argument. I'm more interested in unpacking my own gut feeling that this Duchampish behavior . . . shouldn't be tolerated! (Well okay, it should be tolerated under the rubric of "free expression," but only in the sense that we tolerate someone throwing his ice cream cone against the wall if he is a toddler but not if he is an adult; and further, just as "No one considers a plane crash as 'anecdotal'" (Taleb), an adult who throws his ice cream even one single time, even in an obviously anomolous turn of events, this adult's peers shouldn't ignore or forget what happened, and they won't in any case.)

... The definitions of empirical terms in the sciences are intended to facilitate discourse that is primarily explanatory (in the causal sense) and predictive.

I need to better understand exactly what these two terms mean in the sciences! It seems that in common parlance an "explanation" is merely a half-narrowed-down "prediction": the less is known at the outset, the greater number of candidate "explanations" may be spun (and only later falsified). A "prediction" also can be just a blind stab; it can rank far below a bonafide "explanation"; but the idea here, "in the sciences," seems to be that a "definition" forms only after the empirical work has settled on a bankable "prediction." The resulting definition is then characterized as a predict-ive one only after the so-called "prediction" is no longer really a prediction at all: we begin to be able to "predict" things when we have seen them unfold exactly the same way, over and over, in a sufficiently well-controlled setting. (N.B. No "social" or "cultural" setting is anywhere near this well-controlled! N.N.B.B. Any "large-sample theory" is a theory which can only apply to . . . large samples!)

Where art is concerned, no such constraints obtain,

[***collective gasp***]

though there is a clear sense in which definitions must be brought into fair agreement with the

[140]

general sorts of theories and activities that characterize our aesthetic concern with the arts themselves.

One could only hope! Care to say exactly what all of those might be?
:^/

I myself am burdened with myriad concerns, a dozen or so pet theories, and a small handful of chronic actvities, most of them centered on some form of art, and the rest living in the "open concept" borderlands, which we can safely include here without contradiction at all. I've never quite felt the need, just to get through the day, to posit a definition which agrees with any of them. Maybe I need to think more about that? I had already decided I was fortunate not to feel the need!

The lack of definition, even of coherent usage, I feel more acutely regarding such terms as, say, to "understand a piece of music," on which point Dad himself once told me, the first time I pressed the matter, that there is in fact no agreement. On the other hand, I think we can all agree that this non-concept has in fact taken on a systematic importance among precisely this cohort of aesthetic concerners.

The concession,
it may be admitted,
points as well to the possible vacuity of definitional disputes.

Or the likely vacuity!

(No, my Theory of Likely Vacuity is not based on a "large sample," not quite; but let's just say that recent expanded sampling efforts have thus far turned up only confirmation.)

But,
more important,
it signifies a refinement
in the theory of definition
and
a sense of
the function and validity
of particular definitions of art.

i.e.
They are
functional and valid
only
normatively
and
nominally?

...

...Danto, in ... "The End of Art" (1984), has usefully collected the historically unfolding record of the art tradition in a way that confirms the conceptual puzzle of what we take ourselves to be doing in defining art—...

Still,
what we should understand by the definitional question
remains for others to examine
(for instance, Robert Matthews, 1979),

particularly if
there is no final or essential theoretical discovery
about the nature of art
(see for instance Francis Sparshott, 1982).

Matthews, "Traditional Aesthetics Defended," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XXXVIII

I can't find Sparshott in the bibliography to Part 2. His The Theory of the Arts was purportedly published in 1982.

Nelson Goodman (1977) has, for reasons rather different from Danto's, eschewed the definition of art.

In speaking of the "symptoms" of art as opposed to its "defining properties," however, he does actually consider a set of disjunctively necessary and conjunctively sufficient conditions that tempt us—against his demurrer—to view his thesis as definitional.

These are linked
to
symbolic functioning;
to
features of symbols,
to
features symbolized,
and to
functioning at least by way of exemplification.

One may perhaps say that, effectively, Goodman favors a functional essentialism with regard to art rather than a substantive essentialism—...

...if he were to concede that much, artworks might be shown not to exhibit the salient

[141]

symbolic functions he favors and yet remain significant artworks for all that, Goodman might well be obliged to curb considerably his semiotic orientation, both in general and in detail.

There is a typo or run-on somewhere in here, with or without my excisions.

The theory that works of art are symbols or symbolic forms is perennially of interest, of course.

Goodman introduces a particularly subtle version of it,... But in doing so, he obliges us to consider once again how minimal the basis may be on which to construe an object as functioning symbolically ...

The key to Goodman's entire theory of art rests with the concept of exemplification.

Granted that
to exemplify is to symbolize;

the question remains
whether
in possessing whatever properties it does possess
(non-symbolic properties),
a work of art
must be said
to refer to or symbolize
any or all such properties.

Goodman's account, therefore, suggests a possible asymmetry between validating and invalidating definitions of art
or,

more informally,
characterizations of what serves as strong (or even decisive) evidence of the presence of art. ...

... Instead of challenging what is normally thought to be a defining property of art, namely, being an artifact, [Jack] Glickman [(1976)] attempts to show that being an artifact does not entail having been made by anyone. ...

...his claim that "particulars are made, types created" draws us on to the profound ontological problem of how a work of art can be a particular and combine concrete and abstract properties...

...the so-called "institutional" theory of art advanced by George Dickie (1969)...

There is no question that some sense of the institutional or societal complexities of art is essential to our theorizing.

But Dickie's thesis has puzzled his readers primarily because,

as [Ted] Cohen [1973] very clearly shows,

we cannot sort out satisfactorily
whether
the prior achievements
of some putative artwork

are marked as such
by a knowledgeable clientele

or
whether some (somehow) authorized public body
fixes the pertinent properties
of a would-be artwork
by
selecting some artifact for artwork

[142]

status.

...

Cohen's own emphasis rests chiefly with
the performative feature of Dickie's defining conditions:

both
with respect to "conferring"
(in Dickie's account)
a status
that must already obtain
before
the would-be enabling act itself

and
with respect to the difficulty of supposing
that relevant conferring moves
need be (or can be)
directly linked
with what Dickie has in mind
in speaking of appreciation. ...

Fingerprints or Mushroom Stamps?

This is my Goodreads review of Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams: Contemporary Art and Complicity.

---

Feeling horny? Grab this book and flip to page 153. You'll find a photo of Family Romance, a "mixed media" piece comprised of four half-realistic, fully naked mannequins representing mom, dad, bro and sis.

Really need your hands free while you ogle? Break the spine of the book along this page; that way it'll lay flat on the table all by itself. Or, if you live in Southern California, you can head to the Central Library in LA and grab their copy, which has already had its spine broken in precisely this spot and is prone to fall open to precisely this page and this image.

I hesitate to add, " . . . for precisely this purpose," because there is no way I could know for sure what the "purpose" of the spine-breaker was, no way to know if this purpose was shared or how widely, no way to know if there was in fact any purpose at all. Among hundreds of LAPL books I've checked out, dozens have had broken spines. I can't remember another one that had an image of nude children anywhere in it, let alone precisely where the spine was broken; but let's imagine, in a mashup of the Infinite Monkey Theorem with Lacan's Missing Signifier, that there is at least one other book in these particular stacks that would seem, to me, to depict nude children in a semi-realistic manner, and that there is at least one other person in Southern California who would agree with me that this is what it depicts. Were this all to be true, the book I happened to check out wouldn't be special even in this regard. All that would be special about it from my standpoint, perhaps, is that I happened to read some other inscrutable, overlong art-crit book which mentioned this one favorably, my interest was piqued, I swapped one for the other at the circulation desk, and I was unlucky (lucky?) enough to find my latest heist literally falling open to an unusally pungent image before I was able to read a single word. This is all that I ought to be certain of. Nothing I can observe about the book proves anything further.

This has been my inner rationalist speaking. My inner empiricist is not as sanguine.

GEORGE DICKIE—The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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What to do with this, knowing that it comes not at the end but at the beginning of a long series of refinements, abandonments and reformulations?

I only know how to do one thing, so that's what I'll be doing here.

---

[100]

The Myth of the Aesthetic Attitude

GEORGE DICKIE

[orig. 1964]

Some recent articles¹ have suggested the unsatisfactoriness of the notion of the aesthetic attitude and it is now time for a fresh look at that encrusted article of faith.

Note 1 lists two articles:

Marshall Cohen, "Appearance and the Aesthetic Attitude" (1959)

Joseph Margolis, "Aesthetic Perception" (1960)

This conception has been valuable to aesthetics and criticism in helping wean them from a sole concern with beauty and related notions. However, I shall argue that the aesthetic attitude is a myth...

TIMOTHY BINKLEY—Contra Aesthetics

Philosophy Looks at the Arts
ed. Joseph Margolis
(Third Edition, 1987)

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[80]

Piece: Contra Aesthetics

TIMOTHY BINKLEY

[orig. 1977]

I. What Is This Piece?

1. The term "aesthetics" has a general meaning in which it refers to the philosophy of art. In this sense, any theoretical writing about art falls within the realm of aesthetics.

There is also a more specific and more important sense of the term in which it refers to a particular type of theoretical inquiry which emerged in the eighteenth century when the "Faculty of Taste" was invented. In this latter sense, "aesthetics" is the study of a specific human activity involving the perception of aesthetic qualities such as beauty, repose, expressiveness, unity, liveliness.

I think I prefer the first sense to the second, even though it often appears semantically imprecise or even outright deceptive.

Later in the Anthology we encounter some powerful arguments against conflating "aesthetics" with "philosophy of art"!

Although frequently purporting to be a (or even the) philosophy of art ,

aesthetics so understood is not exclusively about art :

This is exactly what I don't like about the second sense.

. . . in relation to the unknown

My dad once said to me that philosophy is "highly destructive of certainty." Thus prompted, I want to enumerate some (possibly novel) observations about certainty which come from outside philosophy's academic silo. In doing so, I affirm the above remark as a serviceable mandate for philosophy proper, on top of whatever more parochial application it may find day-to-day; but I suggest, also, that the "destructive" bent is not philosophy's alone, and that, in fact, this oft-hidden "philosophical" potential of so many other intellectual and cultural practices is precisely what redeems them beyond their parochial circumstances of origin. In fact we may be "doing philosophy" while we're doing something else, whether we realize it or not; but this can be the case only if certain peculiar conditions are met therein.

---

Christopher Lasch's chapter "The Soul of Man under Secularism," which is the final chapter of his The Revolt of the Elites, contains the following passage:

In the commentary on the modern spiritual predicament, religion is consistently treated as a source of intellectual and emotional security, not as a challenge to complacency and pride. Its ethical teachings are misconstrued as a body of simple commandments leaving no room for ambiguity or doubt. Recall Jung's description of medieval Christians as "children of God [who] knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves." . . .

What has to be questioned here is the assumption that religion ever provided a set of comprehensive and unambiguous answers to ethical questions, answers completely resistant to skepticism, or that it forestalled speculation about the meaning and purpose of life, or that religious people in the past were unacquainted with existential despair. The famous collection of songs written by medieval students preparing for the priesthood Carmina Burana would be enough in itself to dispel this notion; . . .

Or consider the varieties of religious experience analyzed by William James in his book of that name, . . . Religious faith asserts the goodness of being in the face of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation—which have their origin not in perceptions exclusively modern but in the bitterness always felt toward a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish—often become the prelude to conversion.

(pp. 242-243)

For Lasch here, "religion" may be "a challenge to complacency and pride." Is it also destructive of certainty? He says only that certainty is not something that religion necessarily provides. Above all, he sees suggestions to the contrary as a kind of motivated slander issuing from the apostles of "secularism"; in other words, from his book's eponymous "elites." That is more so what is at issue in the above passage.

I happen to think he has a fair point here, despite being a deeply "secular" person myself. Still, it is curious to return to his previous book, The True and Only Heaven, and find the following:

The scientific worldview, [William James] argued, seemingly so "healthy" and "robustious," so "rugged and manly" in its respect for facts, actually concealed a childish desire for certainty. . . . Science . . . had inherited the attitude of those who longed to live in a risk-free world. . . . Verification, that much-vaunted principle of modern science, was a technique merely for avoiding error, not for wresting truth from chaos. . . . It was a position that could never serve as a guide to the conduct of life.

(p. 289)

Now, if what today's mandarin technocrats "long" for is "to live in a risk-free world," perhaps they are not doing a very good job; perhaps they have become irreverrent of "verification" in precisely such matters as verification ought apply to most rigorously; perhaps they have found the sheer scale and scope of their scientific problems unamenable to control, and so simply given up on "verification" wherever insistence upon it threatens to slow their advance. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, for one, has powerfully argued this about forecasting and forecasters; and this, anyway, is what so often appears to have happened most any time a new technology is released into the world without its behavior being fully predictable or its effects fully foreseeable. (And how could they be?)

This latter book of Lasch's is subtitled "Progress and its Critics"; but the legitimate critique of scientific progress seems to me to issue from within science's own walls: the whole problem is an irreverence for "verification," not an over-reverrence for it.

But of course science cannot really be about "certainty" either, because true certainty doesn't exist. How often have all of us non-scientists (and non-doctors and non-economists) been scolded to that effect in recent decades? And, how selective and unidirectional this scolding has been!

The reality is that some houses of worship are full of bullheaded hypocrites, just as some institutions of higher learning give safe harbor to sloppy methodologists and bad-faith polemcists. As my undergraduate Music History prof, David Grayson, aptly put it, "It is the destiny of great music to be played badly."

It would be overstating the case to say that "science" or "religion" (or "philosophy" or "music") are necessarily "destructive of certainty," but all can have this effect, depending on how they are practiced. It is the element of practice, as conspicuously absent from Lasch's remarks as from those of his retrospective adversaries, which is ultimately determinative of such outcomes as he is concerned to examine. The Jamesian notion of "quality of belief" can never get us quite all the way to practice. That quality and that belief have to be realized somehow, realized in earthly deed and not just in thought or word. I think that "conduct of life" is not quite the same thing as what I mean to denote here by "realized."

The historical baggage of (and inherent tensions between) religion and science, so-called, make it nearly impossible to parse the issue of practice without adopting a certain degree of methodological philistinism. Again, a high "quality of belief" is of no help here; it more easily blinds us to some otherwise obvious conclusions if we do not take pains to circumvent it. But if we can manage at least this much, then we need not abandon any particular beliefs of our own in order to see, more broadly, that "quality of belief," when it is "realized" in "practice," can (and probably will) lead to the destruction of myriad easy certainties that had taken root prior to the "conversion"; we can see, in other words, that "philosophy" in its certainty-destroying capacity can be practiced through almost any cultural medium, but that not just any quality of belief or of practice will get us all the way there; in yet other words, a high quality of belief realized in exemplary practice can transfigure a seemingly benign earthly pursuit into a fully "philosophical" one; and of course, a low quality of belief or merely perfunctory practical activity makes this exalted outcome impossible, even when the "music" being "played" this way is widely conceded to be "great."

By "methodological philistinism" I mean merely to suggest a way of getting past the obvious fact, inconvenient for both sides of any fraught cultural conflict, that the belief and practice of most exponents, most of the time, is very low. The fallacy of incomplete evidence is always available to those wishing to show that their adversaries have sought mere "intellectual and emotional security" rather than the "challenge to complacency and pride" that comes from commitment and struggle. It would be notable if an author of Lasch's persuasion could show in more detail that this or that commitment to this or that lifeway really did coax a higher "quality" out of its exponents. Failing that, I have only my own haphazard experiences and anecdotes to fall back on, whereby all signs point unequivocally to Jung's purported caricature of Christians being, actually, quite a servicable portrait of every form of ostensible commitment I have run across face-to-face. It is very rare for anything else to be the case. I am suggesting, though, that there are certain commonalities among the committed exceptions, even though they may belong to incommensurable cultural forms, even to the most infamously incommensurable forms, "science" and "religion."

The aim here is not to deny the incommensurability but merely to notice what is wrong with Lasch's remarks, in spite of all that is right with them. James-as-rendered-by-Lasch has badly mistaken the scientific "respect for facts" for heedless worship of them. But to really "respect" facts is something else entirely. This is neither the exclusive burden nor the exclusive privilege of science. Respect per se is precisely the precondition for adeptness at any cultural practice.

Of course in a culturally pluralistic environment one had better be quite careful about paying such respect, about daring even to speak of such minimum "facts" as are necessary to establish preliminarily. How to handle this? There have been entire libraries filled with that kind of advice, and with chronicles of its refinement through practical application. There is nothing "childish" about this literature! Quite the opposite.

---

The thing about rationalism that leads the same word to denote a properly philosophical school or lineage, a Silicon Valley subculture, and a potentially deal-breaking trait on dating apps, is precisely that it is destructive of certainty. It may be possible for certain entrepreneurial types to outwit others by reasoning their way to near-certainties which remain opaque to normie-brained competitors, but I'm not sure that this practical application, with its positivistic orientation and narrow scope, serves as a good proxy for everything that a good-faith social actor is confronted with in today's world-at-large. Lack of certainty is one thing, surfeit of illusion is quite another. Human beings are illusion-generating machines. Illusion is constantly being created anew, faster and in greater quantities than any proper "science" or "philosophy" can address it. Only the most pressing or salient matters can be addressed, or (eventually) address themselves; the rest of it skates.

Lasch's chapter of course begins in his dissent from those "1960s revolutionary" slogans which were "much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx"; in dissent from "the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, . . . leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art" (p. 234); from Wilde's notion that Christ was himself the "most supreme of individualists" (p. 232); and so on.

Lasch holds that "this kind of message" merely "confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd." "In place of self-denial and self-control, it offered the seductive vision of selfhood unconstrained by civic, familiar, or religious obligations." (p. 233) "The unexamined premise that history can be compared with the individual's growth from childhood to maturity . . . made it possible to condemn any form of cultural conservatism, any respect for tradition." (p. 237)

Wilde's particular rhetoric may well be worthy of the criticism, and so too may be most of the "artists" who have attempted to make good on it, but it seems, also, that this same criticism cannot apply equally or in the same form to any-and-all ways of being an "artist." Already in the suggestion that life-as-art might be "unconstrained" by any "obligations," something is very wrong. (Recall once again Dr. Grayson's quip.) Much great art of the past seems, at least in hindsight, to have been hatched under severe "constraints," a point which "cultural conservatives" and antimodernist critics never miss an opportunity to reiterate. If Lasch did intend to cast his lot with this tendency, he has buried that intent beneath myriad contrary innuendos.

The Danish radical artist Asger Jorn made a distinction between "art" and "critique" which is very relevant here. Jorn called art "primary action in relation to the unknown," whereas "critique" is "a secondary reaction to something primary which already exists." Of course another way of saying that something "already exists" is to say that its existence is certain. All certainty is precious! The mere "existence" of an artwork is unlikely to be an outright illusion, Warhol and Duchamp notwithstanding; but artworks bring along with them into existence all manner of illusions about the intent, meaning, and value of the work. Intent, meaning, and value are most of what matter about art to most people, but they are often inscrutable, even if the mere existence of the work and certain observations about its formal properties are beyond question. Hence disputes over intent, meaning and value account for most of what goes under the heading, Philosophy of Art.

I think it is because of this inscrutability and not in spite it that these aspects, far more so than the mere artifacts or formal properties themselves, are the customary bases of critique, even long after academic art criticism has contrived an identity for itself as "objective." A mere homage or counterfactual to the form-and-content of an existing artwork is hardly a critique at all unless it bleeds into questions of intent, meaning, or value. That is precisely what is "secondary" about a "secondary reaction," and what is "primary" about "primary action": the bases of critique are epistemically very tenuous, but they are taken as given "facts" about the artwork and about the artist. Conversely, the object of "primary action" is "the unknown," the un-certain; art as primary action pleads uncertainty about the intent, meaning, and value of its antecedents, even as it also is, as all contemporary art must be, a "reaction" to some already-existing forms and artifacts.

What would it mean for someone to underdraw the boundaries of their own certainty based on an illusion? It's not clear that this has any ramifications for Jorn's formulation. If an artist is truly uncertain in the moment of creation, and if that uncertainty is truly their object, then there is the possibility of "primary action." (Of course if a critic interviews them about their state of mind, or tries to read the resulting work for psychological tells, expect the illusions to come at you fast.)

What would it mean to overdraw the boundaries of one's certainty? This is more familiar, and it does, plainly, come to bear on "critique."

What is wrong with Lasch's chapter, then, is that he has merely presented the reverse caricature of the one he is writing against. He has committed the same fallacy of incomplete evidence. The fallacy is the same because certain contours of the problem are the same in religion, science, philosophy, and art: it is easy enough for outsiders to form a certain uncharitable view based on the lowest common denominator of practitioners; at this, the adepts are bound to cry foul, but there is little they can do to compel a higher quality of belief in their cohort.

It's a bit of a stretch (but only a bit) to rephrase Lasch in Jorn's terms: Wilde claimed to be extolling life lived as a work of art, but what he (or at least his postmodern pseudo-followers) ended up extolling, instead, was life lived as a critique of all the lives which had come before, a critique of the "common herd" toward which they now felt a "sense of superiority."

In yet other words,

disillusionment, we might say, is the characteristic form of modern pride, and this pride is no less evident in the nostalgic myth of the past than in the more aggressively triumphal version of cultural progress that dismisses the past without regrets.

(pp 241-242)

Now, what is so wrong with a little bit of well-justified "disillusionment?" One problem, at least, with this "modern" form, besides its pridefulness, is that it is too knowing; it can only amount to "critique," to "secondary" rather than "primary" action. What does the knee-jerk Pollyanna rejoinder to "disillusionment" come down to but the suggestion that perhaps the pessimist does not fully know the good side of everything at issue? I tend to be pessimistic, that is, to think precisely the opposite; but I also tend to think that we do not actually manage to dig up very much of everything that is down there, good or bad, no matter how hard we try; hence the irreducible "unknown," what Donald Rumsfeld infamously called "known unknowns," in relation to which we "act" . . . if in fact that is how we understand ourselves to be acting . . . not even if but especially if we are "artists."

Conventionally the reversion to critique is parsed as a postmodern inevitability, the curse of life after-the-fact: too much has been done, too much is known too well; not enough is uncertain. But again, this can refer only to the mere existence of artifacts and formal properties. That is all that we really know about. We do not really know much about intent, meaning, or value. Most of what we know is that those things do not remain stable over time. We know that we ourselves may feel or react differently each time we confront the same inanimate physical stimulus, but we do not know exactly why. Instrumental musicians come to know this especially intimately through our peculiar kind of "practice." Yet when we encounter people who themselves do not have that kind of intimacy with the artworks or with the instruments, we constantly find them driven to desperately deny any uncertainty about intent, meaning, and value, because it is precisely (and perhaps paradoxically) these epiphenomena of artworks that people care most about. Here of all places is where audiences demand certainty, precisely where it is least forthcoming. Understandably, people are not too keen to simply abandon their most cherished intuitions to the undertow of passing time and the ever-accelerating churn of cultural relativity. But it is precisely this denial which imprisons us in critique. It is nothing about how much we really know, nothing about the instability of popular taste or about the arbitrariness of signification. Rather, it is our desire to know all, and to think that we already do. It is the old "childish desire" again. And so Lasch, though he overcorrects, also provides an indispenable piece of advice for artists and audiences, even for those of us who will never believe in God. Of course we cannot (must not) simply forget what we know; but given what precious little certainty is available to us, there really is no shortage of "unknown" arenas for "artists" to "act" in "relation" to. In fact there is an abundance of "unknowns," the more so the more exemplary our "practice" can be made. What is not abundant? The courage and intellect required to face up to it all; the same in art as in religion, philosophy, and science.

As usual, Ernest Becker has a passage which ties all of these disparate ideas together beautifully:

In the West the belief in a dual universe lasted right up until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century, and then gradually faded away, . . .   If you ask someone "where" babies come from he will tell you that they come from the union of the sperm and the egg: so sure is he that everything takes place on tangible physio-chemical levels that he thinks that one causal link in a process of unknown origin explains that process. Do we know where babies come from? Do they not indeed mysteriously spring from an invisible void? . . .   We enter rooms, houses, theatres, stadiums, full of faces that were invisible eighty years ago—and yet most of us claim we "know" where they come from.

. . . there are signs that the scientific view itself may be bending. I don't know what to make of "quasar stars" that leave "holes in space"—and neither, it appears, do the astronomers.   . . . the whole development of atomic physics tends to validate the idea of a hidden, power world, rather than invalidate it.   . . .   There seems to be empirically an invisible inside of nature from which powers erupt into the visible world from an unknown source. And since our bodies are all composed of elements which break down into atoms which break down into energy, it truly appears that we are constantly generated out of a void, that our physical form emanates from an unknown dimension which sustains it.

(The Birth and Death of Meaning, pp. 120-121)

Scientific materialism, in other words, furnishes an ever lengthier and more detailed chain of proximate causes without ever quite landing on an ultimate cause. There is no danger here of going wanting either for "facts" or for "uncertainty," or for "existential despair" if that's more your bag. It's all in the mix. Blanket ascriptions of "childishness," then, just like blanket ascriptions of adept enlightenment or religious profundity, cannot really be made, at least not to entire academic fields or cultural institutions. These ascriptions can be made only to individuals. There is no social theory of art that can modulate the epistemics of that question. The "great music" of science can be played "badly" or it can be played well; a hobbyist group can give a jagged but rousing rendition, or a celebrity professional group can give a soullessly "perfect" one. Choose your own adventure.

William James cannot serve as proxy for the sum total of modern religious practice, because there have not been very many William Jameses (perhaps there has been exactly one) in the "modern" era. There was, however, at least one, just as there have been a few model rationalists, and indeed also a few (only a few) modern artists who have insisted, always, on acting in relation to the unknown, in Jorn's sense; or perhaps what these artists have done is merely understood, as good rationalists also do, when this is actually what they are doing, and when it actually is not.

Wolterstorff—Kissing, Touching, and Crying

Nicholas Wolterstorff
"Why Philosophy of Art Cannot Handle Kissing, Touching, and Crying"
(2003)

---

[17]

I

From Friday, March 15 through Sunday, March 17, 2002, the Vienna Philharmonic performed four concerts in New York City, three in Carnegie Hall, and one, on Sunday evening, in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Two of the three Carnegie Hall concerts were enthusiastically reviewed inside the Arts section of the New York Times of Tuesday, March 19, by one of the Times regulars, Allan Kozinn. The heading for the review was "Fresh Power in Familiar Works." In his review, Kozinn writes that Bernard Haitink, the conductor of the Carnegie Hall concerts,

imposed order and an almost narrative sense of drama on [Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8] without taming it or smoothing its raw emotional edges. The Vienna players were in their element: the brass and winds produced the textured chords that are central to this orchestra's trademark sound, but it was the dusky, dynamically fluid string playing that gave the performance its soul.... The Schubert Ninth, on the Saturday program, was appealing in a similarly visceral way. Its familiar themes were writ large and driven hard, yet there was also sufficient transparency in the orchestra's sound that details of the music's inner lines sometimes shone through and altered the perspective.

The review of the concert in St. Patrick's Cathedral took up three columns on the front page of the Arts section, and then continued inside with three columns at the top of page 5, side by side with the two columns of the other review. The concert was described as a "free program to honor the victims of Sept. 11"—this being the date, in 2001, that a terrorist attack destroyed the Twin Towers in New York City. The review was headed "A Somber Memorial from the Vienna Philharmonic." The reviewer, another of the Times regulars, James R. Oestreich, wrote,

The memorial program anchored a basic sense of mourning in the Christian season of the Passion, centering on Haydn's unrelentingly somber "Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross." The evening opened with the solemn Adagio from Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. It ended with Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus," a simple consolatory choral work, performed without applause and with everyone in the audience holding a lighted candle.

One concertgoer was quoted as saying afterward, "After all the angst and the anger and the hassles of the last few months, the Mozart was like a benediction. It seems O.K. to let go a little, to let the dead rest in peace." Another attendee was quoted as saying, about the whole evening, "It is a warm, wonderful gesture [on the part of the Vienna Philharmonic]. It is very generous and very healing."

How unthinkably rude it is, even within the social norms of New York City, Planet Earth, ca. 2002, to subject this attendee's pronouncement to the scrutiny of analytic philosophy!

Rank—Art and Artist (viii)—Partiality and Totality

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

[100] I have already, in another connexion, starting from the psychology of the neurotic and discussing psychotherapeutic possibilities of curing him, emphasized the therapeutic and indeed absolutely vital character of illusions

in contrast to Freud,

who regards them (even from a historical point of view) merely as infantile wish-fulfilments which we have to outgrow.

I believe, however, that everything that is consoling in life—that is, everything therapeutical in the broader sense —can only be illusional, and even the therapeutic effect of analysis I have tried to explain in my latest "technical" work by the unreality of the analytical situation.

Rank—Art and Artist (vii)—On Abstraction and Intuition

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

Chapter Four
THE PLAY-IMPULSE
AND ÆSTHETIC PLEASURE

...

[91] Worringer has very rightly objected that art has up to now
[92]
been studied far too much from the standpoint of the æsthetic effect of the finished product , in the case of the Classical above all. The catchword of this method of criticism was "intuition (Einfühlung)," a word minted by Theodor Lipps, which, according to Worringer, stops short at the psychology of Classical art. To this intuitive æsthetic of Classical art he opposes the abstraction-character of primitive art , which produces pure style-forms where the craving for "feeling oneself into" leads to naturalism . But valuable as this critical demarcation of the Classical art-feeling may be, Worringer's application of his psychology of style to the problem has not enabled him to grasp the spiritual part played in the forming of style by the individual's urge to artistic creativity.

i.e. To jump ahead a few pages:

abstraction and intuition
are not specifically
characteristic of artistic experience,
but are general psychological attitudes
towards the world
.

Becker—Escape From Evil (iv)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

---

[146]

CHAPTER TEN

Retrospect and Conclusion:
What Is the Heroic Society?

. . . if we can no longer live the great symbolisms
of the sacred in accordance with the original belief
in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a second
naiveté in and through criticism.
Paul Ricoeur

...

As far as the science of man is concerned, many thinkers since the Enlightenment have believed that everything is possible for a science of society. ... All we have to do, they claim, is to change the structure of things and a new society will emerge...

[147]

... Revolutionaries still today trumpet this philosophy of history as the fall of pure men into corrupt social structures.

The reason the philosophy is so attractive is that men need hopes and ideals to urge them on—... All truths are part-truths as far as creatures are concerned, and so there is nothing wrong with an illusion that is creative. Up to a point, of course: the point at which the illusion lies about something very important, such as human nature. If it is false to that, then it becomes oppressive, because if you try falsely to make a new beginning you fail. I know that this bit of wisdom is already stale to our epoch, but even in its staleness we can't let go of it. ... Marxism in its traditional form is simply not a correct guide for a new society. But the irony is that we simply do not know what to do with this stale truth. That is why there is such a crisis in Marxist thought, in leftist-humanist thought. ...

Becker—Escape From Evil (iii)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

---

[96]

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Nature of Social Evil

Nor can we deny that we all eat and that each
of us has grown strong on the bodies of innumer-
able animals. Here each of us is a king in a field
of corpses.
Elias Canetti

We have seen with Rank that the driving force behind evil in human affairs stems from man's paradoxical nature: in the flesh and doomed with it, out of the flesh in the world of symbols and trying to continue on a heavenly flight. ...

Our great wistfulness about the world of primitive man is that he managed willy-nilly to blunt the terrible potential destructiveness of the drama of heroism and expiation. He didn't have the size, the technological means, or the world view for running amok heroically. Heroism was small scale and more easily controlled:... ...a kind of warfare that has always made military men chuckle. Among the Plains Indians it was a kind of athletic contest in which one scored points by touching the enemy; often it was a kind of disorganized, childish, almost hysterical game... Anyone was liable to be snatched out of his hut at daybreak, and on mountainous islands like those of Polynesia groups lived in continual fear of those just over the

[97]

ridge... This is hardly the ideal of altruism, and there are very few today who have a romantic image of primitive man's peaceful nature;... Since we do not experience the terror of the occasional victims of primitive raids, we can look back nostalgically at the small numbers consumed at random, and compare them with those who died in one day at Dresden or one flash at Hiroshima.

Rousseau had already wistfully observed the comparatively low toll of life that primitive warfare took, and a whole tradition of social analysts including Marx agreed with him. ... Today we are agreed that the picture looks something like this: that once mankind got the means for large-scale manipulation of the world, the lust for power began to take devastating tolls . ...

Becker—Escape From Evil (ii)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

---

[52]

CHAPTER FOUR

The Evolution of Inequality

Radin's view of how shamans and elders gained control of ritual is full of volition, scheming, competitiveness ;... At the level of equalitarian society—simple hunting and gathering tribes—Radin's scheme... is compelling. But what I like about Hocart's view of the growth of privilege at a later stage of social evolution is that it accents the other side: the common accord with which men reach for their own subjection.

In Radin's equalitarian society organismic well-being is achieved by an economy of reciprocal exchange;... In Hocart's rank society there is a new economic process: the flow of goods funnels to a center of power... he takes the surplus, pools it, and then gives it out as needed.

Immediately the question arises, Why did people go from an economy of simple sharing among equals to one of pooling via an authority figure who has a high rank and absolute power? The answer is that man wanted a visible god always present to receive his offerings, and for this he was willing to pay the price of his own subjection. In Hocart's words:

The Fijians had invisible gods, sometimes present in the priest or in an animal; they preferred a god always present, one they could see and speak to, and the chief was such a god. That is the true reason for a Fijian chief's existence: he receives the offerings of his people, and in consequence they prosper.

[53]

That is, they prosper because there is a god right on the spot that visibly accepts their offerings; thus there is no doubt about their favor in his eyes.

... Prosperity and chiefs were associated because the tribes with great chiefs were actually more prosperous. Hocart explains this as a circular process : the wealthier tribes were more energetic, and so they rose among their neighbors. But part of the reason that they were more energetic was that "there is no doubt that present divinity evoked an enthusiasm which acted as a tonic, and braced men to greater efforts." "A Fijian will put his back into his work when striving to shine in the eyes of the great man." Imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today if we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labors. ...

... Besides, says Hocart, if you are without a king you are in a position of inferiority in relation to your neighbors ; when others parade their visible god, and their favor in his eyes, how can you stand being shown up as having no god of your own? The Jews were mocked in the ancient world because they had no image of their god, he seemed like a mere figment of their imagination;... ... one always knew how one stood with the visible god , but the Israelis were never sure how they stood with their invisible one —the whole thing must have seemed sick.

To speak of the Pharaoh is to sum up the whole process: once you have a visible ritual principal in the form of a chief or a king,

[54]

a visible god, by definition you already have divine kingship—the great emergent tyranny of the ancient world. ... Divine kingship sums up the double process of macro- and microcosmization: it represents a "solarization of man, and a humanizing of the sun."

Becker—Escape From Evil (i)

Ernest Becker
Escape From Evil
(1975)

---

[xv]

Prefatory Note

Approaching death, Ernest Becker requested that the original manuscript of this, his final book, rest private and unpublished in a desk drawer, no energy remaining in him for any further barter with the gods. Believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his scientific literary career, Robert Wallace and I (with some initial anguish over the risk of irreverence) firmly decided upon publication realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus. ...

Marie Becker

---

Rank—Art and Artist (vi)—Life and Creation

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

[37]

Chapter Two
LIFE AND CREATION

...

[38]

...the fundamental problem of the relation between living and creating in an artist,...the reciprocal influence of these two spheres.
...creativity lies equally at the root of artistic production and of life experience. ...lived experience can only be understood as the expression of volitional creative impulse, and in this the two spheres of artistic production and actual experience meet and overlap. Then, too, the creative impulse itself is manifested first and chiefly in the personality, which, being thus perpetually made over, produces art-work and experience in the same way. ...

[39] In creation the artist tries to immortalize his mortal life. He desires to transform death into life, as it were, though actually he transforms life into death. For not only does the created work not go on living; it is, in a sense, dead; both as regards the material, which renders it almost inorganic, and also spiritually and psychologically, in that it no longer has any significance for its creator, once he has produced it. ...

...besides the original biological duality of impulse and inhibition in man;...[there is also to be reckoned with] the psychological factor par excellence, the individual will, which manifests itself both negatively as a controlling element, and positively as the urge to create. This creator-impulse is not, therefore, sexuality, as Freud assumed, but expresses the antisexual tendency in human beings, which we may describe as the deliberate control of the impulsive life. ...

[40] If we compare the neurotic with the productive type, it is evident that the former suffers from an excessive check on his impulsive life, and according to whether this neurotic checking of the instincts is effected through fear or through
[41]
will, the picture presented is one of fear-neurosis or compulsion-neurosis. With the productive type the will dominates, and exercises a far-reaching control over (but not check upon) the instincts, which are pressed into service to bring about creatively a social relief of fear. Finally, the instincts appear relatively unchecked in the so-called psychopathic subject, in whom the will affirms impulse instead of controlling it. In this type...we have, contrary to appearances, to do with weak-willed people...; the neurotic, on the other hand, is generally regarded as the weak-willed type, but wrongly so, for his strong will is exercised upon himself and, indeed, in the main repressively...

And here we reach the essential point of difference between the productive type who creates and the thrwarted neurotic... Both are distinguished fundamentally from the average type, who accepts himself as he is, by their tendency to exercise their volition in reshaping themselves. ...

Art and Artist (v) + Bodies and Artifacts (v)

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

[11] Primitive religion, as a belief in souls (as we know it), is originally so abstract that it has been called irreligious by comparison with higher religions, in which the gods have already assumed concrete form. But from a study of these abstract preliminary stages of religion, which are a matter of spirits and demons, we see also that the urge for abstaction in primitives is rooted in the soul-belief that, in the intellectualized form of the East, culminates in the absolute abstract of the soul. Compared with the idea of the soul or its primitive predecessors even the abstractest form of art is concrete, just as on the other hand the most
[12]
definite naturalism in art is abstract when compared with nature.

Good point, re: relative qualities. Naturalist artists are trapped in abstraction much as Satanists are trapped in Christianity.

But the origins-of-religion stuff is hard to follow. If the gods have already assumed concrete form in higher religions , did the "lower" religions not project the god-force onto very concrete beings and objects? The omniscient Christian god seems ultimately abstract compared to myriad snake-gods whose abstract being may at least inhabit real snakes periodically.

Rank—Art and Artist (iv)—Dynamic Needs of Equalization

Otto Rank
Art and Artist
trans. Charles Francis Atkinson
(1932/1989)

---

[xlviii] a paradoxical phenomenon discloses itself, which will not startle the psychologist and indeed will facilitate our approach to the understanding of the spiritual dynamism in artistic creativity. The autonomous individualism of primitive man, as well as that of the lordly masters appears to be more dependent on Nature in its artistic creativeness than is the sedentary collective type of man, who, though depending to a great extent on nature's moods and his own environment (of commerce), can yet rise to abstractions in art which are quite independent of reality. We shall see presently how this compensatory function of the art-form brings the development of personality and its dynamic need of equalization into unison. Here I would merely point out...that in neither of the two art-forms is it a question of an absolute style-principle, but only of a more or a less, while at the same time both style-forms alike possess the tendency to reproduce something absent , which in certain cases happens to be a natural object, while in others it pictures an idea. The obvious purpose in this tendency is domination , whether this takes the form of a naturalistic representation of an animal as a hunting spell or of the symbolic representation of a human abstraction. Behind both there is the creative will of the personality, which only now and then manifests itself directly, and at other times reacts to the compulsion of collective society and gives expression thereto. Undoubtedly this second art-form...is more capable of development, not only for stylistic and aesthetic, but for psychological reasons as well. For the abstraction at the base of this mechanical art represents even in itself a rising above nature, and it can be still further intensified and varied, whereas in naturalistic or organic art the objects within a cultural environment are limited, so that the artistic effort to deal with them otherwise than in their natural setting does not find them very malleable. In a word, art consists in the latter case of arbitrary

[xlix]

re-creation (not copying) of the given objects; in the other, of the new creation of ever changing ideas. Nevertheless, for both we must assume a creative force in the individual himself, which has to be studied in its various forms before we can arrive at a deeper understanding of the art-forms produced by it.

[end of Introduction]

---

I

Rank's

feeling is insistent that artistic creativity, and indeed the human creative impulse generally, originate solely in the constructive harmonising of this fundamental dualism

of individual and collective. (p. xxii)

By therefore relegating

biography (or pathography)

to the margins, Rank reestablishes a line (perhaps a barrier) between transmission and reception, a line that uncritical, self-projecting observers have tended to blur.

I see no reason why the audience cannot also be creating something through their participation, incommensurable as that something may be with what the artist has presented to them. Yes, reception can be a (self-)generative act, a transformative act, or at the very least an act of consolidation, a renewing of vows to ego and/or to alter. Audiences must also have some dynamic need of equalization even if that need is not as tempestuous as that of the artist-type . But I also see no reason why we should be obligated to assume this of the audience tout court. The old saw about actions speaking louder than words is never too obvious or trite to be relevant. Experience permits us to be dubious when someone tells us offhandedly that a song or a movie or an unrealized concept piece "changed my life." Don't tell me, show me. Don't write your own biography so mechanistically. The fact that you yourself have done it does not make it valid.

Becker—Birth (vi)

Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)

---

[155]

Chapter Twelve

WHAT WOULD A SCIENCE
OF MAN THEN BE?

The Merger of Social, Psychological, and
Political Theory

"The real possibility is one which can materialize, considering the
total structure of forces interacting in an individual or in a society.
The real possibility is the opposite of the fictitious one which
corresponds to the wishes and desires of man but which, given the
existing circumstances, can never be realized."
Erich Fromm
(1964, p. 140)

One thing that right away lightens the burden of our inquiry into the real is that all of human evolution and history has been a search for the true interrelationships of things; we have been probing reality for hundreds of thousands of years. When man found that certain ways of doing things worked to bring him satisfaction and survival, these ways became true and right; ways that didn't work became false and wrong. And so moral codes grew up around the interrelationships of things, theories of good and evil that tried to separate the real from the illusory.

The curious thing about this long search for reality, as

[156]

anthropologists have long known, is that a large part of it was accidental. Primitive man did not know the interrelationships of things in many areas of his life, and he thought these interrelationships were primarily invisible and spiritual. As a result, when something important did not work, he looked for any clues he could get, any kind of chance hints and associations. ...

... The second curious thing about accidental causal explanations is that they did not vanish from the earth with prehistoric evolution, but remained an intimate part of human beliefs all through human history, right up to yesterday, so to speak. The Athenian civilization that we so much admire for its noble reason began to expire in the blood of its soldiers on the beaches of Sicily, while its admirals cut open chickens to try to get a good entrail reading for a propitious time of departure. ...

[157]

...

Becker —Birth (v)

Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)

---

[112]

Chapter Ten

CULTURE: THE RELATIVITY
OF HERO-SYSTEMS

"If the end of all is to be that we must take our sensations as simply
given or as preserved by natural selection for us, and interpret this
rich and delicate overgrowth of ideas, moral, artistic, religious and
social as a mere mask, a tissue spun in happy hours . . . how
long is it going to be well for us not to 'let on' all we know
to the public?"
William James

...

[113]

...: in things social, man is the only discreditor of man. ...

One of the main reasons that cultures can be so directly undermining to one another is that, despite their many varieties, they all ask and answer the same basic questions. So that when two different ways of life come into contact they clash on the same vital points. There are only a handful of such vital points or "common human problems" (cf. Kluckhohn, 1950);... One of the great advantages of being able to boil the human situation down to the same questions the world over is that it partly lifts the screen that divides us from other peoples and ways of life. ...there is what anthropologists have long recognized as "the psychic unity of mankind":... ...even if you can never actually feel and see as another, you can understand strange premises and see sympathetically why people do not act as we do. ...

[114]

...

Becker—Birth (iv)

---

[75]

Chapter Eight

CULTURE AND PERSONALITY

The Standardization of the Self-Esteem

"We are born to action; and whatever is capable of suggesting and
guiding action has power over us from the first."
CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

". . . mankind's common instinct for reality . . . has always held the
world to be essentially a theatre for heroism."
WILLIAM JAMES

If there were any doubt that self-esteem is the dominant motive of man, there would be one sure way to dispel it; and that would be by showing that when people do not have self-esteem they cannot act, they break down. And this is exactly what we learn from clinical data, from the theory of the psychoses, as well as from anthropology. ...

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... Anthropologists have long known that when a tribe of people lose the feeling that their way of life is worth-while they may stop reproducing, or in large numbers simply lie down and die beside streams full of fish:...

... It is wrong to say that man is a peacock, if we mean thereby to belittle his urge to self-glorification, and make it seem a mere matter of vanity and self-display. ...when we tally the sum of these efforts, the excruciating earnestness of them, the eternal grinding-out of the inner-newsreel, we can see that something really big is going on—...

This is the uniquely human need,... each person's need to be an object of primary value, a heroic contributor to world-life—... This seems to be the logical and inevitable result of the symbolic constitution of self-worth in an unbelievably complex animal with exquisitely sensitive

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and effusive emotions. ... Self-preservation, physio-chemical identity, pulsating body warmth, a sense of power and satisfaction in activity—all these tally up in symbolic man to the emergence of the heroic urge. ... Freud saw the universality of narcissism, and revealed the invertedness and the clinical liabilities of it. Adler too studied the neurotic overemphasis on the "Will to Power," and made the idea a central part of his formulations. But it was Nietzsche, earlier, who saw the healthy expression of the "Will to Power" and glory, the inevitable drive to cosmic heroism by the animal who had become man.

... If you are a psychiatrist or social worker, and want to understand directly what is driving your patient, ask yourself simply how he thinks of himself as a hero, what constitutes the framework of reference for his heroic strivings—... If you are a student of society, and want to understand why youth opts out of the system, find out why it fails to offer them the possibility of real heroism. If you are a child psychologist you already understand the

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deeper meaning of what we casually and often scornfully term "sibling rivalry." ... The child needs to be an object of primary value, and by definition only one person can be primary;... Children are not vicious animals struggling to dominate rivals, but culture-heroes in the making, desperately trying to stand out.