Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 16:45:55 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Aesthetics and ethics


Tobin Nellhaus <nellhaus-AT-gis.net> writes
>
>Allergic to over-simplifications as always,

But, Tobin, aren't you offering some pretty glib over-simplifications in
return? :- 

>I
>can hear Meyerhold being shot already. 

I was speaking, not of the relationship of ethics to aesthetics in the
Soviets, but in a eudaimonic society of freely flourishing and creative
people.

>Besides, a lot of stunningly
>brilliant art is ugly (Francis Bacon's painting is a fine example).

I gave a clear example of a sense in which Bacon's art is not ugly but
beautiful. I doubt Keats means by 'beauty', 'pretty', rather, something
capable of conveying the joys of aesthetic experience, in which we inter
alia transcend ourselves and are never more ourselves than when we do,
as C S Lewis put it. That's anyhow what I mean by it. And, as Bhaskar
says PE155 'There is in aesthetic experience a genuine aspiration to
concrete utopianism, neo-Blochian hope and prefigurationality.' Of
course, if you stay on the surface, a screaming Pope is a screaming
Pope. But the paintings bear witness to the deeper possibility of a non-
alienated existence.

>For
>that matter, a lot of truths are ugly too.

Again, if you stay on the surface. But my appeal was to alethic truth in
its ethical sense. If Being is good, and deprivation of Being bad, then
the truth of Blake's desolation and of the airman's suicide is
beautiful. 

>Keats's claim is lovely, but
>highly Romantic in every sense.

Since when was Romantic a boo word?

>I'd bet that radical Shelley knew better.
>And Shelley's wife -- the author of *Frankenstein*.

I gather from Moretti that Frankenstein is a metaphor for the horror and
threat presented to the bourgeois brain by the early alienated and
exploited industrial working class, so the truth of Frankenstein is
beautiful too.

>Why Carrol wants to damn the
>fictional Irish airman escapes me -- millions of poor sods get conscripted
>into the army with no chance of escaping to Canada or wherever, and this
>fellow sounds like one of them.

Yeats' poem clearly tells us that the airman wasn't a conscript but a
volunteer:

>Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
>Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
>A lonely impulse of delight
>Drove to this tumult in the clouds;


Mervyn



>Carrol wrote of Pound's politics:
>
>> They are pretty terrible. But not essentially worse than the politics of
>> the U.S. government.
>
>I'm sure this was meant to speak to the detriment of the US government, but
>it comes off soft-pedalling Pound's explicit fascist sympathies and rabid
>anti-semitism.  But I have to agree that one can't simply judge aesthetics
>on the grounds of the author's politics.  There are heaps of great writers
>with horrid politics, Pound among them.  Why Carrol wants to damn the
>fictional Irish airman escapes me -- millions of poor sods get conscripted
>into the army with no chance of escaping to Canada or wherever, and this
>fellow sounds like one of them.
>
>Mervyn, on the other hand, writes:
>
>> Thirdly, the view that good writing excuses bad politics seems at odds
>> with the (D)CR view of aesthetics as 'a branch of practical philosophy,
>> the art of living well' (dpf 15), closely related to ethics.
>[snip]
>>                    The logic of this position is
>> ultimately, I think, that of Keats - 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' -
>
>Personally I think allying aesthetics with ethics is a bad deal for both.
>For one thing it starts drifting off toward "politically correct art."  I
>can hear Meyerhold being shot already.  Besides, a lot of stunningly
>brilliant art is ugly (Francis Bacon's painting is a fine example).  For
>that matter, a lot of truths are ugly too.  Keats's claim is lovely, but
>highly Romantic in every sense.  I'd bet that radical Shelley knew better.
>And Shelley's wife -- the author of *Frankenstein*.
>
>Allergic to over-simplifications as always,
>
>T.
>
>---
>Tobin Nellhaus
>nellhaus-AT-mail.com
>"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce
>
>
>
>
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