The Experience of Beauty: Seven Essays and a Dialogue 9780773599826

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the experience of beauty

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The Experience of Beauty Seven Essays and a Dialogue

h a r ry u n d e rwood

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2016 i s b n 978-0-7735-4801-5 (cloth) i s b n 978-0-7735-9982-6 (epdf) i s b n 978-0-7735-9983-3 (epub) Legal deposit third quarter 2016 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Underwood, Harry, author The experience of beauty : seven essays and a dialogue / Harry Underwood. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isb n 978-0-7735-4801-5 (hardback). – is bn 978-0-7735-9982-6 (epdf). – isb n 978-0-7735-9983-3 (epub) 1. Aesthetics. 2. Art – Philosophy. I. Title. bh39.u53 2016

111’.85

c2016-903461-5 c2016-903462-3

This book was typeset in 10.5/14 Sabon.

Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein

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Contents

Preface ix Acknowledgments xv 1 The Experience of Beauty 3 2 Platonic Desire 29 3 Nietzsche’s Artist and His Thinker 55 4 A Dialogue on Truth, Love, Beauty, and Art 79 5 Seeing and Making in Art 90 6 On Truth in Art 111 7 Proust’s Vision 125 8 The Beauty Within 141 Notes 163 Some Further Reading 171 Index 173

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Preface

Beauty is a secret preoccupation of all of us. It is secret not because it is shameful but because it moves within us at a greater depth than do other things that engage us. The experience is often said to be wordless. Yet, though a feeling that comes over us, beauty seems also to express us; that is another reason for our intimacy with it. Why is a phenomenon so intrinsic to our experience so little grasped? Why, for that matter, is it so little written about? Beauty, one would think, is a natural subject for the philosophy of art and for the art critics but, in our age, they shy away. They are right to do so: the analytical techniques they employ, the slicing and dicing of concepts, are singularly incapable of capturing the essence of beauty. These approaches lead to a perverse predisposition to conceive of art as more about the intellect than the emotions. To capture beauty, a different talent is required. In every generation, a few books of prose steal onto the market, often memoirs of quite solitary lives, that seem to distill the poetry out of the writer’s experience. They are always marked by an intense concentration upon sensations and thoughts, which seem to seal off the writer and the place he or she inhabits. I have a cherished pile of such books, and you may too. They can serve as treatises on the nature of beauty. My objective here is different. The writers of whom I spoke address particular experiences. My objective is to understand the poetic itself, as an impulse moving through ordinary experience. This can be achieved only by staying close to the experience itself. So I have attempted, in the time-honoured style of the philosopher, a reflection upon my own

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experience. (I have also, of course, done some reading.) The philosopher, perhaps laughably, prizes his or her own intuitions as the key to a greater reality. But really intuitions are all anyone has to go on, and the philosopher also knows that, in light of the partiality of their source, it is essential to examine them as diligently as possible. This book, then, is an attempt to meet beauty on its own terms, as it presents itself to us, and to determine what in general can be said about the experience. Inevitably, this account will be partial and personal and will give the reader – I hope – something to disagree with. Yet I find that beauty seems to be questing after something, and what could that be if not its own meaning? I begin with beauty’s power to transfigure ordinary experience and how that instructs and shapes us. This leads to a discussion of the idea of beauty as a force for philosophical thought, for art, and for an ethical life (in the possession of a personal ideal). I present seven essays plus a dialogue, which to some extent round out earlier thoughts. There are two principal themes overall: the first concerns the meaning that beauty comes to have for a person through his or her experience of it; the second concerns the connection between coming to understand the meaning of beauty and becoming a developed person. The first essay describes how beauty enters into our perceptions, memories, and judgments, and, as a puzzle, becomes an occasion for reflection. The encounter with beauty is felt to be meaningful, but also a mystery. In the contemplation of this mystery, a person seeks the inner meaning of his or her experience. The love such contemplation inspires is at the centre of the experience of beauty. Coming to understand this will assist in revealing to oneself what one values and therefore in enhancing knowledge. The essay traces the development of the appreciation of beauty from the child to the adult. It considers to what extent the sense of beauty is personal and how it may be shared (as well as judged). Another and I can possess a common appreciation of beauty because, whatever its beginnings in any individual consciousness, the sense of beauty is always seeking out new forms of beauty to understand and appreciate. In the final essay, I return to our lives and their meaning, and argue that the ideal is the inspiration we find within them. If the first

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and final essays express my own vision, they bridge encounters with others – philosophers, artists, writers, and critics. I seek from these thinkers a critical understanding of their ideas as they bear upon my themes. Here we encounter Plato, Nietzsche, Cézanne and his interpreters, Iris Murdoch, and Proust. Plato and Nietzsche tell us about the nature of beauty in human experience and give us a sense of what matters in our experience and where it ought to lead. They understand that, for the budding philosopher, the desire for experience is also the desire to know its meaning. They write for that idealistic spirit. One might say that Plato’s Symposium is a vision of life for the aspiring person in the age of classical antiquity and all ages that look to it for inspiration and that Nietzsche’s The Gay Science fulfills that same role for the modern age. They share also the conviction that the quest for meaning is, at heart, a quest to know what is valuable – noble and fine – in human life and to embody it. Both contend that it is right to aspire to be a higher form of person. Both these philosophers, poets of experience as they are, convey the thought that beauty has a larger meaning than the pleasure it gives or other embellishment it may lend to ordinary life. For each, the beautiful, as an object of desire, mediates the desire for meaning in one’s life. Both Plato and Nietzsche point to the fact that we desire the experience of beauty. Both believe that the experience points us to matters of surpassing value. For both, therefore, beauty has a philosophical function, which is to provide an ethos for the transformation of the self. For Plato, the operative desire is for knowledge of the truth and takes the guise of an attraction to beauty (as the apprehension of inherent meaning). He believed that beauty serves as a marker of the good which is in certain things and that our love of beauty leads us, in stages, as our understanding of its meaning develops, to an experience of the good itself and therefore to wisdom. For Nietzsche, the operative desire is to discover one’s own truth and takes the guise of the creation of beauty (as the propagation of fresh meaning). He believed that a truthful understanding appreciates that the world has only such meaning as we confer upon it, so that each of us is like the artist who transfigures the world in accordance with his or her vision.

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These positions each implicate a certain philosophical ideal. For Plato, it is an ideal of self-cultivation, for Nietzsche one of self-realization. The differing ideals reflect differing conceptions of how beauty is rooted in reality: that it is an objective phenomenon, as Plato believed, or a subjective one, as Nietzsche did. The difference is whether beauty is seen or made. Granted that we love beauty, is such love, as Plato believed, an experience of neediness (a desire to possess the objects of our vision) or, as Nietzsche believed, one of a superabundance of feeling (a desire to bestow our vision upon the world)? For both, their philosophical projects are also visions, experiences of beauty itself: of the beauty these thinkers find in philosophy and desire that their readers find there too. In providing us with their visions, they model for us the philosophical life itself. In the end, to me at least, the fact that Nietzsche contended that he was writing against Plato (and the entire tradition) matters much less than the fact that his distinctive illumination of life complements Plato’s for those who desire to understand life in the round. It seemed irresistible, if a bit cheeky, that Plato and Nietzsche should be brought together for an imagined conversation, which is the subject of the dialogue that follows the essays about their ideas. Their differing views of the reality of beauty are shown here to have implications for the meaning and value of art (is it an attempt at seeing the world or at the making of one?) and for how we should live (is philosophical contemplation or purposeful activity preferable?). The discussion works its way to a kind of resolution in which a common theme is identified: that it is important that each person come to understand the nature of his or her experience in order to be able to place a value upon it. Both philosophers have been attacked for their illiberal politics. They would instill an aspiration toward a life that is exceptional. What’s worse, they believe that only the exceptional deserve to rule. If the first proposition is incontrovertible, I dispute the correctness of the second. These philosophers’ concerns do not seem to lie with politics at all, as the difficulty of extracting from their work a coherent political doctrine demonstrates. But if, in saying this, I am guilty of wishful thinking, still I am certain that the goals they prescribe for us as individuals, or rather for what we might individually make of

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such prescriptions, are salutary. In any event, anyone in our age who is sufficiently idealistic to desire a better self is already certain to be grounded in humane values, essential as they are to a good life. I will attempt no further defence of what seems to me not to require one. The three essays that follow the dialogue are about art and its conception of the world. Essay four argues that the best art exhibits both an apprehension of the real and an expression of the artist’s spirit. I study how Cézanne grappled with the stuff of the world in order to portray how it made itself visible to him. While he sought truth to appearances, his own vision is unavoidably implicated in the depths he lends to ordinary perception. Essay five examines the relationship of art to truth as expounded by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. She is sympathetic to Plato’s contention that there is a clear connection between any value art may have and its truthfulness, and she is critical of his contention that art lacks truthfulness. In her view, great art teaches by example. It provides a model of unselfish attention to the plural detail of the world. It also provides a just and merciful reckoning of the subjects it depicts. While Murdoch’s premises can be accepted so far as they go, her approach can also be criticized because in her preoccupation with a purity of vision, she neglects the importance of the depth that imagination brings to vision. Essay six, by reference to Proust, shows how vision as an individual conception of beauty at its highest is necessary to the realization of a work of art and also to a complete life. Proust shows, comically, that most people lack vision or any sort of self-understanding, and as a result their experience does not enlighten them. They merely express, irrepressibly, what they are. In his own case, his life as he depicts it is a distraction from the book he hopes to write. But living it is shown to have been essential, not just because it provides him with his material but more importantly because it shows him that he has all along possessed within himself the means for its expression. In the final essay, I consider the ideal as applied to a person’s life. What can one make of what one conceives to be the inner meaning of one’s experience? I argue that one fashions out of it, more or less consciously, an ideal for oneself. The ideal is an idea that one desires

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to place at the centre of one’s being because one finds it to be beautiful. This is not necessarily a philosophical idea or an image of the divine, but is more akin to an idea we seek to embody in our lives. Put another way, it is the self we desire to be – the anticipated result of our lifelong development. It is also, in a sense, our innermost self, because it concerns what all our feeling and all our thought have converged upon. Thought and feeling are inextricable, and they make up, for each of us, a whole, or make out of us a being that struggles to be whole. All human aspiration strives to achieve a spirit incarnate. If the ideal is abstract, how is it realized? Vision serves to do so. The ideal is discovered to us by love, but vision gives us our projects. One may therefore ask, where does vision come from? The answer is that it too comes from within our lives. It comes from a sense of beauty that is particular and personal and that informs the world as we see and encounter it, and also as it might yet be if it can be made to accord with the ideal. If, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder, then philosophy’s spark is the same as that of poetry and art. For any of us, being struck by some particular and personal beauty, as in the experience of wonder, may foster the determined attempt at understanding the deeper questions. The answers sought are actually embedded in the questions that we pose to ourselves, or in the search they precipitate, for the questions, and the search, imply that one is a being of a certain sort. It is by virtue of that fact that we possess a particular vision and thus that we are creative beings. In us, self-expression takes an original but still ever-to-be-determined form. If all this is true, if we are creatures of vison and a sense of beauty is at the root of vision, then it must be true that we are each, in our lives, challenged to grasp a mystery. Nietzsche said that poetry is a truth that, once unveiled, remains a veil. I believe that the same holds true for all the deeper stirrings of thought, and hope that, despite all the words that follow, I have remained faithful to what Nietzsche divined.

Acknowledgments

I thank my respected former teacher John Burbidge and my learned friend Gerald Owen for having read and commented upon earlier drafts of this book and for having encouraged me to persevere. The publisher’s anonymous reviewers commented on drafts with sympathy and insight, and made pertinent criticisms that improved the final result. My editor at mqup, Mark Abley, was kind, helpful, and encouraging at every turn. This project would not have come to fruition without him. My reading group comrades in arms have kept my mind directed to philosophical reflection these many years. The greatest debt I owe is to my wife Denise Ireland. Thanks to her, I have for so long seen art and everything else through an artist’s eyes. I discussed with her much of the contents of this book and many matters of style, and have been sensible enough always to have followed her advice. I dedicate the book to the memory of my parents.

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the experience of beauty

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1 The Experience of Beauty

The problem with beauty, even more than the problem of the good, is that the concept gets lost in subjectivity. It seems to follow that, as a generality, we can find only banal things to say about it (such as that it is “in the eye of the beholder”). At the same time, though, beauty touches us individually and we feel it to be something profound. We grope for words to describe what this is and find that we have merely replaced a mystery by a commonplace. So we fall back upon talking about how it feels to us, or upon reciting what things feel beautiful to us, as if we could hope, thus indirectly, to approach this property that is elusive like no other. But these expedients fail, and beauty continues to solicit the understanding. It is a mystery, perhaps because we are mysterious to ourselves. Perhaps, then, beauty is a key to understanding who we really are. A kind of beauty exists that is perfectly accessible to the understanding, a beauty that comes to us unveiled and even exposes itself flagrantly: the beauty gazed upon in the faces of our sleeping children and the beauty that lights up a spring morning. We are surrounded by this sort of beauty, if not immersed in it. It is the basso continuo of an ordinarily happy life, and we feel a certain distress when it absents itself. This manifestation of beauty, this loveliness, insinuates – as the dictionary in fact claims – that beauty is sensuous pleasure. But even loveliness presents its little questions. It itself cannot tell us why quite disparate sorts of sensations (a spring morning, a sleeping child, or, say, a beseeching melody) are each considered lovely, even of an equal loveliness with one another. To discern the answer takes a little thought,

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which then discloses that all of the things mentioned give us a kind of innocent joy, they recall us to the things that matter in the daily round, and they satisfy an apparently innate need for continuing reassurance that all’s right with the world, such as a child seeks and we also need (and can get, even, from the rumble of distant thunder or the sound of a train moving through the night). Presenting itself in the way that it does, loveliness tempts us to take it for granted. If its essence lies in its appearance, as it insinuates, it must surely expose itself to a look. And then since a steady look would require an effort, we give the lovely things arrayed about us a mere passing glance. The small stimulus thus received immediately vanishes from notice, giving way to a vague impression of happiness. In sum, we waste, by not attending to it, so much of the loveliness to be found in the greater and smaller details of our surroundings. And finally, that which is most appealing in loveliness is also what is most limiting in it: it seems to lack complexity. It is a quality some things have that I, along with everyone else, am charmed by. It therefore seems to concern what we all already know – or what we assume we know – and have no need to ponder. Loveliness seems, even, to be rather dull, which is strange for a thing that is shining. There is nothing to it (is there?) beyond the experience itself, and it seems that it cannot hope to satisfy that part of ourselves that yearns for our experience to teach us something. If loveliness seems somehow inadequate to explain what beauty is, it’s because a thing’s appearance is merely the beginning of what’s interesting about it. Beauty exists in tension with loveliness, counterposing its depths to the other’s surfaces. If loveliness is imprinted upon the consciousness as a sensation, which we cannot retain, beauty is so as an emotion, which we can. If, therefore, loveliness is present to us, beauty is a presence within us. If loveliness is familiar – and, as such, accessible – beauty resonates in the spirit of the solitary person, to whom, indeed, it may feel quite incapable of being shared. If loveliness sounds only in the major key, the key of joy, a quintessentially shared and simple emotion, then beauty more characteristically sounds in the minor, the key of longing, loss, and regret, all mainly private emotions. Perhaps for all these reasons, or others not

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yet fathomed, beauty is elusive. Even when it coexists with loveliness, it does so as its shadow. Felt more in the twisted overgrowth and the occluded orchard of some abandoned place than in the admirable neatness of the domestic garden, beauty seems both to repel and to attract, calling up the thought,“Perhaps I do not even belong here” as it also does “This is where I wish to dwell.” Or imagine the northern tundra or the jungle rivers of Borneo, both mysterious places to most of us, places where we might, were we suddenly transported there, feel struck with awe. Does this not show that what is familiar to us is just what loveliness is? If, miraculously, the easy feeling of familiarity of place were to be lost, then the beauty of the place might stand revealed, as if it had previously been obscured. That would surely be an experience of the uncanny. I have hinted that beauty is a kind of unlooked-for encounter. We may step out for a stroll in fine weather, stop the car to take in a distant prospect, attend a concert – all with a view to having a pleasant experience. Seldom do we venture out seeking an experience of beauty. Just to voice the thought impresses me with its oddness. Instead of my finding beauty, it finds me, arrests me – possibly even seeks me. It is true that if asked why I’m going to see an exhibition of Titians – for which I have to take the trouble of a flight to London – I might reply, “Because I find his paintings to be beautiful.” Still I am intending to go see the paintings, not the beauty. The way to approach a painting, or any work of art, is with a cool curiosity, not in a frenzy of anticipation. One should have in mind the question “What does this mean?” or, if one is in a more critical mood, “How does this work?” But as I ponder such questions, moving from the painted whole to individual detail and then back to the whole (as perhaps did also the artist who created the work), beauty surreptitiously draws me in and, like a child, I just stare. We approach a painting this way because it is the way to approach all experiences one believes to matter. If instead one were to go merely hoping for a pleasant experience, the investment would be commensurately lower, as would the return, and beauty would certainly be absent from the equation. Beauty reveals itself in the questions that are asked of a thing.

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The investment we make by asking a question is simply the meaning we seek. We seek it in a painting just as we do in a novel or essay, knowing that we are likely to find it there because we know we are engaged in confronting the project of another consciousness. Past experience has made us sensitive to the (fairly sophisticated) questions we need to ask ourselves and the object. They concern the thought that the artist attempts to convey via the subject matter, but also the artistic means used in order to create the work. We need to be aware that, as the artist expresses meaning on these different levels, they work or fail together. The canvas may furnish an essay on the beauty of the divine through its exquisitely modelled figures, and equally, if still more abstractly, through the use of geometrically perfect perspective and proportions. The remarkable nature of our own consciousness permits our being moved by the message through the appreciation of the mastery of the means. If the work is a great one, however, all sense of the artist’s tricks is swept away by the artist’s vision. Our appreciation of nature, another cardinal experience of meaning for most, is somewhat different, although there too we come questioning. Nature is free of intention and, to the extent that it is ordered, the canons of aesthetics do not enter into it. So, unlike in a painting, there is no sense in which its detail is “necessary” or “superfluous.” Such considerations are irrelevant. Of course, it has the regularity of the laws that shape it. But the fact that it has a physical form that can be read from it by a knowledgeable person does not explain why we find it beautiful. Sometimes it is the disorder in nature to which we are most powerfully drawn. The fact is that, like art, nature provides endless opportunities for wonder. If the beauty of art lies in the wonder that it has been conceived, the beauty of nature lies in the fact that it has not been conceived and, in its abundance and strangeness, could never have been conceived by us. Nature, especially in the wild, is a world unto itself, a closed world. Unless we live within a certain natural landscape, as few of us any longer do, we have to ask to be admitted to it, which, if we do so with reverence, it graciously permits. There is at first a moment of discovery, the moment when one rounds a bend in

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the road or crests a hill and the view suddenly opens out before one’s eyes, or when the light changes and the view, previously inert, is thrown partly into high relief and partly into deep shadow, as if the scene were set for a drama which was about to ensue. The moment before, one might have been fatigued from the climb or wondering if rain would come. Now one stops, roused into contemplation. From wondering at the whole, one’s eyes become attuned to its fantastic intricacy. One fixes on this or that detail – not, as in addressing a painting, to remark upon how it contributes to an overall coherence, but instead on account of its individual beauty – for every part of nature is complete in itself. Yet one senses that all that is visible is bound together by invisible forces, which are held in an almost palpable tension.1 So, gradually, and especially for one who lives within its purview, the landscape comes to appeal to an inner sense even more than to an outer one. What was once spread out, quite exposed to the examining eye, closes in upon itself, becomes a spirit to match one’s own spirit. Isn’t this the inevitable effect of contemplation? It makes of one’s experience a poem: a kind of silent colloquy one has with its subject. Reverie is the state of mind I am describing, or perhaps it is better described as a mood. One can surrender to it, as when we allow ourselves to be seduced by beauty, or, as when we look at pictures or listen to music, it can be induced by an act of concerted attention and then letting go. It is the state in which we contemplate nature and art because only in this state can they reach us and speak to us. One must for a long moment be alone, even if with another. Reverie is – to appropriate a Heideggerian term – a clearing, a place, that is, where the presence of things can become intelligible. This nomenclature implies that here there is a distinct difference from the mind’s normal state where “perceiving” operates as a projection of the ego into the world. I am looking for something or on my way somewhere; always I am executing a plan of some sort. In reverie, although the mind is rapt, things cease to be set into place by an ever-busy consciousness and simply unfold. In this state, a person is lost in thought except for the fact that the attention is directed outward rather than inward.

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One’s perceptions are with one preternaturally and are inseparable from one’s thoughts. One inhabits them. Wittgenstein captured the phenomenon in a notebook entry when he described a “poetic mood” as “a mood of receptivity to nature in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself.” Thus, in reverie, the ordinary barrier between myself and the world is effaced. I forget myself. It is like being in a waking dream, for when I dream I am not conscious of myself as dreaming, and the dream is real. Yet we say, paradoxically, that in this state one is put in touch with oneself. That is because one is profoundly in the moment. The distractions that ordinarily bedevil us dissolve and one is at peace. We want the moment to go on and on. In reverie, we are released into a state of wonder, which is an experience that things are. For wonder to be felt, things must lose their ordinary reality – the reality we attribute to them – and resolve themselves into pure phenomena. They slip their moorings. We feel this as a displacement of our own ordinary experience, and the moment as being suspended in time. Yet this is not felt to be an encounter with unreality, but instead with a greater reality. It feels, as a dream does, or a vision, more real than what we ordinarily experience because of the heightened emotion that accompanies it, an effect of the heightened power of the objects of perception to affect us. It is therefore an experience of the uncanny. It reveals a dimension to being that is ordinarily withheld from us. Yet it contains also the mystery of its meaning. In this way, it is an impulse to poetry. Reverie is also the state in which loveliness is transfigured into beauty. Loveliness, I contended, is typically unregarded since, in its familiarity, it poses no particular puzzle to consciousness. But if I contemplate a lovely thing by itself and divorced from whatever it is that renders it ordinary, it changes under my very eyes. I am startled by its particular beauty. It now seems fresh to me, and it may seem strange because of the unaccustomed light in which I see it. I have been brought into intimacy with it, for what had before hardly seemed to matter now seems precious. And yet, because I am impressed by its claim to a transcendent reality, it seems more detached from me too.

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It is also true that, in reverie, things may reveal themselves to be more ambiguous or unsettling than they immediately proclaim themselves to be. Such is the power of thought and its influence over our feeling. There is a picturesque Welsh lake (a friend tells me) that exists only because a river was dammed to provide power to English cities, and under its surface an old village lies submerged. My friend could perceive its loveliness but could not feel it: his apprehension was bruised by his knowledge of what had gone before, the loss of which had made possible the loveliness. Schiller, in a letter to Goethe, speaks of the “poetic mood” as being one that “purifies the mind from emptiness and commonness” and through which “every single object will acquire a world of its own, and insignificant phenomena infinite depth.” This is the privileged state of consciousness that was so vital to Schiller, to the other Romantic poets and philosophers, and by extension to all poets (and some philosophers). Schiller insists that “it depends upon the mind as to whether an object is to signify anything, and thus it seems to me that the emptiness or fullness lies more in the subject than the object.”2 The painter and the poet are adepts of reverie in the way they place their rapt attention upon their subjects. They are able to convey the discoveries they make while in that state, even though to do so requires the saying of the unsayable. All such works of art have this in common: they register the artist’s heightened perception and the inner resonance the experience has. Whatever their subject is, whatever they may purport to show, the experience is the real subject matter. In this heightened perception, the artist discovers the strangeness of what she had felt she already knew, and she is caused to search inside herself for its hidden meaning. This search, since it seeks to understand why she feels what she feels, also seeks the meaning of her own experience. Examples from poetry and from painting will illustrate. In “Snow,” by Louis MacNeice, the most placid instances of ordinary reality, those where, looking around, one might say not much is happening, are made to seem vertiginous:

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The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes – On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands – There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.3 The poet’s sense of the accidental invading the ordinary gives rise to the “drunkenness of things being various.” This effect is precipitated by the incongruous conjunction of two things out of season with each other but also – to the consciousness of the poet that has been heightened by his absorbing that incongruity – by the sharpish taste of a tangerine. He might also be saying, in the last line, that we are ordinarily separated from such pure sensation by the workings of consciousness. Something quite similar happens when Wallace Stevens places a jar on a Tennessee hilltop, as described in his poem “Anecdote of the Jar.” This is the most subtle disturbance of the commonplace imaginable but how it changes, and discloses, the landscape: I placed a jar in Tennessee. And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill.

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The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was grey and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.4 What at first blush looks like an alteration of the landscape is more truly an alteration of one’s consciousness of it: in this case, the singling out of the jar causes the mind and senses to question the relationship between the jar and its surroundings. This serves to heighten the poet’s consciousness and to reveal a strange beauty in the “slovenly wilderness,” as transformed into a mind-imposed order. Poetry ponders, as all art does, its own mystery, and in these two poems it ponders the connection between poetic vision and the changed perspective: how we are jarred into an unfamiliar way of seeing that manifests beauty. As Stevens remarked, “In the presence of extraordinary actuality, consciousness takes the place of imagination.”5 The inner resonance of the artist’s experience can be discovered in certain early paintings by Henri Matisse and late paintings by Georges Braque. Both take as their subject the artist’s own studio, the intimate theatre of the painter’s consciousness. Matisse’s studio is bare – he arranges its sparse contents at will to create a focus for his compositions. A model may be placed on a chair. Her features are indistinct (she exists as a type, not as an individual). The painter may be sketched in the act of painting the model. Always, the studio’s double windows are featured, open, to let in the light and air of Paris. The play of light and shadow, their effects upon colour and the way they cast themselves upon a wall or vessel of water – these are intrinsic and might be the true subject matter of the paintings. In 1914, during a period of intense experimentation, Matisse painted a particularly remarkable canvas, Vue de Notre-Dame, of a view from the window of his studio on the Quai Saint-Michel.

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Despite its title, the painting verges on the wholly abstract. A black window frame is set on a blue ground. The window opens to a sky of the same blue. The view is represented by a mere smudge of white paint set onto the blue ground, which nonetheless, by dint of pure contrast, perfectly conveys the brilliance of full sunlight reflecting off stone. Here, painting has the quality of a memory reduced to an idea that has the feeling of a pure visual sensation. Matisse’s objective in painting, he said, was to pursue the emotion associated with his vision into its depths, “towards what I feel, towards a kind of ecstasy.”6 He must have experienced that smudge of light ecstatically. If Matisse’s paintings open out to a sensuous world, Braque’s close in on a constricted and somewhat airless space. They exhibit the immense clutter of his studio. The things depicted are his talismans, among which he has lived forever. They are repeated from painting to painting in different configurations but are never located in any recognizable physical space. At the same time as they are real, they are also objects in an imagination. Because they exist within an enclosed room, actually and metaphorically, the play of light doesn’t come into it. But an object, a simple bird-like object, will flit through pictorial space like a spirit through the world, and it lightens the feeling without bringing in light. This object, though immaterial, carries the same weighty connotations as the actual contents of the studio. It attracts the eye and lingers in the consciousness as a mystery. Here are two painters, one young, one old, whose canvases are about the artist’s personal experience of beauty, of the poetic as he feels it. In looking at the paintings, one feels a stirring in the subconscious of some unnameable sensation. As Braque said, “In art, there is only one thing that counts; the thing you can’t explain.”7 These are all thoughts – the painters’ and the poets’ – that are born in reverie and the changed perspective it induces, and in the revelations that induces, felt ecstatically. Robert Musil said of poetic creation that it “pertains essentially to that which one does not know; to one’s respect for it.”8 But the poetic is also a kind of knowing. It knows, and sustains, the idea that beauty is a mystery. In his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge distinguished between what he called the primary and secondary imaginations:

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The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the manner of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to recreate: or, where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.9 In my old Oxford edition, the editor, John Shawcross, explains as follows: The distinction here drawn is evidently between the imagination as universally active in consciousness (creative in that it externalizes the world of objects by opposing it to the self) and the same faculty in a heightened power as creative in poetic sense. In the first case our exercise of the power is unconscious: in the second the will directs, though it does not determine, the activity of the imagination. The imagination of the ordinary man is capable only of detaching the world of experience from the self and contemplating it in its detachment; but the philosopher penetrates to the underlying harmony and gives it concrete expression. The ordinary consciousness, with no principle of unification, sees the universe as a mass of particulars: only the poet can depict this whole as reflected in the individual parts. It is in this sense (as Coleridge had written many years before) that to the poet “each thing has a life of its own, and yet they have all of our life.”10 The primary imagination (which, remember, Coleridge said we all possess) is the inner resonance, the elusive meaningfulness, which often portends that one is in the presence of beauty – the profound and the mysterious conjoined in one sensation. The secondary imagination is its translation into art. The object or experience under

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description is evoked through the expression in language of what might be called the emotional charge with which, for the poet, it is associated. W.H. Auden, in his own gloss on Coleridge, described the workings of the primary and the secondary imagination in the poet as follows: “The impulse to create a work of art is felt when, in certain persons, the passive awe provoked by sacred beings or events [the primary imagination] is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship or homage, and to be fit homage, this rite must be beautiful [the secondary imagination].”11 The primary imagination, Auden writes, is concerned with sacred beings and sacred events. Sacred beings cannot be anticipated but must be encountered. On this encounter, the impression made upon the imagination is of an overwhelming but indefinable significance. To illustrate, Auden quotes from Witchcraft, by Charles Williams: “One is aware that a phenomenon, being wholly itself, is laden with universal meaning. A hand lighting a cigarette is the explanation of everything; a foot stepping from the train is the rock of all existence … Two light dancing steps by a girl appear to be what all the Schoolmen were trying to express … but two quiet steps by an old man seem like the very speech of hell. Or the other way round.”12 Auden comments that the response of the imagination to such a presence is “a passion of awe.” This may vary from joyous wonder to panic and dread. A sacred being may be attractive or repulsive: “It may be noble or something unmentionable in a drawing room … It may be anything it likes on condition, but this condition is absolute, that it arouse awe.” What determines the response is “below consciousness.” There are some sacred beings that seem to be sacred to all imaginations. Auden mentions the moon, fire, snakes, and “those four important beings which can be defined in terms of non-being”: darkness, silence, nothing, death. Others are purely personal. The secondary imagination is active rather than passive, and its categories are not the sacred and profane but the beautiful and the ugly. These pertain to form, not to being. To the primary imagination, a sacred being is “that which it is” (it is self-sufficient). To the secondary imagination, the beautiful is “as it ought to be” (it inspires

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satisfaction). Of it, Auden says, “it approves of regularity, of spatial symmetry and temporal repetition, of law and order: it disapproves of loose ends, irrelevance and mess.” The secondary imagination is social and craves agreement. The beautiful and the ugly provoke disagreement and the feeling that “one of us must be wrong.” But as to the sacred and the profane “neither of us will dream of arguing the matter.” Both kinds of imagination are essential to the healthy mind – “the inspiration of the sacred to the rejuvenation of the forms of beauty, and of beauty to overcome the passivity or possession of the mind by the sacred which, sooner or later, must lead to the exclusion of all else, as profane, and madness.” Sacred encounters give rise to the impulse to write, because to praise. “The pure poem would be, I suppose, a celebration of the numinous in itself in abstraction from all cases and devoid of any profane reference whatsoever – a sort of sanctus, sanctus, sanctus.” Auden has virtually defined the sacred as that which inspires awe. His use of the word shows that he intends a special meaning of his own: awe is neither a religious feeling nor one that is detached from religious impulses (e.g. the impulse to fall upon one’s knees). Accordingly, fear and dread are not necessarily its concomitants, nor even solemnity. Joy also is possible. Whether it is awe that is felt, with its connotations of respect and even dread, or wonder, a pure joy, the experience portends a transcendent mystery and a fascination with it.13 The eye is drawn compulsively, and the mind is set to thinking. In the successive moments of the experience, for the poet, the first moment is one of confusion and even disorientation, and the second one is of assimilation. The poet finds the language that is suitable to the experience, which, since it is a mystery that is spoken of, must be the language of beauty. Poets rework their experiences in full consciousness. The rest of us do so, I suggest, in partial consciousness. The “sensibility” we each possess – the shape of a person’s mind as it is disposed to the experience of beauty – could be described in just that way. Of course, though partial, a sensibility develops through experience so long as we continue

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to live. I must now consider how the experience of beauty contributes to the shaping of a person and what this means for its own meaning. This exercise is a phenomenological one – it tries to capture the way experience feels. A crucial insight of the phenomenologist (we can thank Hegel for introducing this thought into philosophy) is that an adequate understanding of how we experience requires a description of how consciousness develops through its experience. It may even be said that the way we have come to experience and the way we do experience are the same. A phenomenological approach is therefore one that, by retracing the steps necessary to achieve a certain state of development, lays bare the meaning of present experience. Without being phenomenologists, we all know that how we think and feel is the product of how we developed, although we tend to forget this because there is no need for us to reprise our past experience in order to live in the continuous present (it is enough to consult memories of the past occasionally). I have to do my best to recall, from a great distance, my childhood experience and how it felt. Yet certain memories stay with me. I know that the child exists in the moment as the adult dwells in memory. The child experiences raptly as the adult does reflectively. In this way, heightened perception – the direct apprehension of experience – is associated with the child’s way of seeing. The consciousness of an inner resonance – the felt quality of experience – is associated with the adult’s. The child does not, as we do, distinguish the poetic in his experience from the rest of it. That would destroy the immediacy of things for him. Poetry is haunted by memory. The child, then, is all receptivity, carried, indeed, to the point of rapture. Due to its being unburdened with memory and association, the child’s experience has a freshness and clarity, those qualities of the morning, and an intensity too. It is unburdened with the order that past experience gives to present experience, which causes us to live forward and backwards and not in the immediate moment. The child lives fully in the moment, a creature of emotion and not of reflection. We, as adults, sentimentalize experience, which the child does not do: he has not lived long enough to experience regret as longing. His experience is like first love before it dawns upon the lover that it is love: an

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instinctive love, as avid as an appetite, but also an awakening to a fresh emotion. Thus the brightness of all his experience. A child’s power to associate is freer and therefore more poetic than an adult’s because all experiences are equally real to him, their reality being grounded in their vividness rather than in some more impersonal quality. Nabokov, in his memoir Speak, Memory, describes a watercolour, hanging high up on the wall of his childhood bedroom, which showed “a dusky path winding through one of those eerily dense European beechwoods, whose only undergrowth is bindweed and the only sound one’s thumping heart.” Into this enchantment he could, “in a mist of drowsiness,” imagine himself climbing, as if into the scene of a fairy tale.14 He is not seeing the picture as a translation of experience, in which its reality is diminished; he sees it as experience itself, in which he can participate. Naturally, therefore, the child finds the world to be charged with meaning, even if it often seems strange. In this way, he imbues beauty with magic. The child’s first apprehension of beauty, then, is essentially an emotional attachment to his world. For a very young infant, his mother is the only beauty he knows. Gradually there are other things that he unconsciously associates with security, which are the product of his developing self. But the development of an independent child is also the development of an individual sensibility that moves onward from its starting point into the unknown, in a movement between fierce attachment to the known and its implicit rejection in the quest for discovery of the new. It is of course in the imagination – and therefore in solitude – that the sensibility is incubated. An observant child left to himself, as children rarely are these days, is a natural solitary. He is not yet a social being (may be almost a wild creature). Being scarcely aware that he is alone, he is immune to loneliness. He is scarcely aware that he is engaged in thought. His absorption is complete because solitude affords the absence of distraction only so long as the mind is quiet: the exercise of the imagination is associated with reverie, which is a solitary movement through the world. But what is lodged in his mind eventually works its way into fully conscious thought, where the child is able to comprehend the nature of beauty as a thing detached from himself. In his first ragtag collections of objects of no intrinsic

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value or interest, the child first experiences how beauty operates as an extension of himself (in this case, appreciated only in the guise of things that belong to him). He is scarcely conscious of anything but the happiness they make him feel. It is by a subsequent awakening to nature that the sensitive child first becomes conscious of beauty. For the child’s developing imagination, the landscape is a living presence, a surrounding and enfolding beauty that seems to exist for him alone. It is because of his experience of emotion that he is, soon enough, a creature of memory. He is drawn back to the mysterious place, at the bottom of the garden or in the fields beyond his house, where he first felt some stirring of emotion within himself. Then comes the passionate attachment to what is his own. At this stage, he makes no distinction between what he loves and what he finds beautiful – the ability to abstract from experience does not yet exist in him. As a creature of attachments, he does not adjust well to new people or things, even if attractive – not until he comes to love them, in which event the tenacity of his grip upon them is fearsome (and he is fearless on their behalf). But the child is also capable of love at first sight. As the child develops into the young person, he becomes conscious of an appetite for experience of every kind within which he can “find himself.” But instead of himself, it is various other objects (often people!) that he must find first, and as he does he begins to lose importance for himself as the central focus of his strivings. What does seem important to his developing understanding is learning all there is to know about the objects of his passions; in this investment in the other, and wherever it leads him, he comes into possession of the surprising insight that things do not exist for him, but he for them. This marks the growth of the moral sense. Yet in an irony of self-development, the child will have cast away the truth of the imagination, which had been a sort of self-preoccupation, in the light of a fuller reality. What replaces the unfettered exercise of the imagination is the capacity for critical appraisal. In coming to differentiate what is of value to him from what is not, he learns to hold things at an appraising distance; from having been strong in his emotions and having learned through them the meaning of his own attachments, he becomes acute and confident in his judgments. They are the means

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by which he articulates his experience in order that he may crystallize its essential value. He is well on his way to becoming fully formed. The adult cannot occupy the continuous present of the child, nor have the freshness of his perceptions, but she does enjoy a privilege that is barred to the child. The adult’s consciousness of any experience is intrinsic to the pleasure the experience provides, and often it is essential. For example, one cannot have any meaningful experience of art (except as a kind of magical alternative reality) without grasping the rather sophisticated concept of representation. Then to understand any particular work of art really requires the ability to relate it, simultaneously, to the world and to other works of art – essentially to all one knows. Likewise, whether or not we are consumers of art, after an early stage of life, all our experience is relational. Any particular encounter draws on past experiences, but equally it contributes to future ones, so the next painting one looks at will be seen ever so slightly differently than the last one. And this occurs naturally, without our ever intending it. It is not strange at all, but completely human, that one should be moved by hearing a piece of music merely because one had heard it sometime in the past or by the beauty of a day because it revives the memory of a day “when first I set out.” As beauty accumulates in one’s experience, the world becomes more beautiful as a result or at least one becomes more conscious of the beauty the world holds. The adult cannot recover the child she was, yet by some miracle she remains that child. She remains all the beings she once was, on the way to becoming what she now is. All development is just the working out of the potential (and the problems) presented to us by our innate dispositions. That is, in one sense, the significance of memory: as a record of how one became what one is. Memory exists not for our incidental pleasure (like an old photograph album) but because it is important to knowing who one is now. This great capacity for memory of childhood or otherwise accounts for much of the pathos, hence much of the beauty, stored up in our emotions. The record is, indeed, such a long one. The memories that things spark and associations they have is the result of so many experiences undergone but now forgotten. However one may disregard or

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even stifle memories, any of them can flame into life at any moment. But even if not recalled to life, they are the stuff out of which is spun the thread of one’s existence. It is spun out of all the great emotions one has felt – the past joy, excitement, grief, embarrassment, and shame. They inhabit the perceptions. Some memories, of course, are quite specific: the tall Queen Anne’s lace blowing in the breeze brings to mind a summer’s day from long ago. Others have faded. But each new experience is inevitably a recapitulation of earlier similar experiences, whether preserved in a memory or residing (as Auden put it) “below consciousness.” Each love is also all past loves; each spring all past springs. Each such experience seems to be celebrating – or mourning – the past. Thus we feel each spring to be, as well as an emergence, a re-emergence (and each new love a happiness that replaces a sadness). So one goes to the place in the woods where a particular flower may be found in bloom at a particular moment in the year, and the heart stops on finding it there again, just as the heart did on the first discovery. But the memory of other springs and other loves brings that familiar poignant awareness that even at their peak things are on the brink of falling away; as we age, our experience, while no less immediate, comes more and more to have, as its theme, our own eventual leave-taking.15 What this does not imply is a desire to return to the site and time of any past experience. Some of the old are overtaken by their memories as if, almost, they decline to live in the present, since the images it casts up cannot rival, for beauty, those stored up in the mind. Is this a way to relive the past or is it (more likely) an honouring of the dead, including former selves? The pressed flower that falls out of a book picked up at random does not make one long for the dewy bloom it once had been. But it is the hopefulness of life, the possibility of its continuing development, at any stage, that we mostly try to sustain. At each point on the inescapable cycle of change, there are new effects to discover, disclosing fresh beauty to the senses. Often, perhaps, there is a craving for these effects because they are fresh. Does this craving express a buried wish to be disencumbered of our stock of memories and associations, and their accompanying pathos, to recapture,

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somehow, the naive wonder of the child? Or does it signify only the desire to grasp the meaning of childhood vision? Our experience is a perpetual leave-taking and a perpetual homecoming. We do not disavow either. Just as when we are on a foreign venture, part of the pleasure comes from the fact that one’s home is left behind, but one knows that one will return to it, also with pleasure. This restlessness of the spirit, this constant alternation between movement and repose, is the way we experience not only music, but also everything. At each stage, the development of the sensibility is mirrored in the articulation of critical judgment. I mentioned earlier that the predisposition to appraise, to hold all objects equally at a certain distance in order to be able to scrutinize them, has its onset at an early point in the development of one’s understanding of aesthetic beauty, when one is at a similarly early stage of understanding oneself. There is at this stage an uncertainty of judgment because one does not yet have sufficient other experience to relate to this one. The craving therefore is for more experience. If the immediate objective is to acquire the ability to place a value, positive or negative, on aesthetic objects, hours of observation and reflection are likely to be necessary, for this is a discipline like any other. There are young people occasionally to be seen in art museums – I was once one – scrutinizing every painting with the same sense of seriousness and care. They remain in the gallery long after most others have left. It will never be enough, of course, simply to observe. The object must be questioned. The hope is that its nature shall come into better view for the better understanding of both the object and the means by which one comes to understand it. At any early stage, when our opinions are undeveloped, the opinions of other people are correspondingly important. If one doesn’t have eyes of one’s own, one can perhaps borrow others’. This is indeed a vital way that our judgments come to maturity and even then continue to develop. Nuance and inflection are added to the way one sees and appraises. Then the desire is to try out one’s acumen on aesthetic conceptions ever more remote from one’s own

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to see if they too can be induced to give up their meaning. Instinctively, one knows that, with the new and the difficult, the rewards are ultimately realized if, for a time, one is able to place judgment in abeyance. We must, all over again, learn from the work itself. Seldom are we disappointed, for many will have gone before us and picked out, for our edification, those objects that are the best, and even those that are less good are in some degree edifying because they are imbued with their maker’s faith. Finally, to the educated sensibility, the conception of the beautiful comes to transcend all geographic and temporal boundaries. We are as at home with Yoruba sculptures as we are with classical ones. In fact, the beauty of each type seems more compelling when examples of each are placed side by side. They seem to converse with one another, as if possessing a common language. Similarly, some of the most beautiful of all art is produced at the confluence of quite different cultures (witness Byzantine icons and Gandharan sculpture). What we come to look for is the truth of the artist’s experience. The truth of vision is that beauty resides in what is individual in experience, and that many disparate visions can legitimately claim to capture beauty. We have now not only accustomed ourselves to seeing with other eyes but are avid to do so. If the point of experience is (as many say) simply to have it, why do we feel driven to say how it felt to us and why? We do this to articulate our experience, first of all, to ourselves and only secondarily to others. The effort involved in expressing a coherent view out loud, and in defending it, helps, but gaining an understanding of one’s response comes first. What we then address is the object of our experience and its meaning, but it is actually our response to it (its meaning for us) that is really at stake, as this is all that we are able to question however hard we might otherwise try. Understanding our response and justifying it, though they may seem different exercises, are closely linked. In both instances, one is trying to place a value on the object or, more precisely, to articulate the value one has already placed upon it. One evaluates just by being drawn to a specific object, though the reasons why might remain unarticulated. (One has placed a positive or negative value

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on the thing.) Even if one has an inkling as to why one was drawn, or wasn’t, the elaboration is bound to be revealing. Nonetheless it is still an elaboration upon what one all along knew. The attraction or dislike or indifference is often fairly immediate, and even on the second, longer look, the first reaction generally sticks. We articulate our views also for the purpose of eliciting a response from others, for the shared value of the conversation. Sometimes, one seeks affirmation, although rarely that alone. One may be angling for admiration for one’s cleverness or looking to provoke. At least, one will have felt curiosity in the other’s opinion and often enough tentativeness in one’s own, such that it genuinely matters whether the thought will find support. If it does not, there is still the hope of illumination of some sort. Typically, and whether rationally or not, we want other people to support our judgments of beauty and can feel that they are blind if they don’t. We attribute intrinsic value to what we think beautiful and we believe that, generally speaking, people ought to recognize and acknowledge things of value. Intelligent people will apply the same strictures to themselves and, on appropriate occasions, question the possibility of their own blindness toward others’ conceptions of beauty. At the same time, we understand that diverse rational people hold incommensurable views about what is valuable and beautiful. Art in particular can generate disagreements out of its very fruitfulness. We accept that taste, because it is personal, is also partial. In that way, too, we can claim our own partiality. Idiosyncratic though my judgments may be, and yours for that matter, they are not permitted to be indiscriminate. When my perspective encounters yours, a rather complex dialectic occurs. Since beauty is a value each of us attributes to the object, one expects one’s judgment to find acknowledgment in the other person. Nevertheless, since perspectives are personal, disagreements are inevitable. Recognizing that, we demand that judgments should at least not be arbitrary; they must be explained and justified by reference to qualities in the object (which, if one is sophisticated, are then related to generally accepted aesthetic criteria). The test of cogency will lie in whether these judgments serve to open other people’s eyes, even if they do not dispel all controversy.

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Wittgenstein was right to observe that “a person who has a judgment doesn’t mean a person who says ‘Marvellous!’ at certain things.”16 A judgment commits the person to have thought about what makes the thing “marvellous” and to be ready and able to discuss and defend his or her point of view. One insists on this not for the sake of being difficult, for one’s own opinion is also at stake. But even amid general agreement, it remains important to know how others justify themselves; one may disagree with or be enlightened by the reasons furnished, and only once the adequacy of an opinion is established can it truly be said that one accepts it. In the dialectic between art’s subjective and objective elements, between one’s experience of a work and its objective value, the breadth and depth of one’s experience has real bearing upon the adequacy of one’s judgments, the legitimacy of one’s claims in the view of others, and the confidence with which one shares them. That must count toward the state of fulfillment that comes through having had much experience. Beyond this state may come a point where the opinions of others cease to matter because the value a person has come to place upon her experience has progressed so far beyond doubting it that she has virtually ceased to feel the need to judge. At this stage, one might say, she has so entirely assimilated her experience she desires no further experiences for her illumination. Other people’s responses are important to her now only in respect of those few people close enough to her that she finds in them a reflection of herself. There are a great many things she cares about and a great many for which she cares not. She knows in either case what things they are. Now that her once-ferocious will is no longer inscribed in all things, she is enabled to abide within her experience, as if in a permanent state of reverie – to sense, in many if not most moments, its poetic quality. Poetry, it is said, is a way of knowing and not a way of judging. A recapitulation and resolution of past experience permits her, finally, to see poetically. It may be proper, then, to speak of her as having a vision – a way of seeing that is also a way of knowing, because it is a fully achieved insight into the value of things. This is a state in which she attends, reflexively and with great gladness, to all loveli-

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ness. It’s not that the experience of the child has been recaptured in her spirit; rather, the appreciation of the poetic has embedded within it consciousness of time past and of many passages and the emotion they call up. This sense of the poetic roves backwards over great distances. Does there come to her, finally, when she reaches a ripe old age, a sense of things being so complete in themselves, and so little dependent upon her, that her own existence ceases much to matter? If it is even partially true that the goal of exercising judgment is finally to cease from doing so – if this actually happens – then one can at least imagine a withering away of the desire to judge in a state of reconciliation with the rest of being. That it could happen is suggested in the fact that none of this is entirely foreign to what most of us, in our admittedly incomplete state, do sometimes experience. Consider what the following little fable has to say. At a party, a woman of a certain age is insulted, mortally, by someone she has long known and respected. He is in his cups, of course. He tells her that, actually, they have nothing to say to each other. She contains herself long enough to make a graceful exit, finds her way home. There she has a small garden, which she goes out into. It is evening, but there is enough light that the flowers, in the full bloom of summer, are visible through the shadows and their fragrance is on the air. There, in the moonlight and the silence, she is restored to herself. Nietzsche said, “But the voice of beauty speaks gently: it creeps only into the most awakened souls.”17 Beauty is a paradox, a phenomenon (literally, “a thing that appears”) that hides itself in phenomena. These may be things of an outward loveliness, in which event they will be revealed to be ever lovelier. But it is also quite possible for beauty, we saw, to hide itself in the obscure, the elusive, the difficult, and even the unpleasant and the repellent. It hides itself from you in order that it might reveal itself, even though the revelation will show itself to be a withholding of a deeper sort. In reverie, beauty is experienced as the hidden that also reveals itself. It is, as I have suggested, an experience of the strange, including the strangeness that reveals itself in the familiar (that particular cloud you decided to ponder). As has also been suggested, this is the result

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of the unfamiliar regard upon it, a special attention that you give it. Beauty’s promise is to reveal itself to you if only (hard as this is) you will attend to a thing in its singularity and this is, I have asserted, a way of questioning it. A flower plucked from the garden and held in one’s palm and in one’s gaze reveals itself as it did not before it was plucked, when it was unknown to you and disregarded because of its utter familiarity. Under one’s quiet gaze, it reveals in due time its individual beauty, like a thought that gradually achieves shape in the mind. This, one feels, is what the thing is in itself. And because it has been revealed in particular to one through one’s attention to it, and then only gradually, it feels particularly one’s own possession. Beauty’s promise has been fulfilled. But the promise is also deferred. The more intimate the experience of beauty, it seems, the more intriguing is its mystery. The more present it is, the more elusive. The sense of wonder that beauty inspires is truly an ever-deepening mystery. And yet, there is something it has told you. This feeling of intimacy in the presence of beauty, this gathering up of oneself into itself – why, love is what one feels. Beauty is an expression of love, including the kind that wrings the heart. It is the melody anyone can listen to but only I can hear just as I do; the face that anyone can look upon but only I can love as I do. It is the way a tree set by itself in a field seems to be a token of eternity; it is the whole landscape that has become part of my identity. It is that dissonant piece of music that is rebarbative to me on first hearing, but begins to beguile on the fourth, and is riveting on the fifth. Beauty coaxes its way into my consciousness and the piece becomes precious to me. As I question it, doubt it, even scoff at it, it becomes intimate to me, and finally I feel the budding of love. Of course, the sources of love are themselves mysterious since the experience is not rooted in our conscious will or even, necessarily, in our convictions. I cannot piece out why I love: only in the actual encounter does the question find an answer. There, love’s object is discovered to have incalculable value for me, found, even, to be that which constitutes value for me. The object and the love for it are a quite inseparable experience of value. The same is true of beauty and the beautiful thing.

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Paul Valéry, the poet and critic, observed that beauty is the other – the incompletely comprehended – but in which, paradoxically, the self finds completion. He did not mean that beauty’s meaning eventually becomes apparent, or ever could, but that its value does. The one it hides; the other it shows. In so doing, beauty reveals something other than itself. Like love, like certain challenges that you can meet or fail to meet in the course of your life, beauty questions you and, out of the discovery of your own emotions, it reveals yourself to you. It reveals not only what you value, important as that is, but also that there are connections among how you perceive, what you feel, and what you value. By revealing these, beauty allows you to take the truest possession of yourself. Our consciousness of beauty is deeply sprung, as love is, and is shaped by our life to this point, of which it is the expression. Things matter or they don’t only to an individual consciousness such that if they do, it is in a particular way for particular reasons. Everything depends upon our history and its residue, and especially upon what we have found, through living, to have mattered. No beautiful thing, however unique, exists by itself for us: it is related to other things and what we have made of them, and they all relate to who we are. And our sense of beauty reflects what we have already managed to make of ourselves, or desire to make of ourselves, or are open to becoming, or all of these, and it will in turn contribute to shaping us. We are never revealed to ourselves all at once, but only gradually as our lives follow their inwardly directed course and we pursue the thread of our own experience. And as the sense of beauty develops, it sets the net for the beauty one does not yet know. One has inwardly accepted beauty to be, because of its worthiness, intrinsic to one’s development. The child, led by his experience, unconsciously cultivates an aptitude for beauty, felt (less abstractly) as love. He loves without knowing since he is innocent of love’s meaning. His maturity will critically depend upon his coming to understand what love is, and all the knowledge that depends upon that understanding. The adult, supposing she is true to the child she has been and is alive to beauty, looks to achieve a sense of beauty that may abide with her. Then, finally, that emotion that has accompanied particular experiences can find itself

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transformed into a presence, and the world into a place of continually unfolding wonder. Beauty is a quality unlike the other qualities things possess. It seems to emerge from those other qualities without ever being reducible to them. For that reason, and as I noted when dealing with aesthetic judgment, it is impossible to demonstrate the presence of beauty in a thing on the basis of its attributes (as a fact might be demonstrated). The most an admirer can do is hope to persuade another to try to see what he sees. Yet because both persons share a point of reference in the object under discussion and the common goal of understanding it, consensus might be attainable. Beauty is inseparable from my feeling. But it is also particular to the object. I conclude that beauty depends upon the light in which something is seen. It depends upon how it is cherished. But we do not think that we confer that value. Instead, the light that is beauty permits a thing to be seen for what it is – for the value it actually possesses. We feel that we merely respond to it, and the proper response is to cherish it. We also feel that we can fail to see the beauty that was there all along and that beauty must instruct us. If this is a paradox – if beauty cannot exist without the light that we ourselves throw upon the world, and yet the world possesses a value that is not of our own making – then it is, surely, a paradox that goes to the root of our being.

2 Platonic Desire

“Time is a moving image of eternity,” Plato wrote. We know time mostly as a succession of fleeting sensations. A spirit like Plato’s found it impossible to conceive that these “mere appearances” could constitute the real. There must exist something that underlies them and persists through all changes and for that reason possesses a greater reality. These hypothesized entities are, in Plato’s parlance, the “ideas” or “forms.” Plato’s Idea of the Beautiful, for example, is that it is an abstract entity in which every instance of beauty participates and by virtue of which it is beautiful. The idea is perfect as the instances we encounter cannot be (as only the idea of a circle is a perfect circle). But it can be known in ordinary experience as an intimation of itself. In this way there is a connection between the idea and the instance that elevates ordinary experience. This strange thought, that the succession of moments that make up our lives contains a meaning that is greater than the sum of them, is also for some a natural intuition. It is perhaps the beginning of any faith. The opposition between appearance and reality reminds us of the Allegory of the Cave in the Republic, where appearances are likened to shadows on a wall – mere phantasms. In the picture with which we are presented, the inhabitants of the cave are prisoners. They are held fast by shackles in a position facing the back wall of the cave. Shadows march in procession across the wall. The prisoners cannot see that they are caused by objects moved by unseen hands in front of a fire, which burns high up behind them. For the prisoners, the shadows are their entire reality and they vie to make out the images

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and predict their sequence. Strangely, the tale does not end there. By some mysterious intervention, one of the prisoners’ bonds are loosened. He is prodded to stand, painfully, to turn around, and to walk toward the light that comes in at the mouth of the cave. At first, he is dazzled even by that light, but by and by the horror of his deception is revealed to him. He denies his eyes. He must be dragged up the steep path out of the cave – from which he emerges into the light of the sun. At first, it is unbearable for him to look directly at the things it illuminates. He can tolerate only their reflections in water or their shadows; they are, however, the reflections and shadows made by a true light. Eventually he is able to make out the sun and understand it to be the source of all illumination. Finally, he looks at it directly and understands that it is illumination itself. How could he fail to feel happiness for himself – and pity for those he has left behind? Still the tale does not end. The newly liberated soul descends back into the cave. Now it is the darkness that blinds him. The prisoners subject him to mockery for having corrupted his eyes in having gone above, and when he attempts to relate what he has encountered there, he finds himself confronted by that murderous resistance people feel when they are told that all they believe and value is false. In the cave, the spirit is inert. People are incurious. Nor is there any inkling of beauty there, any intimation of the good. Absent, even, is that primitive emotion, desire. The prisoners do not even desire their own state; still less could they form the desire for change or conceive of the form change would take. It is a mystery, therefore, what force it is that singles out one prisoner and causes him to be removed from the cave. The force would have to come from without (as Plato actually suggests). There is a second conundrum and that is why the former prisoner returns to the cave. Why does he relinquish the complete fulfillment to be felt in contemplation of – what we are to take to be – the Idea of the Good itself? The best I can surmise is that the force that removes the prisoner is the reader’s own aspiration. We render credible his reorientation through our aspiration to escape into the light, which we have because the cave is enough like our own world (we feel) that we recognize ourselves in the benighted prisoners. Socrates certainly thinks so: he describes the cave as “an image of our nature.” He

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means that we are in thrall to appearances. Yet the fact that we suspect that we are in thrall means that we actually aren’t or aren’t entirely. Indeed, we can point to lots of ways that our ordinary experience is quite unlike the conditions found in the cave. Our experience contains beauty, which disturbs perception and introduces us to the thought that something lies behind appearances. It contains love, the perception that something other than oneself and one’s needs is important. It also contains aspiration, which is the desire for understanding. All of these are agents of spiritual change. Since Plato must be perfectly aware of all that, the purpose of the allegory must be not to show us our world in a mirror but instead to help spark a desire for the change of which he knows us to be capable. The return to the cave marks the fact that the philosopher’s devotion to the truth is also a desire to serve its cause through a readiness to engage with others. This is where, the Republic shows, the education of the guardian class finally leads. The Republic itself provides Plato’s answer to the criticism – and it is a frequent one – that the goal of his philosophy is detachment: the permanent contemplation of an intellectual ideal. The ideal is actually better seen as an inspiration to a certain way of life, that of the philosopher, and it is one that requires engagement. Of course, in the allegory, the philosopher finds that where others lack a reciprocal attraction to the ideal, they repudiate the suggestion that they misconceive the real.1 As readers, however, our regard goes to the philosopher, and our aspirations may follow. Plato thinks – it may surprise some readers to learn – that desire is of critical importance to human possibility. And of course it is and for the two-fold reason that it is strongly rooted in human nature, driving us powerfully, and that it is always directed toward some object or other. Desire marks the fact that we have goals and pursue them robustly. Naturally, the desires can be rational (“good”) or irrational (“bad”), depending upon whether their objects have good or bad effects upon the person subject to them. Irrational desire is blind: it seeks the bad believing it to be good. The bad has to include both obsessive and insatiable desires. Plato’s concern is particularly with

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the latter, which he calls “appetites.” These, including in particular the desires for food and drink and sex, have the characteristic that practically as soon as they spend themselves they are replenished. In the Gorgias, Plato compares them to a sieve and to a leaky jar. It is not that these desires cause us to seek pleasure that makes them irrational. Plato was no puritan. It is the fact that they are difficult to control, if they are controllable at all. They lack the virtue of moderation. This was important for Plato, as it was for the Greeks generally, for he, and they, could not conceive of a well-lived life that did not present the picture of a harmony of all its elements serving an overall excellence of purpose. Plato has the bias to think – as, probably, most do – that it is better, because we are happier, if such desires as we have are not reckless and blind but are controlled, to some appropriate degree, by our intentions. The question therefore is how, in our own interest, the desires can be made rational. Here I must distinguish, to a degree, the answers that Socrates and Plato respectively gave to that question. Socrates left behind no writings, so scholars have to infer his actual views. They associate Socrates with the positions he strikes in the earlier dialogues (when Plato was likely still strongly subject to his influence) because these differ from those expounded in the later dialogues, views that are inferred to be Plato’s alone. Socrates and Plato did concur that it is only rational to be virtuous. Their argument assumes, plausibly, that we desire to be happy and think to be good whatever conduces to happiness. If we are right about that, then it is rational to desire the good. Questions remain of course about how the good is to be conceived and whether it coincides with the traditional virtues.2 Socrates also believed that we quite naturally desire the good. That is to say that whatever we desire, we do so in the belief that it will do us good. Desire, in this conception, is inherently rational. This is what lies behind his famous and otherwise obscure pronouncement that “no one willingly errs.” If one does err, that is, it must be because, through ignorance, one mistakes the bad for the good rather than because one was motivated by vicious desires. If in particular one pursues immoderate pleasures, it must be under the conception that they will lead to one’s greater happiness. But this is a misconception because overindul-

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gence leads in various ways to unhappiness. So if we would secure the happiness we desire, it is urgent that we overcome the deficiencies in our knowledge of what is truly good. If Socrates believed that knowledge of the good is necessary and also sufficient for virtuous action, Plato demurred. He believed that some desires are inherently vicious as well as powerful enough to overcome the conviction that it would be better not to be led by them. Knowledge remains, for him, necessary to virtuous action, but in addition self-control will be required. For this reason, in the Republic, Plato decreed a long and rigorous and disciplined education for the guardian class, analogous to an athlete’s physical training (askesis) but addressed to the mind and character as well as to the body. Despite all of that, for Plato as for Socrates, it is primarily knowledge of the good that is aimed at by philosophical training and that schools the philosopher’s desire. As Plato puts it, by keeping company with the divine and the orderly, the philosopher becomes both. Except for the elaborate pedagogical regime that Plato proposes, there is perhaps no great practical difference between his method and the one we see Socrates pursuing more informally. No less than Plato, Socrates believed that virtue could not be taught, as one might teach arts and skills. It could be acquired, but only by a rigorous process of dialectical thought, which the student himself must undertake. This is the form of thought that has, as its object, giving an “adequate account” of anything and, as its method, the reasoned exchange of views, which roots out error as it goes. It results in knowledge. It is what Socrates and his friends are at work upon throughout the dialogues. We see them, especially, striving to describe the good that underlies and underpins all the individual virtues. Plainly, the dialectical exercise is a philosophical one. It can be undertaken only by those whose thought has become properly philosophical, which means, at least, self-critical. Clearly, Socrates did not envisage a professional class of philosophers, as Plato did. He did, however, put his young interlocutors through a rigorous form of intellectual training using his own method of cross-questioning (elenchus). The starting point of the elenchus is always the actual beliefs of Socrates’s interlocutor. In forcing upon him a confrontation between

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what he believes and what he can justify, Socrates is at the same time forcing him to undertake an examination of himself. The exacting dialectical exercise is also, necessarily, an exercise in self-development. It is training in the intellectual honesty, the rigour, devotion, and self-discipline required of the would-be philosopher. This is a process in which the desires are transformed through the attempted attainment of the knowledge of the good, which becomes the overriding desire. One cannot be sure that, for Socrates as for Plato, this implied the existence of an Idea of the Good, which might theoretically be known. Nevertheless, Socrates clearly believes the task involved to be no easy one. He famously professed his own ignorance along with everybody else’s. If dialectics is the exercise that a teacher and a student of philosophy engage in when they come together, it was also Plato’s view that life’s experience can operate dialectically upon the mind and spirit if it is properly attended to, as a budding philosopher would, with knowledge of the good as her object. Plato shows us in the Symposium that, through the experience of love, including passionate love, a person can come to have knowledge of the good so long as the experience includes reflection upon its meaning. The achievement of that knowledge will be the fulfillment of the love that leads to it. Love in this philosophical form Plato calls eros. It is apparent that it is a kind of aspiration. Desire is fundamental to eros, to its initial spark and continuing power. But eros is desire that has been enlightened by its encounter, in ordinary experience, with objects of value. Thus, unlike desire by itself, eros has the power to educate the lover. She comes to understand that what she loves is the good in whomever or whatever she loves. Eros operates dialectically in progressively enlarging her attachment, from objects of lesser value (associated with less developed desires) to those of greater value (associated with nobler desires). In each case, there is a desire to possess one’s object, but as the objects of one’s desires become abstract – as for philosophers they tend to – they can be possessed only through thought. That is true to a pre-eminent degree of the ultimate object of love, the Idea of the Good itself.

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Possession in this sense is the same as knowledge, and the desire to possess can have nothing to do with self-gratification and has everything to do with self-fulfillment. Thus, because it seeks the good, eros is an enlightened form of desire. Nevertheless a desire it remains. It achieves the transformation it does because, as desire does, it disturbs the philosopher’s former conception of herself as stable, and to what had been settled perceptions it yields new insights, the truth of which is felt to be of acute value to herself. Desire itself requires a spark and Plato recognizes that, in the case of eros, it is beauty that provides it. The Symposium therefore also provides us with Plato’s conception of beauty. It should come as no surprise to learn that eros, which desires the good, is attracted to the beautiful because it is an intimation of the good.3 Plato remarks in the Phaedrus, his other dialogue about love, that beauty is the “most loved” because it is the “most visible” manifestation of the good. For once, it seems, our senses do not mislead us. The Symposium is itself extremely beautiful, a poetic work of prose, and almost persuades us of its truth by its beauty, as great literature does. It deserves reading on that account alone. Here, in this dialogue, we find ourselves well outside the cave, in a realm of common experience that is charged with positive meanings. This is a dialogue about love. Plato shows us how high we can aspire due to the power of love, aided by the power of beauty. He reveals his astonishing thought that the love of the beautiful aims in its essence at transcendence – at escaping time in order to touch perfection, a quality we do not directly encounter in ordinary life. Plato’s message is embedded in the story he tells in this dialogue, and not in its arguments. For once, Plato does not consider that his subject is best elucidated through Socratic questioning. Instead, there is an appropriately rhetorical cast to the discussion about love. This is a dialogue largely composed of speeches. The setting is intimate, a drinking party (symposion). The participants are friends and their speeches, which they have decided will be made in praise of love, an occasion for friendly rivalry. Their culmination is a great account by Socrates of love’s transformative power. This he unfolds as it was

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once unfolded to him (so he says) by a teacher who was also a priestess, as the imparting of a mystery. The dialogue ends with a disturbance that alters the atmosphere and, in grand operatic style, with a speech that celebrates Socrates as himself a figure of love. The scene is set at the house of Agathon, a noted tragedian. (His plays are lost.) He has just won a prize for his first tragedy, which had been celebrated, the previous evening, by rather strenuous revels. This evening’s affair will take place in a lower key. We encounter Socrates on his way to Agathon’s house. He has just bathed and is sandal shod, both very unusual for him. Along the way Socrates becomes lost in thought and is eventually found standing on a neighbour’s porch. He will not be stirred. The dinner gets underway without him. Socrates finally comes in halfway through the meal and is immediately asked by Agathon to share his couch. Agathon imagines that if he touches Socrates, he may catch a bit of the wisdom that must have come to him while in motionless contemplation. Socrates seats himself as he is bid and observes, ironically as usual, that if only wisdom could flow like water from a full cup to an empty one, he would soon be overflowing with Agathon’s wisdom. He deprecates his own as “a shadow in a dream.” Agathon, amused, tells him that this time he has gone too far, but that, in any event, Dionysus will shortly judge their respective claims to wisdom. After dinner, a libation is poured out to the god, a hymn is sung, and the party sets itself to drinking, doing so moderately since some guests feel the effects of the previous night. One of the party, Eryximachus, proposes that the evening be spent in speeches in praise of the undeservedly obscure god of love, Eros. Socrates observes that no one will vote against that suggestion, including himself, “when the only thing I say I understand is the art of love” (ta erotika).4 The flute girl is sent away, in a tacit acknowledgment that, on this occasion, the erotic will be merely a matter of talk, and the gentlemen proceed to the delivery of speeches that, unsurprisingly, praise the god by praising love itself. The three initial speeches give more or less conventional accounts of how love operates beneficially in relation to human concerns, as a harmonizing influence. They take us up to something wonderful: the speech made by Aristophanes, the great comic playwright. For some

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readers, this is the most memorable speech in the dialogue. As such, including it is a mark of Plato’s daring, particularly since it can be read as a proleptic critique of the speech Socrates will give. In his own praise of love, Aristophanes declines to treat it as divine, for his is a story about human beings, not gods, and about human love, which he evokes with both comedy and pathos. According to him, people were once, literally, joined at the hips with others of their kind, and were magnificently powerful four-limbed creatures. Because of some insolence on their part toward the gods, Zeus sliced them into two, “like a flatfish.” Humankind was condemned to a perpetual search for its missing half in its quest to “heal the wound of human nature.” This is the origin of love: that when a person meets the half that is his own, the two are struck senseless by love and desire and the conviction that they belong together, such that if they could be forged into a single being, they would agree without reservation. Aristophanes concludes that people should show due reverence to the gods and hope to win the love of the one intended for us, so that each of us can recover his or her original nature, as is required for our race to flourish. He seems to imply that love thus understood provides the natural limit to human aspiration. According to Aristophanes, love would not exist but for our incompleteness. This captures the profound irony that it is in our incompleteness that our humanity is fulfilled and that if we were ever to achieve the completeness we desire, in the union with another, our humanity would be lost with the loss of our capacity to love. For you can only love another. But of course a perfect union can never be achieved. A belief that love itself will complete us is an illusion. Aristophanes relates that there remains an unfulfilled longing even in the heart of erotic bliss, even if the cause remains obscure to us: “It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle it has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle.”5 The problem is that, despite being united in love, we remain two people. There is no such thing, he seems to say, as a spiritual union between the two. Our hope for completion, because it is fixed on an impossible desire, is doomed to disappointment. Yet while there is pathos in our condition, for we are never free

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of yearning, there is consolation in the love and companionship that is available to us in our self-divided state. We human beings simply make do with less. Agathon’s speech, which comes next, serves as an interlude between the two great speeches that conceive of love as longing, the one just given and the one that Socrates will give. His poetic speech idealizes love. The beautiful is good in itself, he seems to say. Art is self-sufficient. Along the way, Agathon suppresses everything anxious and unsettling about love, everything aspiring, and even suggests, playfully, that as love subdues and controls all other passions, it must be the most moderate of all. Agathon unwittingly provides Socrates with an opening. His response is to say that the speech was most lovely but had nothing to do with the truth and was therefore not adequate to its object. Socrates subtly changes the rules of the game at this point. It had originally been proposed by Eryximachus that “each of us give as good a speech in praise of love as he is capable of giving.”6 Socrates insists that the only valid approach to praising Eros is to do so philosophically. Actually, he makes a broader assertion: that no praise, however it may conjure with beauty by applying to the object “the grandest and most beautiful qualities,” is in fact beautiful unless it be true and do justice to the object.7 Socrates proceeds to cross-examine Agathon and extracts the admission that the central argument of his speech, that divine Eros is the most beautiful of the gods, must in fact be false. Since Eros loves beauty, and what we love we desire, and what we desire we necessarily lack, Eros must lack beauty. Socrates is able to nail this point because he extracts from Agathon the acknowledgment that love is the same as desire. If that is so, then love can never come to rest in the object, for the lover, by definition, will never cease to desire. This secures a very important point for the argument to come, where love is portrayed by Socrates as an active movement of the spirit, a searching out of its proper object. It gives rise, however, to a common-sense objection (which Socrates himself identifies): we can and do love what we already possess although, by his theory, desire and love itself should then cease. But Socrates asserts that what we come

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to desire in that case is the continued possession of happiness. In other words, our anxiety concerning the loved object does not cease, for there is always the possibility of its loss, and in that light we never truly possess it: we can only continue, unceasingly, to desire it. Socrates hits upon an essential truth about human nature: love, like everything else, is caught up in contingency, a fact that carries with it all the greater pathos because, of all things, it is what we most long for to be permanent. As later on in the piece we learn, love desires to possess the good forever. Having disturbed everyone’s preconception that love is itself beautiful, Socrates commences his own speech. As the speech unfolds, it becomes apparent that the earlier speeches serve as a foil for his greater brilliance. He weaves an argument about the meaning of love in the life of man which outdoes in power and poetry all of the previous attempts, including even that of Aristophanes. He will show that neither the desire for self-completion, nor the belief that love does complete us, is misplaced. Neither is at all pathetic, as Aristophanes had suggested, but a key to the profoundest possession of the self. Socrates describes an exchange that he had as a young philosopher with Diotima, his teacher in the art of love. As a priestess, she can interpret the divine mysteries. She also demonstrates skill in Socratic dialectic. Socrates tells us that he had himself once believed that Eros was beautiful, and Diotima disabused him of the belief. In her estimation, Eros is neither beautiful nor ugly, but something in between. His nature is explained by his origins. He is the offspring of Poros (“resource”) and Penia (“poverty”), and he is, as a result, perpetually resourceful and perpetually needy. For while “tough and shrivelled and shoeless and homeless,” he is “an awesome hunter, always weaving snares, resourceful in his pursuit of intelligence, a lover of wisdom through all his life, a genius with enchantments, potions, and clever pleadings.”8 He is said to love wisdom because it is beautiful. And there again he occupies an in-between position, since those who love wisdom are neither all wise (in which case they would no longer desire wisdom) nor all ignorant (in which case they would be indifferent to it). At this point, Diotima shifts the ground of the discussion subtly but significantly. As being neither beautiful

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nor wise, she avers, Eros cannot be a god, for a god possesses both beauty and wisdom. Eros is instead a spirit (daimon). Once again he is a liminal thing: he occupies a space between gods and humans and acts as an intermediary between the two, carrying messages either way. In this, he seems to have something to do with divination, as one possessing an insight or an inkling into divine purposes. Socrates’s error concerning the nature of Eros, Diotima explains, lies in an error concerning the nature of love, whose essence is to be found in the lover, not in the beloved. What, then, is it that the lover loves, or what is the point of loving a beautiful thing? She explains that the lover of beautiful things desires that they should become his own. But to what end? This question stumps Socrates. In a difficult dialectical moment, Diotima explains that it is not for its own sake that beauty is loved but for what it produces in us and for what it causes us to produce. For, she says, we human beings are able to give birth only in the presence of beauty. It engenders a desire to propagate both offspring and, more abstractly, speeches and ideas and other great accomplishments. Either way one achieves a sort of immortality: through one’s progeny, who perpetuate one’s name, or through posthumous fame. By this means, beauty satisfies in the only ways that are possible for human beings their innate longing for immortality. This is to be understood as a desire to possess the good forever, which is our idea of perfect happiness. Beauty is loved because it secures the good, which is au fond what we love. So far Diotima has dealt with what is most desired and has associated that with the opinion of what constitutes the greatest good. These “rites of love,” she says, Socrates could probably have come to experience himself. But the “final and highest mystery,” which is the purpose of these rites when done correctly, she feels she will have to reveal to him.9 She proceeds to describe an ascent to the actual possession of the greatest good through an exercise involving love. The first step, she says, is the love, in one’s youth, of another’s beautiful body. This is the desire for physical beauty, a frankly sexual desire. She has earlier explained this sort of love to be the result of a natural desire to procreate. This includes, as we saw, the propagation of speeches, the idea being that a person who keeps company with

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someone beautiful, and particularly someone who also has a soul that is noble, will teem with ideas and beautiful speeches (speeches, one must presume, about the beauty of virtue) as will make them both better. One would have thought that the lover will come to rest in that love, but that is to forget its active quality. Although it may seem to the lover, at first, that the beloved embodies all the good that there is, that conviction is unlikely to persist. Awakened to the good by his love, he will begin to find it in many places. The thoughtful person, reflecting upon the experience of love, recognizes that what is beautiful in the beloved is not limited to that single person, but is common to many, and he will become a lover of all beautiful bodies. After this, he must come to understand that beauty does not belong to bodies alone, but that the beauty of souls is a greater thing still, even when beautiful souls are not lodged in beautiful bodies. The apprehension of spiritual beauty may then reveal to the lover the beauty of fine activities and just laws, and thence the beauty of many kinds of knowledge. In this movement toward increasingly abstract things, there is a further movement onwards from these single examples to the great generality of beautiful things. The lover will turn his eyes to gaze upon “the great sea of beauty,” which will cause him to give birth to many beautiful ideas of his own. Finally, having through the exercise become strong in his understanding, the lover may have a sudden glimpse and know beauty in its pure abstract form, single and eternal: “All of a sudden he will catch sight of something wonderfully beautiful in its nature; that, Socrates, is the reason for all his earlier labours,” she says.10 Thus the mystery of love, Diotima explains, is a motion ever upwards, starting out from individual beautiful things and using them like the steps of a ladder, which are also lessons, and in the end coming to know just what it is to be beautiful. Only there will the lover give birth, not any longer to the simulacra of virtue, but to virtue itself, for he has beheld its true beauty. The experience is one of wonder. Truth cannot be achieved without perplexity along the way, and Socrates’s speech, presented through Diotima, is challenging. For one thing, Plato makes his reader ponder the deep connection between beauty and love, then brings him or her up short with Diotima’s

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contention that beauty is not loved for itself but for what it engenders. She asserts this despite the fact that the daimon Eros is needy for wisdom because wisdom is beautiful and Eros loves beauty. The apparent contradiction is resolved by understanding that it is Plato’s view that we love beauty not for its own sake but for the sake of the good, of which beauty is the visible sign and which it therefore intimates. This is only possible because beauty partakes of the good – is in itself good – and shows us what is worthy of love. The importance of beauty is that it is a signpost to the value of certain things for one’s life’s sake. Thus she who thinks she loves the beautiful because it is attractive (for its physical qualities) deludes herself. She has simply failed to look through the ephemeral appearance to the permanent reality. More profoundly still, if this person remains deluded, if she chases appearances for the gratification they provide, believing that they will make her happy, she is doomed to disappointment. She will never get beyond the realm of sensuous beauty. Socrates, acolyte though he is, avoids this error. When Diotima asks him why we love the beautiful, he does not give the obvious answer, which is that it seems to promise happiness. He is just stumped. In fact there is a connection between loving beauty and achieving happiness, but it requires that beauty be loved in the right way – with a view to achieving, through it, knowledge of the good, which wisdom is. The connection must be made in thought for the well-lived life to be achieved in practice. Only then will we be led to appreciate that it is the good that we perceive through the beautiful and must strive to know. Diotima deals with the ascent – “the ladder of love” – rather summarily. The ladder proceeds through a sequence of objects of love. Each in turn represents an ideal but one’s conception of the ideal is transfigured along with the object of one’s love from what is most immediately in one’s heart to perfection itself. In effect, Plato harnesses the idealism at the heart of love and its power to transform the person who loves. This development requires the insight that what one loves in the beloved person or object is the good, an insight which is presumably prompted by the overwhelming feeling one has that the beloved is valuable in himself, herself, or itself. Successive refinements in one’s conception of value are to be conceived of as an

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ascent toward the good itself because, as successively more abstract conceptions of the good, they approach more and more closely the highest and most abstract form of the good. In this, its most elevated state, love presumably ceases to be much about desire at all, becoming instead an expression of devotion, in which concerns about the relation of the object to the self have become all but superfluous. One’s understanding of the good and of the beautiful proceed together for they are both a reflection of the same spiritual truth, in which the more abstract is associated with the more elevated, or divine, a thought that probably accords with ordinary intuition. That does not mean that the ascent should be considered to be a selfexplaining process. It must educate us. The ascent is actually depicted, of course, as being a developing awareness, occurring in stages from first intimation to final revelation. Love can operate this way, moving dialectically toward a greater and greater understanding of value, because the love of the good is also the desire to be enlightened by it, hence to know it more fully. Thus desire must become reflective if its object is to be fully achieved. Love, by itself, may not carry one upwards. Love may conceivably find fulfillment in its object, once found, and resist moving beyond it. Love is not necessarily always questing for something else, but thought is, so long as the desire to know is also present. What we are shown is that love proceeds toward its ultimate object through reflection upon what is achieved at each stage. This readies the lover for the next. There is, in the process described, a striking parallel with the dialectical exercise described in the Republic, where, in the course of the exchange, the true nature of the object under discussion is more and more closely approached. Plato clearly believed that, at least in principle, the real could be laid hold of in thought, even though it transcends actual experience. We have already seen that the objective of dialectical reasoning is to give an adequate account of the object of examination. Without that, all that is claimed to be knowledge is only “a dream” (or mere speculation). Again, philosophy is that task, and the Dialogues attempt that account. There will be a need to entertain hypotheses, tentative models of how things are (for example, what justice is), and to test them against

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reality. The best hypotheses are those that best account for the most diverse experience. The exercise must therefore be guided by someone whose vision is, Plato says, “synoptic” – one who can see things in the round. Seeing things from many angles in order better to grasp what they are is a process of discursive thought (dianoia). There are, however, truths for which no account can be given because they cannot be grasped in discursive thought but only in intuitive thought (noesis). They are spiritual truths. Grasping them will depend on factors apart from one’s abilities and discipline as a thinker: it must depend upon how developed one is as a person. It is not just the dialectical exercise itself but also the person that one has become through that exercise which equip one to have the critical noetic insight. The distinction between the two modes of thought plays out at a critical moment in the Republic as Socrates and Glaucon at length approach an understanding of the Ideas, such as the Idea of the Good. Socrates refuses to hazard any sort of supposition of what the good may be, for “all opinions without knowledge are blind.” He is, however, prepared to relate what the good resembles or, as he puts it, “what looks like a child of the good and most similar to it.”11 This is a tip that we can approach the description of the good only indirectly, by analogy with what we do know, and in this case the good that is produced in the soul. The child of the good is the sun: “As the good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intellected, so the sun is in the visible region with respect to sight and what is seen.” It is what makes truthful thought possible.12 As they near the limits of what can be expressed in discursive thought, Socrates tells Glaucon that there is a point at which he will no longer be able to guide him. Dialectic involves a movement toward the truth; indeed, if successful, to its very threshold. Then the truth is seen or it is not. We must in the end see with our own eyes. We can be prepared for the experience but we cannot be made to have it. It is the same in the Symposium. Diotima cannot instruct Socrates in the content of the Idea of the Beautiful. It is inexpressible. Socrates will have to climb the ladder of love for himself. The Republic and the Symposium describe two approaches a person may make toward the understanding of the good, one through

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thought and the other through love. It turns out, however, that they are not separate but intertwined: in order to advance, love requires the self-reflection that thought provides and thought requires the desire that love provides. The ascent toward the truth could not occur unless a magnetic attraction were felt coming from its direction, which is an instinct for the good. It could also not occur without the confrontation of ideas that takes place in discussion or reflection. Because the way to the good is not self-revealing, love can scarcely avoid becoming, at some stage, self-aware. The ladder of love may be a difficult climb – it may be, as it was in the Allegory of the Cave, a troubled passage from ignorance and illusion to knowledge – and the aspirant can scarcely avoid calling upon thought. In this way, the separate strands of thought and feeling, because one has not slighted either, are brought together in the effort to understand what is of value in one’s experience. The result is a being whose thoughts and emotions cohere, with the result that her life can be said to demonstrate self-knowledge. As seekers after truth, we must ask whether in the Symposium Plato has provided us with something more than an inspiring picture. Is love as we feel it actually aspirational at all? We can safely assume that people all desire to learn what love means to them. Does it make sense to conceive of such reflection as resulting in a progression from one type of emotional attachment to another? In dealing with the love of persons and the love of knowledge (maths and physics, say), one feels that we may not be speaking of a single type of attachment. For example, although both types might be described as “passionate,” is this anything more than a metaphorical use of the word when it comes to the love of knowledge? The answer to these questions, I think, depends entirely on the type of person one is. The experience of transcendence is clearly not for everyone or perhaps even for many. But Plato is writing here for the budding philosopher – one for whom love is essentially aspirational because all of her experience is. She shares with many the propensity to love what is good in people and things, and the ability to perceive their beauty is certainly not hers alone. But, for her, the question of the meaning of her experience

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is always present and is, moreover, a question about whether she is following the right path. If she then seeks to build on her experience so that it leads somewhere in particular, it makes sense to think of its having an upwards movement. Plato provides at least a coherent account of how love might develop out of itself. If it can be considered that the ladder of love is a coherent account of the development of love, at least for some types of people, the question still remains whether it provides a desirable model for life. Should we consider the exercise worthy for where it ultimately leads, and that alone, or is it worthy also because of the knowledge it yields of the value of human life that is obtained along the way? A modern reader may resist the idea that human love exists for the sake of some other, supposedly higher form of love. It is important to determine whether Plato’s account compels this conclusion. Some scholars believe that it does. Robert Pippin asserts that “the continuous ascent requires some explanation of dissatisfaction at lower levels.”13 For this scholar, then, but for that “dissatisfaction,” the ascent is incomprehensible. Martha Nussbaum observes, however, that love for another person is “not easily transferable.” That love cannot serve as “just a way station to the good.” Nor should it be thought that it should do, since it is itself “a thing of the intrinsic value and beauty.”14 Gregory Vlastos argues, similarly, that in Plato’s schema, the loved one is not loved for her own sake, as something inherently precious, but “only insofar as in her and by her perfection is copied fugitively in the flux.”15 No human individual, he asserts, could compete with an abstract perfection. We are all a complex of good qualities and bad and should be loved for what we are. Love is not veneration, he suggests, but is tolerance, trust, forgiveness, tenderness, and respect. I offer two responses to such criticisms. First, it is obvious that Plato must conceive that a person is loved for who she is. The first stage of love is for the body but the second, recall, is for the spirit, which is virtually a metonym for the whole person, including her strengths, which attract admiration, and her weaknesses, which attract tenderness. The critics are stuck on the view that Plato regards the love of another person as an inferior form of love. What he actually thinks is that it is a more immediate form of love and is so because it is a

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more apparent source of beauty. But its beauty must be profound, and the love it induces must also be profound, in order to permit the lover’s advance toward the understanding of more spiritual forms of beauty. It is saying a great deal for human love, which we first experience in youth, as Diotima says, that it leads, with greater maturity, to the greatest good of all. It is true that Diotima says that the first is “small” in relation to the second, but that is not a measure of the insignificance of the one but instead of the significance of the other. Second, the thought that, in self-development toward an ideal, we would abandon commitments as we go makes no psychological sense. We do not, in fact, aspire to higher things in order that the things we now care for will cease to matter to us, nor do older attachments cease having value because we acquire others. We speak of life as tracing a thread, and a thread is continuous and our attachments cumulative. So it may be conceded to the critics that if the ascent is conceived of as a process in which one detaches oneself from some less perfect thing in order to attach oneself to another, more perfect one, where perfection is understood strictly in terms of its degree of abstraction, it is unlikely to be comprehensible to modern minds, even though we may accept that the idea of the good is abstract. If, on the other hand, the ascent is conceived as an ever more comprehensive love, in which the increasingly abstract stands for the increasingly general, then I think we can accept this as meaningful spiritual progress. This must be the intended message. Plato is quite emphatic that the attachments that occur at each stage of the ascent are felt for objects that are each in their own way valuable. He could not have accepted that we would cease to love objects good in themselves, including the laws and philosophy itself, in order to love better objects, or that a person could be inconstant in her attachment to what she acknowledges to be valuable and still ascend toward a higher state. To the contrary, Diotima’s message is that one can progress from perceiving any individual person, or other attachment, as uniquely beautiful to perceiving it as a participant in a more general beauty. It is therefore likely that one’s existing loves will deepen as one’s understanding of the meaning of love develops. It is true that, in the case of one’s love for another, the lover will come

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to understand that her love will not bear the weight of meaning that she originally placed upon it. But that understanding is a kind of truthfulness to her love and not an infidelity to it, and is in no way inconsistent with a strengthening of that love. A reader of the Symposium would hardly know what love for another being feels like if she hadn’t already experienced it, and the sense of how it can move the soul toward any objective would remain a mystery. The Phaedrus fills that gap and should be read in tandem. What it brings out is that this love of which Plato speaks is not some paraphrase of the real thing: it is a fully human love and therefore an embodied one. That’s putting it mildly. He actually thinks it’s a divine madness, or mania, that causes a complete disruption of life and the sense of what is vital to it. It is like the inspiration that upends the poet’s perception. The core of the dialogue is another myth recounted by Socrates, an extraordinary panegyric on the effect of love. The soul is likened to a charioteer and two horses. It is also winged. When its wings are in perfect condition, the chariot flies high and has a prospect of the entire cosmos, but when they shrivel it falls back down to earth. The growth of the wings represents the receptivity of the soul to beauty and to love. When the lover looks upon the beloved, the stream of beauty that pours into him through his eyes warms him and waters the growth of his wings. Meanwhile, the heat warms him and melts the places where the wings once grew, places that were long ago closed off with hard scabs to keep the sprouts from coming back; but as nourishment flows in, the feather shafts swell and rush to grow from their roots beneath every part of the soul (long ago, you see, the entire soul had wings). Now the whole soul seethes and throbs in this condition. Like a child whose teeth are just starting to grow in, and its gums are all aching and itching – that is exactly how the soul feels when it begins to grow wings. It swells up and aches and tingles as it grows them.16

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Martha Nussbaum finds in the Phaedrus a contradiction, indeed an implicit repudiation, of the picture of love previously presented in the Symposium. If that dialogue presented love as a chastened, spiritualized emotion, in this one it is an unbridled passion. She reads the dialogue, too, as showing the philosophical life to consist in the “life of mania,” “a ferment of the entire personality,” instead of as previously the “life of stable contemplation.”17 What Nussbaum prefers not to see is where that folie à deux is said by Plato to lead, and it is to a similar place as the Symposium does, for the passion Socrates describes clearly opens up the lover to the realm of transcendental knowledge. Moreover, even if we may be tempted to think it so, mania is not shown to be identical with sexual desire, though clearly that is a part of it. The soul of the lover, remember, is a chariot. It is drawn by a temperate (white) horse, which pulls the soul upwards, and an unruly (black) horse, which drags it down. Socrates describes an intense struggle between the horses, with the charioteer (recalled to the ideal of beauty by the beloved’s face) struggling to rein in the black horse. The metaphor shows that love cannot get off the ground unless lustfulness is checked. It also shows that the lover’s objective should be to bring the spiritual and physical aspects of love into harmony. We are told, specifically, that if the lovers are able to persist on this path of self-control, they will follow the regime of philosophy, which is to pursue that vision of true beauty that is the promise of their love. They will form a lifelong philosophical friendship. Otherwise, they may share, while in love and afterwards, a lesser but still worthy mutual friendship. But they will fail to ascend. Nussbaum fails to acknowledge that Plato’s ideal life is one of passionate friendship – a relationship in which each overcomes himself or herself for the sake of what the two of them can achieve together – as opposed to one in which each finds completion in the other. The modern reader, however, will be less persuaded by an imagined picture of the redirection of sexual energy – which must be exceptional – than by the true picture of the power of love to spur productive work. In sum, far from slighting human love, Plato exalts it by showing how its insights must be incorporated into philosophical reflection and indeed into the way that activity is carried out (by friends

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through their friendship). It is fundamental that, through the love of another, we first learn how to love. The loves that follow the first, of any object whatever, even the love of the good itself, follow from the first in being idealistic, for all love is connected with the value of its object. We return now to the setting of the Symposium. The dialogue does not end with the speech of Socrates. Plato has a dramatic coup in store. At the conclusion of the speech, there is applause and cheers. Aristophanes attempts a protest that he has been misunderstood. And then a drunken party headed by Alcibiades bursts in. The aristocratic and surpassingly handsome Alcibiades is another historical figure. He is supremely favoured with the attributes deemed desirable in Athens and, despite his young years, he has already achieved renown. His political ambition and craving for public adulation are unbounded. In the story Plato now tells, Alcibiades enters not just drunk but also wreathed like Dionysus himself. His intention had been to present the wreath to Agathon, but he is stopped short by finding Socrates in the company. He had previously abandoned Socrates as a teacher and companion and is not particularly pleased to find him there. Some rather pointed banter ensues. Alcibiades complains that he can’t turn up anywhere without finding Socrates there, then observes that the old philosopher has parked himself next to the handsomest man in the room (Agathon). Socrates responds (ironically) that Alcibiades has become viciously possessive of Socrates’s love for him. Alcibiades promises revenge for this aspersion, but in the meantime sets about making a wreath for “that magnificent head.” Otherwise, he says, Socrates will grumble that he has insufficiently honoured him. He initiates some serious drinking and orders the jar to be filled for Socrates who, he notes, will always drink what is put before him but will never show any signs of drunkenness. Eryximachus bids Alcibiades to give a speech. When the latter says that Socrates would beat him up if he dared praise anyone else in his presence, even a god (and Socrates shushes him for the impiety), Alcibiades declares his own unwillingness to praise anyone else. Eryximachus therefore invites

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him to offer an encomium to the philosopher, whereupon Alcibiades promises to tell only the truth although he acknowledges that, in his state, the presentation may be disorderly. But, he says, directing himself to his old teacher, “even a sober and unclouded mind would find it hard to come to terms with your bizarreness!” As he progresses, it becomes apparent that this speech too is made in praise of Eros although not the god (or daimon) himself but instead the man who in so many ways stands for him. Appropriately in a dialogue that concerns itself with the beauty of bodies and souls, Alcibiades considers Socrates’s appearance, which he compares to a statue of Silenus, a satyr.18 Silenus was the tutor of Dionysus and, moreover, his oldest and wisest companion. Alcibiades compares Socrates also to Marsyas, a satyr whose melodies had the power to possess and so to reveal those who were ready to receive the god and his mysteries. In the presence of Socrates, Alcibiades says, he is overcome with a frenzy of emotion, which is quite unlike the experience of hearing even the greatest of orators speak, for they never make him ashamed of his very life, as Socrates does. Socrates makes him feel he should devote all his attention to what he most neglects – his shortcomings. “So I refuse to listen to him; I stop my ears and tear myself away from him, for, like the Sirens, he could make me stay by his side till I die.”19 And then, to demonstrate Socrates’s power over him, and the philosopher’s own self-possession, Alcibiades, the proudest of men, relates a story that is acutely humiliating. It concerns an attempt he made at seducing Socrates, which Socrates had turned aside by saying, “You offer me the merest appearance of beauty, and in return you want the thing itself.”20 Alcibiades reveals a great truth about Socrates. He relates that his ideas and arguments are ridiculous, like the hollow statues of Silenus, but when opened up, they have the figures of gods inside, as such statues do. “They’re of great – no, of the greatest – importance for anyone who wants to become a truly good man.”21 Here Alcibiades reveals his thwarted eros for the good. Though he loves its image as reflected in his old teacher, he fails to aspire to the quality itself because he is irremediably attached to the desire for glory, fame, and power, and they are inconsistent with it. He is also angered by Socrates, who causes

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him to feel dishonoured in his own eyes. Perhaps the failed seduction of Socrates was a half-aware attempt on Alcibiades’s part to prove that virtue is not stronger than desire, and thus to drag Socrates down to his own level. It was at any rate an attempt to exert power over the man who exerted a strange power over him. Isn’t that the way the powerful tend to operate? It isn’t the way that Socrates does. He operates, as Alcibiades hints, by the insinuation of an ideal, but never seeks to force the choice. Alcibiades is relegated to the afflictions of his own desires. Socrates could not be tempted because his virtue is simply an expression of himself. These are the “beauties” that he has inside. If Alcibiades is unhappy, whatever his gifts, it is because he is torn by incommensurable desires and cannot change. Socrates is happy because his desires are ordered and aim at the good. Philosophy, as Socrates demonstrates by his life, can provide one with the right relation to oneself and the right relation to others: it can make one happy. Here in the Symposium is the only place in the Dialogues where we are given a glimpse of the young Socrates – and therefore of the progress he makes from acolyte to mature philosopher. Early in the dialogue, the mature Socrates, who normally professes that he knows only that he knows nothing, announces that there is one subject that he knows about and it is the erotic arts. In one sense, this simply anticipates the revelation to come that Socrates has received instruction in the nature of love from Diotima. But the more significant meaning is that, like Eros, he loves wisdom. In fact, this love is exactly what Diotima imparted to him. In so doing, she provided to the young Socrates a goal to live by, because the desire for wisdom is the beginning of wisdom. In the mature Socrates, the love of wisdom has long since become a discipline for life. He has ceased to desire any other life. This discipline is what he calls, in the Apology, the care of the soul, and it is, he states there, all that he has to impart. That is so, of course, because he denies that he possesses any doctrine to teach or that he ever served as a teacher of the young men who gravitated to him. The love of wisdom is best captured in the profession of ignorance because, by disclaiming any knowledge of the truth, Socrates and those for whom he serves as a model are spurred ever onwards to

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its attainment. But Plato also shows us that the person who truly loves wisdom has also attained it, and with it the self-sufficiency that this implies. If that person has not succeeded in resolving his doubts concerning the nature of truth, he has nonetheless achieved a virtuous life. That is because his life is properly oriented toward the good, and such a life involves a renunciation of all that is not good (of which things one can speak with some confidence). The virtue Socrates shows, more a matter of integrity than of uprightness, is achievable by anyone who devotes his life to the same quest as if it alone mattered, though few will do so. The self-sufficiency of Socrates is an achieved wisdom and therefore an achieved love. Socrates shows his love in the fact that he cares for the soul of his interlocutors as much as he cares for his own, although it is out of generosity, not out of need, that Socrates helps others to the care of their own souls. He practises philosophy as a form of intellectual seduction so that, ideally, others will come to love wisdom as perfectly as he does. If he has no doctrine to teach, he does possess a method, in dialectical argument. This is a feature of ordinary discursive thought: it can be engaged in by a solitary person, as “a dialogue of the mind with itself.” It is better represented, however, as a shared search for understanding, as depicted in the Dialogues. In this process, the one who is closer to having achieved knowledge will naturally lead, by posing questions to the other, but, as he himself lacks perfect knowledge, he will also expect to learn from the exercise (as Socrates always professed it was his hope to do). That this presents a true picture of loving friendship Diotima hints at when she says that the goal she describes is to approach the nature of love correctly and, in this, one can be led by another. It is also suggested in what she says about how the lover (who is, be it recalled, the budding philosopher) leads the beloved in this quest. For Diotima tells us that, even at the first stage of the ascent, there is a proper way to love: the lover “should love one body and beget beautiful ideas there.” Dialectic, then, shouldn’t be understood as beginning and ending with Socrates’s takedowns of professional know-it-alls. It describes instead what is involved in private discussions among friends, when everyone present freely professes his ignorance and desires to know

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the truth. On these occasions, Socrates served, he said, as a “midwife,” helping the hesitant to give better expression to their thoughts. In the Apology, where Socrates, who is on trial for corrupting the youth of Athens and for introducing new gods, gives a defence of himself, and inferentially of philosophy, he does not choose to compare himself to a midwife but instead to a “gadfly” (and Athens to a “sluggish horse”). He describes himself, that is, as if serving a public purpose and makes no mention of the different sort of philosophical activity that is appropriately conducted among friends. Socrates chose not to lay before the mob the true meaning of philosophy. By this withholding, he shows that he also understands the nature of true friendship: it is a matter between friend and friend. In the Symposium, we are presented with a very unusual work of philosophy in that its style and its contents are poetic in the highest degree. Its subject, we saw, is the nature of the beautiful and the means by which through philosophical knowledge is attained. In addition, and as importantly, it surely represents an approach to life that is beautiful in its author’s eyes. It could not be otherwise since, for him, the good and the beautiful are conjoined. The dialogue’s simple message is that the beautiful intimates the good and incites the love for it. Plato must therefore speak of love in relation to the objects to which this life of which he conceives is devoted. It is not solely or primarily life as it ought to be lived (a moral imperative) because it accords with the good: it is equally the life that one desires to live because it is a life of passionate attachment. Plato is otherwise absent from his dialogues but he is, in this one, quite present, at least in spirit. Thus the Symposium includes the celebration of Socrates as an object of love, for Plato’s own filial love of Socrates can never be in question. We ourselves are invited to love Socrates and, through him, invited to lead the philosophical life. Plato had responded to that invitation. That he then claimed Socrates (who, though he was everything fine, was not a particularly poetic man) for his own poetic conception of philosophy was an amazing artistic feat and, as these are, an amazingly bold act of appropriation. His love alone justifies it.

3 Nietzsche’s Artist and His Thinker

In The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche conveys a strange message and confers an exacting task. He tells us that we can embrace our fate, unknown to us though it must be, and still become the true creators of ourselves, and that we must do both. The task is no less than the overcoming of oneself. For we know ourselves to be, as natural beings, bound by necessity. Yet we feel prompted inwardly to be something greater than we now are. Nietzsche believes that we are called to a heroic life as the only one in which this dilemma can be confronted and, perhaps, surmounted. The tragic hero overcame it when he foresaw his fate, recognized its injustice, and willed it to be what it was. Nietzsche argues that the conditions of modern life create a new opening for the individual who is like the hero in desiring to be the exception. He wishes us to make that choice and will show us how. Nietzsche is famous for his supposed irrationalism. Yet he does not contend that the conditions of life are unknowable. He denies, rather, that human life has any inherent purpose. We desire to believe that it does and also to believe that we are free to choose our own fates. That too is an illusion. We can maintain these illusions only because we segregate what we know to be true according to the laws of nature from what we believe to be true about ourselves, as if we were not part of nature. But, in the strong soul, the acceptance of the fact that we are not wholly self-determining is liberating because it is felt as the overcoming of an illusion one desires to believe. This is also Nietzsche’s response to the cultural crisis of his time. Previously the illusion of an

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absolute personal freedom was sustained by a belief in the existence of an inherent moral order, itself sustained by a benevolent deity. This had lent dignity to life and to the individual, too, in the idea of moral responsibility. Nietzsche perceived that he was living in the twilight of belief, and he realized the consequences of what was impending for man’s conception of himself. Recall his most famous trope, that “God is dead.” This appears, via a parable of fleeting brevity, in The Gay Science. Nietzsche himself is clearly the “fool” who announces in the marketplace that “God is dead, and it is we who killed him.”1 The mirth with which this announcement is greeted by the good burghers present has nothing to do with their conventional religiosity: most have already slipped into unbelief. The truly subversive message, which Nietzsche says that one or two people were only just beginning to recognize, is that it is we who killed God. That is the pass that Western rationality has brought us to. It is the implications of this feat of deicide to which men are blind. While himself godless, Nietzsche sees this event for the monumental presumption that it is. That we should have reached this pass means that the great Enlightenment experiment has also failed. This supposed that men could come to understand that they themselves are the authors of their deepest beliefs about value and be liberated by the knowledge (and keep their values too). Nietzsche accepted the first proposition and denied the second. This phenomenon, which he described as the “historical consciousness,” weighs upon us as a great burden. In his early essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” he relates that history is not simply the past and its record: it provides us also with our conception of the present. Every era has its absolute presuppositions – “horizons” – within which individuals and whole civilizations do their living. These set the limits to what people can believe to be true. In the past, people thought that their horizons were true reflections of reality, and that they could therefore know what human purposes were proper to pursue. But history teaches that these are simply man-made perspectives which are devised to meet the needs of their time. When they are discovered as such, they lose their power over us but also their power to sustain us. To Nietzsche

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it was a momentous discovery and foredestined a skepticism toward all values and a corrosive nihilism. It was a feature of the belief structures of the past that they covered up the truth of their own origins as the poetic creations of cultures. Metaphysics and religion could therefore pretend to knowledge of an absolute truth. But insofar as they commit themselves to truth and to conscience as a measure of things, as did Christianity, they contain the seeds of their own destruction. The will to truth leads us, in time, to recognize history’s lesson that there can be no inherent truths, because belief is transitory and, in historical retrospect, the origins of belief in human needs are all too apparent. Formerly peoples set a table of values over themselves in complete unconsciousness that they were doing so. Now the individual has superseded the people and has become conscious of the fact that values are not fixed and permanent. All ascriptions of value are seen to be historically mediated and therefore contingent. History has seen to the abolition of horizons, as consciousness itself has become historical. The last gasp of metaphysics is represented by Hegel, who had most fully thought through the Enlightenment project. He held that, coming at last to grasp the fact that it creates the world out of itself, the mind is caused to be at home with itself. Nietzsche held the opposite. His spirit is decidedly homeless. This view helped him to see that the historicizing tendency has actually produced in modern man a sense of loss, an irony about his very self, and a hopelessness that he will ever again regain the powers wielded by his predecessors who had one and all followed some great idea. Nietzsche thinks that the death of God means also the death of man as he has hitherto lived. He himself, in the attacks on Christian belief and on morality and all metaphysics that were to come in his later books, is part of the great nineteenth-century wave of demythologization, which itself partakes of the historical consciousness, and which he pursues with a particularly brutal relish. And yet he looks askance at the results. According to him, the highest values have begun to devalue themselves. He fears above all else the development of a general state of easy unbelief that thinks of itself as good mental hygiene instead of, as it is, a withdrawal into the littleness of the selfish ego. Nietzsche sees a light

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going out of the world. His concern is that the historical sense should never reign without restraint, that it is destructive of the “pious illusion” necessary for love, because “it is only in love, only when shaded by the illusion produced by love, that is to say in the unconditional faith in right and perfection, that man is creative.”2 It was true in the nineteenth century, as today, that a common culture existed despite the waning of universal (religious) values, and that it was expressed in both “high” and “low” forms. High culture (“the best which has been thought and said,” according to Matthew Arnold) had been set up by some as a bulwark against what was coming to be called “philistinism.” But to Nietzsche, the culture of the intellectuals, like Arnold, is itself philistine. It represents merely the decay of all former ideals. Culture had once expressed the collective genius of a people but now had come to serve purely as a veneer applied to an empty spirit, furnishing “nothing but the arts and artifices for prettifying life.”3 “An inward culture for outward barbarians,” he called it.4 Culture in this sense causes a person to cease to be aware of life. “No one should be surprised,” he writes, “if the people perishes of petty egoism.”5 Culture is set, that is, upon a nihilistic path. Given the collapse of horizons of belief and the fact that all cultures are predicated upon values – they elevate certain ways of life and exclude others – the question of how a legitimate culture can now be conceived of must be faced. The Nietzsche we confront has abandoned all schemes for the reformation of Western civilization and has set his sights upon the individual’s self-directed effort to find meaning in his own life. Education, he believed, only thwarted all such efforts by inculcating conventional ideals, those very ones in crisis. Nietzsche now advocates, as against a culture of self-cultivation, one of self-realization, by which he means the effort to separate oneself from what one has been taught in order to find within oneself one’s own paramount values. He writes, “Culture is the child of each individual’s self-knowledge and dissatisfaction with himself. Anyone who believes in culture is thereby saying: ‘I see above me something higher and more human than I am.’”6 He argues that only the love of this higher thing “can bestow on the soul not only a clear, discriminating and self-contemptuous view of itself; but also the desire to look beyond itself and

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to seek with all its might for a higher self as yet still concealed from it.”7 Nietzsche’s solution, then, at this stage of his thinking, is that a person should become self-surpassing through self-appointed goals – an ambition, one might think, not so very different from Plato’s, albeit shorn of any suggestion of transcendental destinations. It might seem that, in speaking of his new ideal as “culture,” Nietzsche is perverse since the concept implies generally held values and, for him, all that is finished, exhausted, and there only remain the values we adopt for ourselves. Nevertheless he preserves the idea of culture as a horizon of values within which a person, as much as a society, is able to find life to have meaning. But is even that still possible? The abiding question for Nietzsche is this: Given that life has no inherent meaning or purpose, beyond the brute facts of nature, how is it possible to live as if it did and still live in the light of truth? Nietzsche’s answer to the dilemmas of modernity is (as the philosopher George Grant once put it) to call for “more of the same.” Or, as Nietzsche himself would say, he does not retreat from the implications of those dilemmas. He will succumb neither to despair in the world’s loss of meaning nor to an easy acceptance of the fact. He will reclaim nihilism and pessimism – those profoundly destructive forms of a life-denying Weltschmerz – but in a life-affirming form. Nietzsche gauges the collapse of the old order as opening up a place for the possibility and necessity of the creation of new meaning. This is likewise, as we will see, a necessity for art. Just as the loss of belief in conventional morality makes necessary the creation of new values, the loss of belief in conventional truth will elevate art into an exemplary meaning-creating enterprise (and task). His answer will make sense of some quite opaque Nietzschean aphorisms, which seem, somehow, to assimilate life to art – his assertions that it is necessary “to lend style to one’s character” and that we desire to be “the poets of our own lives.” To understand these is to obtain an insight into the problem that we are beings who are both determined and indeterminate and to potentially overcome the dilemmas posed by life to the living. If the question is how we are like artists, the answer lies in the essentially creative nature of our beings. In that respect, we press against our inherent limitations and give the world the meaning

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that it does not otherwise possess. This, the task of creation, will be felt in strong spirits as a delight in the exercise of one’s powers. But it is also, inescapably, the assumption of a great responsibility. For the task that is set before us, which is to do justice to the world as it actually is, compels us to recognize the terrifying and questionable character of existence (“the abyss,” he called it) and yet to affirm it by desiring nothing different than to live life in the light of that truth. In the face of this, we are heroes – possibly even tragic heroes – or we are nothing at all. The heroic life is the only authentic response to the tragic condition of life. It is also the life that, because it is truthful, the noble person will instinctively desire to live. Nietzsche embarked upon such questions and the tasks they import in The Gay Science (1882). This book follows Daybreak, wherein he begins his “campaign against morality.” The earlier critique of culture anticipated the attack on morality, because both can be seen as organized efforts to distract man from the true task of living for himself. In the case of morality, this is quite explicit: the demand it makes is for selflessness, which is living for others. Since that is an unnatural thing to do, the demand has to be cloaked in the false teaching that self-sacrifice is noble. There is therefore a need to reframe what nobility is. The project that is The Gay Science follows logically from the critique of morality. It forms an extended exhortation to his readers to frame their own horizons in an exclusively this-worldly life. “Self-overcoming,” Nietzsche’s basic requirement for us, has elements of self-surpassing (as was already seen in his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator”) and also of a newly emphasized self-scrutiny. It is an exigent ideal he prescribes since in order to be self-affirming it is required for us also to be self-negating. What is to be negated is the culture of which one is the product and the received ideas embedded in it, without undertaking which it is impossible to know the truth that we are called upon to affirm. Accordingly, we are both to affirm and to negate our unbelief. It is this difficult exercise that Nietzsche attempts to capture in this text. This great book contains no systematic argument, but that is only to be expected from this particular philosopher. Nietzsche denied that the truth ever forms a system. As he perceived and we can endorse, lives

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– our own lives – are completely unlike systems. Moreover, life can only be understood from particular perspectives, and these must be as various as there are people. His is an attempt to grasp life by bending it to his interpretative will, which he does, among other things, by attempting to capture the feeling of life, down to its passing moods. It is, Nietzsche considers, the only way to do justice to life. The book opens upon the moment when the author most feels his power and the possibilities it confers. It is a moment of joy. If there is also an undertone of melancholy, that is nonetheless all that it remains. Nietzsche declares – and we cannot tell what courage it costs him to make the claim – that he has achieved a free spirit. It is, he says, January, and he intends henceforth only to say yes to life. This vow comes from one who, as he confesses, had retreated into solitude as a self-defence against a contempt for men that had become pathologically clairvoyant (because, presumably, they fail to face up to the implications of their unbelief and allow a drift toward a nihilism of the destructive sort). From this “nausea,” he returns to his life with, as in any convalescence, sharpened senses and fresh appetites. He will no longer do battle with ugliness: “Looking away shall be my only negation.”8 Here, while still in the book’s preface, we are given an inkling that it will serve as a demonstration of the author’s love for the philosopher’s life as he conceives it. The signs of the struggle to achieve this state of being are not dissembled, nor is the fact that a strong love is required to win through to that life. It is a very palpable vision. It seems probable, even, that in writing The Gay Science, Nietzsche is himself undergoing the very exercise in self-transformation that he prescribes for his readers. He is engaged, that is, in “self-overcoming.” This term implies for him a continuous renewal of outlook in light of the fresh discoveries the self makes and is bound to make, and his book is a compendium of such discoveries about life. So we find the author making and recording many discoveries about consciousness, also recording, in a confessional way, what the experience of living has disclosed to him about himself. He seems to have believed, with good reason, that he embodied both the artist and the thinker and that it was this achievement that gave him his peculiar ability to understand modern life and the proper response to it.

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Fittingly, The Gay Science is not a through-composed work but a compilation and ordering of notebook entries that, once arranged, resemble the enactment of a drama. It is a record of perceptions, and they are of a type that depends on the author’s moods and the way they open up worlds to him. Nietzsche is, as is often remarked, a keen psychologist. (Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk suggests that Nietzsche’s psychological genius seems to be posted over the entrance to the twentieth century.) Not so remarked upon is the fact that his psychologist’s eye is trained as much inwardly as it is outwardly toward the behaviour of others. This has given him an acute understanding into what Proust calls “the intermittences of the heart” – its inconsistencies and its inconstancies. One may instance his treatment of beauty. In numerous places, Nietzsche demonstrates his sensitivity toward beauty. But he appreciates how dependent it is upon one’s mood – thus his observation that “the world is overfull of beautiful things but nevertheless poor, very poor when it comes to beautiful moments and unveilings of things.”9 For “the unveiling must have been accomplished by our own soul because we needed some external expression and parable.” Here he captures the poet’s need, and also our own, to find our happiness or our melancholy written in our surroundings. Elsewhere, he observes that, when beauty does unveil itself, it does so “once only.” So capricious are we that, though the beautiful thing itself does not change, this only makes it seem stale. Thus the world remains “overfull” while being perceived as “poor.” Nietzsche appreciates very well that moment of high expectation that yields only disappointment, accompanied by irritation, because we expected to be moved and were not. Finally, The Gay Science is itself a work of art, which in its feeling of immediacy, conveys that state of excitement that Nietzsche contends is always associated with the creative act. So we return, after that excursus, to the idea of a gay science. The discovery Nietzsche had made, and which led to the book, was that the tragic pessimism he already possessed could be experienced joyfully. If people generally have lost the desire for life, he sees that as being

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because underlying their unbelief is the loss of the sense that life is worth desiring. For himself, by contrast, his unbelief triggers a great desire for life. He identifies himself as godless and an immoralist and in such an advanced stage of each, so cold, hard, and tough, that he does not claim that the world is worth less because it is ungodly and “inhuman.” He considers it a monstrous presumption that men should judge the world, as Schopenhauer does, and set themselves apart from it: “It would seem laughable to us today if man were to insist on inventing values that were supposed to excel the value of the world.”10 He rejects the nihilistic pessimism of his age. He sees that unbelief can be turned into a positive force, if felt to unleash the creative urge. This – which he will later call the “will to power” – is the will to place one’s stamp upon one’s own life and give the world meaning in one’s own eyes. Only in the strong soul is this paradoxical joy triggered by unbelief, for only the strong soul relishes the idea of life as a test of his power, through his own activity, to overcome the inherent absence of purpose in life. In the strong person, the motivation to be tested comes from the need to live a life in which he can feel pride. That this project may fail – that its failure may be written in the stars – does not deter him: it engages him. It calls forth a spirit of discovery, which is the desire to see what life holds in store for him. If Nietzsche is correct, even the setbacks he encounters will subsequently be seen to have made an essential contribution. That is, he will be strengthened by them. “Le gai saber” – the gay science –  meant, to the troubadours, the art of poetry, and theirs was of course a poetry of love. So the insinuation is that this book will be composed of love lyrics. If the courtly love of which the poets sang is an ideal one and unattainable in real life, that speaks of Nietzsche’s vast ambition to transfigure commonplace reality so that it may be worthy of bearing our love. The word saber (savoir) hints at an esoteric kind of knowledge and indeed Nietzsche claims to have a “science” special to himself. It is a love that has incorporated the truth, so that it does perfect justice to life. As such, it can know itself, joyfully, to have accepted the world for what it is.

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Yet this book, out of all of Nietzsche’s work, cannot be understood without an appreciation of the solemnity and weight of the burden he has assumed, and in maddening isolation, as if he were bearing it alone. It is nothing less than the overcoming of European civilization, made necessary by the crumbling of the values (the faith) that had provided its foundation. Here, he confronts the necessity for the destruction of existing values, but this must be understood as a clearing away of the rubble. There is no exultation in destruction per se, no desire to destroy for the pleasure of it. The exultation, instead, is found in the necessity of reconstruction (corresponding to what he calls the “revaluation of values”) and therefore in an activity that is creative. Nietzsche will say that there can be no destruction without creation and anyway that exposing the “misty shroud of delusion” hardly destroys the world that for most people counts as real. “We can destroy only as creators,” he writes.11 This is his bulwark against nihilism. It is also his faith. He conceives his task as being to persuade his reader that the task of creation is a task worth undertaking. Fundamental to his argument, which is equally an argument with himself as with us, is the problem of how belief in any value can be authentic when every value is put into question. There is an affirmation of the necessity of belief to overcome the plague of denial in which his contemporaries found themselves. At the same time, the scrutiny of any such ideal one desires to embody is necessary to avoid the possibility of self-delusion. In this book, we find Nietzsche in the midst of this struggle, which is, in itself, a form of affirmation. He presents the struggle to us so that it may serve as a pattern, for those who are able to seize upon it, of a truthful life, which is also intended to be a joyous one. An appeal of this sort can lie only to the solitary individual, and must appeal to the heart as well as to the mind. This portends a new kind of philosophy: a philosophy engagé. In a quite fascinating way, we find Nietzsche assuming for philosophy the task that he had formerly assigned to tragedy. He had argued in The Birth of Tragedy that the tragic dramas of the Greeks exposed the “terrible truth” that life is meaningless and destructive but also, through the illusion that art

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creates, made it seem beautiful and therefore desirable. Subsequently he abandoned the hope that art could still serve that purpose or indeed that it was a desirable one. It seemed to him infected by the romantic pessimism of Schopenhauer, in which art serves as a solace for the otherwise brutish condition of life (much as the Victorians submersed themselves in the music of Nietzsche’s early hero, Wagner). Can philosophy serve a more truthful purpose? Art achieves its effects subliminally; philosophy works through a process of conscious thought. Yet it will have to assume some of the attributes of art if it is to elevate life by disclosing the possibilities for living. Therefore philosophy cannot consist of doctrine alone: it must also be a kind of rhetoric. And The Gay Science is in fact a collection of rhetorical strategies designed to shake the reader out of his presumed complacency and to make him see the world and himself afresh, and to desire a new life. This involves the unmasking of the reader’s presumed false consciousness, which is rooted in the conventional beliefs by which he unconsciously strives to hide the truth from himself, and tendering to him a truthful alternative that he can find to be beautiful. Style is essential to this exercise. The reader must be made to feel the lack of any firm ground beneath his feet, for the sake of making him feel not the distress but the exhilaration of vertigo. Often Nietzsche’s imagery serves to exalt the indeterminacy of open horizons, and suggest the love of fate or of necessity, the semblance of fate – as if that were sufficient to ground a life, as if the very difficulty that this love portends were its own purpose and justification. In this, he serves as the artist does for, he asserts, “Artists continually glorify – they do nothing else – all those states and things that are reputed to give man the opportunity to feel good for once, or great, or intoxicated, or cheerful, or well and wise.”12 I might pause to mention that this last expostulation shows that Nietzsche still believes that art has a special purpose in life although he conceives of its purpose differently than he had in The Birth of Tragedy. He asserts that every art and every philosophy presupposes suffering and can be viewed as its remedy and an aid “in the service of growing and struggling life.”13 But there are two types of sufferers: those (like himself) who suffer from “the over-fullness of life,” and

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who desire a Dionysian art that does not shrink from depicting the terrible and questionable, and those who suffer from “the impoverishment of life,” and who desire either rest and stillness or the forgetfulness that lies in intoxication and anaesthesia. Nietzsche says that, regarding all aesthetic values, he now asks whether they imply “hunger or super-abundance.” This suggests that art must serve philosophy and a particular conception of truth. Yet, in other moods, as we shall see, Nietzsche thinks of art as a blissful dispensation from the tragic view of life. This ambiguity he never, it seems to me, resolves. By the time Nietzsche comes to write The Gay Science, he no longer finds it enough to have great ambitions and to strive to realize them. Earlier, in his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he had invited (as we glimpsed) a certain trust in one’s instinctive loves – as if these, by themselves, could survive the collapse of any warrantable structure of belief. But now he sees that what is required must begin from a true reckoning of the nature of life, and one’s instinctive beliefs must be regarded with the suspicion that they have been corrupted by the culture that shaped them. In order to become self-directed, we must be absolutely without self-delusion. To this end, Nietzsche introduces us to the concept of “intellectual conscience,” which he describes as “a conscience behind your conscience,” one that questions any judgment that “this is right” or “this is wrong,” whose roots lie in our instincts. One must become unable to accept any belief of right and wrong for which one has not first given oneself an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con: to scrutinize each belief as severely as one would a scientific hypothesis. Intellectual conscience must also be concerned with the adequacy of the account one gives to oneself of who one is. Nietzsche demands a more stringent form of honesty with oneself than had appeared in his earlier works, but he is not finished. A new note is sounded to accompany it: the note of necessity. If we are to become human beings “who give themselves laws, who create themselves,” we must become “the best learners and discoverers of everything that is lawful and necessary in the world. We must become physicists in order to be creators in this sense.”14 This is the necessity that flows from man’s place in nature, as science reveals it to us, and

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it is not to be overcome even though man in his social guise is constantly self-overcoming. Book I of The Gay Science begins with the observation that man stands alone among all the species in one sense. Every other contains within itself an end or purpose shaping its drives. Man’s life alone is essentially purposeless, at least once his survival is assured. Therefore he has to fulfill one more condition of his existence than do the other animals: he has to devise why he exists. This charge is a measure of how deep responsibility runs for ourselves. But, in addition, it is a brute fact that all of creation is determined in accordance with strict laws of causation, which operate in ways that can never really be known. The effect is that all one’s most cherished beliefs and values must be regarded as contingent. One is to accept the fragility of valuation, alongside its necessity, and accept living with that ambiguity. In part, this is a counsel of prudence (a warning that our projects may fail). In part, it is a demand for an honest life. But Nietzsche makes a still bolder claim upon us, one befitting free spirits. The love that is now urged upon us is a love of necessity, as reflecting the only true love of life. It is the love of what cannot be avoided, of one’s fate, and that of every part of life, including things one would seemingly want to deny. Loving necessity means accepting in one’s heart the injustices of life, including the fact that one’s projects, though they deserve to succeed, will probably fail, because the necessity that resides in nature is also nature’s indifference to us. To love necessity would seem to be to surrender the will. But it is not a (Schopenhauerian) quietism of which Nietzsche speaks: it is instead something more like the testing of the limits of the possible. It, contrary to quietism, requires courage and resolve and discipline.15 How does a stance which treats our horizons as open and ourselves as boundless potentiality cohere with necessity? Nietzsche trusts that the acceptance of necessity and the other burdens one imposes upon oneself will produce, somewhat paradoxically, a genuinely free spirit, for freedom is meaningful only as an overcoming. He wants to create human beings “who are bent on seeking in all things for what in them must be overcome” – the fear of life foremost among them.16 “Send your ships into uncharted seas!” is his exhortation. Yet he notes that

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even those disposed toward his message lack faith in themselves, and must acquire it. They have to persuade the skeptic within themselves “and that almost requires genius.”17 All these ideas are caught in one of his marvellous aphorisms: We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned bridges behind us – indeed we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us. Now, little ship, look out! Beside you is the ocean: to be sure it does not always roar, and at times it lies spread out like silk and gold and reveries of graciousness. But hours will come when you realize it is infinite and there is nothing more awesome than infinity. Oh, the poor bird that felt free and now strikes the walls of his cage. Woe, when you feel homesick for the land as if it had offered more freedom – and there is no longer any “land.”18 The ship upon the open sea symbolizes the desire for knowledge and also for life. The land, receding and finally disappearing, represents the abandonment of certainty and along with it any possibility of taking one’s bearings. It is at this point that the possibility of discovery is at its height. But there is also the hint of necessity in the image, for there is nothing external to ourselves that will give us bearings. Elsewhere, Nietzsche tallies up what is lost: the trust in the eternal and the human need to lose oneself. He addresses the “man of renunciation” in his solitude: “You will never pray again, never adore again, never again rest in endless trust … Who will give you strength for that? Nobody yet has had the strength.”19 He speaks of hopes, but these are to be felt only by those who have experienced “splendour, ardour, and dawns in your own souls.” The strength must come from within, from one’s passionate longing “to be a single great mood incarnate.”20 He foresees that history may one day give birth to such people, who will feel as their usual state what has entered our souls only now and then. He associates these supreme experiences with new reckonings of the value of life, which will be felt as personal to each seeker after knowledge. These valuations will justify a particular way of living and thinking and as such are experienced as “a sun that shines espe-

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cially for him and bestows warmth, blessings, and fertility on him.”21 Nietzsche wishes for the creation of many more such suns. Happiness is not exactly renounced, but neither is it aimed at. That would at best lead us to accept a conventional sort of happiness (which is just comfort, which he scorns). Happiness will come unsought to the free spirit, and in a transcendent form. The fact that the human animal is a living contradiction – a compound of necessity and potentiality – is caught in Nietzsche’s doubleedged injunction that “You must become who you are.” (This is said to be a dictate of intellectual conscience.) “Who one is” is what one is fated to be, but it is also what one has it in oneself to be. They are two aspects of the same phenomenon – call it being a person. Since both necessity and potential are true conditions of life, then how they operate together can be determined only by living: this is a fact inscribed in our becoming. We are not pure potentiality and self-overcoming is not a matter of choosing oneself in a condition of what we would now call existential freedom. It is instead a kind of contest between the self one desires to be and the limits imposed by necessity. Whether in one’s own case change is possible can never be taken as a given (as, perhaps, in conventional morality it is). There is simply a challenge that one can take up or avoid. People are more or less reflective, more or less intuitive. In some, the drives are tenacious, in others feeble. Some are more motivated by the external circumstances of their lives to seek change within themselves. Realizing one’s potential in the Nietzschean sense, a desirable unity of self, will never happen in those who, constitutionally, lack either the desire or the will. And in the case of those who possess both, there can be no assurance whatever that the effort will succeed. One’s strength may flag at any point or be broken on contending circumstances beyond one’s control. By the same token, to one to whom nature has given the gift of being aspiring, a nudge in the right direction may suffice. In any event, one’s actions will disclose what one is made of. The ultimate test of whether one can accept both necessity and becoming is the love of fate, or in Nietzsche’s version of this, the willing of the eternal recurrence of the same (the repetition in succession of every moment of your life in an endless cycle). The point of this

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thought experiment is expressed in the following passage: “If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, ‘Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?’ would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight.”22 The thought in question compels the acceptance of becoming because it implies acceptance that there are, in life, just these moments and nothing beyond them. It also implies the acceptance of necessity, the fact that things can be no different than they are and were, an acceptance so complete that one desires and wills that they shall not be any different than they are, were, or will be. If we really were able to live so perfectly in and for the moment as to will its eternal recurrence, along with every other fact of our lives – if, that is, we were able to will both the pure contingency and the pure finality of all things – we would affirm truly, and not (as we actually do) by way of lip service, the preciousness of each moment. We would, at a stroke, liberate ourselves from the burden of living in the past, and all the resentment, shame, and guilt that go with that, and also the burden of living for the future and the illusion that it will redeem the errors and mischances of the past. We would give up the craving for immortality. Nietzsche must know as he addresses us that it is purely accidental whether we have the capacity to meet the test he poses. So if he persists it is because he has a kind of faith in us. It is out of the same concern that he addresses us with such urgency, with that beautiful appeal to our stronger natures that is contained in The Gay Science. If captivated by that, we can at least as readers be the people that Nietzsche desires us to be. Here and elsewhere in his works, life and its challenges are meant to seem intoxicating in much the same way that Nietzsche supposed art to be. From first to last in the Nietzschean corpus, art is “the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life, the great stimulant of life.”23 A stimulant produces intoxication and that, Nietzsche says, is “an exalted feeling of power”24 or, one might say, of possibility. It is the state “that creates art” as well as the state that creating art induces. But art is not only an expression of the will. It possesses the power to “fix an image of what ought to be” because

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it selects and highlights and glorifies, strengthens or weakens certain valuations, and in so doing it transforms the world, for the world as we see it is the way the world is to us. This is the key to Nietzsche’s assertion that, “Art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life.”25 The creation of beauty should not be seen as distinct from the creation of value and therefore of meaning itself. It is an exercise of the “shaping will” because the will to make beauty is inseparable from the will to shape the world until it reflects one’s projects. Will and vision are, in homo faber, very nearly the same. And so Nietzsche writes: “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature – nature is always value-less but has been given value at some time, as a present – and it was we who gave and bestowed it. Only we have created the world that concerns man!”26 Also this: “Likewise our love of the beautiful: it also is our shaping will. The two senses stand side-by-side; the sense for the real is the means of acquiring the power to shape things according to our wish. The joy in shaping and reshaping – a primeval joy! We can only comprehend a world that we ourselves have made.”27 And this: “All nature ceases and becomes art.”28 If the world can be grasped only through metaphors, then the metaphor makers rule and the artist is the true metaphysician. She invents new perspectives and thus generates insights and new meanings. And in this way – since it is her vision with which she is concerned – she makes things beautiful for herself. Nietzsche tells us that we should learn from the artist how to make things beautiful for ourselves in order that we may see life to be beautiful and desirable. Our own lives too must be made beautiful in our eyes (just as man “admires himself” in his art). Nietzsche writes that, “One thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by this or that poetry or art.” With some levity, he suggests fitting one’s strengths and weaknesses into an “artistic plan,” in which “even weaknesses delight the eye.” He declares: “To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art!” He explains how this may be achieved:

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Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small.29 A person’s style is a manifestation, ideally, of individuality. It is, to use a Proustian word, an inflection. It implies a certain elegance and a certain fastidiousness because in all the small ways one expresses oneself – in one’s taste, in one’s manners – there too the essential self is found. Like a work of art, style is the effectuation of the elements of a personality into a harmonious whole, an expressive unity. None of this is possible unless the inner and the outer selves mirror each other. Now recall that this is Nietzsche’s idea of the true meaning of “culture” and explains why he speaks of culture in relation to the personal. Style, in Nietzsche’s sense, is an answer to the fact that, in modern life, there is a disharmony between the inner and the outer. Nietzsche wishes to restore to life the totality of an idea or rather the force of one. Style, it seems, must be the object of an aspiration along these lines. There is every connection between achieving a style and self-overcoming as self-transcending. Nietzsche doesn’t think of this task as anything but problematic. For that reason, the aphorism should not be interpreted as a lighthearted invitation to undertake a “makeover.” Of course it is playful, but not in an unserious way. Any inference that a person should try to invent a style for himself, the way a dandy does, would violate what should be considered a virtual rule of Nietzsche interpretation: if there are two readings, one of which makes a task seem easier and the other harder, choose the second. This better accords with what is expected of us by the master proponent of self-overcoming because the greater the implied difficulty, the greater the opportunity for overcoming. It accords moreover with his view that what we are, we are out of neces-

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sity. A style that is merely assumed is one that is false and is doomed to fall away as one’s essential nature reasserts itself. It is only by the exercise of a determined will that a person is capable of change, and even then there are limitations (as Nietzsche notes) on how much change is possible. As a person, one has both strengths and limitations. Character is a matter of what can be made out of them, of how they can be shaped to a certain purpose. Style, so conceived, is an achievement. Nietzsche, the “initiate and disciple of Dionysus,” may have been infatuated – it is not too strong a word – with intoxication. He appreciated perfectly well that he contained contradictions (“antithetical capacities”) within himself. Yet it is pretty clear that he was no advocate of giving free rein to self-expression, much less to the unfiltered id. Those same capacities, he asserted, “are not allowed to disturb or destroy one another.”30 Necessarily, he was an advocate of self-restraint. In art, he favoured classicism over romanticism – a regime of strict rules and models over the free play of genius. The same should be understood to apply in the making of a self, except that the rules and models are self-imposed. For the artist, he said, freedom and necessity are the same thing. This seems to imply a very willing submission to rules and models. Why would the artist make this choice? I think he would argue that such constraints upon her endeavour also enable her vision. The greatest artists will press up against these limits, bending them to their artistic purpose and making out of them a new and striking beauty. And then they will hand the rules over to others but now subtly modified by their own activity. It may well be that Nietzsche thought that, for us too, freedom and necessity should be regarded as the same. That is, we should willingly shoulder the constraints that are anyway unavoidable and see to what extent we can bend them to our will. This is to live truthfully. At the same time, it points to how we live productively in light of the truth. Though it is right to set out to remake the world, or at least our own relation to it, we cannot believe about it whatever we may choose. Since the world exists independently and is refractory to false beliefs about it, our beliefs must be treated as always provisional and subject to disproof by experience. This applies especially to what one

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believes about oneself for there we are very prone to ignorance and error. So we are to conduct a sort of experiment with our lives – a test of our own ability to contrive new meanings (or purposes) within constraints both internal and external. In something of the same vein, Nietzsche declares, “We want to be the poets of our own lives.”31 Once again, Nietzsche doesn’t mean that we should fashion for ourselves a persona the way a novelist contrives a character’s persona, out of her imagination. He could not possibly have intended such a flimsy conception of personhood. What he had in mind is more like a self fashioned out of a person’s own ideals, and thus one that has become “what one is.” The goal should be to be in relation to our lives as the artist is in relation to her art, that is, to express through them a great idea of our own devising. It should be one that conceives of life as a meaningful whole in the way that a work of art is, and has something of its power too. For, as the artist shapes her work according to her vision, and finds it reflected there, we shape the world according to our work, or whatever our project is, and hope to find ourselves reflected in what is so made. That is why Nietzsche contends that art provides us with “the good conscience to turn ourselves into an aesthetic phenomenon,” and thus to have a life that is the disciplined expression of a coherent idea, as a work of art is, and earns us our own self-respect because it satisfies our own high demands. “In art,” Nietzsche says, “man takes delight in himself as perfection.”32 There is a sense, however, in which we are called to a greater task than is the artist. For the artist, the desire for life is a desire to live unreflectively in the flow of life. This, Nietzsche felt, was the special talent of the Greeks. They were, he contends, in love with the beautiful surface of life and not its imagined depths. That is because, he believed, they understood all too well what those depths contained. They knew not to look too deeply into the truth since to do so would destroy the illusion that the truth is beautiful. They were therefore “superficial – out of profundity.”33 In their love of appearances, moreover, they were artists and enabled to create beauty, which they did, in tragic drama for example, by casting a beautiful (dream-like) veil over life’s questionable aspects. As we have noticed already,

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Nietzsche (as himself an artist) approves of this impulse to fix and immortalize the beautiful things that may be ascribed to the world. The impulse is prompted by noble feelings of love and gratitude. Like the Greeks, we, too, who are like artists, are so intoxicated by life that we experience exultation as almost a normal state: Oh, these men of former times knew how to dream and did not find it necessary to go to sleep first. We men of today still master this art all too well, despite all of our goodwill toward the day and staying awake. It is quite enough to love, to hate, to desire, simply to feel – and right away the spirit and power of the dream overcome us, and with our eyes open, coldly contemptuous of all danger, we climb up on the most hazardous paths to scale the roofs and spires of fantasy – without any sense of dizziness, as if we had been born to climb, we somnambulists of the day! We artists! We ignore what is natural. We are moonstruck and God-struck. We wander, still as death, unwearied, on heights that we do not see as heights but as plains, as our safety.34 Much of what Nietzsche has to offer the spirit that conceives of itself as the exception is contained in this picture – the experience of life as sublime, inducing a rapture that is felt not as an interruption of the ordinary but as its natural accompaniment. There would seem to be an uneasy relationship between joy and the truth, one that is obscured by art in that it is not art’s purpose to engage with the truth. Since art issues out of a state of intoxication, it involves forgetfulness of self and of mundane reality. Art accomplishes its task, which is to make things beautiful although nothing inherently is, by floating above the truth. (It ignores what is natural.) In this way, art embodies the spirit of play – even around serious things. As oblivious to the truth, the artist cannot be said to possess the will toward self-deceit. But equally she lacks a will toward truthfulness. She would instead speak of her love. But this shows that she fails to understand the meaning of her own activity. The artist’s love is an illusion because it still attributes to life an inherent value

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(for example, that it possesses beauty). Moreover, it is essential that art should serve as a form of apprehended beauty if it is to fulfill its purpose of enhancing life by making it seem desirable to herself and the rest of us. At best, art has an ambiguous relationship to the truth. On the one hand, it enacts the human task: to stamp the world with meaning, an essential activity. Lest we fall into despair, we must construct new horizons for ourselves and they must consist of positive meanings. On the other hand, Nietzsche has urged upon us “intellectual conscience,” which is truthfulness to the actual condition of life. We, Nietzsche’s readers, are charged to take up the artist’s task as an element of our own self-overcoming. But we are to do so as thinkers. The thinker embodies the truthful apprehension of reality, the artist the authentic response to it. One can combine both in one person. But then we find ourselves embracing a dilemma – one to lay alongside the reconciliation of necessity and potentiality – and that is how love and conscience are to be reconciled. We must affirm meaning and value while being under no illusion that they are really part of the fabric of the world. We cannot recover the condition of the Greeks (as Nietzsche had once thought we could) for whom beauty was enough.35 Nietzsche’s solution to the dilemma he poses is that we thinkers must find within ourselves the strength to see the truth as beautiful, so that it may provide a new horizon for our lives. The person who can do this is one who can combine within himself both negation and affirmation, the utmost seriousness with a sense of play directed at those serious things. Such a person possesses a free spirit (la gaya scienza). He is one who has become capable of lightness of heart despite his knowledge of the most terrible truths of life. We are told near the end of The Gay Science that the free spirit “would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being one practised in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses.”36 This speaks of the acceptance of the truth as true affirmation demands, its incorporation into one’s life, finding that truth to be beautiful. Joy results because the absence of any meaning conferred on human life opens up the possibility for its creation in one’s own.

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As the book closes, Nietzsche associates himself for a moment with the other “modern men,” who are cautious about ultimate convictions. He includes all those who, like himself, are “untimely” and not at home in the present, and who feel disfavour for all ideals that might lead one to feel at home “in this fragile, broken time of transition.” He places himself also with the “good Europeans” who have outgrown Christianity and yet would sacrifice everything as the Christians did, doing so not for their unbelief but for their own, hidden, faith – a faith that compels them to embark onto the sea. It is, he says, “the hidden Yes in you” that is stronger “than all Nos and Maybes that afflict you and your age like a disease.”37 To liberate oneself from everything that makes one a heavy European, one must overcome “the sum of the imperious value judgements that have become part of our flesh and blood.”38 A person must overcome his time and also his aversion to his time and his untimeliness in order to befit himself for the adventure of life. Doing justice to life means accepting the truth while still affirming the value of life: this is the courage to love without illusions, to dream while awake. * * *

n i e t z s c h e ’ s i d e a l s f o r l i f e ( w h i c h , as w i l l b e a p pa r e n t, a r e a l l i n t e r r e l at e d ) Intellectual Conscience (The Virtue of the Thinker) This is the element responsible for negation in the “revaluation of all values.” It entails strict honesty with oneself as to the human condition, and therefore acceptance that there are no fixed truths or values (strong nihilism) and that necessity is the rule of nature (strong pessimism). Creative Self-Determination (The Virtue of the Artist) This is the element responsible for affirmation in the revaluation of values. The courageous person joyfully accepts that although life

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propounds no value, it possesses supreme value for the one who desires to live it to the full. It entails that the absence of an extrinsic order of meaning creates the possibility for the adoption of ideals of one’s own making as well as the necessity for doing so, since for life to be bearable it must be justified in one’s eyes. A corollary rule is that the choice of ideals must be authentically one’s own and should be prompted by whatever is, for oneself, the highest. An Experimental Attitude toward the Truth (The Virtue of the Physicist) This entails that all claims to knowledge must be treated as provisional and subject to the only test that matters: the test of one’s own experience. Becoming Who You Are This entails that life should be lived actively, so as by its outcome to disclose one’s essential nature to oneself and demonstrate the adequacy of one’s self-understanding. A corollary rule is that the ideal of self-realization (self-making) is achieved not by education but by undertaking some great project. Self-Overcoming If there is a key concept, embracing all the others, this is it. It is the engine of one’s self-realization. It entails embracing a tentativeness of all beliefs (including, even, one’s own ideals), an experimental attitude toward living, a desire for change and growth, and an openness to discovery (a free spirit). It requires a continuous dissatisfaction with the state of oneself one has so far achieved and a willingness to reconceive one’s ideals, beliefs, perspectives, and goals so as to incorporate into them the discoveries one has made in living.

4 A Dialogue on Truth, Love, Beauty, and Art Now it would not be fitting for a man of sense to maintain that all this is just as I have described it, but that this or something like it is true concerning our souls and their abodes, given that it is evident that the soul is immortal, I think he may properly and worthily venture to believe. Plato, from the Phaedo

plato: Herr Nietzsche, I think? Or is Herr Doktor the more proper form? At last our paths cross. nietzsche (after bowing respectfully toward Plato): It is true that I’m not often to be found wandering in the sacred grove below. I prefer mountain air. plato: And I had thought you might be avoiding me! nietzsche: Why would you think that? plato: Because by now just about all of our colleagues have introduced themselves to me, save for a few former sessional lecturers who are perhaps rather shy. A good many tell me I’m their first stop. nietzsche: No doubt they were all bursting with things to ask you – or more likely to tell you – about yourself. How annoying in either event. I avoid them because they are forever quarrelling over the artificial problems they themselves invented. It’s their way of ducking the real ones. They give philosophy a bad name – if not a bad smell.

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plato: They can’t help disputing. This may not solve the problems, which are after all eternal, but it does something just as important for the disputants: it discloses to them what they believe. nietzsche: As if that could possibly tell you what you believe. plato: How do you suppose we learn what we should believe? nietzsche: From our errors and mishaps, if conscientiously examined. plato: You describe, seemingly, a solitary path. nietzsche: Do you mean that I seem to dispense with friends and lovers? plato: And teachers. nietzsche: Oh, teachers! They fill your head with their ideas, leaving no room for any of your own. Once, though, I had high hopes for friendship. If a teacher, by virtue of his authority, cannot help shaping his pupil’s thoughts to his own, a friend offers up his own thoughts to his friend – if at first timidly since they are precious to him. In this ideal form, there is a value to friendship. It doesn’t lie in its supposed naturalness or easiness but in its difficulty, in the risk that is inevitably associated with venturing intimacy. Like any act of love, this puts who one is to the test, accepting the test to be necessary and accepting also the implied risk of failure.1 plato: You speak, I perceive, of a younger self. It is of course the young who possess the greatest talent for friendship as the entwining of two souls that sense they share all that is precious about the world. Isn’t it odd, and wonderful, how that sustains a love? nietzsche: But a thinker spends long hours alone pursuing his thoughts to the depths. What a deep well that is! Inevitably he is alone there.

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plato: In my case no less than yours. Yet the reader is always present when you write, isn’t he, as a kind of ideal listener? nietzsche: One’s audience is everyone, and yet no one.2 The writer’s paradox. It is different for those philosophers who are not primarily writers. I mean those who are simply setting down a scholarly argument of their devising. They know precisely their audience and how to write for it. They may refine their argument as they write but they do not use their writing as a means of conducting an exploration, as I did. I am not sure that my critics, the ones who contend that I am not to be considered a philosopher at all, aren’t at least in small part correct. For I am sure my thoughts led me whither they would because I was determined not to lead them. plato: I wonder if your conception of writing, as involving discovery, and presumably also self-discovery, has influenced your philosophical views, or perhaps it is the other way around. nietzsche: Are these things at all separable? plato: Not, I would say, if one’s philosophy is for oneself a way of life. nietzsche: As was certainly the case with you, and also with me, however radically our philosophical convictions may differ. plato: Your view that life finds its justification only as an aesthetic phenomenon is another way of saying, I take it, that life is felt to be worth living only by one who conceives it to be beautiful? (Nietzsche signifies assent.) And you also say, perhaps more controversially, the world is not beautiful in itself but must be made so by man’s activity. (Nietzsche assents.)

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You’re comparing this activity, I take it, to that of an artist who creates a picture of the world and because he finds the picture to be beautiful, he considers the world to be so? (Nietzsche assents.) Therefore persuading himself of an untruth, according to you? (Nietzsche assents.) You see yourself as having a task quite similar to the artist’s: to make life seem desirable to man by presenting a picture of it that he will find to be beautiful? nietzsche: Forgive me for seeing where you are taking me with this line of questioning. You’re about to demonstrate that I quite consciously lie about the value of life? plato: It would seem to be the simple-minded conclusion. nietzsche: Except that I am unlike the artist in that I see life as beautiful and terrible all at once – beautiful even because it is terrible. I have not hidden this idea in what I have written. The idea lies at its very core. It has its foundation in the view, also yours incidentally, that truth has its own beauty, at any rate for souls who are strong enough to love it. plato: If I understand your position correctly, the only people who can legitimately claim the world to be beautiful are those who can perceive that it is not. It seems to me you are going to have to give up either truth or beauty. nietzsche: Actually not, because the person of whom I speak is able to see the world as beautiful while knowing it is not. It is simply that he finds to be invigorating what to others might be repugnant. That is simply the effect of love.

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plato: I have a different conception of truth, and a different conception about the accessibility of beauty. I see it as being everywhere in the phenomenal world. It is why we love. Beautiful things intimate to us the value of ordinary experience. nietzsche: The love you speak of in your doctrine is not felt for the natural object itself but for something beyond experience, as you set out in the Symposium, and that seems to me to disprize the experience. The object disappears into its philosophical purpose. plato: But the love of which I speak is for the beauty or the truth or the goodness represented in the experience. Our love for the object is an insight into its essential nature. How can that be any kind of disprizing? nietzsche: I can agree with you only if you will give up any talk of self-subsisting values and by that I mean values said to exist independently of things. Even then, however, we differ on whether they inhere in things. Look, I agree with you upon the necessity of love, that frontal engagement with life. It is only through love we come to know anything, ourselves even. But I dispute your contention that love is a kind of insight into the permanent value of the beloved object. Love is felt for a certain thing only for the sake of your life, and when you no longer need it, it is gone. It is like growing and shedding a skin. plato: This sounds like rather a bitter experience. Indeed, you yourself observed that you often look back in anger at the most beautiful things because they could not hold you – which makes it sound as if they were at fault. nietzsche: Not exactly that, but I do say we cannot affirm what is living within ourselves without also negating that which has died. If the separation is a painful one, so be it. plato: We should not outgrow our loves. A love that has been outgrown is simply a love that has failed probably because it was too

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weak and too self-regarding. The world will sustain our love for it given a proper attitude of openness and attentiveness toward it. nietzsche: That is just not true to how we love. It is, if you like, a mood. Lacking love, we can only find the world to be an impoverished place. But, possessing love, the world is transfigured in one’s eyes. plato: Surely it is because the world is beautiful that we love it. nietzsche: No, it is beautiful because we love it. plato: Then what precipitates love? nietzsche: Why, anything that puts us in the mood. Anything that works upon us like an intoxicant. I can hardly say what that is for you. But I do know it is when he is in an intoxicated state – when he is fullest of feeling – that the artist creates. For it is then that out of his own riches he is prompted to give of himself – of his genius – to the world. plato: You write that he forces things to partake of his riches. Isn’t that your conception of transfiguration? It isn’t love as I understand it to be: a regard for the world as it is, which the person who loves it would not for anything see changed, much less violated. nietzsche: This person as you describe him is not a creative being. He is certainly no artist. The thought that one would sit around contemplating things, waiting earnestly for the spirit to descend, is just untrue to the restless will of man as I conceive him. Art, you see, is not really a matter of fashioning garlands to hang about statues on festival days. It is a means of viewing the world. You have failed to see this because of your limited sympathy for art. plato: You have failed to ask, because you are disabled by your philosophical doctrine from asking, whether the artist’s conception represents the truth. The artist supposes that he captures something

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real. And if art could provide us with a picture of the real, as philosophy attempts to do, I would be all in favour. But actually it imitates badly. So I simply say that art creates its own reality, which I believe to be very often foreign to the truth. nietzsche: Art’s concern is not with imitation. It speaks to a truth of a different sort, the artist’s own truth. Only, if he succeeds, it is one the rest of us have to acknowledge and even accept as our own. By the way, your denial that art can be considered truthful actually creates a serious problem for your treatment of beauty. plato: And you are about to show me why you think this is so. nietzsche: Please answer this. Do you accept that many people find works of art to be beautiful and a source of value in their lives? (Plato assents.) You would say, I take it, that they are mistaken? (Again he assents.) It follows that there is a type of beauty that is false because illusory? (He assents.) Now in the theory you outline in the Symposium, beauty plays the important role in life of providing a signpost to the good. In that sense, it is a criterion of the real, is that correct? (He assents.) But if beauty can be an illusion, which you have just asserted, then it would seem that in order to be able to distinguish false from true beauty, we will need first to possess the criterion that beauty is itself supposed to provide in your own theory.

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plato (after keeping silent for a moment): I think what you have shown, in this bit of dialectic, is not that I am entirely wrong about art but that I was guilty of overstatement. While I do not retreat from my view that much that purports to be art fails, or is fraudulent, even, I think I am bound to say it should be possible, by a rigorous consideration of the merits of any artwork, to sort out the falsely beautiful from the truly so. If so, then there is such a thing as “truthful art.” What would that consist of? Well, I must maintain the view that art cannot give an adequate account of what is real. For that, metaphysics is required. But that is not to say art cannot truthfully evoke the emotions associated with actual experience and thereby serve a valuable function in helping us to understand our experience in general. In that way, it could help us along the way toward knowledge of the good. nietzsche: People might think the emotion expressed by art is more real than the propositions of any metaphysics. There are philosophers who might think that too. You spoke nobly all the same. You have fairly acknowledged, I think, that any account of beauty that fails to account for art is incomplete and has a flaw at its heart. plato: We have yet to examine your view of art and its relation to true beauty. And turnabout is fair play, in the old saying. nietzsche: I am ready. plato: If I have understood you correctly, it is your view that the artist in an excited state transfigures things? (Nietzsche assents.) The purpose of this exercise – or if it makes no sense to refer to “purpose” when what you speak of is virtually the satisfaction of a drive, then call it its end and object, the work of art itself – is seen by the artist as being stamped with his own perfection. That is its significance?

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(He assents.) It follows that this is beauty he has created for himself? (He assents.) Your theory of art does not seek to explain how art communicates, or even if it does? nietzsche: Except insofar as art may induce an ecstatic state in its audience. plato: As was your theory of how tragedy moved its Greek audience. But you have failed to identify any form of art that could accomplish the same in the modern era? nietzsche: You are correct. plato: So we do not find in your work a theory of beauty conceived of as the quality drawing a person to a work of art? (He assents.) Emphatically, we do not find any suggestion that art communicates a meaning shared between artist and spectator? (He assents.) Yet I doubt there ever lived an artist who did not believe that he learned from the world the meaning he expresses in his work. Or that any artist has ever felt he creates simply for his own sake. He knows that his art must always aim to move its audience, and if it should fail in this he knows he has failed. The greater his regard for his work, the greater his disappointment. nietzsche: Well, if you are right, these artists of whom you speak

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all misconstrue themselves, as thinkers and poets have always done. They imagine they have discovered some immemorial truth, but instead they do something much more interesting: they provide us with a new perspective on what we thought we already knew. plato: And the artist’s audience, who conceive that he has uncovered some genuine truth about the world, do they too mislead themselves? nietzsche: They are merely persuaded by the power of the artist’s vision to believe in its truth. plato: Is the same true of your own enthusiastic readers? nietzsche: Mine is likewise a perspective. But it is also a strategy to provoke the revaluation of values that, if it should succeed, will be pursued by those who do so as their own truth. plato: I do fear you create a dilemma for the spirit by refusing to acknowledge there is anything naturally beautiful. You risk condemning man to a permanent state of longing, without resolution, and your gay science is quite at risk of devolving into a disillusioned love, a condition of the spirit in which no sort of faith remains possible. You ask too much of man. He cannot, wholly out of his own resources, sustain a love of the world. nietzsche: Perhaps no one has ever been so strong. Still, I have a greater hope for man and more belief in him than you do. There is a wellspring of desire within his being – a desire to know, in his own experience, how it feels to be a discoverer and conqueror of the ideal – a place beyond all discoveries so far made – one over-rich in what is beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine.3 plato: There is a kind of irony in your objection that I postulate a world beyond this world to which people are encouraged to aspire. Isn’t that exactly what you contend for according to what you have just said? I don’t blame you for your vision – I applaud you for it.

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Philosophy, if it is to be useful, must contend for the life most worthy to be loved and pursued – which the philosopher will think to be the same as life itself. My objection to your approach is simply this: philosophy must be for the willing, not just for the strong. (They are quiet for a time.) plato: Despite our differences, which our conversation has, in part, exposed, I do think a helpful bystander might observe at this point that the differences are less grave than might be supposed. They lie in our respective views of how we come to place a value upon things. You say it is by finding ourselves reflected in them and I say that it is by learning from them. This leads to our advocating different attitudes. I say we are called to a close, loving attention of the world, in which the world is essentially left to disclose itself. We leave it as we find it. And you, that by our activity we make the world over so that it appears more beautiful to ourselves because it is made to express ourselves. Either way, we agree there exists in each human being a force, whether it is called desire or the will, which a person can turn to the development of himself. The point of experience, we agree, is not simply to have it, as any unthinking creature may do: it is to learn from it. For we also agree that a person’s objective must be to be able to place a value upon his own experience, and further that this is an achievement that is never unearned. It is sometimes said that philosophy is not properly a mental exercise but a practice; a “way of life” is how it is put. It is of course that, but also more. It is a criticism of all ways of life, in particular one’s own, and in this way the means to a life that is different and better than the one heretofore lived. Don’t you agree?

5 Seeing and Making in Art

Art exists because what is seen is also felt and demands to be expressed. This is primordial, as is shown in the very earliest art objects such as votive images, which were invested with magical powers and were worshipped or propitiated. But, as these pieces are, all art seems always to have been derived from the real. The earliest form of painting, the cave art of the Paleolithic Era, was so. These effigies were, plausibly, precipitated by the remembered excitement of the hunt, and the desire to relive it in the mind. (They have the quality of a dream.) During the hunt, the hunter is pure instinct and does not reflect. But in the quiet aftermath, how could the bodies and the movements of the animals fail to recur to his mind? He might then have picked up a stick and begun to draw these images in the dust, and later again and again, for what crowds the consciousness must find expression somehow. Eventually, an inventive few might think to paint the herd on a cave wall, taking advantage of its verticality and horizontality, in order to depict the animals’ presence in and movement through space. The hunters are not depicted or are depicted only as stick figures, because to render them naturalistically, to create a tableau, would have been to objectify the experience, and thus to falsify it. The hunted animals are of course fully depicted, with staggering delicacy and with great sensitivity to how they appear, move, and mass in herds, because the exactness of naturalistic detail is essential to the expression of their felt beauty. Cave paintings are often presumed to have been exercises in magic and so in a way they are, for art is a kind of magic: the herd is conjured

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into existence. But magic in the pure sense is not, as is often supposed, more primordial than art. This mistake is made because art is thought to exhibit a detached, and therefore higher-order, consciousness. The fact is that art has always expressed the experience of the artist from the inside. It originates in a heightened sensitivity to the perceived and this occurs alongside a quickening of the emotions: excitement is a form of attention. One can easily see that the paleolithic hunter was predisposed to be an artist because he was at no point lost in his experience, but was the master of it. Its conversion into art required, in addition, technical skill of a high order and an excellent visual memory, but not more. The modern artist also seeks to capture the essential beauty of the phenomena he paints. In attacking the canvas, he concentrates on the scene before him, first taking it in as a whole and then in its details. His gaze ranges back and forth from near to far. The vista resolves itself into planes and forms comprised of colour and tone. Some come into prominence and others recede. Finally they recompose themselves into a new, unified whole, a mental image or impression, which is both a selection from nature and a heightening of natural effects. Out of this impression will emerge a realized work. John Ruskin came to see how this process occurs. Ruskin, the greatest art critic of the nineteenth century and a painter himself, was at first very committed to the idea that truth in art is a matter of the strict representation of nature. His advice to young painters was to go to nature “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”1 Ruskin knew, however, that it was impossible to capture every detail of the natural subject on paper. Nature is just too profuse. Even a square inch of field has too many blades of grass for it ever to be reproduced. It is through a gesture, a sleight of hand if you like, that the artist depicts many blades of grass, perhaps by a soft stroke with the edge of a flat brush. Ruskin understood that an artist operates with an understanding, largely intuitive, of how a picture is made. This cannot be reduced to rules. It is therefore not to mere appearances, but to the underlying forms of natural beauty that the painter must be faithful, and that he must study, in order to express their truth. As Ruskin put it, in his stern prose, “The power of every

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picture depends on the perception of the imagination into the true nature of the thing represented, and the utter scorn of the imagination for all shackles and fetters of mere external fact that stand in the way of its suggestiveness.” The work of the painter is therefore to impart insight, “to be a glass of rare strength and clearness too, to let us see more than we could ourselves and bring nature up to us and near to us.”2 The first volume of Modern Painters (published 1843) was written to establish that J.M.W. Turner, Ruskin’s older contemporary, was the greatest landscape artist who ever lived, even that he was the only one who told the truth of nature: “the only painter who has ever drawn the sky … the only painter who has ever drawn a mountain, or a stone … the only painter who ever drew the stem of a tree … the only painter who has ever represented the surface of a calm, or the force of agitated water.”3 Turner could fill up pictorial space with atmospheric effects, for example showing how the diaphanous light of sunrise seen through the morning mist will serve to dissolve hard objects such as mountains, in this way creating a unity of impression which feels completely true to nature. He could achieve such miraculous effects because he truly painted what he saw, the real colour, space, and form of nature, instead of following conventions. Ruskin pointedly noted that Turner acknowledged that there were also departures from nature in his canvases, which Ruskin considered to be imperfections that were outweighed by their virtues. Ruskin’s possession of a strong ideal in some ways enabled his eyes and in other ways dimmed them. It enabled him to appreciate better than anyone Turner’s fidelity to nature but got in the way of understanding how Turner departed from it. His understanding changed after he was exposed to more expressive painting, particularly Tintoretto’s great cycle at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in Venice. Then, in 1845, he travelled to the Alps, to a site sketched by Turner, the Pass of Faido, for the express purpose of investigating the workings of Turner’s imagination. There Ruskin undertook his own sketches, which demonstrate how, not so subtly, Turner transformed the scene to conform to the impression made by it upon his imagination. Ruskin’s own rendition of the scene is all too credible as a

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representation but, when put beside Turner’s, looks picturesque and above all lacks the feeling of the other’s barely contained force. The result demonstrated to Ruskin that the truth of art lies in the artist’s fidelity to his impression. So he wrote, “If going to the place, we see something quite different from what is there then we are to paint that – nay we must paint that, whether we will or not; it being, for us, the only reality we can get at.”4 As if taken aback by his own thought, he imagines an interlocutor saying to him, “Well, but then, what becomes of all these long dogmatic chapters of yours about giving nothing but the truth and as much truth as possible?”5 And Ruskin replies that he says that still, but that the truth so presented will need the help of the imagination “to make it real” – to enable the spectator to feel he was at that place. For what the eye sees, the imagination perfects, and however far the painting departs from the objective, an essence is captured. Thus, while Turner of all painters to the ordinary eye “seemed to obtain the least acknowledgeable resemblance to nature,” in fact it was only “the cheap deceptive resemblance”6 he eschewed while he achieved “the precious non-deceptive resemblance.”7 Without conceding any earlier error, Ruskin had cured himself of his youthful view that Turner’s departures from nature were flaws in his work: they are actually closer to its raison d’être. Ruskin had always understood that painting, if it is any good, never merely imitates, but he had nonetheless believed that there was such thing as perfect verisimilitude. He came to realize, however, that “representation” involves an element of expression, in which the subject matter is seen in light of the artist’s emotion and so, in a sense, symbolizes the experience. But when he asserts that Turner’s impression captures what a visitor to the selfsame scene would himself feel, that is surely not quite right. (Ruskin effectively disproved this contention by his own sketch at Faido.) It would be more accurate to say that the visitor – or any viewer of the painting – is persuaded by Turner of the truth of Turner’s vision. This final step into the subjectivity of vision Ruskin was unwilling to take. Turner demonstrated that it is in abstraction from nature, simplifying but also exaggerating, that nature is most convincingly rendered, a perplexing fact. The explanation has to be that truth to nature lies in the truth to the feeling it conveys,

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a feeling that colours the perception itself. Ruskin is correct that the viewer responds to the truth of the artist’s vision. That is not, however, because the artist has aptly captured what one would have felt in his place, but instead because by his skill at rendering he persuades us of the truth of his vision. We see through his eyes. Those artists who succeeded Turner and Ruskin schooled us so thoroughly in the truth of impression that we, the audience, eventually stopped looking for anything else in art. We ceased to accept as real any paintings that have the feeling of having been constructed out of the furniture of the world in order to present something of significance – in other words, much of classical art. The art of our own time insists that the world does not present itself in such static tableaux (as photographs also present it, but with less discrimination), but is constantly being remade in one’s vision, and therefore can be captured only by an art that is itself dynamic. In the Nymphéas of Monet, the water of the little pool reflects the clouds and it is upon that reflection that the water lilies float, in perfect concord with what one sees, unmediated by what one knows. Impressionism, the first modern movement in painting, abolished such constructs as the hard outline insofar as they do not reflect how we actually see. We look at the world with a roving point of view, focusing now on this, now on that, heedless therefore of “foreground” and “background” or the other laws of composition. So we accept their absence in painting and the absence too of perspective. We can even accept multiple perspectives contained within a single canvas. Though the contours of things change depending upon whether one looks down upon them, or along a plane on which they sit, or as distant objects, such multiple views were captured by Monet in one canvas as he stood on his Japanese bridge and contemplated the lily pads below and also stretching away from him. By abandoning himself to what he sees, the artist will capture reality in a way that ordinary perception misses. As such, to perception, the work of art may appear at first sight to distort reality. Only on closer examination can the deeper truth to natural facts disclose itself. This core of natural fact is rarely wholly absent from art where it does not strive to be utterly hermetic. Why are we convinced by

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van Gogh’s strong palette and seething compositions and by Picasso’s fractured physiognomies? Because in each case there is a profound fidelity to the painted things, which helps us to accept the artist’s vision. In van Gogh’s case, we are tempted to think of his painting as a pure expression of his emotional state but, more accurately, his emotions lend intensity to things he has closely observed. In Picasso’s case, we can see from his early paintings the careful study he made of things, which was later to permit him to discard realism without sacrificing resemblance. In his maturity, he never worked from life but drew upon the image in his head. Nonetheless he captured the likenesses of his models and lovers to an extraordinary degree, as one can see from photographs, and did so even where the portrait is cubistic. At the same time, the paintings of these masters possess a greater verisimilitude in that they also represent the artist’s subconscious response to his material. Art steals its magic from the everyday, which it also departs from in order to convey an inner truth, and in both ways it heightens our own powers of observation. Sometimes the commonplace is delivered as a revelation because the artist has noticed and captured some incidental bit of beauty that one had not bothered to heed, like the sheen coming off a petal which brings out its particular tone. Sometimes the artist scrutinizes appearances so closely (as in the fur of the hare in Dürer’s watercolour) that they seem to be – a paradox – impossibly real. In each case, the artist’s vision directs our attention to what one already knows or believed one did. The sense of seeing again for the first time, which supplies much pleasure to the spectator, expresses the mystery of what is seen: it establishes that a phenomenon can be both seen and unseen, and that there is a close connection between whether it is seen at all and how (that is, the quickening emotion with which) it is seen. The existential question art poses is how far a work can depart from the apparent and still remain real. The answer is, quite far. We have been so persuaded that the essence of art is vision that we earnestly go searching for the beauty in any work, the beauty that, as it also happens, the artist cannot avoid putting there. The greatest artists “pose the question” by assuming an apparent arbitrariness. This approach, plainly, elicits the strange by eradicating the picturesque or

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the merely delightful from their work, but it may also stimulate the perception of abstract patterns in nature or of the expressive possibilities of colour, shape, and line. Beauty is its own argument and makes us feel the necessity that resides in what is apparently invention. Of all twentieth-century philosophers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty is the best equipped to write about art as a perceptual phenomenon. This French philosopher is most famous for his studies in the phenomenology of perception, that is, in the philosophical description of the nature of perceptual experience. He had a particular preoccupation: he desired to lay to rest Cartesian dualism – the theory that mind and body are different substances. He taught that it is only because the body is in the world and has acquired a certain relation to it that a person gains knowledge at all, and specifically knowledge of himself. There is an indivisibility between self and world. His essay “Eye and Mind” seeks evidence of this fact in our experience of painting and the painter’s experience of physical reality. According to Merleau-Ponty, “Painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.”8 The Cartesian makes an error thinking that what is visible to us is simply what we are physiologically equipped to see. This assumes that “we” are of one substance and the world is of another, and that we represent the world to ourselves. Instead, Merleau-Ponty thinks, the world reaches out to us and we to it: “Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body by a secret visibility. ‘Nature is on the inside,’ says Cézanne. Quality, light, color, depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them.”9 It is not how this “echo” comes to be that interests Merleau-Ponty, at least in this essay, but only that it is. And that it is, is exactly what painting explores, the enigmatic exchange between ourselves and the world that results in seeing. The painter’s vision is distinguished from “profane vision.” Ordinary vision depends upon the play of light and shadow in order to make the object visible to us. But we do not lose ourselves in these effects. To the contrary, they are not noticed by most of us: they lose themselves in the object. The art-

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ist’s purpose is to “liberate the phantoms captive in profane vision,” and thus to render visible that which vision “believes to be invisible.” This he does by interrogating the means by which the visible makes itself so. Essentially, he records its effect upon himself. In the same essay, Merleau-Ponty addresses what is apparently a second form of artistic expression. (He does so, confusingly, without distinguishing between the two or relating them.) The second also has to do with an exchange the artist undertakes with the world. If the first corresponds to what could be called the “contemplative” element of art, the second does to the “expressive” element. In both senses, art gauges how things in the world “strike the body” (in Merleau-Ponty’s sense). But only the first is concerned to disclose the hidden springs of the visible. It works from the outward in. The second strain works from the inward out. It is a response to the pure sensory impact of things. As he writes: Things have an internal equivalent in me; they arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence. Why shouldn’t these [correspondences] in their turn give rise to some [external] visible shape in which anyone else would recognise those motifs which support his own inspection of the world? Thus there appears a “visible” of the second power, a carnal essence or icon of the first. It is not a faded copy, a trompe-l’oeil, or another thing. The animals painted on the walls of Lascaux are not there in the same way as the fissures and limestone formations. But they are not elsewhere. Pushed forward here, held back there, held up by the wall’s mass they use so adroitly, they spread around the wall without ever breaking from their elusive moorings in it. I would be at great pains to say where is the painting I am looking at.10 A painting is only an apparent analogue to the real, in the sense that a diagram is an analogue since its purpose is to identify the relationships between parts that in the overall constitute a thing. A painting, instead, makes visible the inward traces of vision and in doing so offers to vision “the imaginary tapestry of the real.” Merleau-Ponty believes that the eyes do not merely register the external world. The

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eyes have “the gift of the visible” as inspired men once had the gift of tongues. They are prophetic. He writes: “It is no more possible to make a restrictive inventory of the visible than it is to catalogue the possible usages of a language or even its vocabulary and devices. The eye is an instrument that moves itself, means which invent its own ends; it is that which has been moved by some impact of the world, which it then restores to the visible through the offices of an agile hand.”11 Thus the painter adds to the phenomena of the visual world (like the portrait painter who captures not only the sitter’s likeness but also his character) and re-inscribes in nature, for us to read, what he has taken from it. Although Merleau-Ponty does not note it, he has described the double aspect of the artist’s encounter with the world. These are the two dialectical moments of seeing and making, which are separable in theory but not in practice. Also Merleau-Ponty does not directly attempt to show how seeing and making operate in relation to one another. In his reflections upon Cézanne, however, these questions are posed. Cézanne’s paintings, perhaps pre-eminently, present a puzzle about what it is that the artist struggles to express. Is it nature? Or is it the artist’s vision? Cézanne claimed fidelity to both. His rather contradictory pronouncements suggest, as Merleau-Ponty believed to be the case, that Cézanne was seeking to overcome the dichotomy between the subjective and the objective. This is suggested in Merleau-Ponty’s description of Cézanne’s ambition as being “to make visible how the world teaches us.” This conveys that the exercise begins with looking. The mature Cézanne firmly rejected outright invention in art. Painting had to engage with concrete particulars. And yet the world is not simply given. In some sense, in fact, it resists being captured at all. The expression of what is seen requires decisions about what to show and how to show it, which are in turn challenged by the visible. His laudable goal was to paint things as they appeared to the eye, not as he knew them to be. But it was nonetheless his eye, and it was on account of this fact that his painting gave birth to modern art, with its multitude of singular visions. He said that painting from nature is not copying the object but is realizing one’s sensations. Lest that seem too starkly put, it may be noted that he

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also said, “L’art est une harmonie parallèle à la nature,”12 which is rather like Merleau-Ponty’s observation that phenomena evoke an “internal equivalent” in anyone. Notably, perfection of form in art is opposed to the perfection of form in nature. Nature composes itself according to its own rules and is by the rules of order disordered. Nature is not “aesthetic,” for this concept implies a process of selecting, ordering, and expressing. Art demonstrates its distinctness from nature, to which it is also beholden. Also, the artist is himself a force that is like nature in the creation of an order that is uniquely his. This is all elucidated by Cézanne’s further remark that “The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.” His paintings give expression to the harmonies to be felt in nature, but nature is dumb and paintings speak. (They are “compositions.”) He sought truth to appearance, which was, however, not a literal truth but one that could be discovered only in the act of appropriating the appearance to the painting. In painterly terms, this required a new formal language. The result rescues the ordinary things that Cézanne insisted on painting from our over-habituated perception and restores to them a mystery they ordinarily lack, which is the mystery of how things appear under scrutiny. His was a scrutiny of nature so intent as to force from the subject matter itself the means by which it was to be represented, and upon that scrutiny depended the very possibility of painting. Cézanne died in 1906. In 1907, the first retrospective of his paintings was mounted at the Grand Palais in Paris. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited often and left his impressions in the form of letters written to his wife, Clara Westhoff. Rilke had an acute eye but an even deeper sensitivity to the mystical power of painting, and the letters show off both. But it was as a model for art to follow that Rilke was most impressed by Cézanne. One day he writes: “Today I went to see his pictures again; it’s remarkable what a surrounding they create. Without looking at a particular one and standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels their presence drawing together into a colossal reality. As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all.”13 The quality disclosed to his gaze is “good conscience” and specifically the good conscience of the colours – “their

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simple truthfulness, it educates you.” Elsewhere, he finds “this limitless objectivity, refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity” (the unity comprised by the observed things). The difficult concept that Rilke expresses here does not have directly to do with the artist’s attention to the physical appearance of things. It is much more about how the artist applies himself to his task, his attitude of mind, than it is about his technique. The artist, and Cézanne in particular, is not free of ego nor can he be if he is to achieve anything. Rilke perceived in Cézanne “a mutual struggle” between looking and perceiving and then making use of what has been perceived. In this appropriation, Rilke says, using startlingly Nietzschean language, that Cézanne “forces [the paintings] to be beautiful, to stand for the whole world and all joy and all glory.”14 Yet Rilke insists that the artist’s ego is nowhere in the work. In the act of appropriation, both the physical (the external) and the personal (the spiritual) are subsumed. Or, as he puts it, poetically: “[It’s] natural, after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this one makes it less well, one judges it instead of saying it … The love is so thoroughly used up in the action of making that there is no residue.”15 There is, then, an absence of “judgment” in truly realized art. It is an achieved objectivity. Before considering further what exactly this might mean, let’s look at his analysis of one phenomenon – the painter’s use of colour in his portrait Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair. Rilke describes the arrangement of colours in the interior in which the figure is set – what would normally be considered background – as creating in themselves a vibrant tableau embedded within which the figure’s form and features are expressed by a simple modelling. The colours relate each to each so perfectly it’s as if every part were aware of the others and the overall effect is one of equilibrium. The armchair itself (“the first and ultimate red armchair in the history of painting”), though strongly painted around the light figure of the sitter, does not overwhelm the figure. This, he writes, “seems so perfectly translated into its painterly equivalents that, while it is fully achieved and given as an object, its bourgeois reality at the same time relinquishes all its heaviness to a final and definitive picture-existence.”16

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The painter’s struggle, then, is to accept things as they are (even while “forcing them to be beautiful”), to leave things so completely alone that they can come to terms among themselves. As Rilke expresses it, beautifully, the artist is put to “the trial of reality,” that is, to an acceptance beyond judgment. In this, Cézanne’s devotion, lies “the beginning of sainthood.”17 Rilke’s admiration for Cézanne is grounded in the latter’s ferocious attachment to the observed, which was inseparable from an equally strong attachment to craft, which may stand for a love that is exacted and painful because the struggle to see and the struggle to express are equally difficult and, in the end, the same. The truthfulness to reality rests upon the artist’s complete devotion to capturing the appearance of things, while the imposition of meaning is the necessary result of the fact that art is a making. It reflects an interpretation because the world cannot be seen free of interpretation. The poet’s vision, as Rilke exemplifies it, is one of totality – it is not analytic. Mystical though it practically is, one recognizes his Cézanne in the studies by Roger Fry, the English critic and painter, and by Merleau-Ponty. Fry’s Cézanne: A Study of His Development was published in 1927; Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” in 1945. Fry was a formalist and believed that the meaning of a work of art is conveyed exclusively by its formal attributes. He praised the formal rigour of Cézanne’s work and its complete absence of extraneous poetic associations (characteristics both also key to Rilke’s appreciation). Cézanne also aptly illustrated another of Fry’s doctrines. For Fry, art throughout its history displays an attempt at reconciling the claims of the understanding and the appearance of nature as revealed to the eye, with each new discovery superseding the existing attempt at a synthesis. Impressionism can be cited here. In Fry’s view, however, Cézanne represented a decisive advance on Impressionism. The object of that movement (as well described by Merleau-Ponty) was to depict objects “as they appear to instantaneous perception, without fixed contours, bound together by light and air.”18 This involved an exact study of appearances, and Cézanne learned this aspect of his craft from Impressionism. His early works, predating his encounter with Impres-

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sionism, employed a somewhat coarse “Baroque” style with invented tableaux (such as his Raising of Lazarus). They nonetheless already displayed, Fry says, the strict and simplified harmonies of colour and the massing of volumes that were always to characterize his work. For example, he took from the local colours of his subject a few notes, out of which he composed an overall harmony. In the early 1870s, Cézanne began painting en plein air with Camille Pissarro, serving with him a virtual apprenticeship. From Pissarro he learned to take his motif from nature, to work with patient and methodical deliberation toward its realization, and to use a richer palette of colours than formerly. But Cézanne could never be satisfied by strict adherence to Impressionist doctrine, with its preoccupation with the immediate sensation. Its “lurking menace,” to quote Fry, was the disintegration of structure.19 Cézanne needed to draw forth what was hidden behind the veil of appearance. The purpose of painting, he felt, is to capture not an effect, as the Impressionists did, but reality itself, or rather to persuade the eye, through the power of painting alone, that this had been achieved. Things must be made to display their objecthood. He sought depth – Alberto Giacometti said that he believed Cézanne was seeking depth all his life – through his gaze.20 As Merleau-Ponty puts it, Cézanne did not wish to create pictures but to attempt “a piece of nature,” and Cézanne himself said of nature: “The artist must conform to this perfect work of art. Everything comes to us from nature; we exist through it; nothing else is worth remembering.”21 This notion of conforming to the real (which is what he meant by “nature”) is deeply problematic. What is it to conform to “nature” as somehow opposed to the physical appearance of things? If it is nature in depth that is aimed at, how is this something different from the artist’s interpretation of nature? Merleau-Ponty’s response, from a phenomenological standpoint, looks rather like Rilke’s, from his poetic one. The function of art, as expressed by Cézanne, is to present not an illusionary tableau of the world, but the object as it strikes consciousness prior to any interpretation. Or rather, since a painter must interpret what he sees, the interpretation must not be distinct from the act of seeing, in which the self is

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utterly submerged. The world in this innocent state, before we have imposed meaning on it, is the same as “the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things” and to see it thus is to sense “the continuous rebirth of experience.”22 Cézanne’s aim was to capture the object or the face “emerging from the colour.”23 Merleau-Ponty writes, “The painter who conceptualises and seeks the expression [in a face] first misses the mystery – renewed every time we look at someone – of a person’s appearing in nature.”24 The true artist, he implies, will make that phenomenon visible to us. It is no wonder Cézanne sometimes gazed and pondered for hours before putting down a stroke. Cézanne was extremely conscious of how each part of the painting affects every other part, and his paintings by design cohere tightly. He achieves this effect, first, by a massing of simple geometrical forms within a balanced structure. Next, drawing on a limited palette, he varies the colour, stroke by stroke, within an overall harmony in which the same colours are drawn from here and there in their surroundings. The connection between colour and structure, which together evoke plastic form, is made through the artist’s observation that changes in colour correspond to movements of planes. Cézanne took from the Impressionists their method of breaking up the colour of a mass by making small touches of comparatively pure colour, whose point is, however, in his hands, to represent an object rather than an atmosphere. They broke up the tone by juxtaposing, rather than by mixing, the colours that make it up. But he, as Merleau-Ponty explains, employs a “progression of chromatic nuances across the object … which stay close to the object’s form and the light it receives.”25 The object is no longer, as in Impressionism, lost in its relationships to the atmosphere and to other objects but retains its depth and solidity. A single outline sacrifices depth, and Cézanne therefore places several outlines in blue upon the canvas. Then he lays on his modulated colour, and as he follows the swell of the object the old outlines are lost and a new one emerges, which he may emphasize with a stroke of blue. Finally, as Cézanne himself said, “When colour is at its richest, the form is at its plenitude,” and the object emerges.26

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Fry describes the same process in the following words: “Each touch is laid with a deliberate frankness, as a challenge to nature, as it were, and, from time to time, he confirms the conviction which he has won by a fierce accent, an almost brutal contour, which as often as not he will overlay later on, under the stress of fresh discoveries and yet again reaffirm.”27 And further: “Cézanne’s tendency is to refer all the forms to extremely simple elements and to retain vitality by the minute, impalpable play of the surface and by the quality of the contours. Every particle vibrates, the palpitation of life is revealed in the delicacy and sensitiveness of all these innumerable touches so freely and lightly inscribed on the canvas, to kindle what a smouldering glow of colour.”28 The impression created by the density of the painted objects is such, he writes, that each object is “infallibly in its place” and even that “its place was ordained for it from the beginning of all things.”29 Naturally, Cézanne painted only from life. His preference for the still life is readily explained by the fact that the objects are chosen and arranged at will, which permitted him, at whatever length he wished, to achieve that richness of colour, that plenitude of form, that he so sought. But his landscapes also, although less visibly, demonstrate his desire to make the world material, and even in the depiction of light we are made to feel (as we never do with the Impressionists) how matter absorbs or reflects light. In constructing his landscapes, Cézanne is described as looking at the view until he had captured it in its totality, what he called a “motif.” When he had a hold on his motif, Cézanne began to paint all parts of the painting at the same time, using patches of colour to fill out his original charcoal sketch of the basic topography, at once giving it its density and balance. Plainly he was seeking the same fixity as he achieved in his still lives. Even his portraits express the blockishness of objects, and they can seem to be ungainly collections of parts that do not quite cohere. In his earlier still lives, there is so emphatic a focus on the object as to create an uneasy relationship between figure and ground, and this is resolved by placing the objects within a perfectly balanced composition. The same observation applies to the portraits.

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All tension falls away in the blissful apprehension found in Cézanne’s late, nearly translucent landscapes, done both in oils and watercolour. The suggestion of colour and volume, by the elucidation here and obscuration there of a line and by minute local variations of colour – these effects no longer preoccupy the painter. He is liberated from the “substantiality of things,” his earlier objective according to Rilke. In these works, though ever in the grip of how things look, Cézanne is experimenting with the pure geometry of form – the landscape is conveyed by a kind of indicative shorthand – and finding, like any mature artist, his release into a realm of pure idea. He is enabled by the effort of years applied to his technique in the largest sense of that word. The timelessness of the world portrayed remains the same, and the world remains stripped of identifiable human associations. There is the same primordial strangeness that things acquire under intense observation. But, somehow, the world as he depicts it simply exists. Picasso famously hailed Cézanne as “like our father.” This is not for reasons of superficial style, however much Fauvism and Cubism may resemble elements of Cézanne’s style writ large. Instead, what was liberating for other artists in the work of the master was its intimation that a work of art is not a set of referents to some other reality, be it out in the world or within the spirit of the artist; rather, the work creates or contains its own meaning without ever ceasing to be the product of an intense engagement with the external world. Cézanne emboldened those who followed to pursue the pure essence of line and colour rather than subordinating their use to that of a vocabulary applied to the representation of the world. But whereas Cézanne struggled to achieve a synthesis of colour and form, his great followers, Picasso and Matisse, were without that preoccupation, and instead propounded the relative independence of colour and form to each other. In doing so, they reintroduced into painting a poetic quality that is associated with the beauty of everyday life that was absent from Cézanne. (He presumably would have considered it to detract from both the purity of nature and the purity of painting.) If Cézanne’s paintings seem to concentrate energy, those of Picasso and Matisse seem to explode with it. Their talents are profligate, encompassed only by the totality of their

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oeuvre, whereas with Cézanne you could learn everything he had to say from a single canvas – but you would have to gaze at it forever. Soon after his death, Cézanne’s concern with substantiality began to disappear from art. The first abstract canvases, by Kandinsky, of 1911, result from the artist’s attempt to convey the sensations, aural and visual, associated with being present at a concert of startling new music for the piano by Schoenberg. He was, as he avowed, seeking the spiritual in art. So, too, were his Russian contemporaries, Kazimir Malevich and the other Suprematists, who conducted the first painterly exercises in monochrome and in pure colour. Cubism, while rejecting abstraction, dissolves objects into perspectives. With Dadaism representation collapses into a sort of parody of itself, and in surrealism art is absorbed into a dream world, whether one of childish lightness (Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Joan Miró) or of Freudian ponderousness (Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Delvaux). Then there is Giorgio Morandi. He, like Cézanne, made rather hermetic paintings of ordinary objects and, also like Cézanne, seemed obsessed with how phenomena appear in the world. But his painted jars and vases have meaning only relative to one another – only in their presentness to each other – and to nothing else whatever. This artist, too, seems to have taken leave of the material world. The works of the Abstract Expressionists collectively provide an epitome of the human spirit, whether introverted (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko) or extroverted (Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning). Finally, the Minimalism of the sixties and beyond seemed to herald the disappearance of art as a material medium into a kind of metaphysics of presence, providing a moment of respectful silence before the onslaught that is the anti-art scene of the present day. This tear through the twentieth century shows that the world is “seen” by the artist as an ever more immaterial essence. Art travelled a long way, and quickly, from Cézanne, and his successors seem to have felt fairly uniformly that there was little left to be said about the natural world. This was, in its way, a tribute to him. If the art of the last century can be said to have advanced dialectically out of the possibilities it successively created for itself, it may now legitimately be asked whether the dialectic has ceased operating

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at all. Surveying the field of contemporary art, one may wonder, in particular, if the model of seeing and making makes any continuing sense. It would seem that it does, but selectively, and in those cases it reinvents the idea, as I shall show. For two centuries and more, artists have faced the choice whether to make their work a mirror of its time or to present some remote (often poetic) ideal. Our age is no different. All contemporary art, one might observe, is concerned with the concept of the point of view, which it either exalts or puts into question. This is not so surprising since the world has never appeared to be so little self-subsistent and self-revealing as it does now. In a case as problematic as modernity, the easy, popular, and cynical way to proceed is to produce mere artifacts of the times, mere commodities. Nor would it take much effort to show that the works of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, for example, like the works of Pop artists before them, are just that. They are produced like commodities, they look like them, and they function in the market like them. None of this is any the less so as a result of the extreme self-consciousness, the knowingness, that lies behind them. Whatever degree of irony this may imply, it does not change what they are. Of all such works, it can be said that they are more comfortable as stunts than as objects of contemplation, for they do not open themselves up to contemplation at all. Their reality, to the extent that they possess any, is as concepts and not as representations. A difficulty for the work of art that aspires to be an artifact, or an event, is that it is difficult to out-perform contemporary life itself in respect of its novelty, complexity, and sheer scale. Could anything an artist can create rival the experience of walking Tokyo’s Ginza by night? Artworks produced in our time so often look sadly diminished, their pretensions risible. But the quest for the new is also, if conscientiously conducted, the quest for its illumination, and the successful art of our time, like that of any other, both partakes of and interrogates its time (and human experience generally). It interrogates in particular the nature of beauty as heretofore conceived. The artist perceives the truth that beauty as generally or popularly conceived in his era (or in any other) lags behind the possibilities for its creation that are opened up by life’s changing circumstances. He

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appreciates that any conception of beauty, along with every other vital idea, becomes obsolete and insists upon its own renewal. In our era, art has opted to treat the idea of beauty as paradoxical because it treats the place of man within the world with doubt and suspicion. The concern of contemporary art is not just with how we conceive the world – a concern that art has always had – but with our presence in the world, especially as exhibited in the phenomena we have ourselves introduced into the world and the meanings these may have that we never intended and may barely grasp. For it is virtually a condition of the contemporary world that we do not understand it: for all our brainpower we stand before what we ourselves have created like primitive man before what he did not create. The best of contemporary art comprehends this. Necessarily, in order to express it, it uses the lenses through which we moderns interpret the world (photography, film). The products of mass media are themselves artifacts of modernity, particularly in their use to convey, obsessively, objects of desire. In this way, they tend to take the world at its own valuation. Art therefore must set out to use the media, and technology generally, in ways foreign to their conventional uses, and even to subvert them. Since technology is above all “rational,” including the media whose purpose is to communicate “information,” its subversion results in the expression of the deep strangeness of a wholly human-made world and its purely accidental beauty. This idea is true to the utter contingency – the lack of purpose or direction – of the world at this moment. It is true, also, to the way we see things, to the meaning we impose upon the accidental and contingent – not felt as concrete things but as uncanny presences. By this means, against all the tendencies of our time, art can reduce the matter of the world to spirit, and thus effect a transfiguration of the banal. Examples are many, but a small handful may suffice. One is the work of Michael Snow, with his witty evocations of a point of view that is frequently missing (is present in its absence and vice versa), which are also fully Modernist reflections upon the medium of film. Another is the paintings of Anselm Kiefer, which seem to evoke in oneself recollections of things with which one actually has had no

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previous acquaintance. Jeff Wall’s huge glossies can serve as a third example. Do they capture some banal event or portray a carefully staged tableau? The works of our selected artists have the feeling of enactments: they are trying out what it is like to be alive now. If there is an air of solipsism to such works, that would seem to indicate the artist’s perplexity concerning how he and the world fit together. Contemporary artists desire to resist the seductions of beauty, finding it no longer possible to believe in its existence or, at least, finding beauty no longer to be present in the world. But though beauty has vanished from their work, it is nevertheless preserved, obliquely, as the evocation of something forgotten. Is this a result of anything other than the fact that the artist’s gaze has fallen upon the scene and has memorialized the act of looking? In the case of a photograph which, because it captures a moment in time forever, insists upon the significance of that moment, as one for which it was worth stopping time, we naturally go looking for the significance there. Similarly, in the case of art, the mere act of representing, because it involves selecting and framing the image, expressing a point of view, makes an implicit claim to be considered an aesthetic phenomenon. Even an apparently random collection of detritus – say the gleanings from bits and pieces of plastic washed up upon an ocean beach – insinuates an order because these objects were spotted, picked up, and placed, and because, in the effort at presenting a tiny microcosm of modern existence, the arrangement grasps at metaphor. One must go further and assert that there is no true picture of the world that does not conjure a vision. The work of art that lacks it is lifeless. In order to disclose how things look and feel to us, the artist must disclose them as alive and therefore in their beauty. And so, however rigorously excluded, and to whatever depths art may descend, beauty seeps back in. Of the artist’s activity, one can clearly say that it is a seeing and making: the artist discovers the world but also creates it. Art is not purely receptive nor purely creative, but is both at once. Cézanne’s gaze seems to demonstrate this because it was the active searching out of an order that was at once manifest and hidden. If we associate the receptive element in perception with Plato (the close, loving attention

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to the world) and the creative with Nietzsche (the personal expression of that love), the two approaches must be combined in order to derive an adequate conception of art. Indeed, as Cézanne shows, seeing and making are likely to be found – even by the artist himself – to be inextricably combined. Seeing and making most obviously coalesce in the activity of the artist, but our ordinary perception involves the same process of observation, selection, ordering, and framing. Even when I see something as like or unlike other things, then, by this act of the understanding or of the imagination, I project myself into the world as surely as if I had created a picture or a poem. These are the same faculties that the painter or poet draws upon in order to create, albeit her reach is the greater. That all seeing is also representing is a point wittily made by René Magritte in his La condition humaine, in which a painting within a painting (a canvas sitting on an easel) is continuous with the landscape being painted by an absent artist. Each of us contrives that painting because in each act of perception we bring something to the world and take something from it, and all according to our particular aptitude.

6 On Truth in Art

Missing from Plato’s account of the beautiful is any sympathy for art. Art persuades by its richness, which has the semblance of how things are. For Plato, this is just the problem. Truthful perception, according to him, penetrates appearances in order to capture the essences lying behind them. As we have seen, this task is undertaken in thought, culminating in an insight that is a kind of seeing. If art remains stuck, as it must, at the level of appearances, it can only represent a lesser form of reality. The example he gives is of the picture of a bed, a representation of a constructed object that is itself derived from an idea. So art deals in fact at third hand. Worse, it professes to know the object as it is in itself. This is an illusion, but a powerful one. By its superficial appeal, art may persuade us to linger forever in the realm of appearances, and in this way is an unhealthy rival to philosophy as a world-representing endeavour. True perception requires a reorientation of the mind away from habitual modes of perception, the condition that exists in the Cave, which art only reinforces. What Plato misses, obviously, is that art is not fundamentally imitative; it also transfigures. To illustrate this, and since Plato wished to address the representation of beds, let us consider the iconic bed. Admittedly, it had to wait for van Gogh. The bed he painted, his own, is in no sense a copy even though it represents an object. It is the manifestation of an obviously heightened consciousness directed toward its world. One observes that his is a consciousness agitated by light and colour. The painting, despite being non-naturalistic, succeeds in conveying a poignant sense of a humble existence. It is not that the real

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is irrelevant: to the contrary, it is critical to the success of the painting. This is art that conveys ideas, some painterly, some moral in the broad sense. It tells us very little about beds in general, it is true, but in the light of the painting that objection would seem a kind of madness. What Plato misses, then, is that art, and not only philosophy, teaches “connectedness with the real.” This phrase comes from Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist, who was much concerned with the nature of moral consciousness. She provided a defence of art that is a corrective to Plato. The power of art to change us lies in the fact that it enlarges the range of our experience and, especially in the case of the literary arts, our experience of the human. One common way that it does this is by engaging our sympathies and antipathies. Of course it must represent people and their experience in a true light. Provided that it does, it can help us to overcome our own propensity to self-delusion. Murdoch’s concern, like Plato’s, is for the truth. Hence, she writes, the relation of art to the truth must be the fundamental concern. “‘Beauty’ cannot be discussed ‘by itself.’” She agrees with Plato that (as she puts it) “the attractiveness of beauty turns out to be the moral pull of reality,” and that one should therefore be able to extract “some positive aesthetic touchstone from his writings.”1 That suggests, as the following quotation confirms, that art cannot be both aesthetically good and morally bad: A reading of Plato helps us to see how good art is truthful. Dream is the enemy of art and its false image. As pictured in the Republic, the higher level is reflected as an image in the lower-level. The high-temperature fusing power of the creative imagination, so often and eloquently described by the Romantics, is the reward of the sober truthful mind which, as it reflects and searches, constantly says no and no and no to the prompt easy visions of self-protective self-promoting fantasy.2 In that (rather clotted) passage appear several of Murdoch’s themes, to which we will return. But, for the moment, it is apparent that she is speaking of an exacting conception of art, of “high art” as we customarily think of it, and against the sentimental and the

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self-indulgent, from which we learn nothing. This is apparent from her praise of a painting by Titian of a scene from classical mythology, The Death of Actaeon (in the National Gallery, London). Here we see that her objection is not to the dream-like per se, for the scene portrayed has all the disturbing power of a dream. We see Actaeon not, as in some other renditions, at the moment when he stumbles upon Artemis in her bosky bath (a lubricious pleasure for him and for us) but in the aftermath of that moment, when the goddess has transformed the hunter into a stag and he is brought down by his own hounds. Murdoch writes, “When Artemis speeds by as Actaeon falls, the revelation remains mysterious but somehow true, and with the ‘hardness’ of truth.”3 She means by “hardness” a clear-sightedness, an absence of sentimentality. Murdoch is both pro- and anti-Platonic in her views: she is the former in her view that art is valuable only in so far as it is truthful, and the latter in her view that great art, at least, is so. Art no more than beauty can be discussed “by itself.” It does not succeed or fail on the strength of its aesthetic or purely formal values alone, and that is because it does not convey an aesthetic idea alone: it also conveys an idea about the real. It is this fact that confers moral authority upon it. To convey an understanding of the doctrine that lies behind this, it is necessary to say a word about the first principles of her theory of the moral. Murdoch subscribes to Plato’s view that there can be no separation between the truth and the good, understanding the latter not only to be the things that are just but in fact the ultimate constituent of reality (the light in which all other things are seen to have meaning). If the true is the good is the real, then morality (and moral philosophy) can be seen “not as a hole-and-corner matter of debts and promises” but “as covering the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world.”4 They are concerned, in particular, with how we see the world. As to what informs that vision, there is no great mystery. “In moral life,” she writes, “the enemy is the fat relentless ego.”5 To do good consists of showing a constant unselfish attentiveness to others. A person possessing this quality (or ability) acts habitually not with the right concern alone but also with

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the right understanding of the other (one that does justice to the person he is). Thus to act aright is also to see truthfully. This (very straightforward) conception of one’s duty follows our most basic intuitions of the moral. Murdoch doesn’t feel the need to ground these in any sort of meta-ethical framework, as Plato may seem to do. In a certain sense they are self-evident, but if they need to be grounded she would be content to do so in our natural aspiration to be good. To the extent that the good is felt by anyone to be real, it has all the reality that it may require because, for that person, it is also exigent. It is therefore self-grounding. Her word for attentiveness is “attention.” This is a concept Murdoch borrows from Simone Weil to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. It describes not just an activity of the conscious mind but a special disposition that accompanies it. This she calls “love”: “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”6 And reality is the “unutterable particularity” of nature, in which the most particular and individual thing is the mind of man. Love is also, therefore, the ability to direct one’s attention “outward, away from the self, which reduces all to a false unity, towards the great surprising variety of the world.”7 Murdoch never ceases to stress that achieving this ability is difficult, because it is a struggle against selfish preoccupations. However, we are helped by the fact that we possess a natural inclination toward the good (that it possesses a magnetic quality for us). The ability to conceive of the good in this way is a moral achievement, and is perhaps its epitome. If, on the other hand, the good is not reflected in our conduct, there has been, first of all, the failure of the desire to see the circumstances before one with clarity and justice. This is not to say that the matter involves an exercise of the will alone. What the good may require in any individual circumstance may be difficult to discern except upon careful reflection. It does mean, however, that its discernment is inseparable from the continuing effort at it. If we are naturally drawn to the good, as Plato observed, we are predisposed to misconstrue it, as he also observed. Murdoch is quite definite

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that its enemies are misconceptions about reality, principally social convention and what she calls “fantasy.” By this word, she means the capacity to draw things from the outside, not grasping their reality and independence, into a “dream world” of our own making. Fantasy is “the proliferation of blinding, self-centred aims and images” associated with desire.8 “Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.”9 Its overcoming is an exercise of the imagination. We may conceive of the imagination as the faculty for making fantasy, ordinarily put to the dreaming of daydreams, but its real purpose is not to embroider upon ordinary reality but to see more deeply into its nature. The imagination, at its highest, is the same as insight. “We use imagination not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and the apprehension of the real.”10 This struggle to see can be encountered in innumerable novels, she says, but equally anyone can know it from his or her own experience. Because the work of attention goes on continuously and imperceptibly builds up structures of value around us, it is true to say that “at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”11 She denies the common conception that moral choice is an exercise of the “isolated will” (the will acting in isolation from the rest of our being) and contends that acting rightly comes out of “the quality of our usual attachments.” Thus “the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time, not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments.” In this, the assimilation of our experience through reflection upon it is important. She quotes Simone Weil: “Will is obedience not resolution.”12 Since, for Murdoch, the quality of consciousness is critical to virtue – to our ability to choose well and to act well – and since also we possess a propensity to self-delusion, anything that alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness and objectivity is itself connected with virtue. She conceives of beauty in this way, again following Plato, laying emphasis upon his thought that beauty is the one spiritual quality open to immediate apprehension. (Beauty is exhibited in things in ways that the good is not.) As a result, she writes, it

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is “perhaps the most obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for ‘unselfing’”: Beauty is the convenient and traditional name of something which art and nature share, and which gives a fairly clear sense to the idea of quality of experience and change of consciousness. I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.13 Beauty serves here to stir the beholder into being present to the real (the things of true value) with the implication that the state of self-preoccupation concerns an illusion (a false value). This state is also one that induces anxiety while beauty, experienced as detachment from oneself, induces calm. A sudden light is shone upon the insignificance of the self and its preoccupations as compared with “the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees.”14 Murdoch takes a puckish pleasure in proposing that “bringing home a potted plant” can have something to do with virtue. She doesn’t suppose the appreciation of such things to be the most important place of moral change, only the most accessible. Art is a somewhat more difficult case not only because it is less accessible than nature but also because not all art is very good at conveying any particular spiritual quality. But great art surely does: Art, and by “art” from now on I mean good art, not fantasy art, affords us a pure delight in the independent existence of what is excellent. Both in its genesis and its enjoyment it is a thing totally opposed to selfish obsession. It invigorates our best faculties and, to use Platonic language, inspires love in the highest part of the soul. It is able to do this partly by virtue of something which it

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shares with nature: a perfection of form which invites unpossessive contemplation and resists absorption into the selfish dream life of the consciousness.15 She is referring to a specifically aesthetic experience: the experience of a work of art as itself a locus of value. We have the same experience of nature. But art is edifying in another sense because it is, unlike nature, a human product. It has the power to communicate and to reveal. (In this sense it is more like philosophy.) What art communicates, however, is not so much a message but is more like an example. This is due to the fact that it embodies the artist’s consciousness. The importance of art, it might be said, lies not in its being an artifact but in its being an attitude. The attitude Murdoch commends is, of course, one of openness and attention to the salient detail of the world. “Good art, however complex, presents an evident combination of purity and realism.”16 In this way, it shows us the truth. “Good art shows how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. We are presented with a truthful image of the human condition in a form which can be steadily contemplated; and indeed this is the only context in which many of us are capable of contemplating it at all.”17 Art, she says, is a kind of “goodness by proxy”18 because it shows us how to be good. That is because “virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man”: it is “a selfless attention to nature.”19 She quotes Rilke praising Cézanne for a “consuming of love in anonymous work”: Rilke said of Cézanne that he did not paint “I like it,” he painted “There it is.” This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals, or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals. We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of something else, a natural object, a person in need. We can see in mediocre art, where perhaps it is even more clearly seen than in mediocre conduct, the intrusion of fantasy, the assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world.20

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Art provides a model of unselfish attention to the plural detail of the world. There is a second sense in which it teaches: it provides a “just and merciful” reckoning of that which it describes or depicts. In this second sense, art shows us not only the proper disposition toward the world, but also the fruits of its exercise. Like love, good art is attentive to its object and so is capable of yielding such insights. In transcending the “limitations of personality,” great art exhibits the connection of “clear realistic vision with compassion.”21 We see this everywhere in painting: in Cimabue’s and Giotto’s testaments of a human faith, in Velázquez’s paintings of ordinary folk, in Rembrandt’s searching self-portraits, in Chardin’s tender domestic scenes, in Watteau’s ephemeral trysts, in Goya’s depictions of war’s horrors, and on and on. Similarly, in the music of the greatest composers, one finds their personality of course but also a kind of argument for (or defence of) a certain spiritual conception of life that is individual to each of them. No less than other forms of art, it expresses in symbolic form the artist’s insight into the truth. Most of all, perhaps, literature is a place in which the nature of morality can be seen. While all art tells us what is to be human, the novel and drama are special cases because, by telling stories, they can capture the trajectory of a human life. We judge the greatness of novelists by the quality of their awareness of others. The greatest, such as Tolstoy and George Eliot, display a “god-like capacity for so respecting and loving [their] characters as to make them exist as free and separate beings.”22 Only in this way (through love) can they truly know their characters and thus teach their readers to apprehend their characters’ reality, and the reality of others more generally. They are models of the great artist who sees her subjects “in the light of justice and mercy” even if those are “sad, absurd, repulsive and even evil.”23 Tragedy is the highest art because of the difficulty in seeing evil and misery justly. Whereas art, insofar as it sees justly, might be supposed to present to us a model of the integrated ego, it is Murdoch’s interesting idea that “tragedy, like religion, must break the ego, destroying the illusory whole of the unified self.”24 If so, tragedy is a kind of antiart. It is perhaps also a necessary corrective to the rest of art because

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suffering and death are also part of human reality: moreover, we prefer to deny their presence in our lives. In tragedy, she observes, “Sin, evil, is the evasion of the idea of death; refuge is taken in the exercise of power, heroic fantasies of will or fate, cults of suffering or the passing-on of pain as damage to others.”25 Tragedy brings us face to face with the resulting human cost. Why, despite experiencing tragedy as almost unendurable (King Lear will serve as the example), do we see it as beautiful? How misery and evil become so when presented in this form is, Murdoch says, a mystery. She simply concludes that “art cannot help, whatever its subject, beautifying and consoling.” Goya’s horrors of war are “terrifying but beautiful.” In this sense, tragedy is not anti-art but it is, she writes, “some sort of contradiction, destroying itself as art while maintaining itself as art.”26 Murdoch rightly appreciates that tragedy, though beautiful, challenges the idea of beauty and presents a test for any theory of aesthetic beauty. In confronting these difficulties, she might usefully have drawn upon her own insight that great art reveals the truth since, of all art, tragedy is the most truthful and the most beautiful. She might then have realized that tragedy actually reveals, more powerfully than anything else, that there is a beauty to the truth in its artistic representation. Thus, tragedy, although harrowing, is (as Aristotle said) uplifting, even if one would never want to witness directly, like some voyeur, the events it depicts. As spectators to tragic drama, we bear witness to profound human suffering, but because the raw facts have been transfigured into art we are also moved by it. By this means, tragedy elevates the humanity of its victims – but also our own. Nietzsche, if we consider him, was correct in proposing that tragedy captures the full truth of reality but wrong to think that the beautiful thing it makes of that truth is a kind of lie. In fact, we never lose sight of the suffering of the victims. But we are able to look it in the face because we share in it, vicariously, as Aristotle said, in feeling pity. The beauty of the drama resides in the fact that it is a truthful reckoning with life (reveals all, obscures nothing) in which, because it is also art, we are able to participate, and to do so as moral beings. The experience is uplifting because it is of supreme value, and it is so because it affirms

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our humanity. In tragedy, as we have seen in other contexts, it is just such experiences that are felt to be beautiful. Circling back to Plato, one can observe that Murdoch’s conception of love as true perception, and also as the desire for it, is like his. She also brings out what was only implicit in his conception: every act of true perception involves creative energy. Everyone has experienced how the act of attention, which may feel passive, actually engages the mind and so yields insights which lead to further insights and finally, if ideally, to a satisfactory understanding of the object under contemplation. It is just this kind of thought that art exacts. Murdoch observes that the spectator has “an analogous task” to the artist’s: “to be disciplined enough to see as much reality as the artist has succeeded in putting into it.” She accepts that this may not be easy but still thinks that the appreciation of beauty in art and nature (for all its difficulties) the “easiest available spiritual exercise.”27 Here I think she underestimates the difficulties that art presents to the person who tries to get as much out of it as he can. She underappreciates the extent to which great art presents a puzzle to the mind – tragedy is an obvious example – such that, so far from being an education unto itself, it might seem hardly comprehensible except to the person who has already experienced a good deal of life. Even if that is not so, and one can respond to art as if intuitively, it clearly has the greatest meaning and value for the person who has already developed the insight necessary to read it as the play of human values. We don’t just “see” what the artist saw because this “seeing” is a purely analogical concept. More accurately, we feel what the artist intended us to feel (presumably his own emotions). So doing is a feat of the imagination, of the sensibility, or of both. Most primitively, this occurs when we identify with a particular character in a novel. This is a kind of sympathy. We conceive of a fictitious being as human, with the human capacity to suffer or feel joy. Good art may cause our sympathies to be extended to types of persons with whom we have previously found it difficult to identify, and this would seem to be some sort of moral achievement (although not if a person’s capacity is limited to feeling sympathy for characters in books while real persons leave him unmoved).

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Then, too, some of the greatest literature is ironic and thus presents a problem for the reader’s response to the characters. In his masterpieces Pale Fire and Lolita, Nabokov presents us with ideals that are no less shining for the protagonists (whose conscious life is the story of the novels) for the fact that they are completely twisted. The protagonists, albeit that they may be artists in the Nietzschean sense, are also monsters of egoism. The line between the two, Nabokov insinuates, is indeed thin, as thin as the line that separates fantasy from reality. These protagonists’ grip on reality is deficient because they reinterpret the world in light of their warped ideals. They have no means of comprehending the real. The complex truth of these works depends upon the reader’s sympathetic understanding of the characters’ perverse visions but also upon their rejection. But as Murdoch herself emphasizes, not all art is “good” in her sense, which encompasses both aesthetic beauty and moral acuity. Thus not all art is apt to serve as a portal. The difficulty for each of us lies in discriminating whether art is good or bad or good in one sense but bad in the other. A moralizing fable, lacking all sublimity, is likely to be bad art while art that shimmers with aesthetic appeal may be at its heart vile. Some art is false because banal. The banal in art signifies a failure of attention in the final product, which is dead, and yet in its sentiment it is likely to be sincere and well-meant. (Amateur art, as well as salon art of all ages, is like that.) Some art is false because it mocks beauty while aping it (Leni Riefenstahl). But there is also art that takes up the ugly, even the degraded, and transfigures it (Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline), or, as in the case of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, it does the same for the banal. It can be very difficult to distinguish good art from bad in both senses complementary to Murdoch’s conception of good art. (Where do Robert Mapplethorpe, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade, and J.K. Huysmans belong?) Should the spectator be unable to tell the difference, the risk is that the beneficial impact that Murdoch argues for will be felt in reverse: the meretricious will be elevated over the truthful and associated “fantasies” will be reinforced. Part of the difficulty in sorting out the good from the bad in art lies in the different things that we expect from art than we do from

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morality. There is a stronger acculturation, hence consensus, around the idea of the good (the morality one is allowed) than around the idea of the beautiful (the aesthetics one is allowed) because creativity as to aesthetics is healthy for society and creativity as to morals isn’t: we wouldn’t think to praise someone for his “interesting” morals. Art matters less to society than solidarity does, or matters in a different way. We think of art as a place for creative exploration and experimentation, from which we derive stimulation, and it must therefore at times confront convention. Many people might therefore consider that Murdoch’s conception of “good art” – art that provides an accessible model for our conduct – is rather narrow. On the other hand, the fact that it is good for art to be experimental does not mean that any particular piece of art is any good just because it is so (a mistake that is endemic to the current age). Here Plato is to the point. The process he describes in the Symposium, which is akin to self-education, begins from a desire to learn from what one already knows, or has an inkling of, and the deepening of the understanding goes hand in hand with the development of character. In this spiritual exercise, we are guided by our native instincts (our natural attraction to the good). How does this apply to art? It would seem that there are natural limits to the autonomy of aesthetics from morality: we cannot think beautiful what we believe to be bad. We can perhaps find “transgressive” art to be interesting, even absorbing, as a challenge to settled conceptions, but not if such art is felt to be disgusting or trying hard to be or if it fails to say anything fresh or illuminating (that is, if it is rubbish). Of course, one can be wrong and call something ugly “good,” believing it to be beautiful. More likely still, one can experience an ambiguous attraction toward the ugly or the vicious and feel a certain shame as a result. But any perception that depends upon error is capable of correction (as Plato continually showed). It is rather like being deflected from one’s intended course. Murdoch’s emphasis is upon the purity of one’s experience, as is only to be expected of someone who has asserted that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” But we should consider the well-lived life to be characterized not only by a purity,

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but also by a breadth and depth, of vision. Instinctively, one desires to be not only a virtuous person but also a developed one, the kind of person who might continuously bring to his life the insight that she assigns to the artist. It is not enough that one should be able to understand the point of a story, which even a child can do; one wants to be able to make the finer judgments too. Neither is it enough simply to have certain experiences, which produce certain insights. Instead, those insights must be knit together so that they have an overall implication and can make an overall difference to one’s life. This involves learning from all of one’s experience, including, even, from what is repugnant. One ought therefore to conceive of art not as a point of entry into the good life but as a means by which the quality of perception, in an already discriminating person, can be enhanced. That aspect of Platonic thought which concerns the link between a developing understanding and a developing character might seem to have invited a response from Murdoch, but for some reason it was an invitation she did not take up. Still, it would seem to follow from what she propounds that the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility, in a more or less conscious way, could contribute to the formation of character. She herself says that “learning to detect the false in art and enjoy the true is part of a life-long education in moral discernment.”28 This implies (correctly) that cultivation of the aesthetic sensibility bears a lot in common with cultivation of the moral sensibility: both involve the capacity to separate what is superior from the meretricious, and a predisposition to prefer the superior. They help to direct the inner life toward matters of value. Enjoying art is like being immersed in life (its simulacrum) while at the same time being detached from it and able to contemplate it, as the artist does, as if it were a whole. To contemplate it is to reflect upon it. In this, we benefit from art’s implicit promise of meaningfulness. Murdoch’s elevation of art implies that it possesses a clarity of discrimination and that our own powers of perception require its assistance. That may well be so, but art doesn’t simply show us certain truths. More subtly, it assists in developing in us certain powers of discrimination and judgment that continually further an insight into how things are. The objective is a judgment that is not only percipient but personal,

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one having depth because we have depth. For any of us the questions an artwork raises will have different answers than it does for others, for, in any instance, the answer we may find is a connection made with one’s own experience. To possess “depth” is simply to possess the sort of ability that permits such connections to be made, which one has by virtue of being in possession of one’s own particular way of seeing (or vision). This is certain to have been honed by many previous acts of looking and by the effort to inhabit the artist’s consciousness, to see with her eyes. One knows that in seeing with her eyes, one may more fully see with one’s own.29 An analogy exists with the poets. It is wellknown that poets immerse themselves in the poetry of other poets. They do so not to appropriate another’s voice but to find their own, and so to seal their destiny to be poets. They know, instinctively, that art is an accessible means to connecting with oneself. If one is to learn from it, art must be felt as having implications for the person one is now as well as for the person one desires to be. Art must be allowed to challenge a person. Rilke allowed it to do so in his encounter with the archaic statue of the torso of Apollo (in the Louvre). Standing before it, he felt that it exposed him. It seemed to say to him, “You must change your life.” For, though truncated (entstellt – disfigured – is Rilke’s word), it must have seemed in its sublimity to possess a completeness that threw a light upon his human incompleteness. Hence the imperative quality of what Rilke felt he was hearing, its clarion call: we can bear the thought of our shortcomings only if it is accompanied by the resolution to overcome them. At the root of his encounter lies the perception that because beauty is in its nature fine, we are called by it to live in its light, to be stronger and better and more feeling, and even to make a certain sacrifice of ourselves to it, the sacrifice, at least, of our complacency.

7 Proust’s Vision

Toward the end of À la recherche du temps perdu, in a celebrated passage, it is revealed to the narrator, twice referred to in the text as “Marcel,” that his own past life provides the materials for a literary work. The author, another Marcel, or perhaps the same one, shows us a man in possession of an inchoate ideal and on a search for that which would realize it, an ideal that both is, and is symbolized by, the book he aspires to write. The book is nothing but his own experiences and cannot be written without his having lived. But it cannot consist only of a record of his experiences: it must be an achieved work of art. The book is finally delivered to him by a vision of perfect beauty, in which his past is recovered through a series of involuntary memories. As “outside of time,” they mirror art. Marcel discovers that the ideal exists within his life, and indeed within himself, and that it can be retrieved. The novel that results is like the book of our own lives, or of life itself – long and somewhat indeterminate and spotted with beauty and chagrin. But it is unified by a complex and (until the end) hidden narrative structure and, even more so, by the author’s great intelligence, sensitivity, and wit. Proust had the desire to be a writer and imposed upon himself an arduous apprenticeship that today would seem completely unconventional for an aspiring novelist. Actually he started fairly conventionally, writing short literary pieces for reviews and newspapers. But within a few years he embarked upon an exercise that was to take him ten years – the translation into French of two books by Ruskin, The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. At the start, he had little

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English, and Ruskin’s style is difficult (a fact amply demonstrated for anyone who has read Proust, but not Ruskin, once she is told that Proust’s own prose bears Ruskin’s profound influence). Not incidentally, one of these books, The Bible of Amiens, reads a cathedral – one whose facade is covered in thousands of carved figures – as if it were a book. Ruskin wrote about other French cathedrals too, and Proust visited them and studied them through Ruskin’s eyes. When he thought he was dying, he visited Venice to look at it through the master’s eyes. (Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice is a reading of Venetian art through its history.) In his introduction to La Bible d’Amiens, Proust wrote this about that visit: And my admiration for Ruskin gave such an importance to the things he had made me love that they seemed to be charged with a value greater even than that of life. This was literally the case, and at a time when I believed my days to be numbered, as I left for Venice in order to be able before dying to approach, touch, and see incarnated in decaying but still-erect and rosy palaces, Ruskin’s ideas on domestic architecture of the Middle Ages. What importance, what reality in the eyes of one who must soon leave the earth, can be possessed by a city so special, so fixed in time, so specific in space as Venice, and how could the theories on domestic architecture which I could study and verify there on living examples be those “truths which are more powerful than death, which prevent us from fearing it, and which almost make us love it”? It is the power of genius to make us love a beauty more real than ourselves in those things which in the eyes of others are as particular and perishable as ourselves.1 Here, Proust exhibits his sensitivity to the inestimable value of beauty. (In this respect, he is like Ruskin. Nonetheless, elsewhere he rejected Ruskin’s theocentric system of aesthetics.) More conventionally, Proust wrote an early draft of À la recherche, later published under the title of Jean Santeuil. Although it contained many of the elements of the later masterpiece, including the episode with the morsel of madeleine dipped in a teaspoonful of lime

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tea before being eaten, which is popularly believed to be the crux of the later book, Proust abandoned the manuscript as lifeless. He had not yet discovered the meaning of art. He was also honing his powers of elaborate description. One of the literary essays he published (in Le Figaro) describes a descent in a motor car from a hill outside Caen down into the town, and how during the journey, presumably because the road followed a tortuous course, the spires of the town’s two great churches seemed to change place. The essay, or a version of it, is included in Swann’s Way, the first volume of À la recherche, where the churches are transposed to the fictional town of Martinville, near Combray, the place where the young Marcel spends his summers. In the book, this piece of writing, although accomplished – it demonstrates the acuteness of his perception and makes a telling point about the mysteries of perspective – has the air of a set piece, and an entire book composed of such marvels would constitute a curio, a case of a sensibility as yet uneducated by life. As a final exercise before embarking upon his great novel, Proust wrote the fragments gathered together as Contre Sainte-Beuve, again a recognizable effort at the novel he was to write later. Evidently during this apprenticeship, Proust attempted and failed to write the book of his life. That failure, and ultimate success, raises the interesting question of the nature of the missing spark. We are quite accustomed to novels that plot a linear movement in the protagonist’s life, from a condition of ignorance (darkness) to a condition of awareness (light). At the same time, the protagonist comes to define himself as a (more) complete human being. It is a version of the myth of the Cave. Iris Murdoch says that every novel has this narrative form (with its inherent drama). It is certainly characteristic of the nineteenth-century novel, which so often takes the form of a Bildung (education), either in a straight up or an ironic form. Whether hero or anti-hero, the protagonist generally attracts our sympathy. (We too strive.) À la recherche is not a Bildungsroman because it is not the story of Marcel’s development as either a moral being or an artist. Marcel is shown, from an early age, as devoted to the activity of the conscious mind. Partly, this takes the form of pure phenomenology – the text provides a description of the experience of

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perception. So we are shown, constantly, how Marcel’s consciousness lights upon an object the way a ray of light strikes something in the landscape: out of all manner of things to illuminate, it settles on one, which it simultaneously brings into high relief. This is consciousness in its immediacy. We are also shown, continuously, the assimilation by Marcel’s consciousness of its experience by reflection upon its meaning. Thus Marcel strives for understanding of the mysteries of experience. He does not strive for self-definition in the way of a man of action, the typical protagonist of the novel of the past. Marcel, unlike almost all of the other characters in the novel, places sensitivity and sensibility ahead of the will. He stands apart from the others, who all seem to have such a destructive appetite for life. If the moral problem for Marcel is supposed to be whether he will ever get down to writing his novel, this lies very much in the background and it is in any event supposedly made possible by a somewhat magical experience – a series of involuntary memories – which restore to Marcel the substance of his past. We are shown nothing of the process of composition itself. In fact, reading À la recherche, one feels that the activity of living has, for Marcel, already constituted the writing of the novel. His living of his life, which is to say, the exercise of his powers of observation and his sensibility, has obviated the supposed problem of what to write about. All that has been necessary to produce the conditions for the novel’s creation is for Marcel to come to understand that the key to the mystery of art lies simply in the artist’s ability to be a mirror to his own experience. If that is the truth of art, then the protagonist who is also an artist will cause nothing to happen. That is true of Marcel. As primarily the record of a consciousness, À la recherche is, squarely, a work of the twentieth century, whose novel characteristically demonstrates the transformation of the self – the writerly self – into something like a work of art itself. For that reason, the writer, ostensibly also the hero, disappears into the text. So Marcel is everywhere and nowhere in the book. For all of his self-description, it is extremely difficult to say who Marcel is. Compounding that difficulty is the fact that the narrative, while mainly an expression of Marcel’s conscious life, seems frequently to be gifted with authorial

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omniscience. If there is perplexity as to the point of view from which the story is told, it exists also as regards the point in time in which it is told. Ostensibly, it is a recapitulation based upon memory. But, like other modernist texts, its purpose is to reproduce the texture of lived experience, both sensation and thought, in this case in what should be described as the stream of consciousness of a highly literary mind. It therefore necessarily takes place in what feels like the present moment. It is in part this paradox that the involuntary memory is intended to address, as we shall see. Marcel’s singular vision is formed in his childhood at Combray in his exposure to nature, to books, and to family and village life. There, in solitude, he experiences complete freedom of the spirit. In a sense, his life devolves as he matures. But he must lead his life in order to achieve his adult purpose of completing the novel. The common critical interpretation of À la recherche is that Marcel is, for much of his adult life, “distracted” from his artistic vocation by the hours he spends in drawing rooms and in unsatisfying love affairs. It is true that Marcel’s efforts at writing are stymied, and for a time he complains of a loss in his poetic feeling for beauty (although this is hardly apparent in the narrative). But the real conundrum, one infers, is that he isn’t persuaded of the value of the novel upon which he is fitfully engaged and that is because, at first and also at length, he fails to appreciate the value of his own experience for art, the assurance of which can be provided only as that experience unfolds. Of course, all along the workings of his consciousness are pushing him toward that understanding. Because this is not a Bildungsroman, and there is a great intermittence between the solitude of childhood and its ultimate recovery in the process of composing the text, which occurs after the novel ends, the narrative does not “develop.” There is the feeling that it meanders among incidents (the roman-fleuve), which serve to elaborate endlessly upon the same few inescapable truths about humanity. The book is, upon its face, an odd amalgam of social comedy and private rapture and rumination. But this quirk is critical to its success. Marcel’s writer’s consciousness causes him to maintain a vast ironic distance from the people who inhabit his world, and even

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from himself (although not from his experience of beauty). This is contrived to show not simply the ridiculous poses people strike in society but, more seriously, how their natures are hidden from themselves by vanity and how this causes them to have deluded beliefs about themselves and others. They project a certain character – one they have assumed, without being aware that they have done so, and will in due course betray. The narrator, observing them, at first accepts the meaning they have placed upon their lives but time (and his art) will serve to unmask the ego each person possesses in lieu of a self. In the meantime, the characters spend endless amounts of time on diversions, a fact that serves as a poignant metaphor for the waste of their lives. For example, Swann, in a parallel to Marcel, is unable to write his book on Vermeer, for which his sensibility so aptly qualifies him. Proust clearly believes, as Pascal had, that people embrace distraction in an anxious effort to avoid confrontation with the truth of their lives. It is not that they do not suffer. Proust’s more sympathetic characters do, most conspicuously over love (including, of course, Marcel himself). But it is hard for us to feel sympathy for their suffering because it is entirely self-inflicted, entirely grounded in their own mistakes. À la recherche is the greatest in the long line of novels that present love as a projection of the lover’s emotions onto the beloved. The narrative shows us that, in this respect, we do not confine ourselves to persons. Marcel’s belief that the ancient aristocracy of France could still somehow embody a medieval chivalry is entirely an aesthetic notion, developed out of his attachment as a child to certain adventure stories and his daydreaming over the armorial bearings set in the stained glass at the church at Combray. Somehow, Marcel’s fascination with this type, which in due course reveals itself to have all the pettiness of the bourgeoisie combined with an even more ferocious snobbishness than theirs, becomes mixed up with his own social climbing. As is the case with his vices generally, this cohesion of the idealistic and the craven is hidden from Marcel, although it is revealed by indirect means in the narrative. The novel can linger without dullness for two hundred pages or so each on the accounts of several different soirées. In the apparently

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aimless activity described, everything is revealed about the characters present and finally about life construed as the unflagging exercise of the will. Proust makes one see how we incessantly, and obliviously, place our characters on display, mostly in what we say but also, even, in how we display ourselves – like saints in Gothic paintings shown with the instruments of their own torture (the earnest intellectual Bloch holding his gloves like a scroll of papyrus, the cocotte Odette with blowsy cattleya orchids stuffed into her bosom). This is a display of irony, of course, and it reaches its height in the super-abundant metaphors that clothe in a strange phosphorescent beauty objects that are actually quite banal, such as, in one scene, the overdressed ladies at the Paris Opera. To pick from a veritable fantasia of detail: the house is seen from the stalls as if inside an aquarium; the nodding plumes on the ladies’ headdresses are like the waving fronds of underwater plants. The outlandish imagery that Marcel lavishes upon objects both worthy and unworthy is the product of an alert and sensitive consciousness that is predisposed to find rapture in appearances. But, more importantly, it predicates a search for true beauty. In the narrative, this search is associated with his solitary experiences, particularly as a child, of beauty in nature and art and with his love for his family. These are described in poetic terms and utterly without irony. They intimate, also, that his true self will not be found in society and that his quest lies within. The beauty that stirs him is not excessively refined (that being thinly disguised eroticism of a salacious type) but to the contrary is found in simplicity: in the plain white hawthorn flower, in the recurring “little phrase” in a particular piece of music, in the “yellow patch” which is the door of a building in a canvas by Vermeer. These details are suggestive of a pure and gallant loveliness and, as being practically hidden or easily overlooked, are deeply personal and spiritual. À la recherche is a kind of catalogue of true beauty, understood as that which is deserving of the love of an ardent soul. As in all matters of the spirit, in that love the ego is sublimated in a greater truth, as we see in the young Marcel. In Swann’s Way, in the famous scene in which Marcel takes in the white and the pink hawthorn flowers blooming in springtime profusion on the path he takes by Swann’s

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house on his country walks, he looks deeply into a flower so that it may give up to him its meaning, although it does not, and drinks in its scent, so that he may retain it forever, but he cannot. (Memory, he finds, does not retain scents.) These experiences are not only emblems of his striving to grasp a perfect beauty and a demonstration of its actual elusiveness but also premonitions of the problematic nature of art. How can passages of rapturous description consort with astringent analysis of the psychology of the great cast of characters? Actually, both result from the same vision. They are the positive and negative poles of the exercise in valuation in which the author is involved and are therefore only superficially at odds. The treatment of salon society suggests that Marcel is beguiled by that world but also, in its unflagging comic effect, broadly hints that he is not. His vision is actually searching for its proper object. Life presents to him false ideals but, for the continually appraising consciousness, every pretended ideal is only an occasion for further discovery, which sometimes does not occur immediately. The novel’s other great inquiry into the human concerns what he calls the intermittences of the heart. These occur out of Marcel’s failure to understand the true meaning of love. His disappointments, including disappointments with himself, and his observation of the universal failure of love on the part of others, save only his mother and his grandmother, serve to show to him what is persistent in love, and its fundamental value, and that is the selflessness of maternal love. In this sense, his life’s experience teaches him only what, as a child, he knew already. In the striving that is his life, both his experience of beauty (all that is true) and his experience of the mean, the crass, the self-serving, and the self-deluding (all that is false) are essential. But essential to what? To recalling him to his true self, so it appears, and, after much time, to his greatest task. For Proust, as for Nietzsche, his problems are, to quote the philosopher, his destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness. The principal problem presented to Marcel in the book, as to Proust in life, is how is his book possible? This is another way of asking, how is art itself possible? Further, how can a literary project that is given over to irony sustain an idea of the perfection that Proust believed is

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the goal of art? The answer lies in the fact that the promise of art is, finally, the release of the artist from the burden of that irony which is the correct response to false beauty (as love is the correct response to true beauty). The artist’s instinct will lead him to search, within experience and therefore within time, for a beauty that is timeless, just as Marcel has done. Toward the end of the novel, after a trek that has involved decades of the characters’ lives and thousands of pages of text, appears the scene in which the narrator is suddenly released into his vocation to write the book we hold in our hands. The spectacle of time itself lies before him, time which consumes people’s lives and which (through art) may redeem them. They stand before him, unmasked by old age, led by their natures to their destinies, and the tone gives way to a majestic compassion. Time, after all, brings everyone and everything to this pass. We are presented here with another, but much gentler, form of ironic detachment. The narrative has led, finally, to the hero’s possession of his place in the world. Marcel discovers that he belongs outside the world. He has made the great discovery that he has all the material he needs for the creation of a work of art. It is there in the panoply of pettiness and vanity, as well as in the love and self-sacrifice, of the people who have occupied his life, for they all, in their lives, live out the drama and the pathos of time, and all are therefore worthy of the ennoblement that art will bestow upon them. This same understanding is extended to his own life, the indirection he has pursued, his false loves. Marcel realizes, in effect, that everything that exists has value for art and may be made to constitute a work of art. Ironically, he has not wasted his time at all. Marcel’s sensibility, despite the fact that it is necessarily engaged in seeking out the meaning of things, does not seem to develop over the course of the novel, which is also the course of his life. It seems remarkably mature when he is young, and in his maturity retains the freshness and intensity of his childhood vision. It is rapturous throughout. What we are shown is a person pouring all his energy into his perceptions. We must accept that he is exercising his artistic vision long before he achieves his artistic vocation, and we understand that this is in fact essential to its achievement. The sensibility leads him through experience to its ordained goal.

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It is in fact Marcel’s feeling for beauty that underpins his judgment throughout. It functions as an active force, a type of moral agency. In fact, it is aesthetic and moral all at once. It lends to him a special power of discrimination, an insight into the true value of things. In Proust, as in Henry James, thought and the prose description that is its derivative involve a constant exercise of the judgment, in which the mind weighs the value of everything, where “value” is understood in the sense a moral philosopher would use it (“that which is worthy of esteem for its own sake”) and also the sense a painter would (“due or proper effect or importance, relative tone of colour in distinct section of a picture”). It furnishes him with both detachment and (the other quality necessary for art) engagement. Modernism propounds that our experience is fragmented and is so because consciousness is. But the thinking-feeling-judging that occurs within the flow of consciousness, although open-ended, discloses the world. Furthermore, it is consciousness and it alone that can give shape to a life – trace out a narrative arc – although it does so only in retrospect. In the case of the narrator, the sum total of this experience – his life – is his preparation to write it out. But his experiences provide him only with the material for his narrative. The critical moment lies in his becoming aware that he possesses and has all along been exercising the power to reflect his experiences that enables a work of art. He for whom his consciousness is his sensibility finally realizes that it is also his vision, and could be reflected in a book. With that, he ceases to strive for some unachievable ideal of art and is enabled to possess the ideal within himself. In his preface to La Bible d’Amiens, Proust cites Goethe’s remark that there is poetry only in those things which one still feels and, that feeling once lost, what remains cannot provide the substance for art. It is but a “cold memory.” But the last volume of À la recherche shows us that the feeling can be restored (time can be regained). This cannot be achieved by living itself (an immersion in time), such as ordinarily recollection involves. He writes: Gradually thanks to its preservation by our memory, the chain of all those inaccurate expressions in which there survives nothing

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of what we have really experienced comes to constitute for us our thought, our life, our “reality,” and this lie is all that can be reproduced by the art that styles itself “true to life,” an art that is as simple as life, without beauty, a mere vain and tedious duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records.2 Time can be recaptured only by a process that is outside time. This is involuntary memory, a memory that is triggered by a present sensation, in experiencing which one experiences the original sensation. Nabokov, for one, denied the reality of time by presenting memories as fully real to him in the present – perhaps magically more present to him than the present itself – a sense achieved for him by their saturation in sensuous detail. Since these memories were never lost to him, it is justified in his case to speak of the presentness of the past. In Proust, by contrast, the past must first be forgotten in in order that it might be ecstatically re-experienced in the present. “The only true paradises are those we have lost,” he writes. In involuntary memory, the past, those paradises that had been believed forever unrecoverable, are restored. In the narrative, toward the end, the involuntary memories multiply and seem to convey that the sluice gates are open. The narrator presumably proceeds to map out the plan of his book. But is their effect to show the availability of his memories to him, or is it to show their suitability for art? The novel has shown us that, ever since childhood, Marcel has been involved in some sort of search. (It is a sign, he acknowledges, of a “fundamental trait” and further he states that he has “never progressed.”) The search is not for lost time specifically, but for the truth of his experiences. The hawthorn flower, the twin steeples of Martinville, a cloud that shadows the little Vivonne River – he felt these as “signs” beneath which “there lay something of a quite different kind which [he] must try to discover, some thought which they translated after the fashion of those hieroglyphic characters which at first one might suppose to represent only material objects.”3 As might be expected with a hieroglyphic, these signs seemed to call for decipherment. This is a difficult process, Marcel acknowledges, yet a vital one. It is the only means to arrive at the truth, for what we have

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not had to elucidate by our own efforts is not ours. We have to puzzle over the riddle. The answer to this riddle seemed to be implied in the beauty of the experience, if only it could be extracted and preserved. Involuntary memory solves the riddle. It shows that the meaning of the experience resides in the experience itself, a fact that can be appreciated only through its re-appropriation. By restoring to Marcel the reality of his impressions, the involuntary memory demonstrates to him their truth. The happiness this produces lies in the fact that the search is fulfilled, not by an effort of will, the force of recollection, which cannot fulfill it, but by a sort of grace that his past experience bestows upon him. The more complex meaning conveyed by involuntary memory is that what we truly are we are through what is given to us – “the book whose hieroglyphs are not traced by us.”4 For, Marcel says, the truths that the intellect apprehends directly in the world, which are merely logical, are less profound and less necessary than the impressions derived from the senses, which have a “spiritual meaning” that it is possible to extract. What is this spiritual meaning, this “truth for us,” to which Marcel refers? He leaves us to wonder. Of all the ideas that Proust subjects to such minute scrutiny, beauty is not one. He leaves us in no doubt, however, of his passionate devotion, saying elsewhere that he would gladly lay down his life for it. But in this one instance his task is not to explain it, but is the artist’s task, which is to make us love it. The task that presents itself is to think what has been felt, to “interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think – that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow – what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into the spiritual equivalent. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art?”5 It follows that the work of art is to be found within ourselves, in the impressions left behind by our experiences. Our task is to realize it which, according to Marcel, is not a matter of artistic creativity as it is ordinarily conceived: “In fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should do if it were a law of nature – to

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discover it.” The work of art exists already in each of us and does not have to be invented, only translated: “The function and task of a writer are those of a translator.” Genius, Marcel says, resides in the power that those gifted with it have “to make use of their personality in such a way that their life is reflected in it.” Much is hidden in that word “personality,” but sensibility, together with style, gives some indication of its meaning. The power of genius does not reside in a talent for invention or even for living. Art is not just a question of craft, but also of vision. Life and art are inseparable. The true story of one’s life is found “inside” and is also the source of the literary work of art. Yet it cannot be simply extruded from memory. It is “hidden” and must somehow be “discovered” and “translated” from one medium (which is not art) into another (which is). More mysterious is the assertion that it “pre-exists us” and is “necessary,” but this idea is explained by the fact that life pre-exists the work that it determines. Beyond this, it is strongly implied that lived life has an inchoate form of meaning which predisposes it for art but can become fully known to oneself only in the process of its being realized for art. In Marcel’s case, it is not in being lived but in being relived that life finds its truth: his entire life is in search of its own realization in art. And it is not the faits divers of his life that will provide the material for his novel: it is his conscious life, subsisting in the record of his impressions. For his life as he has lived it has had the quality of a work of art, because he is an artist, and he has only to recapture these in order to write his novel. He writes: “And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life. They had come to me in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself all the nutritious substance from which it will feed a plant.”6 The significance of involuntary memory is that by revealing to him the “truth” of his experiences – their reality – and showing that he possessed that reality within him, it proved to Marcel his possession of the artist’s vision, prompting him to undertake the “translation” of what he felt into “thought” – the literary work of art.

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If involuntary memory provides the motive for art in conveying the truth of Marcel’s impressions, their duration is only for an instant. We are told that “the contemplation, though it was of eternity, had been fugitive.” It is the purpose of art to capture forever experiences of true beauty that will otherwise be lost. Involuntary memory is fleeting, but art is permanent. Art stands as proof that life is not as it seems to be in its ordinary flux, a series of moments which vanish as they occur, but instead that it has about it the quality of eternity. Naturally, involuntary memory cannot do all the work involved in the creation of art, which must include some combination of the artist’s experience and his imagination. The imagination, at the very least, provides that which makes of his experience a unity. In his essay “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire set forth a theory of beauty in art, which seems to anticipate Proust’s own aesthetic. Baudelaire explains that every form of painting is in its time modern since it represents the appearance things have that is characteristic of their time. We take pleasure in the art of our own time for this reason, as we do the art of the past for its representation of times past. He calls this play of appearances “the amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coat of the divine cake.”7 Apart from this element (referred to as “transience”), beauty always contains a second, which he calls “timelessness.” By this idea, Baudelaire seems to mean whatever there is of the poetic in the captured moment. The idea is perhaps better experienced than explained, but it seems to depend upon what is idiosyncratic to the work and not what is characteristic of the style in which it is painted. In a painting, or perhaps just a sketch, this might consist of the particular way the artist has caught the expression of a face, the stance of a body, or some other characteristic pose, which a person may hold only for a moment as he moves through his life. As Baudelaire wrote: “For any ‘modernity’ to be worthy of one day taking its place as ‘antiquity,’ it is necessary for the mysterious beauty which human life accidentally puts into it to be distilled from it.”8 Art is to express the moment, yet it must also press back against the thought that it is only of the moment. À la recherche presents us with what purports to be a monumental artifact of memory. Whether it can in a real sense be so is doubtful.

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But that it purports to be so reminds us that memory, like art, is selective, and the artist’s memory will select for the aesthetic, for what is of a singular grace – the eternal element in beauty. Applying Baudelaire, it may be observed, first, that Proust’s narrative is imbued with “transience,” the romance of his time and place (while most of us, duller souls, impute romance only to other times and other places). His preoccupation with the apparently trivial details of life, which probably defeats some readers, exists because they are characteristic of what life is. At the same time he forces out of them their paradoxical beauty – the eternal quality that resides in them. In the end, everything exists for the sake of his consciousness, and within its four corners. It scarcely matters whether or not the narrative is set in memory. The great unifying force of the novel is found not primarily in its narrative structure but in the writer’s vision, an arc that stretches from the beginning of the novel to the end and stands in contrast with the indeterminacies of life and the intermittences of the heart the novel describes. It speaks the truth of sensibility because, in each moment, we have the strong conviction that we see with the artist’s eyes (which, as Marcel says, is to glimpse another world). The story, such as it is, exists only as a datum of the sensibility. But it has, as a result, the very feeling of lived life. If the artist of our time, the artist as Nietzschean hero, turns his life into a work of art, a sensibility objectified, then the self is mysteriously dissolved into its own experience, as was proved to be essential in Marcel’s case before he could write his novel at all. This is a paradigm for all of art – its greatness, timelessness, universality, and, yes, heart. No false unities are to be presumed. Instead of a “life,” we are presented with a continuous meditation upon life and also upon art, and on the relation between the two, all with illustrations drawn from life. If we go looking for the thread of a life in the text we read, we shall be frustrated. For this book, which is written only after the artist finds his vocation, expresses a sensibility that is, at all points, perfectly complete, and therefore and in that sense impenetrable. The mark of the sensibility may be looked for in those idiosyncratic elements that are also poetic. Or, as the narrator puts it, the work possesses an “inflection,” which is that quality of the artist’s

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expression that survives any superficial change in style. Marcel finds this effect present in early and late works of the (fictional) composer Vinteuil, which, though worlds apart in style, are found to emanate from the same mind. Who could describe an inflection? It is some characteristic artistic gesture, essentially a matter of the spirit, which is why it haunts the spectator or listener and seems to speak to him directly. In Proust’s case, the inflection is impossible to miss. It could be identified as the “outrageously poetic” element of the text. The dyspeptic Romanian intellectual E.M. Cioran amusingly identifies what is “dated” in Proust as “those trifles swollen by a dizzying prolixity, the eddies of the Symbolist manner, the accumulation of effects, the poetic saturation.”9 Yet these stylistic tics are what make Proust Proust and the novel a joy – and an enigma of style. Proust embodies the paradox that profundity is a question of style – and more precisely a triumphant overcoming of the limitations of style. This he could not have achieved without his genius for observation and for the comic and, miraculously co-habiting in the same breast, his passion for true beauty. A novel of indirection such as this one is a gathering up of fragments that, when gathered, are by no means fragments: they are facets of some great reality. Once the covers are closed on the last volume, it is clear that one’s life has been changed. But it would not be easy to say how.

8 The Beauty Within

Throughout this book, my argument has been that beauty enhances life not as an ornament but as an inspiration. This idea naturally has implications for how life is to be lived. At the outset, I considered how the appreciation of beauty can, by helping to teach the meaning of value, alter one’s regard upon oneself. For Plato and Nietzsche, in their different ways, the sense of beauty should lead one to grasp the valuable in life. They go further. They frankly profess to associate the beautiful with the highest values. The objective is to cause us to desire to attain these values. They each set out to accomplish this, appropriately to their purpose, by creating a picture of our lives as they might be realized if we have high ideals and live by them. The picture is of a life that is beautiful. Admiration for the picture sparks the desire in the right person to represent it in one’s being. For any of us, our highest and best is also our most beautiful. In former ages, this was no strange thought. The model was set by the ancient Greeks whose word for the beautiful, to kalón, meant also the noble and the fine. They saw the beautiful as shining through the good, an idea Plato shared. The Greeks thoughtfully bequeathed it to us as a conception of artistic beauty, an idea from which the classical spirit has never wholly departed. Greek sculpture conveys that there is a kinship of the human with the divine, but only insofar as the human achieves its ideal form.1 This was what the Greeks themselves aspired to – it infuses their concept of areté. Even today, the classical ideal of excellence in the form of a fully developed self is felt to be a model to which it is proper to aspire (and not through physical training alone).

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Because beauty is kindred with the abstract, it lends itself well to a symbolic representation of values of a sort often quite difficult to express in words but very aptly expressed in art. One need only consider the forms of artistic expression in religious ages, which, after all, all ages were until the modern. If the Middle Ages renounced the classical idea because of the distance perceived to exist between the divine and the human, the two were reconciled in the Renaissance under the blessing of our classical forebears. When, with the march toward modernity, the individual came to be regarded initially as a locus of value and later as responsible for its creation, beauty ceased to represent a collective ideal, at length became irrelevant except as an ornament, and finally dropped out of the vocabulary of art. But to say that is to be too quick. The observation is true enough of the art that is representative of our age – “a variety show” as one critic has called it.2 There remain, however, those artists – a small band – who cannot get beauty out of their heads. For them, beauty continues to symbolize some determinate thing: their personal highest value. Their work demonstrates to us, those of us who can’t get beauty out of our heads either, that we need not confine ourselves to the paintings and books and music of former ages, but that in the art of our age a felt meaning can sometimes be found. Such artists, and also ourselves, stand up for the survival or, better, the persistence of value in our lives. We are proud inheritors as much as we are originators. In this sense we are against the spirit of the age. But we accord with its spirit and are true to human nature itself in being set on the discovery of the world and ourselves. We are ones who, like our predecessors, would put an idea at the centre of our being because it is beautiful and, by association with it, hope to join the ranks of the beautiful. The hope is not to serve as an acolyte of some diaphanous ideal; it is to live in accordance with one’s own ideal and to be continuously instructed by it, to aspire to live as one feels certain the ballet star or the tennis ace does (the most authentic of them at any rate) for whom all striving after physical mastery is only as an aid to achieving a spiritual grace. They are not the masters of their activity but its servants, for only through it can they possibly come to know that grace. Since this is what they learned to desire, its

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coming to be known is their coming to self-knowledge, of a particularly acute sort, the knowledge that “I am such a being as this, a being for this grace.” We can look as far back as Saint Augustine to find one who, in a way that is already recognizably modern, had the idea that knowledge of oneself would provide one with the ideal one unconsciously seeks, and through it possession of one’s true self. This great and daunting figure tells us about “the beauty within,” which he discovered after seeking beauty in the world “and in my unlovely state plunged into those lovely created things which you [beauty] made.” In Augustine’s case, the beauty to be found within himself was the divine, in which, after all his seeking, he could rest. In the Confessions, he makes a parable of his own life, telling us that he resisted the turn to the divine for a long time and therefore failed to grasp its possibility. Yet all along he somehow aspired to it, as if his apparent dissipation was continually proving to him its own futility. Then one day, reading Saint Paul, his true desire was revealed, and instantly he came into possession of the deepest part of himself because he understood what he had all along been set upon becoming. For Augustine, his ideal was the object of his love, obscure at first, but rooted deeply in his being. Because it was loved, it was not only his highest and his best; it was also his most beautiful. His life had been compelled by an idea without his ever knowing it, and this was so because he was striving to know it. It is important that the things of the world, the “created things,” were beautiful too. Otherwise he could not have sought himself in them. As such, they were creations of that same beauty that was within or were of one piece with it. While he did not find himself there, he was obliged to seek there, and in seeking he was on the way to finding himself. Therefore that beauty too was his beauty. Yet it was only the semblance of a greater beauty, and in that sense it contained only his lesser self, the self he only partly knew. The beauty he ultimately found, the beauty that was seeking him out, was the truer beauty and therefore contains his greater self. But still the beauty that was in the world was loved and it led him to the beauty within, which was his ideal. This was not the object of some abstract devotion. It was his

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great desire for it that drew him to it. For we never love anything or anyone (even God) because we ought to do so but only because he or she or it is beautiful in our eyes. It is, in fact, in the guise of beauty that the good is loved. It is as an idea that is carried within the heart and cherished for its beauty. In the first essay in this book, I suggested that the discovery of what one loves is a key to understanding who one is. But I did not discuss what larger meaning or promise a person’s love holds for his or her life. Is the goal simply the achievement of knowledge itself, as a desirable thing, or is there some larger purpose to which the knowledge is directed? The answer is, as always, that it will depend upon the person one is. But what the ardent spirit feels is that, in every life and certainly in his own, there are loyalties to which a person is called and ideals that deserve his reverence. There is also the faith that if one can come to know what these are, then it ought to be possible to come to embody them with the assistance of the devotion that one feels in one’s heart. The end and object of the desire he has is to represent the ideal inwardly in his spirit and outwardly in his actions. In that way, he can show himself worthy to be a person who loves. That is itself an ideal. Our selfhood is a fragmentary thing, and we do not know ourselves very well. But even as half understood, the ideal provides one with a shining image for one’s life: it is both what one feels oneself to express and what one does not yet fully express but aspires to. As we each seek to understand what is our own ideal, we do so in the only way we can: we attempt to relate it to what we confidently believe we do know. Most people, if asked to identify their ideal, would point to this or that in their experience, especially their activities and adherences, not so much for what these are but for what they imply or for what they bring to their lives. Some – the lucky ones – would refer to their experience as a whole. This is a way of gesturing to what they have found valuable in their lives and, ideally, what has made them into the persons they are, although possibly they were, for the most part, unconscious of that process. At the end of a well-lived life, they can point and say, “It was to this my life was all along directed.”

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The book of one’s life, as one conceives it, is like an ordinary book in being a selection from experience to show what was found significant in it. Like any narrative that is not obtuse, it will be drawn not primarily from the daily round but instead from what has mattered most – what one has longed for most, cared for most, struggled over most. Moreover, these will give it a certain shape, a certain quality. The shape of a life is determined not only by one’s character and the beliefs and aspirations associated with it (ethos in Greek) but also by the more accidental passions (pathos). Those eruptions into life disturb its settled expectations and therefore also one’s self-conception. Whether they were invited or came willy-nilly, we needed those occasions that presented us with challenges to be overcome. We needed even those things that, because of our inadequacies, could not be overcome and caused pain on that account, for that too may register that one is developing as a person. We needed also the love of others to teach us that there is a grace which we cannot attain through striving alone and which, if it is bestowed upon us, we cannot be considered to deserve. Our successes and failures, loves and disappointments are real but, like the episodes in a book, they also have a symbolic meaning. They reflect a life that has attempted to find within itself a purpose and the outcome of that effort: the person we have become with the ideals we have come to hold. We only come to know any of who we are and what we cherish through the possibilities life presents and the projects we adopt. Life is experimental, as Nietzsche said. Projects require purposes and goals. Since few of us consciously make of our whole lives a single project, it seems likely that any goals our lives may pursue are not definitely drawn but are implicit. (We hope and trust that they are implicit.) Although unformulated, they give shape to a life, a degree of coherence as well as of purpose, and because they exist they open up a space for reflection upon where a person’s life has taken him and where it is leading him, on whether this direction is good or bad, and on what, henceforth, he chooses to do with his life. A fuller knowledge can come, however, only in the fuller course of living a life.

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Aspiration to a certain conception of oneself is natural and appropriate to human beings because we have endless potential, which we are always seeking to realize. Also, we never do achieve our goals: we simply make further goals as the immediate one is reached. Regardless of whether we attain these goals, in the striving for them the self is organized around a purpose and achieves all the unity of which it may be capable. So, while the beauty of aspiration seems to lie in what it appears to promise, it actually lies in what it delivers, which may not be the shining being of one’s imaginings (necessary though it is to imagine), but is instead a more resolute and directed character. Plato and Nietzsche each advocate that we should seek the perfection of which we are capable. Yet it is probably true to say that, for both, perfection exists for the sake of aspiration and not vice versa. They seem to envisage that it is the development of character that constitutes the highest good for the individual person rather than the achievement of some preconceived end. (In Plato’s case, at least, there is also an acceptance of the fact of our differing capacities.) There is a tragic element to their thought because they also seem to envisage that what man longs for is forever beyond his reach. At the same time, man is the beautiful being because he does not, on account of its being unattainable, cease to aspire to that goal or condition. Moreover, and this is what makes their philosophies moral philosophies and not merely poignant works of art, they argue that we become better for the trying. If, following Nietzsche, we emulate the artist and the philosopher and aim at the transformation of the world by instilling it with our own meaning, through this effort we first and foremost transform ourselves. So too with Plato. He conveys, when speaking of love, not only that the loved object is loved because it is valuable, but the corollary of this truth, namely that the person who loves is on his way to knowing the good and therein the achievement of personhood, which is the true basis of ethical life. We judge an ideal to be fine if it is difficult to achieve and an object of dedicated effort, whether it is chosen out of duty or love or both. There are uncountable pathways through experience, and Plato (if we look to him) was not attempting to limit them. He conveyed, through Socrates, that the search for the good is up to every

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individual to undertake. Nor does Nietzsche prescribe a single path. On the contrary. For him, the cardinal virtues are the honesty to discard old ideals and the courage to seek new ones that are one’s own. His prescriptions amount to little more than an insistence that you be authentic to your own self-ordained ideals. Both thinkers aim to cause you to desire a better self. One’s life’s work, which informs one’s ideal, may be directed to any honourable and worthwhile activity. The fact that one’s aspirations are limited to the excellent performance of an ordinary task in no way diminishes their value. Such activities abound in puzzles, challenges, and frustrations of their own, and they demand that one cultivate one’s powers and shoulder the discipline required to bring them to fruition. Whatever one does will imply a picture of oneself achieving certain concrete things and, as importantly, doing so in certain definite ways (which exclude other, less worthy ways). Both these, and in particular the latter, imply responsibility to values greater than oneself or than one’s success. There is also the personal responsibility one takes for what one does and for all outcomes, including the inevitable failures, even those that could probably not have been avoided. The test is passed so long as one remains true to those things one loves and true to one’s principles. This book continually propounds that beauty is both abstract and concrete: it exists at a point, or at various points, where the two intersect. Plato held that the productive power of beauty depends upon the mingling of the two essences. Even those who are not Platonists will accept that it is in the nature of beauty to cause the imagination to relate the idea to the object, the object to the idea, and, often, the ideal to the real. This exercise of the imagination creates new possibilities for seeing. It has a name of its own: vision. Obviously vision characterizes the activity of the artist. Art forces the artist to express a conception of the real. (One might say of those works of art that are beautiful that they exhibit an especially profound connection with reality.) But art is in this regard merely a special instance of a general human propensity. (Otherwise we wouldn’t bother with it.) The human actor harbours an irresistible impulse to speculate upon, and to ascertain, whether the real may be made to express his or her

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aspirations for it, whether the world will submit to its own transfiguration at human hands. I have spoken of the ideal as that which is, for anyone, his highest loves. These are quite likely to take the form for him, at least through much of his life, of an abstract idea, even an inarticulable one: beauty in an inchoate form. One is bound to face the problem of how to apply one’s ideal to the real work of life. This is the task of vision. If the ideal reflects one’s aspirations and discipline, vision reflects one’s creativity and drive. Here the artist may be considered as a model. The artist is engaged in an act of creation, which is at once her engagement with the world and the representation of that activity. The work of art that results is her summum bonum: the world in which she wishes, spiritually, to dwell. Of course, her vision is intended to capture what is beautiful in this world, however much that beauty may be animated by the imaginative or even the fantastic. This we encounter in Cézanne and Proust, and they demonstrate too that the consummate artist’s ambition is vast. They certainly did not conceive of beauty as relating only to a narrowly conceived aesthetics of craft. Their artistic projects were also world-disclosing visions. Out of her love of what she takes from nature and from her experience, the artist creates an ideal for herself, embodied in her vision of the beautiful, and it is this that she seeks to realize in her work. It is not without struggle that this ideal is made: it is always a struggle to express something meaningful, let alone the most meaningful thing. The work of art emerges as if out of nothing, as if out of the bare canvas. Yet lying behind it is the artist’s vision, the image seen in her inner eye. Perhaps the idea does not present itself immediately with complete clarity but is veiled, though without being dulled, just as in a perfect dream. The artist’s task is the deeply difficult one of bringing into the light of day what properly belongs to the dream, the translation of the idea into another medium entirely. She cannot be certain just how the work will appear when achieved or whether it will possess the shimmer of perfection. That is all realized, or it is not, in the doing. At the same time, the vision and the life that produced the work can be said to constitute her art’s inner necessity: they are what it struggles to become, through her. Her art partakes of her

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unique experience and sensibility, and she herself provides the spark that kindles her experience into meaning. Success, if it is achieved, is complicated by the fact that it results in a thing that is detached from the artist herself, from the idea of itself. Its contemplation may bring her pleasure or it may be adjudged to fall short of the vision responsible for its creation: either way, the piece does not continue to be for her a living act of creation. Above all, it does not exhaust her vision. As Iris Murdoch observed, “The true artist is obedient to a conception of perfection to which his work is constantly related and re-related.” This can only be the case if perfection can never be realized. Artists work obsessively but not restlessly. They are in continual argument with themselves. An idea exists only to be tested against the artist’s own capacity to express it, and any success is merely provisional, for the next in the series, or the one after, may expose its flaws. And all of her struggles are openly on display. The spectator who attends a retrospective, perhaps long after the artist’s death, may see for himself how the artist moves from one style or theme to another, as the seam is worked out, and yet how each new style or theme seems to add depth to the oeuvre as a whole; how, too, the artist returns perennially to the elements contained in her earlier work, as if her subconscious thought were leading her back, and she reworks those elements to say something new, which is also additive. The spectator, proceeding through and ultimately standing at the end of this monumental, dominating exercise of the spirit, feels, poignantly, that this conversation with itself does not come to a close, no matter how supreme the final achievement or how fallen off from its earlier peak. The ever-unfinished state of all our achievements is the poignancy of life itself. Nietzsche wishes us to appreciate that the achievement of vision in the artwork has a correlative in ordinary life in purposive living as an achievement of personhood. In creating oneself, one is building on the raw materials of one’s nature – a nature that is conditioned by the social world in which one grows up and by other inescapable facts. We do not create ourselves ex nihilo, as if on an empty canvas or blank page; rather, the most successful self-creations are those that

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do justice to what one is, and the only way we can discover that is by exercising our will to see what we can achieve. One can see in the artist’s productions that what she does produce is only what she can produce, because of the limitations of skill or experience or both. Artists tend to depict the world in light of their technical strengths. If Turner, for example, was fascinated with light, that is inseparable from the fact that he was such a master of its effects. An artist’s strengths may also imply limitations in different quarters. But artists resist those implied limitations. Thus many masters begin by producing rather dull, derivative works, and the first flush of genuine inspiration comes only later, not out of nowhere but as an achievement. What seems true of beauty in every context is that we struggle to know it, we strive to create it. Like the artist, we are effortful visionaries. We too have to reach beyond what we know to an accomplishment we did not know it was in us to produce. We too have to put everything we are – our experience, perceptions, energy, and love – into our work. Finally, we too have to contend with the fact that our achievements are lost to us and do not gain us any respite from the struggle to realize our highest. Did Beethoven ever stop composing? Did Picasso cease to paint? Both for artists and for those who are not artists, vision is a force of insight that permits us to see, and if to see then to make, something concrete, in a way that is particularly expressive of ourselves. We too have our projects, and they require our creative imagination. Insofar as this is directed not at purely pragmatic considerations (the application of means to desired ends) and if to excellence, not to obligations imposed from without (such as conformity to expected standards) but to a purely personal excellence, then vision is involved. It implies the virtues and the skills one will exercise in pursuit of the intended goal and those that the goal itself embodies. If one is an active agent, one will be accompanied by the vision of oneself as a shining exemplar. It involves a virtual image of oneself in the midst of performing whatever agency it is that one is called to fulfill. In more romantic ages, men imagined themselves bravely engaged in battle or bent on some knightly quest, but we too can conceive of ourselves as ever

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faithful to our particular ideals. The achievement we aim for is measured against this self-conception and adjudged a success or failure. The business of living in the world will supply us our projects as it most assuredly supplies us with the measure of their success or failure. But without vision, we never will see beyond the tasks prescribed by the immediate moment to the possibilities that life opens up and one may reach for. If our reach should often, or always, exceed our grasp, that too may mark an achievement of the spirit, in that it marks one as a being who ever aspires because one’s ideals are also one’s goals. We have seen that the interest that the idea of beauty held for Plato and for Nietzsche lay not so much in the nature of its essence as in its implications for life. In their separate ways, they associated the desire for beauty with a truthful life or, better put, an authentic one: the life that is properly lived. This is what lies at the root of their interest in beauty: its power to transform a life. The question presented to them is in what manner a philosopher’s conception of beauty and of the life that it inspires can be made to seem inspiring to others. It will not suffice to present that life as itself beautiful and as worthy of one’s aspiration. The reader must somehow be induced to love the idea of that life and thus to desire it and to aspire to it. Plato might have thought that his readers would be naturally disposed to strive for a high ideal while Nietzsche feared that his contemporaries were failing to be captivated by any great idea. Still, they shared an approach to the question mooted above. Theirs, like every philosophy that presents an ideal to emulate, holds a prominent place for aspiration. The reader necessarily starts from a place that is a long way off the ideal, and he must be made to fix his sights upon a certain distant objective. He must be shown that there exists a way to reach it since he can’t be expected to do so in a single bound. The way must be shown to be itself transformative so that the reader can see the prospect of a better self gradually coming into being. And of course the objective must seem worth the effort. It must concern not only a life well lived but also a personhood achieved. The only way to instill in the reader a desire for the higher, more developed life is to present a picture that seems beautiful to him. A

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rhetorical strategy is required, which requires the philosopher to be skilled in the ways of psychological appeal. Plato embraced rhetoric in order to convey the beauty of truthful thought (just as he used Socrates in order to convey the beauty of an authentic life). He did so by inventing a form of philosophical writing, the dialogue, which mimics the back and forth of Socratic discussion (or dialectic) as it questions the world and the reader, and in which thought feels the tug of the good upon itself. This form is intended to embody the honest give and take of open-minded discussion and as well the true concern that friends have for friends. Dialectic reflects Plato’s belief that knowledge cannot be conveyed from one person to another as information is. Its transmission proceeds as the development of a thought and is intended to be mirrored in the reader’s own thought. The key here is that knowledge, unlike facts, is not essentially propositional. It functions more like enlightenment, like an insight into how things are, including into the difficulty of capturing just how they are. Dialectic invites contrast in every way with eristic, the sophist’s form of argumentation. First and most importantly, it differs in its aims. Dialectic aims at truth, eristic at persuasion, in which any and all convenient means may be resorted to. The sophist delivers a speech. Although the truth is irrelevant to his object, this fact must be dissimulated. He must presume already to possess the truth and to desire only to impart it. If he engages in debate, it is only to rebut and never to learn. In sum, the sophist never bares his soul, while the true philosopher is always prepared to do so, and in particular to acknowledge that his understanding falls short. Since eristic was a powerful invention, Plato needed to create a still more powerful one to defeat it. So, in his conception, philosophy is not, as eristic is, a mere technique; it is instead a way of life. This gets at the true purpose Socrates serves for Plato. The superiority of a philosophic way of life (the life of inquiry) cannot be demonstrated by argument alone, for we do not choose how to live based solely upon the demonstrated merits of some particular possible choice. Instead, the desire for it must be engendered. This is a matter of insinuation and is the work of many dialogues: Plato understands that the conviction

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that finally overtakes the spirit proceeds by the gradual tightening of its grip upon it. He achieves his object in large part by creating a drama around the life of Socrates. The reader begins as a spectator, hanging back, at the edge of the crowd around Socrates, but gradually he finds himself drawn into the old philosopher’s circle of admiring friends. As I showed in my treatment of the Symposium, Plato makes of Socrates a figure of love. In this way, we become his acolytes and, like him, may devote our lives to an abstract, but living, conception of the good and find the true self-fulfillment that accompanies this exercise. No philosophical treatise has ever rivalled the Dialogues for its art, and likely none ever will. The conception of philosophy has changed irrevocably since Plato’s time, when the narrowness of thinking according to a particular discipline did not exist. The Symposium and the Phaedrus and the others are philosophy, drama, and poetry combined, and they speak a greater truth on that account. They do justice to life in its various aspects instead of treating it, as philosophy has been wont to do since Bacon and Descartes, as an intellectual exercise that is supposedly modelled upon scientific analysis. One feels that Plato is writing from inside his own experience and also with a view to touching his reader personally. Plato’s greatest rival for the aspiring philosopher’s heart and soul is Nietzsche. Philosophy’s lonely man puts everything on the line, for us but also for himself. He is also a witness to the fact that he does it. In keeping with his view that all philosophy is autobiographical, because life has, and ought to have, implications for one’s beliefs, he is to be found everywhere in his books. His presence there contrasts with Plato’s total absence from the Dialogues. Plato, we infer, did not wish to present himself as a model philosopher. Nietzsche as clearly does (if only as one who is the poet of his own life). He speaks to us face to face – but it is just us two. He is, at times, confessional. The Gay Science in particular is the record of the exertions of a soul, bearing comparison to Pascal’s Pensées and Montaigne’s Essays. At other times, he is hortatory, presuming to confront the reader with the reader’s own conscience.3 His preferred strategy is an unmasking of the causes and conditions of pathological thought. He is a psychologist in the style of the French moralists and of Schopenhauer, and a

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“genealogist” in nobody’s style but his own, and as both he shows us that our thoughts and their origins are not well-grounded and how invested we are in self-delusion. At the same time, he wants to open us up to the possibilities life presents. Nietzsche shows that there is something vital left to say about the spirit when otherwise it might seem that psychology is all that remains. Nietzsche backed away from systematic thinking and exposition, understandably since these are the ways of the metaphysician. As he put it, he fled from big thoughts. He delighted in the telling observation, definitive on its face, but professedly quite provisional. The brevity of these observations’ expression reflects his approach to “deep problems,” which is, he says, like taking cold baths: quickly in and quickly out. The “enemies of cold water” believe that this approach does not get to the bottom of problems. He demurs. “The freezing cold makes one swift.” The Gay Science represents the apogee of this style, in part because it peers into so many corners of human experience in order to illustrate (or, it sometimes seems, to complicate) its thesis, in part because of the sometimes anguished, sometimes exalted, but always quite personal tone that it strikes. Here there is to be found a series of more or less tightly linked reflections, some of which are true aphorisms and others simply aphoristic. Each is an insight that functions as a little argument. These, much as paradoxes do, subvert received meanings and suggest fresh ones. Together, they proclaim their honesty by claiming only to be an interpretation of life. A definite table of values is associated with this interpretation, but the reader is at liberty to accept it or reject it. Nietzsche denied that he desired disciples. However, he takes care to present us with a shining alternative to conventional life. In this way, he cares for our souls. It is one of his most attractive features. As I mentioned, he did not think that the moralists, with all their cynicism, had captured the whole of man. He never forgot that man has it in him to live heroically. Hence, Nietzsche’s critique of moral valuations proceeds in dialectical tandem with an exercise in the revaluation of values, the purpose of which is to demonstrate the availability of an alternative way to live. The rhetorical picture that he creates serves as a countermyth aimed at all conventional conceptions of the world, which can

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no longer capture the imagination or the spirit. Thus however often Nietzsche repeats that life is chaotic, destructive, and meaningless, he is excited by the prospects the revelation of this fact opens up for a joyous life. The world is, to him, beautiful. It evokes the fearless virtues in us. It gives purpose to lives that, with modernity, threaten to go slack. If the world is made in such a way that it brings out the best in us, it seems irresistible to say that it is the best world, and that life does have purpose. It is a picture intended to create in the reader a sense of hope, anticipation, and excitement. He writes, truthfully, that he would like to make life seem infinitely more valuable, even, than it already seems to us. Our two philosophers, then, make a case for the transformation of your life from the small thing that it is to the great thing that it yet might be. They seem already to know that you have a certain dissatisfaction with yourself. They ask that you compare yourself to the ideal, as each conceives that, confident that you, as a person in possession of an aspiring spirit, will take it within, as your own ideal. This aim is quite explicit in Nietzsche, who writes that he means to instill the (justified) ability to admire oneself. Nietzsche’s style is to mount a direct appeal; Plato’s appeal is more indirect, but he does present Socrates as the “midwife” of our undeveloped thoughts (and, we may presume, desires). Both intend to entice you by dangling an idea so beautiful – a vision of your life transfigured – that it inflames the desire for self-transcendence. True, that life is portrayed only in the most allusive terms – even your teachers cannot go along your path for you. In Nietzschean terms, you “become who you are” by becoming what it is in you to be. Proust said that there is no true knowledge without the longing for it. Longing and aspiring have much in common, although aspiration is more purposeful. It implies the movement toward a definite goal, and it requires the sense of a path and the discipline to follow it. Philosophy is in its essence aspiring and shows by its own reach how high a life may aspire. Its aspiration is to know the truth and, so far as Plato and Nietzsche are concerned, not for some abstract reason but to see if one can live by it. On the idea that an achieved life expresses a meaningful ideal, they converge. Also, each

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understands that, for any of us, the ideal is personal. Plato would say that it is intimated by our loves and Nietzsche that it is constituted by them. Regardless, one’s ideal is one’s own. In tracing the ascent to knowledge of the good, the ultimate truth, Plato was also tracing the development of the individual, from a state that is relatively constrained by ego to one of ever-greater understanding and ever-broader sympathies. He places so much emphasis on love as the progenitor of this development because it comes from the unselfish side of ourselves (but only in the properly aspiring soul, in which love always desires to know that which it loves). In depicting a movement away from preoccupation with matters more directly related to oneself toward more abstract concerns, Plato is describing the path of self-cultivation and its salutary effects. What we can achieve, it is to be hoped, is a life lived within a virtuous circle, in which thought expresses feeling and feeling thought. Within this circle, reflection and spiritual aspiration come together in a single discipline, with a deepening of every sort of conscious awareness. A unified person is the result. Nietzsche, in prescribing a regime of continuous self-overcoming, intends something similar, for this effort must involve continuous self-development. The unillusioned life he advocates is, in broad outlines if not in particulars, akin to Plato’s “examined life,” for both require a searching questioning of comfortable beliefs for the sake of the truth alone. That no final truth exists (per Nietzsche) or that one does but it is unknowable (per Plato) makes no difference to the quest. Self-delusion exists to a certainty, and lurks in all self-images, even the shining ones. It can only be overcome in the striving toward a perfected state of knowledge and a perfected state of being. Self-examination is, at every stage, requisite. The two philosophers have given us their visions of the philosophical life and each gives to his vision his love and devotion. Since we are presented with visions rather than regimens, the appropriate question to be asked is whether these provide inspiring models for the people to whom they are addressed: would-be philosophers. The search for truth, the characteristic objective of the philosopher, is bound to seem the more attractive if, as both contend, it also leads

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to the greatest good. It is that attribute that makes these visions fit matter for everyone and modern life. Wittgenstein wrote in his notebooks that “philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.”4 This is a pardonable exaggeration on the part of someone who wrote a good deal of analytical philosophy (albeit aphoristically). Whereas philosophy attempts to provide universal explanations, the ultimate questions, which are also the great ones, are imponderable: “Not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.”5 He said that we are enjoined to silence about such things because that which cannot be thought (in Plato’s sense of discursive reason) is likewise that which cannot be spoken of. For those who, like Wittgenstein, desire to speak no more than is necessary, for fear of overstepping the meaningful, aphorism is a useful medium. It is constrained but not only that: it is as concentrated and suggestive as poetry. Poetry expresses the ineffable unity of man and being or, when that is no longer sustainable, attempts to heal the breach between the two. Philosophy, on the other hand, creates a separation between thought and its objects, which it then tries (often unsuccessfully) to overcome. The mature Wittgenstein appreciated this distinction and, in what might have been the last gasp of philosophical analysis had his view prevailed, thought that wisdom lay in turning away from analysis and attending instead to the way ordinary language works. If the poet succeeds, she conveys the inner meaning of human experience. Nonetheless, we continue to feel a need for explanations. To write philosophy as pure poetry would be to disappoint that need as well as to defeat the purpose of philosophy. We can agree that a purely descriptive philosophy – one that addresses the world as an object of analysis – can be left to the experts. This does not seem to touch, however, the other great question philosophy addresses, which is how we are to live. It is hard to see how any philosophy that lacks a vision – any that fails to disclose the world as a whole and our place within it – could be helpful for living. After all, it must inspire us to live. Nietzsche recognized this. In “Schopenhauer as Educator,” he wrote that every great philosophy says, “‘This is the picture of all

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life and learn from it the meaning of your own life.’ And the reverse: ‘Only read your own life and comprehend from it the hieroglyphics of universal life.’”6 This thought implies the existence of a philosophy that is, like the greatest poetry, a personal vision, but that also captures a universal experience (and only the profound is universal). This creates an enormous challenge for philosophy, as it does also for poetry, in that the personal is also the partial. How many philosophical systems have foundered on this rock! Poetry, by the power of its insight into seeing and feeling, affects the quality of the reader’s perception and emotion. It may seem that poetry grapples with the poet’s solitary experience, but it can provide a truthful rendition of an experience that is also that of the reader insofar as he is able to assimilate the poet’s thought to his own. Philosophy has an additional burden: it must capture an idea that is essential to life. Only in this way can philosophy lay claim to truth. Moreover, since it does lay claim to truth, its conceptions must withstand the scrutiny of conscience, whose purpose is to subject belief to the test of experience. A philosophy that aspires to be useful to life has one further burden: it must give voice and purpose to whatever within us is yearning. It is doubtful that philosophy can fulfill all these purposes. Any one vision or philosophy is unlikely to be able to capture the entire truth. Because experience is so various, any particular doctrine is bound to founder on one or another rock of partiality. There is no philosophical explanation that, under close examination, escapes being caught in internal inconsistencies or avoids decisive counter-examples or common-sense objections; even if it could escape such snares, there will always be objections “in principle.” For that reason, philosophy is less about arguments that persuade than it is about visions that captivate. So when philosophy fails, it should fail in an illuminating way, as the greatest philosophical doctrines and arguments do. Though they fail to explain the world adequately, which is to say comprehensively, they still contribute their portion to the whole of meaning: this is what the world is. In that way, they illuminate. Indeed, philosophy may make its greatest contribution to the world’s store of meaning

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when it fails most spectacularly – where, that is, it expresses a vision partaking of grandeur and of partiality. Such is bound to be true of any philosophy that adumbrates perfection. If it fails as argument, it fails in a different way than those arguments about more trivial issues that, once disproved, disappear and leave nothing behind them. In the same way, Picasso’s failures are far more illuminating than almost anyone else’s successes. Again, we stumble over the connection between philosophy and poetry, between the vision that is personal and the resonance that is common. No one understood better than Nietzsche that philosophy is vision, although Plato’s writing shows inferentially that he too understood this very well. Truthful vision is powerful. Philosophy does incite change in the heart of the reader. Poetry, and all of art, may seem to justify life by presenting it as beautiful (Nietzsche’s point). It requires no argument to do so. Philosophy’s aim is different in that its vision of life comes with an argument to justify itself. Philosophy stands not for the truth of feeling alone, but for the very truth. This, as being of supreme importance, must be contended for. Philosophers may draw on rhetoric, but they must give us compelling demonstrations by argument. Now, it is doubtful whether any argument is, as a pure piece of reasoning, compelling enough to make a person change his life – any more than a person can be argued into loving someone. The only argument that can rally a person toward a beautiful ideal is one that is itself beautiful. It does not preach or hector (which is to commit, Nietzsche says, alchemy in reverse). Rather, it provides a representation of an exemplary life, which it also advocates. Magnetic as this ideal is, one desires not only to believe in it, but also to embody it. All sorts of objections will rear up in the mind. As a true philosopher, one gives them their due. But they are not allowed to defeat the vision. It is, as Plato contends, the love of the real that is the means to the understanding of what it is. What is most true to us is what speaks to our deepest nature, not what stands over and apart from us in some perfect self-sufficiency. We “discover” truth only by taking its thought into ourselves, not by tripping over it as we pursue some other objective. In the well-oriented spirit, beauty is experienced as grounded in a

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truth to life. Plato and Nietzsche persuade, to the extent that they do, only because they capture how we really experience beauty and the reasons we desire to experience it more fully: something that was merely latent in the understanding is released by them. With their achievement so acknowledged, it can be seen that their philosophies are not only beautiful in the images they create but also in the valuable explanations they offer. Each is like a map of the world that captures what is otherwise incomprehensibly vast to the mind and conveys it through some apt idea or analogue. But can the respective doctrines of our two protagonists both be true? Do they not speak in opposition to each other?7 I suggest that they converge on everything of importance. What most separates them is that Nietzsche rejects Plato’s doctrine of permanent, self-subsistent, transcendental ideas, existing in some separate realm of their own. If the Ideas were treated as metaphorical, as a picture merely, Nietzsche might not object to their introduction into the argument since he understands the explanatory power of metaphor. He himself resorts, abundantly, to metaphors. Those he prefers are simply different from Plato’s. Plato might not accept that he himself is resorting to metaphor. He presumably thinks he speaks the literal truth. Yet there is a definite feeling one has in reading the Symposium that Plato describes the course of an exemplary human life in largely symbolic terms. For the Idea of the Beautiful represents, primarily, the object of an aspiration, and its revelation is only a distant possibility. Elsewhere in Plato’s philosophy, the Ideas might serve an epistemological function, as making knowledge possible. But not here. Plato’s argument seems only to require that the Idea be real, be perfect, and be unknowable by any ordinary means – in other words, that it exist as an object of (supreme) aspiration. We can never fully possess the beautiful (or the good) since we can only do so by coming to know it, and there our human capabilities run up against a limit. As a conscious ideal, however, its knowledge provides us with a goal to strive toward and in that way guides one’s thoughts and actions and shapes one’s life. By aspiring to knowledge of the good, that is, we most fully achieve our capabilities. We bring a measure of coherence to an otherwise incomplete self and give it value.

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This is not to suggest that Plato could ever have entertained the thought that an illusion, however beautiful, is a fit object of aspiration. Plato so much loved the idea of perfection that he could not conceive that it did not exist. Since perfection does not exist in the workaday world, he conceived that it must exist in a suprasensible realm and in this world as an idea in men’s heads and a shadow presence in their greatest goals and aspirations. But by conceding the Ideas to be inaccessible to discursive reason, Plato has effectively given up any claim to their existence as fundamental structures of being: what philosophy cannot describe does not, for it, exist. This, their ineffability, however, secures their existence as ideals, or objects of perpetual striving. One might have expected, then, that Nietzsche would understand that the transcendental, as both the artist and the philosopher conceive it, is a paradox and unattainable and therefore in no way a lie but a deep truth about human life. Iris Murdoch observed that the beautiful is an experience of transcendence because we cannot acquire and assimilate it. Perhaps we should then think of transcendence as it exists in painting, as essentially the moment in its resplendency, and the attempt to possess that moment not as an apparent defiance of time, but as an acknowledgment of the invincibility of time. For the beauty of the moment is only worth the attempt to capture it, to make it last forever, because it must pass away. Philosophy leaves behind the sense that the grave questions cannot be answered, although it may provide an inkling into how it is that they are unanswerable. It illuminates life without ever dispelling its mystery. In the case of the two philosophers with whom we have primarily been concerned, their works so capture the ambiguous texture of life as to fuel reinterpretation forever. As I prefer to understand them, Plato and Nietzsche make particular offerings to the perfect, most beautiful, and unachievable. In the Symposium, for example, we are shown that the beautiful is ineffable because it is an ungraspable abstraction. In The Gay Science, we are shown that the great goals are unachievable because they are paradoxical. One might observe that the perfect life does not exist, but also that we need not regret it. Our great goals must remain unachievable because if it were possible to

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achieve them, we should cease to desire, cease to strive, cease to be human. Since the point of art and philosophy is to deepen our experience of the world, they must acknowledge and celebrate the transience of earthly beauty in all its forms and love as an affirmation in the face of that. The ideal signifies above all else that we are beings that strive. There is no shadow realm of ideas. But beauty, though an idea, is quite real, as love is, and as love’s object is. In any life, beauty and love may fail or be lost, but they leave behind their impressions upon the mind and heart, which, because they are inexpressible, are imperishable. Philosophy ends, as it begins, in wonder.

Notes

c h a p t e r One 1 Some painters capture this, including our own familiar Emily Carr and, a favourite of mine, the Englishman Paul Nash. 2 Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Correspondence Between Schiller and Goethe, from 1794 to 1805, trans. L. Dora Schmitz (London: George Bell and Sons, 1877), 396–7. 3 Selected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. W.H. Auden (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), 26. 4 Wallace Stevens, Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 36. 5 Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous: Plays, Poems, Prose, ed. Milton J. Bates (New York: Knopf, 1957), 165. 6 Lawrence Gowing, Matisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 57. 7 Karen Wilkin, Georges Braque (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991), 12. 8 George Steiner, The Poetry of Thought (New York: New Directions, 2011), 147. 9 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. John Shawcross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), vol. I, 202. 10 Ibid., lvii–lviii. 11 This was in 1956 in his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry at Oxford. W.H. Auden, “Making, Knowing and Judging,” in The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 54–8. 12 Williams was a novelist, poet, and essayist and, as a boon companion of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, an “Inkling.” 13 In Ancient Greek, according to Bruno Snell, thaumazein (wonder, amazement) is derived from theasthai (to behold). See The Discovery of

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16

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Notes to pages 15–44

the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature, trans. Thomas G. Rosenmeyer (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), 33. This will become significant in the next essay, on Plato. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 86. Gerard Manley Hopkins suggests, poetically, that this is a kind of recollection embedded in human nature so that even a child may experience it. Thus he gives us young Margaret, weeping, she knows not why, at the sight of fallen autumn leaves. “It is the blight that man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” “Spring and Fall,” in The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250–1950, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 788. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ed. Cyril Barrett (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, n.d.), 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 93.

C ha p t e r T wo 1 We are surely intended to think of the fate suffered by Socrates at the hands of the Athenians. 2 The good as that which makes me happy will plausibly include many virtues, such as courage and good judgment. 3 The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer observed that the function of the beautiful in Plato “is to bridge the chasm between the ideal and the real.” See The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 186), 15. 4 Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianopolis, in: Hackett, 1989), 177e. 5 Ibid., 192d. 6 Ibid., 177d. 7 Ibid., 198e. 8 Ibid., 203d. 9 Ibid., 210a. 10 Ibid., 210e. 11 Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 506e, 508c.

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12 Truth in this sense means something like “a just measure of value.” 13 Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 17. 14 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 218–19. 15 Gregory Vlastos, “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato,” in Plato 2: Ethics, Politics, Religion, and the Soul, ed. Gail Fine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 163. 16 Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianopolis, in: Hackett, 1995), 251b–c. 17 Nussbaum thinks that some upheaval must have occurred in Plato’s life to account for this new insight into passion’s “power for goodness”; he must have fallen in love. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 231–2. 18 Satyrs – half man, half horse or goat – were wild, priapic creatures, but were accounted wise. 19 Plato, Symposium, 216a. 20 Ibid., 218e. “The thing itself”: that is, to be a better man, which Alcibiades asserts Socrates has the power to make him. 21 Ibid., 222a.

chapter three 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), section 125. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 95. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 167. 4 Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages,” 79. 5 Ibid., 112. 6 Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 162. 7 Ibid., 163. 8 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 266. 9 Ibid., section 339. 10 Ibid., section 346; italics in original. 11 Ibid., section 58.

166 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

Notes to pages 65–76

Ibid., section 85; italics in original. Ibid., section 370. Ibid., section 335; italics in original. The American academic Stanley Rosen comments, “In the twentieth century, resolve and courage are invoked as responses to the absence of, or to the impossibility of, rational autonomy, and so they function as the pivot of anti-Enlightenment rhetoric.” See Politics as Hermeneutics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 45. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 283. Ibid., section 284. Ibid., section 124. Ibid., section 285. Ibid., section 288. Ibid., section 289. Ibid., section 341. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 452. Ibid., 420–1.The German word Rausch translates as both elation and intoxication. Nietzsche associates both with the feeling of creative power. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 17–18. Ibid., section 301; italics in the original. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 272; italics in the original. Stanley Rosen, presumably alluding to this passage, called the italicized words “the motto of the modern age.” Politics as Hermeneutics, 151. Nietzsche, Will to Power, section 356. Ibid., section 290. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 35. Nietzsche, Will to Power, section 299. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 83. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, “Preface to the Second Edition,” 38. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 59. In 1870–71, Nietzsche had written, “The further away from true being, the more pure, beautiful, better it is. The life of appearance as goal.” Quoted in Paul Bishop, A Companion to Friedrich Nietzsche: Life and

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Works (Rochester, ny: Camden House), 31. I do not think that this fully reflects his views as of the writing of The Gay Science. 36 Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 289. 37 Ibid., section 377. 38 Ibid., section 380.

c ha p t e r f our 1 Nietzsche’s view of friendship in The Gay Science, as “a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them” (section 14), is very similar to Aristotle’s description of the highest form of friendship. Nietzsche’s feeling for friendship is absent from later works. The Übermensch is a very solitary being. 2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra is subtitled “A Book for All and None.” 3 This is an elision of The Gay Science, section 382.

c ha p t e r f i v e 1 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, ed. David Barrie (London: Andre Deutsche, 1987), 178. 2 Ibid., 26. Ruskin was a meticulous draftsman and fine colourist whose architectural studies are strong while his landscapes are less so. 3 Ibid., 59. 4 Ibid., 437–8. 5 Ibid., 354. 6 Ibid., 344. 7 Ibid., 346. 8 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 166. 9 Ibid., 164. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 165. 12 Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of His Development (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1. 13 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne (New York: North Point Press, 2002), 45. 14 Ibid., 37.

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Notes to pages 100–15

Ibid., 66. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 61. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, il: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 11. Fry, Cézanne: A Study, 32. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 179. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 12. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 15. Fry, Cézanne: A Study, 41. Ibid., 65–6. Ibid., 45.

c ha p t e r si x 1 Iris Murdoch, “The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 449. 2 Ibid., 445. 3 Ibid., 455. 4 Iris Murdoch, “On the Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 380. 5 Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 343. 6 Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 215. 7 Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” 354. 8 Ibid. 9 Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 369. 10 Ibid., 374. 11 Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 329. 12 Ibid., 331–2.

Notes to pages 116–36 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

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Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 369. Ibid., 369–70. Ibid., 370. Murdoch, “Fire and the Sun,” 459. Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 371. Ibid. Murdoch, “Idea of Perfection,” 332. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” 348. Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 371. Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics, ed. Peter Conradi (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 276. Compare Hegel’s view that Shakespeare made his characters “free artists of their own selves.” Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” 354. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), 104. Ibid. Ibid., 122–3. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” 352. Murdoch, “Fire and the Sun,” 459. There is a concentration to great art that communicates itself to us. It is the effect of the total absorption of the consciousness of the artist in the work. This is perhaps why when one engages with such works, it feels, for the moment and possibly for some time after, that nothing else in the world matters.

c ha p t e r se ve n 1 Marcel Proust, “Preface to La Bible d’Amiens,” in On Reading Ruskin, trans. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1987), 59. The quotation within is from Ernest Renan, most famous as the author of Vie de Jésus of 1863. 2 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, vol. 6 of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and D.J. Enright (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 253. 3 Ibid., 232. 4 Ibid., 234. 5 Ibid., 232.

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Notes to pages 137–60

6 Ibid., 258. 7 Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 404. 8 Ibid. 9 E.M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 82.

c ha p t e r e i gh t 1 Malraux said of Greek sculpture, “It is such a world as might have been created by a god who has not ceased to be a man.” See The Voices of Silence (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1953), 76. 2 Jed Perl, Magicians and Charlatans (New York: Eakins Press Foundation, 2012), 12. Perl amusingly describes how nowadays even to ask for the meaning of a piece of art is to invite incomprehension: “A painting is simply what everybody or anybody says that it is, what everybody or anybody wishes it to be” (16–17). I would add that ours is a culture that demonstrates how the loss of leading values leads to a cult of self-expression and overall aesthetic chaos. It is no surprise that the number of those claiming to be artists has exploded. 3 One would have said that he would have been an exhausting companion at dinner, except that he tells us that he keeps quiet in company. 4 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 24. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 1922), 44, para. 6. 6 Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 140–1. 7 In 1870–71, Nietzsche described his philosophy as “inverted Platonism.” This was also Heidegger’s view of Nietzsche. As I have tried to show, however, Nietzsche’s debt to Plato is very great.

Some Further Reading

The reader may find the following books to be worth exploring: Only a Promise of Happiness (Princeton University Press, 2007), by Alexander Nehamas, is one of the few contemporary books about beauty that is written by an academic philosopher and is directed at a general audience. Nehamas associates the attraction to beauty with a desire to engage with it. His own curiosity is very apparent. A Plato who is quite recognizably the same philosopher I describe may be encountered in the pages of books by the late German scholars Paul Friedlander and Werner Jaeger, the authors, respectively, of Plato (Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 1969) and Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 1945). For a readable exposition of how the ancients considered philosophy to be a way of life, see Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy? (Harvard University Press, 2002). All interpretations of Nietzsche are partial, and the secondary literature can be bewildering. I found a pathway to my own understanding of him through reading a brief article by Robert Pippin entitled “Nietzsche and Modernity,” in David Wellbery, ed., A New History of German Literature (Harvard University Press, 2004). The themes touched upon there receive more elaborate treatment by Pippin in his book Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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Further Reading

Those interested in Nietzsche’s own psychology may enjoy Lesley Chamberlain’s Nietzsche in Turin (Quartet Books, 1996), a biography that explores the last year of the philosopher’s working life. George Grant’s Massey Lectures Time as History (Anansi, 1995) are at once an appreciation of the acuity of Nietzsche’s insights and an expression of deep concern about where they lead. Existentialists and Mystics is a collection of Iris Murdoch’s essays on philosophy and literature, and includes the famous “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts,” which demonstrates the relevance of Plato to contemporary ethics. Her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals is a (somewhat) more systematic development of her thoughts on aesthetics and morals and their interrelationship.

Index

abstract art, 106 Abstract Expressionism, 106 À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust): approach to, xiii; and Baudelaire, 139; on beauty, 131– 2; common interpretation of, 129; dilemma in, 129, 132–3, 135–6; early draft of, 126–7; on intermittences of the heart, 132; on involuntary memory, 129, 135–6, 137–8; on love, 130; on memory, 138–9; protagonist’s sensibility, 133–4, 139–40; as record of a consciousness, 127–8; search for value in, 132; social commentary in, 129–31; structure of, 129; Swann’s Way, 127, 131–2; on transformation of life into art, 125, 128–9, 133, 136–7, 139–40; unifying force of, 139. See also Proust, Marcel Allegory of the Cave, 29–31, 111, 127 “Anecdote of the Jar” (Stevens), 10–11 aphorism, 157 Apology (Plato), 52, 54

appearance: vs reality, 29–30, 42, 111 appetites, 31–2 appreciation of beauty. See sensibility, development of argument, 159 Aristotle, 119, 167n1 Arnold, Matthew, 58 art: approach to, xiii, 162; abstract, 106; appreciation of, 120; audience of, 87–8, 120; banal, 121; basis of in the real, 84–5, 90; classical, 94; conditions for meaningful experience with, 19; contemporary, 94, 107–9, 142, 170n2; creation process, 91; disagreements over interpretations of, 23; and experimentation, 122; Impressionism, 94, 101, 103; nature of, 84–5; Nietzsche on, 64–5, 65–6, 70–1, 74, 75–6, 85, 86–8; paleolithic, 90–1; Plato on, 84–5, 111; and point of view, 107; proper approach to, 5–6; reason for, 90; as stimulant for life, 70–1; as worldview, 84. See also art, truthful

174

Index

art, truthful: approach to, xiii; as artist’s fidelity to own impressions, 92–3; and artist’s technical strengths, 150; Baudelaire on, 138; Cézanne on, 98–9; concentration in, 169n29; contemplative element in, 96–7, 102–3; in contemporary art, 107–9; core of natural fact in, 94–5; discernment of, 121–3; for exposing truth about life, 64–5; as expression of real, 147–8; expressive element in, 97–8; as faithful interpretation of nature, 91–2, 101; formalist approach, 101–2; as goodness by proxy, 86, 117–18; inevitableness of beauty in, 95–6; insights communicated by, 118; as lack of sentimentality, 112–13; life transformed into, 125, 128–9, 133, 136–7, 139–40; meaning selfcontained yet engaged with world, 105; Merleau-Ponty on, 96–8; Murdoch on, 112–13, 116–18; vs nature, 99; as permanent record of beauty, 138; as reflection of artist, 74, 86–7, 91; Rilke on, 99–101; Ruskin on, 91–2, 92–4; Schopenhauer on, 65; seeing and making dialectic in, 98, 109–10; self-development through, 123–4; as signpost to good, 116–17; symbolic representations of beauty in, 142; sympathetic response to, 120–1; and tragedy, 118–20; as transfigurative, 111, 112; unfinished state of successful, 149; vision needed in, 93–4, 95, 109,

147, 148–9. See also art; sensibility, development of artist, 65, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76 artist’s studio, 11–12 aspiration, xiv, 31, 146, 147–8, 151, 155 attention, 114, 115, 120 Auden, W.H., 14–15, 20, 163n11 audience, 81, 87–8, 120 Augustine, 143–4 awe, 14, 15 banal art, 121 Baudelaire, Charles: “The Painter of Modern Life,” 138, 139 beauty: apprehension of, 115; approach to, ix–x, 28, 162; as both abstract and concrete, 147; difficulty discussing, 3; Greeks on, 141; as hidden, 25; impossibility of demonstrating presence of, 28; as inspiration, 141; lack of literature on, ix; as moral pull of reality, 112; Murdoch on, 112, 115–16, 161; Nietzsche on, 25, 62, 71, 141, 151; as only compelling argument, 96, 159; as paradoxical, 108; as path to real, 116; for personal development, 27–8, 142–3; Plato on, 35, 42, 141, 147, 151, 161, 164n3; revelation of, 25–6; as secret preoccupation, ix; as signpost to good, 85, 116– 17, 141, 143–4; struggle to attain, 150; for symbolic representation of values, 142; in tragedy, 119–20; as transcendental, 22, 161; transformative power

Index

of, 151; and truth, 76, 159–60; as unlooked-for encounter, 5. See also sensibility, development of becoming who you are, 69, 78, 155 Bible of Amiens, The (Ruskin), 125–6, 134 Biographia Literaria (Coleridge), 12–13 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 64–5 Braque, Georges, 11, 12 Carr, Emily, 163n1 Cartesian dualism, 96 Cave, Allegory of, 29–31, 111, 127 cave art, 90–1 Cézanne, Paul: approach to, xiii; and abstract art, 106; artistic vision of, 98–9, 102–3, 148; development of style, 101–2; formalist approach to, 101; Fry on, 101–2; Giacometti on, 102; influence of, 105; landscapes of, 104– 5; Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair, 100; Merleau-Ponty on, 98, 101, 102, 103; message in work of, 105–6; on nature, 96, 98, 102; Picasso on, 105; Rilke on, 99–101, 105, 117; seeing and making dialectic in, 109–10; still life preference of, 104; technique of, 103–4 character, development of, 123–4, 146 children/childhood: approach of to experiences, 16–17; development of, 17–19, 27; memory of, 19–20 Christianity, 57

175

Cioran, E.M., 140 classical art, 94 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: Biographia Literaria, 12–13 Confessions (Augustine), 143 consciousness, 11, 115, 127–8, 134. See also reverie; sensibility, development of contemplation, 7–8, 31. See also reverie contemporary art, 94, 107–9, 142, 170n2. See also modern art Contre Sainte-Beuve (Proust), 127 courage, 67, 164n2, 166n15 creative self-determination, 77–8 critical judgment, 18–19, 21, 23–5 Cubism, 106 culture, 58–9, 60, 72 Dadaism, 106 Daybreak (Nietzsche), 60 Death of Actaeon, The (Titian), 113 demythologization, 57 desire: in Allegory of the Cave, 30; development of, 151–2; and eros, 34–5; irrational, 31–2, 51–2; as love, 38–9; for possession of good, 40; rational, 32–3, 52; role in self-development, 31, 89; transformation of through dialectic, 33–4 detachment, 31 dialectic: endpoint of, 44; vs eristic, 152; and life experience, 34; as philosophical exercise, 33; and Platonic dialogue, 152; proper use of, 43–4, 53–4, 152; as selfdevelopment, 33–4

176

Index

dialogue, 152 Dialogues (Plato), 43, 53, 153 disagreements, 23 discursive thought, 44 dualism, Cartesian, 96 education, 31, 33, 58, 80, 152 elenchus (Socratic method), 33–4. See also dialectic emotion: in art, 86, 95, 120; in children, 17–18; and memory, 19–20; and poetry, 158; power of thought on, 9. See also intoxication Enlightenment, 56–7 eristic, 152 eros, 34–5. See also love Eros (god), 36, 38, 39–40, 42 ethical life, x, 146. See also good; ideal; personhood experience: adult’s approach to, 16; articulation of, 22–3; and awe, 15; child’s approach to, 16–17; and dialectic, 34; modernism on, 134; as perpetual leaving and returning, 20–1; and primary vs secondary imagination, 13–15; proper approach to, 5–6; purpose of to learn from, 89; as real artistic subject matter, 9–12; as relational, 19, 27; reworking of, 15; and shaping of personhood, 16. See also personhood; reverie; sensibility, development of “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 96

faith, 29 fantasy, 115 feeling. See emotion forms/ideas. See good freedom, 67, 73 friendship, 49–50, 53, 54, 80, 167n1 Fry, Roger, 101–2, 104 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 164n3 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche): as art, 62; on beauty, 62; definition of gay science, 63; on friendship, 167n1; “God is dead” trope, 56; joy in, 61; message of, xi, 55, 60, 63; Nietzsche’s presence in, 61, 64, 153–4; structure and style of, 62, 65, 154. See also life, Nietzschean conception of; Nietzsche, Friedrich genius, 137 Giacometti, Alberto, 102 “God is dead” trope, 56, 57 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 134 good: in Allegory of the Cave, 30; analogical approach to, 44; appeal for, 155; art as guide to, 86; aspiration for, 30, 151, 160; beauty as signpost to, 35, 42, 85, 116–17, 141, 143–4; development of character as, 146; and eros, 34–5; fantasy as barrier to, 114–15; as goal of education, 33; as ideas/forms, 29; and morality, 113–14; natural inclination towards, 32, 114; possession of as happiness, 40; process of ascent to, 40–1, 42–3, 44–5,

Index

46–8, 122, 146–7, 151–2, 159; as truth, 113; virtues in, 164n2; wisdom as knowledge of, 42. See also ideal; Plato; real; Symposium (Plato); truth Gorgias (Plato), 32 Goya, Francisco, 118, 119 Grant, George, 59 Greeks, 32, 74, 76, 141, 163–4n13 Greek sculpture, 141, 170n1 Greek tragedy, 64–5, 87 happiness, 32–3, 39, 40, 42, 52, 69 Hegel, G.W.F., 16, 57 Heidegger, Martin, 170n7 heroic life, 55, 59–60. See also life, Nietzschean conception of hiddenness, of beauty, 25 Hirst, Damien, 107 historical consciousness, 56 history, 56–7 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 164n15 humans. See personhood ideal: approach to, xiii–xiv, 141; aspiration for, 146; development of desire for, 151–2, 155–6; discernment of personal, 144; goal to live in accord with, 142–3; for Greeks, 141; individual nature of, 155–6; as inspiration for philosophical life, 31; judgment of, 146; and life’s work, 145, 148; meaning of, 162; Nietzsche’s approach to development of, 153–5, 156; philosophy for achieving, 157–9; Plato’s approach to development of,

177

152–3, 156; self-knowledge as path to, 143–4; vision for fruition of, 148–9, 150–1. See also good ideas/forms. See good imagination: as capacity for discerning the meaning of art, 120; in child’s development, 18; and fantasy, 115; as insight, 115; primary vs secondary, 13–15; role in creation of art, 93, 138; in vision, xiii, 147. See also vision Impressionism, 94, 101, 103 individual. See personhood intellectual conscience, 66, 76, 77 intoxication, 70, 75, 84, 166n24. See also passion intuition, x, 44 involuntary memory, 129, 135–6, 137–8 James, Henry, 134 Jean Santeuil (Proust), 126–7 joy, 15, 61, 63, 75–6 judgment, 18–19, 21, 23–5 Kandinsky, Wassily, 106 Kiefer, Anselm, 108–9 knowledge, 33, 152, 155. See also good; self-knowledge; truth Koons, Jeff, 107 La condition humaine (Magritte), 110 ladder of love, 40–1, 42–3, 44–5, 46–8 life: shape of, 145; transformation of into art, 125, 128–9, 133, 136–7, 139–40. See also

178

Index

experience; good; ideal; life, Nietzschean conception of life, Nietzschean conception of: introduction to, xi–xii, 55, 59–60, 81–2, 89, 146, 153–5; action as revealing true self, 69–70; art, 70–1, 74, 85; attainment of great goals, 161–2; becoming who you are, 69, 78, 155; change, 73; conventional unbelief as threat to, 57–8, 62–3; creative self-determination, 77–8; desire for life from unbelief, 63; destruction with creation, 64, 154–5; experimental attitude towards truth, 73–4, 78, 80, 145; exultation as normal state, 75; happiness, 69; as involving impossible goals, 88; intellectual conscience, 66, 76, 77; lack of inherent meaning to life, 55, 56–7; lack of system to, 60–1; love, 83–4; necessity in, 66–8; pathways to, 147; perfection in, 146; self-overcoming, 60, 78, 156; self-restraint, 73; selfsurpassing, 58–9; solution to life’s dilemma, 55–6, 59, 74, 76–7, 82; style as manifestation of true self, 71–2; success, 149– 50; suffering, 65–6; superficiality, 74–5, 166–7n35; value as human creation, 61, 71; will to power, 63. See also The Gay Science (Nietzsche); Nietzsche, Friedrich literature, 112, 118, 120–1, 127 Lolita (Nabokov), 121

love: approach to, 162; Agathon on, 38; Aristophanes on, 37–8; of beauty, 35; in children, 18; contingency of, 39; as desire, 38–9; for development of individual, 156; eros, 34–5; knowledge through, 34, 83; ladder of, 40–1, 42–3, 44–5, 46–8; as longing, 38; mania (divine madness) of, 48–9; Murdoch on, 114, 120; nature of, 83–4; for personal completion, 37–8; personal experience needed for, 48; progress of through reflection, 43; as projection of emotion onto beloved, 130; sources of, 26; as true perception, 120. See also desire loveliness, 3–5, 8–9 MacNeice, Louis: “Snow,” 9–10 Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (Cézanne), 100 magic, 90–1 Magritte, René: La condition humaine, 110 Malevich, Kazimir, 106 Malraux, André, 170n1 mass media, 108 Matisse, Henri, 11–12, 105–6 memory, 18, 19–20, 139 memory, involuntary, 129, 135–6, 137–8 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 96–8, 101, 102–3 metaphor, 160 metaphysics, 57, 85 Middle Ages, 142

Index

179

Minimalism, 106 moderation, 32, 73. See also self-control modern art, 98, 106, 142, 170n2. See also contemporary art modernism, 134 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 92 Monet, Claude: Nymphéas, 94 mood. See contemplation; reverie morality: development of, 18; exercise of, 115; Murdoch on, 113– 14, 115; Nietzsche’s critique of, 57, 60; revealed by literature, 118; as selflessness, 60, 113–14 Morandi, Giorgio, 106 Murdoch, Iris: approach to, xiii; on appreciation of art, 120; on art’s relation to truth, 112, 116–18; on attention, 114, 115, 120; on beauty, 115–16, 161; conception and discernment of good art, 112–13, 121, 122, 123, 149; on fantasy as barrier to good, 114– 15; on love, 114, 120; on morality, 113–14, 115; on narrative structure in novels, 127; and Plato, 113, 115, 120; on tragedy, 118–19 music, 118 Musil, Robert, 12

70–1, 74, 75–6, 85, 86–8; on beauty, 25, 62, 71, 141, 151; on culture, 58, 72; on education, 58; on friendship, 80, 167n1; interpretation of, 72–3; and metaphor, 160; persuasiveness of, 160; philosophical approach of, 153–4, 170n7; and Plato, 160, 170n7; on poetry, xiv; psychological genius of, 62; talkativeness of, 170n3; on tragedy, 64–5, 119; on vision in philosophy, 157–8, 159. See also life, Nietzschean conception of; Nietzsche, Friedrich, works of Nietzsche, Friedrich, works of: The Birth of Tragedy, 64–5; Daybreak, 60; “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” 56; “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 60, 66, 157–8; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 167n2. See also The Gay Science (Nietzsche); Nietzsche, Friedrich nihilism, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64 nineteenth century, 57–8 Nussbaum, Martha, 46, 49, 165n17 Nymphéas (Monet), 94

Nabokov, Vladimir, 17, 121, 135 Nash, Paul, 163n1 nature, 6–7, 67, 99, 102 necessity, 66–8, 69–70, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich: approach to, xi–xiii, 161; on art, 64–5, 65–6,

“Painter of Modern Life, The” (Baudelaire), 138, 139 Pale Fire (Nabokov), 121 partiality, 23 passion, 34, 48–9, 165n17. See also intoxication

“On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Nietzsche), 56

180

Index

perception, 96, 110, 111, 120, 123– 4. See also art, truthful; reverie; sensibility, development of perfection, 99, 146, 149, 161. See also good Perl, Jed, 170n2 personhood: achievement of, 146; development of, 156; as living contradiction, 69. See also experience; good; ideal; life; life, Nietzschean conception of; sensibility, development of pessimism, 59, 62–3, 65 Phaedrus (Plato), 35, 48–50 phenomenology, 16 philosophy: approach to, xiv, 161–2; aspiration in, 155; attractiveness of, 156–7; as autobiographical, 153; changing conception of, 153; for exposing truth about life, 65; failure of, 158–9; happiness from, 52; as path to better life, 89; and poetry, 157, 159; as rhetoric, 65; ultimate questions in, 157; usefulness of, 89, 158; as vision, 157–8, 159; as way of life, 152–3; Wittgenstein on, 157 photography, 109 Picasso, Pablo, 95, 105–6, 159 Pippin, Robert, 46 Pissarro, Camille, 102 Plato: approach to, xi–xiii, 89, 161; on art, 84–85, 111; on beauty, 35, 42, 141, 147, 151, 161, 164n3; on desire, 31–2, 33; on development of individual, 156; in dialogues by, 54; on discursive

vs intuitive thought, 44; on eros, 34–5; on friendship, 49–50; on ideas/forms, 29; on life experience, 34; on love, 83–4; on moderation, 32; and Nietzsche, 160; and passion, 165n17; on perfection, 146, 161; persuasiveness of, 160; philosophical approach of, 152–3; and Socrates, 32, 54; on time, 29; use of metaphor, 160. See also dialectic; good; ladder of love; Plato, works of; Socrates Plato, works of: Apology, 52, 54; Dialogues, 43, 53, 153; Gorgias, 32; Phaedrus, 35, 48–50; Republic, 29–31, 33, 43, 44–5, 112. See also Plato; Symposium (Plato) poetic mood, 8, 9. See also reverie poetry: memory in, 16; Nietzsche on, xiv; and philosophy, 157, 159; pondering of own mystery by, 11; as way of knowing, 24, 157–8 poets, 124 point of view, 107 Pop art, 107 present, 56–7 primary imagination, 13–15 projects, 67, 145, 150–1 Proust, Marcel: approach to, xiii; artistic vision of, 148; on intermittences of the heart, 62; literary apprenticeship of, 125–6, 126–7; on Ruskin, 126, 134; on true knowledge, 155. See also À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)

Index

questions, 5–6 real: attainment of, 43, 160–1; as basis for art, 84–5, 90, 147–8; beauty as path to, 116; as ideas/ forms, 29. See also good reality: vs appearance, 29–30, 42, 111 religious ages, 142 Renaissance, 142 Renan, Joseph Ernest, 169n1 representation, 19 Republic (Plato), 29–31, 33, 43, 44–5, 112 resolve, 67, 166n15 reverie, 7–9, 25–6 rhetoric, 65, 152, 159 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 99–101, 105, 117, 124 Rosen, Stanley, 166n15, 166n27 Ruskin, John, 91–2, 92–4, 125–6, 167n2 sacred beings, 14–15 satyrs, 51, 165n18 Schiller, Friedrich, 9 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 63, 65 “Schopenhauer as Educator” (Nietzsche), 60, 66, 157–8 secondary imagination, 13–15 self. See personhood self-control, 33, 73 self-cultivation, xii, 156. See also good; ladder of love self-knowledge, 45, 142–3, 144, 145, 146. See also vision selflessness, 60. See also morality self-overcoming, 60, 78, 156

181

self-realization, xii, 58–9, 78 self-restraint, 33, 73 self-sufficiency, 53 self-surpassing, 59, 60 sensibility, 120 sensibility, development of: introduction to, x, 15–16; articulation of experience for, 22–23; for character development, 123; in childhood, 16–19; and critical judgment, 21, 23–4; full-flowering of, 22, 24–5, 27–8; and memory, 19–20; opinions of others for, 21–2; personal experience for, 24; phenomenological approach to, 16; from relational aspect of experience, 19, 27; as working out of own potential, 19. See also experience; perception; personhood Shawcross, John, 13 Silenus, 51 Sloterdijk, Peter, 62 Snell, Bruno, 163–4n13 Snow, Michael, 108 “Snow” (MacNeice), 9–10 Socrates: on acquisition of virtues, 33; actual views of, 32; on Allegory of the Cave, 30–1; cross-questioning (elenchus) method of, 33–4; on desire and pursuit of happiness, 32–3; fate of, 54, 164n1; on friendship, 54; on good, 44; on love and desire, 38–9; on love of beauty, 42; love of wisdom by, 52–3; on passionate love, 48–9; Plato’s use of, 54, 152–3; role in dialectic,

182

Index

53–4; in Symposium, 35–6, 38–9, 50–2 Socratic method (elenchus), 33–4. See also dialectic sophism, 152 Speak, Memory (Nabokov), 17 spectator. See audience Stevens, Wallace, 10–11 Stones of Venice, The (Ruskin), 126 studio, artist’s, 11–12 style, personal, 72, 73 suffering, 65–6. See also tragedy Suprematism, 106 surrealism, 106 Swann’s Way (Proust), 127, 131–2 sympathy, 120–1 Symposium (Plato): introduction to, xi, 34, 35, 54; Agathon’s speech, 38; Alcibiades in, 50–2; Aristophanes’ speech, 36–8; audience for, 45–6; on beauty, 35, 42, 161; ladder of love, 40–1, 42–3, 44–5, 46–8; metaphor in, 160; and Phaedrus on love, 48–9; setting of, 35–6; on Socrates’ love of wisdom, 52–3; Socrates’ rebuttal to Agathon, 38–9; Socrates’s speech, 39–41; use of Socrates in, 54. See also dialectic; good; Plato taste: as personal, 23 teachers, 80. See also education thinker, 76, 80. See also life, Nietzschean conception of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 167n2 time, 29, 135 Titian: The Death of Actaeon, 113

tragedy, 64–5, 87, 118–20 transcendence, 22, 35, 45, 161 truth: approaches to, xi; and art, 75–6, 84–5; as beautiful, 76; beauty grounded in, 159–60; discovery of, 159; experimental attitude towards, 73–4, 78, 80; and good, 113; as just measure of value, 165n12; lack of system to, 60–1; loss of belief in conventional, 56, 58, 59, 61. See also art, truthful; good; ideal Turner, J.M.W., 92–3, 150 Übermensch, 167n1 unbelief, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62–3 Valéry, Paul, 27 value, 23, 71 van Gogh, Vincent, 95, 111–12 virtue, 33, 52, 53, 115, 164n2. See also good vision: approach to, xiii, xiv; for applying ideal to life, 148–9; for beauty in art, 93–4, 95, 109, 147; for personal excellence, 150–1; for philosophy, 157–8, 159; truth of, 22; as way of knowing, 24–5 Vlastos, Gregory, 46 Vue de Notre-Dame (Matisse), 11–12 Wall, Jeff, 109 Weil, Simone, 114, 115 will, 89. See also desire Williams, Charles, 14, 163n12 will to power, 63 wisdom, 39, 42, 52–3

Index

Witchcraft (Williams), 14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 8, 24, 157 wonder, 8, 15, 26, 41, 162, 163–4n13 writing, 81

183