For this week’s Philosophical Happy Hour, we are discussing the proper attitude towards art. What is art’s end? To how should we comport ourselves with respect to art? A Lyceum Member writes:
What is the proper relation that one should have toward art? It is common today for people to speak about art as a form of escapism but something about this understanding seems quite troubling. Escapism, it seems, is a response to the drudgery and depression people face in their day to day existence. This form of escapism is very much connected to consumerist culture and so it seems as though escapism in this sense is just a distraction. However, there is another form of escapism that I have come across from Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories”. In that essay he describes escapism as a way of going to the real which is found in the stories and our day to day lives actually lack the real. I was interested in what others thought about this topic, especially those with an artistic background.
We may find questions concerning art’s purpose to have been asked not long after the art of writing itself came into existence. Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Plotinus, and many others of antiquity ventured on such enquiries. Such questions carried through the Latin Age, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and continue to this day. Couched always in consideration of humankind, theories of art’s purpose, and how we ought ourselves to engage with it, have varied as much as the philosophical anthropologies in which their authors believed. Those who cannot raise their eyes from the world of men to heavens of truth, it seems to me, serve as poor guides. Therefore…
Horace’s Ars Poetica
Quintius Haratius Flaccus (65–8 BC)—better known as Horace—wrote a poem in his later years under the title Ars Poetica. He wrote this brief but influential work to illustrate the purpose of art, which he proposed as twofold: to instruct and delight. To quote a few lines:
The principal source of all good writing is wisdom.
Translation by Smith Palmer Bovie; a prose translation by Smart and Blakeney is available here.
The Socratic pages will offer you ample material,
And with the matter in hand, the words will be quick to follow.
A man who has learned what is owning to country and friends,
The love that is due a parent, a brother, a guest,
What the role of a judge or senator chiefly requires,
What partis played by the general sent off to war,
Will surely know how to write the appropriate lines
For each of his players. I will bid the intelligent student
Of the imitative art to look to the model of life
And see how men act, to bring his speeches alive.
At times a play of no particular merit,
Artistically lacking in strength and smoothness of finish
But with vivid examples of character drawn true to life,
Will please the audience and hold their attention better
Than tuneful trifles and verses empty of thought…
Poets would either delight or enlighten the reader,
Or say what is both amusing and really worth using.
But when you instruct, be brief, so the mind can clearly
Perceive and firmly retain. When the mind is full,
Everything else that you say just trickles away.
Fictions that border on truth will generate pleasure,
So your play is not to expect automatic assent
To whatever comes into its head…
Much has been said about this twofold aim: its balance or proportion, the manner of instruction, the question of moralizing and the compromise of artistic or mimetic integrity, and so on. Can the didactic truly be art? Conversely, we might ask: can the vulgar? Does art lack something absent a moral core? And what should we make of Horace’s claim that “Fictions that border on truth will generate pleasure”? To what extent can we depart from the “real” in our fictive creations?
On the Sublime
Often attributed to Cassius Longinus, sometimes to Dionysius of Halicamassus, this ambiguously-authored work nevertheless highlights a point seemingly contrary to that of Horace: its titular sublimity.
As I am writing to you, my good friend, who are well versed in literary studies, I feel almost absolved from the necessity of premising at any length that sublimity is a certain distinction and excellence in expression, and that it is from no other source than this that the greatest poets and writers have derived their eminence and gained an immortality of renown. The effect of elevated language upon an audience is not persuasion but transport. At every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer. Similarly, we see skill in invention, and due order and arrangement of matter, emerging as the hard-won result not of one thing nor of two, but of the whole texture of the composition, whereas Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and at once displays the power of the orator in all its plenitude.
Translation by W. Rhys Roberts. Havell’s translation available here.
To be carried away by well-wrought words—or indeed, by screen and score and all manner of artistic comportment: who has not taken pleasure at this? Fantastic worlds, be they wrought by Tolkien or Milton, Dante or Lewis, have a way of enrapturing us. So too, great song and poetry. The sublime (which seemingly yet defies definition) transports us beyond ourselves. But is this transportation always good? Can we become addicts of the sublime? Does such addiction undermine its quality?
Join our Discussion
Can we use art to escape the hum-drum drudgery of our lives? Should it be such an escape? Or must it be closer to reality—must it not transport us to “secondary worlds”, as Tolkien would have it? Should it be didactic? Come share your thoughts this Wednesday (4/3)!
Philosophical Happy Hour
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Come join us for drinks (adult or otherwise) and a meaningful conversation. Open to the public! Held every Wednesday from 5:45–7:15pm ET.
