THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3,ISSUE#14, DEC/2022-FEB/2023
At times in history, art was intimately associated with other avenues of social life. The plastic arts, in particular, were devoted to the production of objects for daily use, secular as well as religious.[1] In the modern period, however, sculpture and painting were dissociated from town and building, and the creation of these arts reduced to a size suitable to any interior; during the same historic process, aesthetic feeling acquired independent status, separate from fear, awe, exuberance, prestige, and comfort. It became "pure." The purely aesthetic feeling is the reaction of the private atomic subject, it is the judgment of an individual who abstracts from prevailing social standards. The definition of the beautiful as an object of disinterested pleasure had its roots in this relation. The subject expressed himself in the aesthetic judgment without consulting social values and ends. In his aesthetic behavior, man so to speak divested himself of his functions as a member of society and reacted as the isolated individual he had become. Individuality, the true factor in artistic creation and judgment, consists not in idiosyncrasies and crotchets, but in the power to withstand the plastic surgery of the prevailing economic system which carves all men to one pattern. Human beings are free to recognize themselves in works of art in so far as they have not succumbed to the general leveling. The individual's experience embodied in a work of art has no less validity than the organized experience society brings to bear for the control of nature. Although its criterion lies in itself alone, art is knowledge no less than science is.
Kant examines the justification of this claim. How, he inquires, can the aesthetic judgment, in which subjective feelings are made known, become a collective or "common" judgment?[2] Science rejects feeling as evidence, how then can one explain the community of feeling evoked by art works? Current feelings among the masses, to be sure, are easy to explain; they have always been the effect of social mechanisms. But what is that hidden faculty in every individual to which art appeals? What is that unmistakable feeling on which it relies time and again despite all contradicting experiences? Kant attempts to answer this question by introducing the notion of a sensus communis aestheticus to which the individual assimilates his aesthetic judgment. This notion must be carefully distinguished from "common sense" in its usual meaning. Its principles are those of a kind of thinking that is "unprejudiced," "consecutive," and "enlarged," that is, inclusive of the viewpoints of others.[3] In other words, Kant thinks that every man's aesthetic judgment is suffused with the humanity he has in himself. Despite the deadly competition in business culture, men are in accord concerning the possibilities they envision. Great art, says Pater, must "have something of the human soul in it,"[4] and Guyau declares that art occupies itself with the possible,[5] erecting a "new world above the familiar world .. . a new society in which we really live." An element of resistance is inherent in the most aloof art.
Resistance to the restraints imposed by society, now and then flooding forth in political revolution, has been steadily fermenting in the private sphere. The middle-class family, though it has frequently been an agency of obsolescent social patterns, has made the individual aware of other potentialities than his labor or vocation opened for him. As a child, and later as a lover, he saw reality not in the hard light of its practical biddings but in a distant perspective which lessened the force of its commandments. This realm of freedom, which originated outside the workshop, was adulterated with the dregs of all past cultures, yet it was man's private preserve in the sense that he could there transcend the function society imposed upon him by way of its division of labor. Seen at such a distance, the appurtenances of reality fuse into images that are foreign to the conventional systems of ideas, into aesthetic experience and production. To be sure, the experiences of the subject as an individual are not absolutely different from his normal experiences as a member of society. Yet works of art—objective products of the mind detached from the context of the practical world— harbor principles through which the world that bore them appears alien and false. Not only Shakespeare's wrath and melancholy, but the detached humanism of Goethe's poetry as well, and even Proust's devoted absorption in ephemeral features ~ mondanite, awaken memories of a freedom that makes prevailing standards appear narrow-minded and barbarous. Art, since it became autonomous, has preserved the Utopia that evaporated from religion.
The private realm, however, to which art is related, has been steadily menaced. Society tends to liquidate it. Ever since Calvinism sanctified man's calling in this world, poverty, contrary to the accepted notion, has in practice been a taint to be washed away only by toil. The same process that freed each man from slavery and serfdom, and returned him to himself, also broke him into two parts, the private and the social, and burdened the private with a mortgage. Life outside the office and shop was appointed to refresh a man's strength for office and shop; it was thus a mere appendage, a kind of tail to the comet of labor, measured, like labor, by time, and termed "free time". Free time calls for its own curtailment, for it has no independent value. If it goes beyond recreation of expended energies, it regarded as wasteful, unless it is utilized to train men for work. The children of the early nineteenth century who were taken from workshop to dormitory and from dormitory to workshop, and fed while at work, lived exclusively for their calling, like Japanese factory girls of today. The labor contract, in which this condition was grounded, proved itself a mere formality. Later m the nineteenth century, the chains became looser, but self-interest subordinated private life to business even more effectively than before, until the structural unemployment of the twentieth century shook the whole order. The permanently unemployed cannot improve a career that is closed in advance. The contrast between the social and private is blurred when mere waiting becomes a calling and when work is nothing but waiting for work.
For a few decades broad strata in industrial countries were able to have some measure of private life, though within strict limits. In the twentieth century, the population is surrounded by large trusts and bureaucracies; the early division of man's existence between his occupation and family (always valid only with reservations so far as the majority was concerned) is gradually melting away. The family served to transmit social demands to the individual, thus assuming responsibility not only for his natural birth but for his social birth as well. It was a kind of second womb, in whose warmth the individual gathered the strength necessary to stand alone outside it. Actually, it fulfilled this function adequately only among the well-to-do. Among the lower strata the process was generally frustrated; the child was left only too early to his own devices. His aptitudes were prematurely hardened, and the shock he suffered brought in its wake stunted mental growth, pent-up rage, and all that went with it. Behind the "natural" behavior of ordinary folk, so frequently glorified by intellectuals, there lurk fear, convulsion and agony. The juvenile sex crimes as well as national outbursts of our time are indices of the same process. Evil does not stem from nature, but from the violence committed by society against human nature striving to develop.
In the last stages of industrial society even well-to-do parents educate their children not so much as their heirs as for a coming adjustment to mass culture. They have experienced the insecurities of fortune and draw the consequences. Among the lower strata, the protective authority of the parents, which was always menaced, has worn away entirely, until finally the Balilla has slipped into its place. Totalitarian governments are themselves taking in hand the preparation of the individual for his role as a member of the masses. They pretend that the conditions of urbanized life clamor for it. The problem so brutally solved by Fascism has existed in modern society for the last hundred years. A straight line runs from the children's groups of the Camorra to the cellar clubs of New York,[6] except that the Camorra still had an educational value.
Today, in all strata, the child is intimately familar with economic life. He expects of the future not a kingdom, but a living, calculated in dollars and cents, from some profession which he considers promising. He is as tough and shrewd as an adult. The modern make-up of society sees to it that the Utopian dreams of childhood are cut short in earliest youth, that the much praised "adjustment" replaces the defamed Oedipus complex. If it is true that family life has at all times reflected the baseness of public life, the tyranny, the lies, the stupidity of the existing reality, it is also true that it has produced the forces to resist these. The experiences and images which gave inner direction to the life of every individual could not be acquired outside. They flashed forth when the child hung on his mother's smile, showed off in front of his father, or rebelled against him, when he felt someone shared his experiences—in brief, they were fostered by that cozy and snug warmth which was indispensable for the development of the human being.
The gradual dissolution of the family, the transformation of personal life into leisure and of leisure into routines supervised to the last detail, into the pleasures of the ball park and the movie, the best seller and the radio, has brought about the disappearance of the inner life. Long before culture was replaced by these manipulated pleasures, it had already assumed an escapist character. Men had fled into a private conceptual world and rearranged their thoughts when the time was ripe for rearranging reality. The inner life and the ideal had become conservative factors. But with the loss of his ability to take this kind of refuge—an ability that thrives neither in slums nor in modern settlements—man has lost his power to conceive a world different from that in which he lives. This other world was that of art. Today it survives only in those works which uncompromisingly express the gulf between the monadic individual and his barbarous surrounding—prose like Joyce's and paintings like Picasso's Guernica. The grief and horror such works convey are not identical with the feelings of those who, for rational reasons, are turning away from reality or rising against it. The consciousness behind them is rather one cut off from society as it is, and forced into queer, discordant forms. These inhospitable works of art, by remaining loyal to the individual as against the infamy of existence, thus retain the true content of previous great works of art and are more closely related to Raphael's madonnas and Mozart's operas than is anything that harps on the same harmonies today, at a time when the happy countenance has assumed the mask of frenzy and only the melancholy faces of the frenzied remain a sign of hope.
Today art is no longer communicative. In Guyau's theory, the aesthetic quality arises from the fact that a man recognizes the feelings expressed by a work of art as his own.[7] The "life analogous to our own," however, in the portrayal of which our own life becomes visible, is no longer the conscious and active life of the nineteenth century middle class. Today, persons merely appear to be persons; both "elites" and masses obey a mechanism that leaves them only one single reaction in any given situation. Those elements of their nature which have not yet been canalized have no possibility of understandable expression. Under the surface of their organized civic life, of their optimism and enthusiasm, men are apprehensive and bewildered and lead a miserable, almost prehistoric existence. The last works of art are symbols of this, cutting through the veneer of rationality that covers all human relationships. They destroy all superficial unanimity and conflict, which are all in truth clouded and chaotic, and it is only in such sagas as those of Galsworthy or Jules Romains, in white papers and in popular biographies, that they attain an artificial coherence. The last substantial works of art, however, abandon the idea that real community exists; they are the monuments of a solitary and despairing life that finds no bridge to any other or even to its own consciousness. Yet they are monuments, not mere symptoms. The despair is also revealed outside the field of pure art, in so-called entertainment and the world of “cultural goods,” but this can only be inferred from without, through the means of psychological or sociological theory. The work of art is the only adequate objectification of the individual's deserted state and despair.
Dewey says that art is "the most universal and freest form of communication."[8] But the gulf between art and communication is perforce wide in a world in which accepted language only intensifies the confusion, in which the dictators speak the more gigantic lies the more deeply they appeal to the heart of the masses. "Art breaks through barriers . . . which are impermeable in ordinary association."[9] These barriers consist precisely in the accepted forms of thought, in the show of unreserved adjustment, in the language of propaganda and marketable literature. Europe has reached the point where all the highly developed means of communication serve constantly to strengthen the barriers "that divide human beings";[10] in this, radio and cinema in no way yield the palm to airplane and gun. Men as they are today understand each other. If they were to cease to understand either themselves or others, if the forms of their communication were to become suspect to them, and the natural unnatural, then at least the terrifying dynamic would come to a standstill. To the extent that the last works of art still communicate, they denounce the prevailing forms of communication as instruments of destruction, and harmony as a delusion of decay.
The present world, denounced though it is by its last works of art, may change its course. The omnipotence of technics, the increasing independence of production from its location, the transformation of the family, the socialization of existence, all these tendencies of modern society may enable men to create the conditions for eradicating the misery these processes have brought over the earth. Today, however, the substance of the individual remains locked up in himself. His intellectual acts are no longer intrinsically connected with his human essence. They take whatever course the situation may dictate. Popular judgment, whether true or false, is directed from above, like other social functions. No matter how expertly public opinion may be inquired into, no matter how elaborate the statistical or psychological soundings, what they reach is always a mechanism, never the human essence. What comes to the fore when men most candidly reveal their inner selves, is precisely the predatory, evil, cunning beings whom the demagogue knows so well how to handle. A pre-established harmony prevails between his outward purposes and their crumbled inner lives. Everybody knows himself to be wicked and treacherous, and those who confirm this, Freud, Pareto and others, are quickly forgiven. Yet, every new work of art makes the masses draw back in horror. Unlike the Fuhrers, it does not appeal to their psychology, nor, like psychoanalysis, does it contain a promise to guide this psychology towards "adjustment." In giving downtrodden humans a shocking awareness of their own despair, the work of art professes a freedom which makes them foam at the mouth. The generation that allowed Hitler to become great takes its adequate pleasure in the convulsions which the animated cartoon imposes upon its helpless characters, not in Picasso, who offers no recreation and cannot be "enjoyed" anyhow. Misanthropic, spiteful creatures, who secretly know themselves as such, like to be taken for the pure, childish souls who applaud with innocent approval when Donald Duck gets a cuffing. There are times when faith in the future of mankind can be kept alive only through absolute resistance to the prevailing responses of men. Such a time is the present.
At the end of his book on aesthetic problems, Mortimer Adler defines the external marks of the great work of art: gross popularity at any one time or over a period of time, and the ability to satisfy the most varied levels of taste.[11] Consistently with this, Adler praises Walt Disney as the great master because he reaches a perfection in his field that surpasses our best critical capacity to analyze and at the same time pleases children and simple folk.[12] Adler has tried like few other critics for a view of art independent of time. But his unhistorical method makes him fall a prey to time all the more. While undertaking to raise art above history and keep it pure, he betrays it to the contemptible trash of the day. Elements of culture isolated and dissevered from the historical process may appear as similar as drops of water; yet they are as different as Heaven and Hell. For a long time now, Raphael's blue horizons have been quite properly a part of Disney's landscapes, in which amoretti frolic more unrestrainedly than they ever did at the feet of the Sistine Madonna. The sunbeams almost beg to have the name of a soap or a toothpaste emblazoned on them; they have no meaning except as a background for such advertising. Disney and his audiences, as well as Adler, unswervingly stand for the purity of the blue horizon, but perfect loyalty to principles isolated from the concrete situation makes them turn into their very opposite and finally results in perfect relativism.
Adler's book is devoted to the film which he loyally measures according to Aristotle's aesthetic principles, thereby professing his faith in the suprahistorical validity of philosophy. The essence of art, he says, is imitation that combines the greatest similarity of form with the greatest difference of content.[13] This Aristotelian doctrine has become a cliche the opposite of which—the greatest similarity of content with the greatest difference of form—would do as well. Both belong to those axioms which are so calculated that they can easily be adjusted to the conventional doctrine in each field. The content of such principles, whether favored by metaphysicians or empiricists, will not hurt anybody's feelings. If, for instance, science is defined as the aggregate of all verifiable statements, one may be certain of every scientist's approval. But even an empty generality such as this discloses its double-dealing potency as soon as it is related to the real world, which "verifies" the judgment of the powerful and gives the lie to the powerless. A dogmatic definition of the beautiful protects philosophy no better from capitulating to the powers-that-be than a concept of art derived from the uncritical applause of the masses, to which it bows only too readily.
The dogmatists succumb to relativism and conformism not only in their discussions of abstract aesthetic problems, but also in their views of the moral significance of art. "There is no question," says Adler, "that prudence should govern art to whatever extent the work of art or the artist comes within the sphere of morality."[14] One of the main purposes of Adler's book is to discover principles for art education. The concept of morality which he advances for this is, however, as unhistorical as his concept of art. "Crime is only one kind of antisocial behavior. Any behavior which does not conform to established customs is antisocial in essentially the same sense. . . . Men who act anti-socially, whether criminally or contrary to the customs generally prevailing, are in the same sense morally vicious."[15] He recognizes the difficulty arising from the fact that different views and customs prevail in different social strata. But he thinks that the resulting practical difficulties do not impair his principle. The problem simply becomes one of fixing upon which mores are more and which are less desirable for society as a whole. This problem, moreover, only exists for him when there is a conflict between the prevailing habits of different social groups; and not when there is a conflict between an individual and all the groups, a situation which incidentally contains within itself the most serious moral problem of all. Thus, with regard to morality, the disparity is obliterated between the principles of metaphysics and those of positivism. Adler is irresistibly led to conclusions drawn long ago by Levy-Bruhl[16] and other sociologists: what is moral is determined by the positive content of existing customs and habits, and morality consists in formulating and approving what is accepted by the prevailing social order. But even if the whole of a society, such as the coordinated German nation, is of one mind in this regard, it still does not follow that its judgment is true. Error has no less often united men than truth.
Even though truth, of its nature, coincides with the common interest, it has usually been at loggerheads with the sentiment of the community at large. Socrates was put to death for asserting the rights of his conscience against the accepted Athenian religion. According to Hegel, the sentence was just, for the individual "must bend before the general power, and the real and noblest power is the Nation."[17] And yet, according to Hegel, the principle Socrates upheld was superior to this one. Contrariety is even more pronounced in Christianity, which came to the world as a "scandal." The first Christians impugned "the generally prevailing customs" and were therefore persecuted in line with the prevailing law and mores. But this did not make them "morally depraved," as would follow from Adler's definition; on the contrary, they were the ones to unmask the depravity of the Roman world. Just as the essence of art cannot be arrested through rigid supra-temporal principles, ideas such as justice, morality, and public cannot be interconnected through rigid, supra-temporal relations. Kierkegaard's doctrine that the spread of Christianity in the public consciousness has nowise overcome the true Christian's wary attitude to the state is more valid today than ever. "For the concept of the Christian is a polemical concept; it is possible to be a Christian only in opposition to others, or in a manner opposed to that of others."[18] Those modem apologists were ill-advised who attempted to validate the attitude of the Church toward witch-burning as a concession to popular ideas.[19] Truth can make no pacts with "prevailing customs." It finds no guiding thread in them. In the era of witch hunts, opposition to the public spirit would have been moral.
Adler's book breathes the conviction that mankind must orient to fixed values, as these have been set forth by great teachers, above all by Aristotle and St. Thomas. To positivism and relativism he opposes sturdy Christian metaphysics. It is true that modern disbelief does find its theoretical expression in scientivism, which explains that binding values exist for "psychological" reasons, because there is need for them.[20] Success, which in Calvinism was not the same as being a member of the Elect, but was only an indication that one might be, becomes the only standard of human life. In this way, according to Adler, positivism grants a charter to Fascism. For, if there can be no meaningful discussion of questions of value, action alone decides. Metaphysics draws from this a conclusion advantageous to itself: since the denial of eternal principles handicaps the struggle against the new barbarism, the old faith must be reestablished. Men are asked to risk their lives for freedom, democracy, the nation. Such a demand seems absurd when there are no binding values. Metaphysics alone, Adler supposes, can give humanity the hold it has lost, metaphysics makes true community possible.
Such ideas misconstrue the present historical situation. Positivism, indeed, articulates the state of mind of the unbelieving younger generation, and it does so as adequately as sport and jazz. The younger no longer have faith in anything, and for this reason they are able to shift to any belief. But the fault lies just as much with the dogmatism they have forgotten as with themselves. The middle class confined religion to a kind of reservation. Following Hobbes' advice, they swallowed its doctrines whole, like pills, and never completely questioned its truth. Religion for modern men tended to be a memory of childhood. With the disintegration of the family, the experiences that have invigorated religion also lose their power. Today, men exercise restraints not out of belief but out of hard necessity. That is why they are so saddened. The weaker they are and the more deeply disappointed, the more violently do they espouse brutality. They have cast aside all ties to the principle of heavenly love. Any demand that they should return to it for reasons of state is not tenable in religious terms. Religion has a claim on faith not insofar as it is useful but insofar as it is true. Agreement between political and religious interests is by no means guaranteed. The naive presupposition of such agreement, made by those who defend absolute values, confutes their doctrines. Positivism is as strongly in conformity with our time as Adler thinks, but it contains an element of honesty for that very reason. The young who adopt this philosophy exhibit greater probity of mind than those who out of pragmatic motives bow to an absolute in which they do not quite believe. Uncritical return to religion and metaphysics is as questionable today as the road back to the beautiful paintings and compositions of classicism, no matter how enticingly such havens may beckon. The revivals of Greek and medieval philosophers, such as Adler recommends, are not so far remote from certain revivals of melodies by Bach, Mozart and Chopin in current popular music.
Adler denounces in impressive passages the hopeless spiritual plight of the young.[21] He unmasks "the religion of science and the religion of the state." But it would be a fatal misunderstanding to summon the young away from these doctrines and lead them back to older authorities. What is to be deplored is not that scientific thought has replaced dogmatism, but rather that such thought, still prescientific in the literal sense, is always confined within the limits of the various specialized disciplines. It is wrong to rely on science so long as the formulation of its problems is conditioned by an obsolete division into disciplines. Economy of thought and technique alone do not exhaust the meaning of science, which is also will to truth. The way toward overcoming positivistic thinking does not lie in a regressive revision of science, but in driving this will to truth further until it conflicts with present reality. Illuminating insights are not to be found in high and eternal principles, with which everybody agrees anyway (who does not profess faith in freedom and justice!), or in the routine arrangement of facts into customary patterns.
Preference for static principles was the great delusion of Husserl's original "Eidetics," one of the precursors of Neo-Thomism. Adler seems to fall into the same error. Sublime principles are always abstract—positivism is right in speaking here of fictions or auxiliary constructions—but insights always refer to the particular. In the process of cognition, each concept, which in isolation has its conventional meaning, takes part in forming new configurations, in which it acquires a new and specific logical function. Aristotle's metaphysics taken as a whole marks such a configuration, as do the doctrines of St. Thomas on whom Adler draws. The categories become distorted or meaningless unless they enter new, more adequate structures that are required by the particular historical situations in which they play a part. The reason for this is not that each period has its own truth assigned to it, as historical and sociological relativism would like us to believe, or that one can dispense with philosophic and religious traditions, but rather that intellectual loyalty, without which truth cannot exist, consists both in preserving past insights and contradicting and transforming them. Abstract formulations of the highest values are always adjustable to the practice of stake and guillotine. Knowledge really concerned with values does not look to higher realms. It rather tries to penetrate the cultural pretenses of its time, in order to distinguish the features of a frustrated humanity. Values are to be disclosed by uncovering the historical practice that destroys them.
In our time thinking is endangered not so much by the wrong paths it may pursue as by its being prematurely cut short. Positivism rests content with the prearranged routines official science, whereas metaphysics invites intuitions that have their content in the prevailing modes of consciousness. The demand for purity and clarity, applicability and matter-of-factness which is immediately raised to challenge any act of thinking that is not free from imagination, expresses a repugnance to going beyond the limitations of the “statement,” to intellectual restlessness and "negativism," all of which are indispensable elements of thought. The truth of ideas is demonstrated not when they are held fast but when they are driven further.
The pedantry of matter-of-factness produces, conversely, a fetishism of ideas. Today ideas are approached with a sullen seriousness; each as soon as it appears is regarded as either a ready-made prescription that will cure society or as a poison that will destroy it. All the ambivalent traits of obedience assert themselves in the attitude to ideas. People desire to submit to them or to rebel against them, as if they were gods. Ideas begin by playing the role of professional guides, and end as authorities and Fuhrers. Whoever articulates them is regarded as a prophet or a heretic, as an object to be adored by the masses or as a prey to be hunted by the Gestapo. This taking of ideas only as verdicts, directives, signals, characterizes the enfeebled man of today. Long before the era of the Gestapo, his intellectual function had been reduced to statements of fact. The movement of thought stops short at slogans, diagnoses and prognoses. Every man is classified: bourgeois, communist, fascist, Jew, alien or "one of us." And this determines the attitude once and for all. According to such patterns dependent masses and dependable sages throughout the world history have always thought. They have been united under "ideas," mental products that have become fetishes. Thinking, faithful to itself, in contrast to this, knows itself at any moment to be a whole and to be uncompleted. It is less like a sentence spoken by a judge than like the prematurely interrupted last words of a condemned man. The latter looks upon things under a different impulsion than that of dominating them.
Adler appreciates the public as it is, and in consequence popularity is a positive criterion to him. He treats the film as popular poetry and compares it with the theater of the Elizabethan period, when for the first time "writers had the double role of artist and merchant competing in a free market for both plaudits and profits."[22] According to him the middle-class theater has been determined by market economy and democracy. Communists or sentimental aristocrats may regret commercialization, says Adler, but its influence on Shakespeare was not so bad. The film must please not merely the masses, but beyond them "the organized groups which have become the unofficial custodians of public manners and the common good."[23] Adler does realize the difficulties encountered by the film, as compared with the theater, because of the size of its public and the differentiated needs of modern society, but he overlooks the dialectics of popularity. Quite against his intention to differentiate and evaluate social phenomena, his static way of thinking tends to level everything. Just as he is tempted to confuse Raphael's and Disney's scenic backgrounds, he seems to identify the Hays Office and the guardians of the Platonic Republic.
His whole approach to the film as an art bears witness to the confusion of entirely different cultural orders. He defends the movies against the accusation that they are not art because of the collective character of their production.[24] But the discrepancy between art and film, which exists despite the potentialities of the motion picture, is not the result of the surface phenomenon of the number of people employed in Hollywood as much as of the economic circumstances. The economic necessity for rapid return of the considerable capital invested in each picture forbids the pursuit of the inherent logic of each work of art—of its own autonomous necessity. What today is called popular entertainment is actually demands evoked, manipulated and by implication deteriorated by the cultural industries. It has little to do with art, least of all where it pretends to be such.
Popularity has to be understood with reference to social change, not merely as a quantitative but as a qualitative process. It was never directly determined by the masses, but always by their representatives in other social strata. Under Elizabeth and even as late as the nineteenth century, the educated were the spokesmen for the individual. Since the interests of the individual and those of the rising middle classes did not fully coincide, the works of art always contained a crucial element. Ever since that time, the concepts of individual and society have been reciprocal ones. The individual developed in harmony with and in opposition to society: society developed when individuals did, and it developed when individuals didn't. In the course of this process, social mechanisms, such as the national and international division of labor, crisis and prosperity, war and peace, strengthened their own independence of the individual, who became increasingly alien to them and faced them with growing impotence. Society slipped away from individuals and individuals from society.
The cleavage between private and social existence has taken on catastrophic proportions toward the end of the liberalistic period. New forms of social life are announcing themselves in which the individual, as he is, will be transformed unless he is destroyed. But the educated are still indissolubly bound up with man as he existed in the past. They still have in mind the individual's harmony and culture, at a time when the task is no longer to humanize the isolated individual, which is impossible, but to realize humanity as a whole. Even Goethe had to concede that his ideal of the harmonious personality had foundered; in our own time, the pursuit of this ideal presupposes not only indifference toward the general suffering, but the very opposite of the ideal, a distorted personality.
In Europe, representation and leadership of the masses has shifted from the educated to powers more conscious of their task. Criticism in art and theory has been replaced by actual hatred or by the wisdom of obedience. The opposition of individual and society, and of private and social existence, which gave seriousness to the pastime of art, has become obsolete. The so-called entertainments, which have taken over the heritage of art, are today nothing but popular tonics, like swimming or football. Popularity no longer has anything to do with the specific content or the truth of artistic productions. In the democratic countries, the final decision no longer rests with the educated but with the amusement industry. Popularity consists of the unrestricted accommodation of the people to what the amusement industry thinks they like. For the totalitarian countries, the final decision rests with the managers of direct and indirect propaganda, which is by its nature indifferent to truth. Competition of artists in the free market, a competition in which success was determined by the educated, has become a race for the favor of the powers-that-be, the outcome of which is influenced by the secret police. Supply and demand are no longer regulated by social need but by reasons of state. Popularity, in these countries, is as little a result of the free play of forces as any other prize; in other countries it shows a similar tendency.
In a beautiful passage of his book, Dewey explains that communication is the consequence and not the intention of the artistic work. "Indifference to response of the immediate audience is a necessary trait of all artists that have something new to say."[25] Today even the imaginary future audience has become questionable, because, once again, man within humanity is as solitary and abandoned as humanity within the infinite universe. But the artists, continues Dewey, "are animated by a deep conviction that since they can only say what they have to say, the trouble is not with their work but those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not."[26] The only hope remaining is that the deaf ears in Europe imply an opposition to the lies that are being hammered at men from all sides and that men are following their leaders with their eyes tight shut. One day we may learn that in the depths of their hearts, the masses, even in fascist countries, secretly knew the truth and disbelieved the lie, like catatonic patients who make known only at the end of their trance that nothing has escaped them. Therefore it may not be entirely senseless to continue speaking a language that is not easily understood.
*excerpted from Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, (New York: Continuum, 1968, 1999) pp.273-290.
[1] These remarks were provoked by Mortimer J. Adler's book, Art and Prudence (New York and Toronto, 1937).
[2] Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by F. H. Bernard. §22, p. 94.
[3] Ibid., §40, p. 171.
[4] Walter Pater, Appreciations (London, 1918), p. 38.
[5] J. M. Guyau, L'art au point de vue socioiogique (Paris, 1930), p. 21.
[6] On the subject of cellar clubs, cf. Brill and Payne, The Adolescent Court and Crime Prevention (New York, 1938).
[7] Cf. J. M. Guyau, op. cit. pp. 18-19.
[8] John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York, 1934), p. 270.
[9] Ibid., p. 244.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Op. cit., p. 581.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., pp. 24-25 and 450f.
[14] Ibid., p. 448.
[15] Ibid., p. 165.
[16] L. Levy-Bruhl, La Morale et La Science des Moeurs (Paris, 1904).
[17] Hegel, History of Philosophy, translated by E. S. Haldane (our version), Vol. I, p. 441.
[18] Soeren Kierkegaard, Angriff auf die Christenheit, herausgegeben von A. D. Dorner und Christoph Schrempf (Stuttgart, 1896), p. 239.
[19] Cf., e.g., Johannes Janssen, Kultunustdnde des Deutschen Volkes, 4. Buch (Freiburg LB., 1903), p. 546.
[20] Cf. R. v. Mises, Kleines Lehrbuch des Positivismus (The Hague, 1939), pp. 368f.
[21] Cf. Mortimer Adler, "This Pre-War Generation" in: Harpers Magazine, Oct 1940, p. 524f.
[22] Op. cit., pp. 131-32.
[23] Op. cit., p. 145.
[24] Op. cit., pp. 483-4.
[25] Op. cit., p. 104.
[26] Ibid.
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