Art and morality

« have a strong emotional effect, but which make it difficult for us to decide, on account of their complexity, howthey influence our outlook and thus our conduct.

This lies at the centre of the long-lasting debate about the effectof tragedy (see Tragedy ).

It seems strange that we should be unable to decide whether tragedies of great power, such as Oedipus the King , exalt, devastate, bewilder, affirm or question basic values, and so on.

Yet all these positions are held and argued about with passion.

That the issue remains so contentious is no doubt partly due tothe fact that there is often a discrepancy between how they make us feel and what we think they ought to makeus feel, and that it is difficult to keep in focus, after the immediate experience of such works, what we actually didfeel.

As any experience of great complexity recedes, we are apt to simplify its effect on us, especially if we are inthe grip of a gratifying theory.

The only thing that can be confidently asserted in this area is that there is no doubtthat some works of art have moral (and of course political) effects.

3 Artistic value and the value of art Although works of art do have moral effects, it has been argued that it is not part of their value that they do.

It was largelyin reaction to the oppressive moralism of Victorian criticism that Wilde remarked that there are no such things asmoral or immoral works of art.

And it is widely agreed (though not universally) that art which, in Keats' words, 'haspalpable designs upon us' is inferior.

But that does not mean that the moral effects of art are irrelevant to its valueas art, only that it is less likely to achieve them if they are crudely manifest.

Nor does the oft-cited fact that thosewho frequent art are not conspicuously better than those who do not have any cogency.

It is very difficult toimprove people and failure to do so may reflect more on people than on the attempt.

Further, to claim that art insome cases derives its value from its moral qualities is not to claim that they are invariably relevant.

It is not easyto envisage a plausible argument to show that much instrumental music or painting has moral properties or effects;and the same is true of a considerable amount of literature.

The claim, made by Tolstoy, that art is only valuable inso far as it has a beneficial influence on people's behaviour, cannot be refuted, but equally cannot be established.It is an attitude one might choose to adopt, but it would certainly eliminate a great deal of what is normally calledart.

It might be claimed that any interesting aesthetic theory will do this, and that what matters is how radical weare prepared to allow an aesthetic theory to be.

Any theory that rules out much of what is widely valued, either onthe ground that it is not art at all, or that it is bad art, risks appearing ridiculous.

There is a certain amount of art(not a great deal, but a significant amount) which takes the form of something approaching a parable.

Tolstoy'sgreat short story 'How much land does a man need?' is a good example.

In such cases it is hard to say thatsomeone could appreciate it without grasping its moral point.

To confine oneself to admiration for its economy,tension, verve, but not to recognize the end those qualities serve would be to fail to recognize a realized intention.Similarly, in a rather more complex case, to see or listen to Beethoven's Fidelio without taking into account its concern with injustice, heroism and freedom (and that not surprisingly it favours the last two and opposes the first)would be so strange that we would normally say that anyone who claimed to be indifferent to its political and moralqualities was simply not responding to the work.

If such a person said that they were only moved by the music, andregarded the drama as too crude to take any interest in, we would wonder how they could be moved appropriatelyby the music without acknowledging that it was articulating the dramatic action.

Of course one could listen to themusic in a purely abstract way, regarding the voices simply as instruments, but that would not be listening toFidelio , but only to an aspect of it, somewhat as if one were to enjoy the sound of a poem in a language that one did not understand.

Of course one need not agree with the morality that one takes a work to be propounding orembodying in order to value it.

But once more it does not follow from this that one ignores its morality or regards itas irrelevant, nor does it follow that one thinks less well of the work.

One may welcome art which puts a moralposition that one can't share in a plausible light.

The phenomenology of responses to art is itself a highly complexmatter, but it seems to be the case that in imaginatively entering the world of a work one is enabled to test one'sreactions to people who hold sets of moral views very different from one's own, and that this is one of the reasonsthat we value the experience of novels, dramas, etc.

Though it is notoriously hard to say precisely what effect apowerful work of art has on us, there is wide agreement that we do sometimes feel changed by such works, whichis a cause both for valuing them and also for feeling anxious about them.

The latter tends to have dominatedWestern speculation on the subject, because many philosophers, Plato being the first and most influential, havetaken it that art typically works on 'the passions', of which they have harboured deep suspicions, because they arethought of as hard to govern, irrational, selfish and destructive.

And the greater the work of art in terms of itspower to affect us, the more dangerous it may be.

This raises the issue of internal and external reasons for valuingart.

Might it not be the case that the reasons we have for valuing a work as art are, at least sometimes, equallyreasons for disapproving of it morally? An analogy with sport might make the point more clearly.

Within such a sportas soccer one may behave in a way that is beneficial to the side one is playing on, in that it helps to score a goal;but the whole activity might be frowned on for fostering a spirit of competitiveness, if that is thought to be a badthing.

Victorian schoolmasters were very keen on competitive sports for a range of reasons which might needexamining.

But it would be possible to disapprove of the whole set of sporting activities that they promoted whilebeing able to make judgments about how well someone was playing a specific game.

Similarly, the reasons we givefor putting a high value on a work of art might, in the context of our complete set of standards, be reasons forthinking that art itself is deplorable; or that most of what is highly esteemed is deplorable.

In practice it turns outto be difficult to maintain this distinction, so that we often find people making what appear to be artistic judgmentswhen they are really making judgments about the whole institution.

Conversely, an overenthusiastic application ofthe distinction leads people to adopt a very narrow set of terms or concepts which they take to be appropriate forjudging individual works, and many considerations which might be considered relevant are claimed to be external,that is, to be dealing with a different question - the nature and value of art itself.

4 Art and the self; art and society Continuing this line of thought, we can deal briefly with two other lines of thought about art and its relation to other enterprises, both of which derive more or less directly from Hegel (§8) .

It was characteristic of him to take a historical perspective on art, valuing the art of different ages and cultures in terms of its connections with theirother concerns.

For us, living in a culture decisively formed in all its aspects by Christianity, art takes on a'romantic' aspect, in his idiosyncratic use of that term.

Hegel sees the tension in all kinds of art as the relationship. »