Art and truth

« literature can illuminate how we ought to live has come from Martha Nussbaum.

Her detailed analyses of literaryworks - the novels of Henry James in particular - set out to show that literature provides a means of extending ourmoral awareness beyond the limits to which traditional moral philosophy can take us.

'Schematic philosophers'examples', Nussbaum says, 'almost always lack the particularity, the emotive appeal, the absorbing plottedness, thevariety and indeterminacy, of good fiction; they lack, too, good fiction's way of making the reader a participant anda friend' ( 1990: 46 ).

Only once its many aspects are adequately represented can a complex ethical question become the subject of clear reflection, and then it is easier to see the various and sometimes conflicting valuesthat are at stake.

For example, by taking us into the lives of its characters, Henry James' The Golden Bowl is able to show us how Maggie Verver's aspirations to a certain kind of moral perfection stand in the way of the full flourishingof her marriage; her love for the prince, fully acknowledged, calls for a more complex moral stance in which shemust relinquish the hope of guiltless moral perfection.

Thus, she must confront the fact that the full expression ofher love may require 'a tragically necessary blindness' ( 1990: 144 ) - it may require her sometimes to turn away from or even wound others who are close to her.

3 Other arts It is natural that representational art, especially literature, should offer the clearest examples of works that are in some way true of the world.

But it may not offerthe only examples.

Turning to nonrepresentational art, Jerrold Levinson has argued ( 1990 ) that there are various ways in which music, a mainly nonrepresentational art form, can aptly be described as true.

Suppose we accept (asseems reasonable) that anger is a destructive emotion.

Passages in the fourth movement of Beethoven's Pastoral symphony express anger, Levinson suggests, and the anger is presented as destructive.

In this case it seemsnatural to describe the passages as true.

A different kind of example occurs where a transition in a piece of musicfrom one emotional quality to another carries the implicit suggestion that that transition is psychologically plausiblein human terms; and we judge the music true if we think it plausible in this way.

Nelson Goodman (§2) holds that all the arts, representational and nonrepresentational, serve a cognitive function ( 1972 ).

Thus it is a mistake to associate science alone with the cognitive and to limit the concerns of art to the evocation or expression of feeling.For him, inventiveness in both art and science consists in the development or modification of elements in a symbolsystem.

Successful symbols illuminate the world through the aptness with which they fit their subject-matter,rewarding those who engage with them with enlightening new ways of seeing the world.

Goodman's ideas canfruitfully be read in conjunction with Ernst Gombrich's work on the visual arts ( 1951 ).

Gombrich starts by attacking the 'myth of the innocent eye'.

The recognition of what lies in our field of view when we perceive, he argues,requires the organization of visual input: what we see is structured by what we expect to see.

Just as scientificdiscovery is preceded by the invention of successful hypotheses, the development of our awareness of the visualworld requires inspired modifications to the 'schemas' we bring to bear upon it.

The history of painting, Gombrichsuggests, can be seen as an experimental process by which our actual visual capacities are gradually enhanced bypainters' corrective modifications to the existing schemas available for representing the visible world.

Rather thansimply assuming that our visual awareness reflects the world in an unproblematic way, providing the touchstone bywhich the accuracy of a picture can be judged, Gombrich's account construes painting as a means by which thatawareness is developed.

The view, shared by Goodman and Gombrich, that art is an instrument of perception, is notunproblematic.

But it is an important development in twentieth-century aesthetics, and its exposition in the work ofthese philosophers provides some of the best reading the subject has to offer.

4 The artistic relevance of truth If a work of art implies the accuracy or correctness of a certain claim, representation, perspective or attitude, can itor should it increase our estimation of the artistic worth of the work if we take the claim or representation to betrue or the attitude or perspective to be accurate or correct? A negative answer is implied by I.A.

Richards when hewrites of our response to literature: the question of belief or disbelief, in the intellectual sense, never arises whenwe are reading well.

If unfortunately it does arise… we have for the moment ceased to be reading poetry and havebecome astronomers, or theologians, or moralists, persons engaged in quite a different type of activity.

(1929: 277) Support for Richards's claim might come from the idea that art is a distinct category of human activity, with its ownpurposes and hence its own criteria of merit.

On this view, just as we judge the merits of, say, the binding of abook by the standards of bookbinding, so we should judge poetry (remaining with the case of literature) by thespecial qualities that set poetry apart as an activity: the aptness of verbal choices, the displayed command ofmetre and rhythm, the elegance and unity of the poem as a whole, and so on.

But it is unclear that poetry (or anyother art form) comprises a self-contained activity with a fixed purpose that defines it as poetry, and dogmatic tosuppose that its 'purpose' necessarily excludes the accurate representation of how things stand in the world.Furthermore, a view like Richards's is hard to reconcile with past and current critical practice.

Henry James is widelyadmired for his moral subtlety, and critics generally assume (and it would seem bizarre to deny) that this qualityadds to his stature as a serious novelist.

Malcolm Budd ( 1983 ) has produced an important argument that bears on this issue.

He makes the point that the value of a work of art as art is always intrinsic to the experience it offers.

Ittherefore does not include the beneficial effects the work may have upon our lives.

For example, if a novel containsan insight that could illuminate our lives, its insightfulness may accrue to its value as art, but only in so far as theinsight informs the reading experience itself, and not in virtue of the work's educative effects.

This seems right, forsomeone could value and enjoy a work as art even though, due to complacency, forgetfulness or some otheridiosyncracy, they failed to respond to it in such a way that it benefited or informed their life.

But to say this is notto drive a wedge between artistic or aesthetic value, on the one hand, and moral or intellectual value, on the other.These values are not in opposition.

It may be its intellectual or moral character that accounts for much of a work'simpact as an object of experience; if it displays intellectual or moral shortcomings - philosophical immaturity, forexample, or racist attitudes - then that is likely to diminish the value we place on the experience it offers.

So,regarding the artistic relevance of truth, we may indeed value a work less as art if we fail to be persuaded aboutthe truth of a claim it implicitly makes about the world - provided its failure to persuade lessens its value as anobject of experience.. »