Tolstoy Focuses His Genius on Art

The thing about reading Tolstoy is that he says things you've already thought and suspected, but says it better than you can. As with all of Tolstoy's books, his characteristic style, personality, and moralism is suffused throughout. Even if you walk away disagreeing, you feel edified after having wrestled with the content. So, where to start?

What about his situating us in the strange world of art itself? And it is strange when you think about it. We're taken backstage to an opera or a ballet. We feel like we're really there. We hear the murmuring, yelling, shifting, tapping, groaning, shuffling, and all that white noise we'd expect backstage or during a rehearsal or practice. He points out how inane a lot of things are that go on. The stage director is yelling at everyone. Everyone there just grins and bears it. So much money is spent on all the costumes and makeup. So many people pay to see the end product. No matter how much the conductor yells at everyone, there is no limit to the amount of verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse they endure. All of this begs the question. What is this 'thing' that all these people are working toward creating?

And that's just opera. There are all the other modes of art as well.

So, what's that eternal, almost Socratic, question? What is art?

What then comes is a virtual whirlwind tour of pretty much every aesthetic theory on the market. It's a panorama of the entire aesthetic terrain at the time. No philosopher is spared Tolstoy's spirited scrutiny or scorn. No theory is sacrosanct. His consideration and sometimes curt dismissal of particular theories are a tad breezy and facile, but it all leads to what Tolstoy thinks anyway, and that's probably the main reason why readers bought the book anyway. I had just slogged through Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment. My mind felt like it had been limping in the hot tar of Kant's stodgy and turgid prose. It was a breath of fresh air to read Tolstoy's inimitable style. Tolstoy's animadversion is basically that 19th-century Art had been essentially about Beauty (and the distinct pleasure aroused from that Beauty), but that this can't be right, since there can be Beauty without Art and Art without Beauty.

Tolstoy's main point is that art is successful when it communicates an intended feeling to its audience. It successfully expresses the particular, comprehensible emotion of the artist as it's concretized in the aesthetic product. There is also a normative element. Any normal Joe should be able to be infected by such a feeling or emotion. It shouldn't only appeal to the elites or a particular class. It should be catholic, and universal. Theories of art might be able to get away with this, but not art itself. You also shouldn't have to endure hermeneutical acrobatics to finally catch art's meaning. A work of art shouldn't be veiled or gnostic or hard to grasp. It shouldn't ever be cryptic or turbid. It should be open to view. Bad art arises from entrenched 'schools of criticism', or being deceived into an 'agony of influence' (where you know that imitating certain art will ensure your social approval by the elites and invitations to those dreaded 'cocktail parties'), or set ways of creating Art, giving rise to the professionalization of those ways, getting a 'career' in those ways, where the main thing is to earn a living and make your Art a commodity, where you have an Aesthetic Emporium of sorts. To think about Art in economic terms is enough to my blood run cold.

As lofty as this sounds, I can't quite come to accept the essence of this theory. I see how it might be necessary in some cases, but I don't see why it would be sufficient in all. And I don't see why it's not sufficient in some cases, and not necessarily necessary in all cases. It's necessary in those cases where the artist intends to infect the audience with such a feeling/emotion. But is it sufficient? Isn't there more to a work of art than the communication of a feeling? Slicing a carrot on a cutting board infects me with a feeling, but that can't be art. Don't get me wrong. Feelings and emotions are about as meaningful as it gets. Perhaps they can be hierarchically related so that the more noble end of the emotional spectrum is that which successful art infects. But is that all there is? Such noble emotions can be aroused by other things besides art, it seems to me. Think of the noble emotions aroused by soldiers in battle.

More to the point, can't we pinpoint all the other things all the other theories of art postulate? As long as they can be put together consistently? Tolstoy dismisses them, but why can't I endorse them without making them necessary and sufficient for a work of art to be successful art? Depending on the context, they might emphasize things that are sufficient, but not necessary, or necessary, but not sufficient. I can't see anything in what Tolstoy argues that would prevent my doing this.

Tolstoy then talks about the best emotions, the ones that saturate his understanding of the essence of Christianity: the unity of men with God and men with one another. The artist whose art infects the audience with these emotions is the best art. There is some affinity with Kant's aesthetic sentiments. Kant called Beauty the symbol of morality and Tolstoy is concerned not to elevate Beauty above Morality, which he saw art in the elite classes doing. Also, art shouldn't arouse something prurient, like the sexual instinct alone, if at all. Trent Reznor's 'Animal' is out. Any art that expresses base emotions is condemned. I mostly agree with this. I do think art, along these lines, if done well, and if appreciated in the right spirit, can be edifying in some way I can't, at the moment, specify. Some such lingering idea like all truth being God's truth seems to be relevant. But I digress.

The end has to do with science. Tolstoy argues that the sciences shape how we judge what's important in this life. Change science to reflect what is noblest in life and art will follow suit. I'd have to think about that, but I wonder why it can't go the other way as well. Can't science be affected by art? Again, it just seems to me to depend. Sometimes one can be downstream from the other. Perhaps the movie 'Inherit the Wind' wouldn't have happened had Darwin not published 'Origin of Species', but I wonder about the cultural impact of the movie and how that impact may have impacted science more than Darwin might have impacted culture. I don't know. I'm just speculating. The arts and the sciences are two potent forces and it's hard to believe that influence flows in only one direction.

Overall, a great book well worth your time. Anything by Tolstoy is worth your time. He has the rare quality of being charming when dogmatic, and so one's pique is never fully awoken. The prose is consistently mellifluous and characteristically éclat, not peaks and valleys, but a steady, flowing river. The style is paradoxically romantic and possessed of commonsense realism. His critical attitude is peevish but oftentimes deserved. There are rarely any cavils. 

Kant's 'Critique of Judgment': Conceptual Labyrinth - nibble, nibble, nibble

Overall, the book could have used some editing, but fulsome, German prose begins to grow on you after a while. It does help tremendously that it is divided into 91 sections, the last two being the longest, so you can keep tabs along the way. Here is a bird's eye view of the book's contents:

Introduction

First Part: Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

First Section, First Book: Analytic of the Beautiful

First Section, Second Book: Analytic of the Sublime

Deduction of Pure Aesthetic Judgments

Second Section: The Dialectic of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment

Appendix: On the Methodology of Taste

Second Part: Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment

First Division: Analytic of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Second Division: Dialectic of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Appendix: Methodology of the Teleological Power of Judgment

Let it be known that these contents are extracted from 'The Critique of the Power of Judgment', translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, not 'The Critique of Judgment' as read for the audiobook, which I think is the one translated by James Creed Meredith. 

Kant is notorious for inventing idiosyncratic idioms to stretch and compact language to catch relevant concepts that hadn't yet been caught. So, comprehending Kant's philosophy is not unlike the experience of learning a foreign language. Luckily, depending on your translation, the footnotes come to the rescue with increasing urgency. To be completely honest, even though I won't read this again for a while, I confess that the work affects my mind like storm clouds. The sheer density of the book is taxing at times. You get a temporary reprieve now and then with a charming metaphor or some rare instances of pleasing diction, but overall it's a slog through a thick jungle of unfamiliar nomenclature related overall to Kant's grand metaphysical vision, which itself takes some time to get used to. I suspect that after you become familiar with the jungle, you'll enjoy it more. 

What about the Aesthetic Power of Judgment? This divides into the Beautiful and the Sublime. The gist of Kant's point about the Beautiful, at the risk of outraging the Kantian specialist and misleading the novice, is that when you make an aesthetic judgment, you're subsuming a particular under a universal, but the judgment is reflective, not determinative, which means you're not saying anything about The World as it is in itself, you're saying something about the principles by which you conceive The World. In this case, such principles are the product of the 'free play' between your Imagination and your Understanding. 

Now, as crestfallen as I am that I'm told that my judgments of the Beautiful aren't saying anything about The World, I find this idea of 'free play' intriguing. As I think about my own aesthetic experiences, Kant gives me a helpful conceptual scheme through which to interpret them. My imagination unifies the parts of some whole. My understanding interprets those parts and relates them together into some 'aesthetic whole'. The dynamic continues when my imagination unifies the parts of that whole differently, either by supplementing the original interpretation or replacing it altogether. 

The Sublime judgment refers to experiences that overtax your Imagination. The 'mathematical' sublime does this through the idea of infinity. The 'dynamically' sublime does this through phenomena in Nature. Here is an example of the latter. Imagine you're on a beach and the ocean water suddenly recedes miles into the distant horizon. In that distant horizon, you see what is undeniably a gigantic tidal wave barreling toward you! Fortunately, you're protected by an impenetrable force field and so the wave won't harm you. But there it is, getting closer and closer, until it's about 50 yards away, towering over you. It looks like its terrible crest could scrape the sky. And then the inevitable happens. That terrible crest begins to curl directly over where you're standing. You're filled with dread. But . . . you're absolutely safe from harm. And there is an odd pleasure about this. It's a combination of the titanic wave and snug safety. 

(You might feel something similar as you watch a YouTube video of some adrenaline junkie hang-gliding over the peak of some majestic mountain. He flies over the top of the mountain and then . . . a thousand-foot drop, miles of craggy majesty, and a gorgeous phantasmagoria of cliff faces, ravines, hills, boulders, snow, foliage, and lakes. You're safe in your living room as you watch, but watching it gives you that sublime feeling that Kant is talking about.)

Then there is the section on teleology. To reiterate, aesthetic judgments aren't about anything in the world. You're supposed to be in a state of pure disinterestedness, so when you ascribe teleology to whatever prompted that aesthetic judgment, this is again not going to be a product of determinative judgment. This is the transcendental deduction that Kant is known for. The world itself is not teleological, but the 'a priori' principles that make teleological judgment possible have to be transcendentally 'fixed' for our judgments to make any sense. 

Kant is adamant that Natural Theology is bunk, based on his noumenal/phenomenal distinction in the first critique, so much is made about the fact that you can't infer God's existence from the unavoidability of teleological judgment. All you can infer about teleological judgment is the fact that when we try to make sense of the world, and ourselves, we can't conceive of this 'properly' without subsuming it under the hegemony of 'mechanical laws'. However, the borders of this Kingdom are restricted by your mind's inability to conceive an unavoidable aspect of yourself and the world without imbuing with 'final causation'. And that's where teleological judgment comes in. Lots of affinities to Davidson's 'anomalous monism' and even Quine's Indispensability Arguments based on his Criterion of Ontological Commitment (in my opinion) here. 

Further, Kant applies his thoughts on teleological judgment to Biology. Different biological theories are discussed and dismissed. The idea of "purposiveness without a purpose" is introduced. The best I can make of this is that there is no overriding purpose imposed from without, but that some kind of purpose is conjured within. (Again, take what I say with a grain of salt because I'm not confident about this.) The view is called 'epigenesis'. It's the idea that biological organisms do come into being. New species don't evolve out of anything 'non-organismic' at a more fundamental level, so he denies that matter can emerge from non-matter. All emergence of this kind involves latent teleological blueprints for the emerging organism to follow. So, if matter emerges, something was already latent in wherever it came from to 'guide' its emergence. The takeaway is that not everything in biology is ruled by mechanical laws. Final causes are required. Required for what? It's required as the 'a priori' principle constitutive of our 'regulative' teleological judgment of biological reality. 

So, once again, we're basically trapped in our minds to make room for Kant's, enlightenment-era understanding of 'faith'. That doesn't mean the book is a waste of time at all. Kant is an intellectual titan. To wrestle with his thoughts is to wrestle with the efflorescence of an entire, conceptual epoch. You'll grab tons of souvenirs along the way. I recommend doing what I said in the title: nibble, nibble, nibble - especially if you're reading it for the first time. The SEP article, 'Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology', is a very helpful as a roadmap. I also profited from the section on this Critique in The Bloomsbury Companion to Kant. Re-read sections you don't understand and jot down Kantian idioms as they come. It'll save you lots of time. Nothing is random and Kant painstakingly ties them together into an intricately related mosaic of concepts. Its legacy is contested by some, as is its relevance to contemporary aesthetic studies, but from what I've read, Kant is making a comeback. And even if he wasn't, I've found, time and again, that the most up-to-date scholarship dismisses views on the flimsiest of foundations sometimes. So, judge for yourself!