Art and Morality: On the Ambiguity of a Distinction

Author(s): Morris Grossman

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Autumn, 1973), pp. 103-106

Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/428708
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MORRIS GROSSMAN


Art and Morality: On the Ambiguity

of a Distinction






WHAT IS THE FULL IMPORT of the moral
thrust of art? This thrust is found in much
art, yet it is sometimes held to be unaes-
thetic; righteous indignation may be a
culminating satisfaction for some, yet its
function is to undeliver us from the "con-
summatory" contentments of actual art
works, and from our isolation in those works.
What, in brief, is the larger relation-ship
between art and life that the morality of art
presses us to examine?
Let us approach this theme by way of the
idea of treating life itself, total life, as an
aesthetic project or work of art. It is an old
idea, as old as the Greeks, but fallen into
disrepute. We still occasionally acknowl-edge
that some people live more artfully than
others, and when we are enthusiastic we
might refer to a singularly successful ca-reer-
some man's life-as a work of art. But
we feel the metaphorical exaggeration of such
talk and on more prosaic occasions flinch
from it. Art may heighten life and elevate
some of its many moments but, just as surely,
life eludes art and refuses to turn into an
experiential unity or a singular ac-
complishment. Life cannot be art and, in its
totality, is not even good material for art. As
Aristotle and others have argued, any life is
too full of irrelevancy to make a good story.
Its beginning is chancelike and not of our
making; its middle is likely a

MORRISGROSSMANis associate professor of
philosophy at Fairfield University.






muddle; its end is often curtailed, more like a
preposition than a noun. Abrupt, codaless
exits leave us unreconciled. Put simply, life is
too disorganized, random and miscella-neous
to admit of overarching direction and
control.
We might even press the distinction be-
tween life and art to the point of
coming

up with definitional criteria which would
guarantee their separateness. Is it not the
case that aesthetic creation always seems to
involve a pruning, a separation of art from
life so that art will be art by virtue of the
separation? Do we not excise those aspects of
life which cannot be brought into aes-thetic
purview and remove them from the canvas
or the story? Is not art essentially such
selection and excision?
Consider the painter's workshop when his
masterpiece is completed. Around the
painting, separated from it, are the messy
palette, the dirty smock, the dingy garret, the
unpaid rent, the vulgar liaisons-and
everything else that is material waste or
spiritual distraction. The painting is per-fect,
better than life, and set off against it like a
flawless gem in a tawdry case. And it is
perfect because it is less than all of life;
indeed, it is said to redeem life (strange
redemptionl) by making part of life better
than all of it and by vaunting the aloofness of
that moment of separation.
But what kind of predicament are we de-
scribing? The part and the whole that we






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104 MORRIS GROSSMAN

are here dealing with remain fundamen-tally
estranged and violently disconnected. The
awareness of this makes the moralist, the
artist of life, discontent. (There is noth-ing
that brings things together so much as the
poignancy of their separation, suitably
sensed.) The moralist is pressed to question
the nature of the artistic achievement, the
masterpiece, which heightens disconnect-
edness, and the definition and conception of
art which gives intellectual fortification to
that disconnectedness.
Just what are we about when we turn parts
of life into art, separate art and life
practically, and distinguish between them
tlheoretically?Are we sacrificing man for his
art or saving man from his life? In choosing
to perfect art at the expense of life, does it
perfect man to make this choice, or only his
art? Though we can conceal the clutter of the
workshop from others, can we conceal it
from ourselves? Where are the parings we
omit from our purview, the unorganized
residue which does not get into our art?
What remains of the large substance of an
artist's, or any man's, life which never hangs
in a museum or sounds in a concert hall or
gets into a novel, or is simply never an
occasion for worthwhile remembrances?
These are difficult questions, but once we
know the agony of the quandary the an-
swers will come forth of themselves. If an
artist is an artist by virtue of what he can
discard, a man remains a man by virtue of
what he cannot discard, and this is always
the bulkier, the more challenging, the more
problematic part of himself. What remains is
the hair and the dirt and the ugliness of
existence, the rubbish he knows is under the
rug, the bugs in hiding, the guilts that
burgeon from buried places, the boredom
and the
pain,
the waste and the
claptrap

of life, and its oppressive and random and
sheer et ceteras. Here is what waits to be
reckoned with, not colors to be squeezed
from tubes, not tones to be plectrumed and
plucked, not words to be rhymed and ca-
denced. There is a vale of soul-making that is
beyond all media, which symphonies and
canvases and poems barely touch. It is a vale
in which we are pressed beyond mere

arts to where art and life fuse in a single
strategy and a total task.
In plainer language we can say that the
materials discarded in fashioning art are no
loss to the art, and yet they remain a con-
tinuing burden. With respect to life there is
no context, no place for waste, no way of
getting rid of what might metaphorically be
called the radioactive debris and the black
oil slicks. Man's condition is like earth's
condition-limited, closed in, contamina-
ble. There can only be arrangements and
rearrangements of what there is, total ma-
nipulations of total accumulations, a volu-
minous burden which must be carried and
projected to an uncertain end.
Life apart from art-and there would be no
apartness apart from the following con-
siderations-consists of opposites unseen and
conflicts unreconciled. It consists of moments
which are not reflected upon and
assimilated, which intrude on us when we do
not want them to, which randomly dis-tract
and oppress. They are our accumulat-ing but
unaccumulated selves. We cannot shed them;
because we cannot use them
positively, they weigh on us negatively. Life
apart from art, inartistic life, is the negative
weight, the tiresome burden, the existential
stress of being, the tragic sense of the unen-
compassed.
The tragic sense, tragedy understood this
way, is not, as it is so often taken to be, a
reconciliation with death, or a reconcilia-
tion of specific moral claims. Tragedy,
rather, is a reconciliation with those mo-
ments of life which resist a coming together
in some organizing purpose. Tragedy is the
sense of, and the ideal victory over, the liv-
ing dissolution that continuously pervades
us, not victory over the actual extinction that
eventually terminates us. Termination and
extinction are no great loss when they come
in due time. The silence at the end of a
symphony is as necessary as any other part
of it; indeed, it is sometimes the best part of
it and a great relief. Dissolution and discon-
nectedness are the real tragic losses. The
tragic sense reaches out to those intransi-
gent elements of our being which otherwise
resist containment, and they become con-






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Art and Morality: On the Ambiguity of a Distinction

tained morally and ideally in the pathos of
the awareness of failure.
Tragedy binds wounds but cannot per-
force heal them. They remain bound wounds,
the more painful because the more
conspicuous. But bound and comprehended
pain is preferred to the deeper pain, that is,
anxiety, of anaesthetized and purposeless
moments. It is astonishing how much sad-
ness and suffering a man will embrace unto
himself to avoid disconnectedness, and to
satisfy his organizing and time-binding self.
Even the words of a popular song tell us that,
"Loneliness remembers what happi-ness
forgets." Movement without direction,
process without contour, suffering without
redemption, are all there is to ugliness and
hell.
Tragedy and the tragic sense are the evi-
dence that man refuses to be the patient
etherized on the table. He would rather give
his pain aesthetic and moral dimension
than be sundered in his being and alienated
from what counts. The search for wholeness
and completion is a formidable principle.
Organizing around some biological purpose
from the start, we remain organizational to
the end. And every accomplishment, sweet
as it may be, must partly sour on itself as it
looks to the task of some larger project.
Our view then has been that aesthetic
experience is not, and ought not to be, sep-
arated from other life experience. In the
tradition of aesthetic theory some writers
(e.g., Dewey) have defended this view, and
other writers (e.g., Pater) have defended the
view that art is something special, distinc-
tive, exalted, and different in kind from the
life experience out of which it emerges and
departs.
These alternatives hardly admit of theo-
retical resolution. Like most distinctions
based on a high order of metaphysical gen-
erality, the distinction between life and art
can be seen as a difference of degree or as a
difference of kind. Like many other such
distinctions, there is a "sense" in which it is
warranted and a "sense" in which it is not.
Any difference in degree can be converted
into a difference in kind by a philosopher
with appropriate, or inappropriate, labels to
hand.

But the making of philosophical
tions is not without practical consequences,
and what concerns us here is the moral ef-
fect of each of the alternatives. The effect of
separating art and life, definitively rather
than tentatively, clearly rather than
ambig-
uously, is to give to art a premature eleva-
tion. This ultra-laudatory conception of art,
which sees it as so many nodules of
perfec-
tion, so many gemlike inflammatory mo-
ments, in a life that is otherwise dull, drab,
and dubious-this conception turns our
thoughts away from the larger task of com-
posing life, and of bringing to that larger
task and art a modicum of order and se-
quence and contoured joy. It is a concep-tion
which leads toward aestheticism (in the
worst sense of that word)-a morally negli-
gent life spiced by aesthetic kicks. To view
art and life thus, to separate them in con-
tentment and to be content in their
separa-
tion, is to make art vicious and to make life
hypocritical. At its worst it is to enjoy with-
out reference to consequences, to be right-
eous without reference to joy, to fiddle while
Rome burns, and to raise flowers alongside
crematoria.
The purpose in seeing art as continuous
with other life activities is not to debunk or
degrade art but hopefully to glorify and ele-
vate life. The moral aspect of art, insofar as
it overflows art, is a reminder of this and
points to needs and predicaments beyond the
obvious confines of the art work. It is a
reminder that the perfection of art is pur-
chased at a price, that a gain here is a ne-
glect there, and that there is inadequacy in
the life in which the art work is embedded. It
is a reminder that much needs to be done,
that a larger project waits, and that to rest in
temporary conditions of seeming
permanence is a permanent condition of
unrecognized failure.
There are certain artists we might call
upon who strongly and specifically convey
the tragic sense of the unfinished and unfin-
ishable quality of works of art. They refuse,
by repeated shows of reluctance, to make
that separation of art and life which tends to
be manifested in the fait accompli of the
finished and presented art work. For them
the art work is never an isolable thing but






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106 MORRIS GROSSMAN

always a work in progress, always in need of
revision, always modifiable in the direction
of an unrealized and unrealizable goal.
These men invite the force of life, with its
raging fires and its unshored fragments, to
overwhelm the temporary ramparts of the
art medium. They are writers like Proust,
for whom a
proof
sheet was simply an
occa-sion for ever-renewed correction and
expan-sion. They are sculptors like
Giacometti, who was always "failing" and
destroying what he did, and for whom it was
apparent agony to face the false finality of
allowing a work to be exhibited. "There is no
hope of achieving what I want, of expressing
my vision of reality." said Giacometti. "I go
on painting and sculpting because I am cu-
rious to know why I fail."
For these artists, the separation of art and
life is "performatively" denied by virtue of
the way in which ongoing artistic activity
(not a mere series of art works) is a con-
scious
grappling
with life. All glimpses of
reality are repudiated for being glimpses,
discrete perspectives, less than unitary vi-
sions and unitary accomplishments. As Gia-
cometti put it, "All I ask is to be able to go
on and on." He did not, of course. Like the
rest of us he was mortal. And the various

pieces he produced, the fragments of his life,
will make their way into various hands,
never to be shored up or united. And yet this
knowledge of failure, this tragic sense
constantly alive, is success beyond all art.
The best art, the best artists are pervaded by
the tragic sense, which is awareness of the
sort of defeat and recalcitrance that life itself
has always imposed upon the living of it.
And so artists love to leave loose ends,
ambiguities, elements of randomness, as a
tribute and echo and reminder of what life is
like and what needs to be done.
Art is better than life, and should be; but
not so much better that it neglects life's
challenges or departs life's memories. The
task of great art has always been to tran-
scend life but to remain relevant to it, to
focus enjoyment but not to forget sorrow, to
surmount the futility of blind righteous-ness
but not to be blind to prevailing evil. This too
has been the task of the good life, which is a
self-regenerative process in which art is that
part which is also the ongoing measure of the
whole. There is a poem by Yeats with a line
in it in which he asks, "Shall we perfect the
life or perfect the art?" To care about the
question and to sense its poignancy is all the
answer that it needs.































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