From: "Tobin Nellhaus" <nellhaus-AT-gis.net>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Aesthetics and ethics
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2002 21:28:29 -0500


Hi Gary--

> Where I think Critical Realism can push us forward here - is contra
Tobin -
> is through insisting that the aesthetic be incorporated within the ethical
> - the good.

There are several different issues here.  One is the theoretical connection
between aesthetics and ethics.  Another is how aesthetics is being defined;
in particular, what sort of object is deemed to have aesthetic properties
(and for what reasons).  As I say in my reply to Mervyn, that definition
shouldn't be made narrowly.  Finally, there's the problem of "insisting."
Who is doing this insisting?  How do they enforce that?  Here in the U.S.,
there are scads of people who demand that art meet ethical criteria, which
happen to designate art that concerns sex -- especially homosexuality -- to
be unethical to the point of evil.  It's all well and good for us to say our
ethics are better, but there's still quite a doorway there for deciding that
art we don't like is ethically suspect, art with bad politics to be bad art,
and art that follows our politics to be good art -- and there's plenty of
history of that on the left as well as the right.  When art must serve as a
handmaiden to politics (ethics put to practice), as far as I'm concerned the
politics/ethics are bad.

Don't get me wrong -- I very much feel that art has political implications,
and I encourage art that tries to help make a better, more democratic world.
I'm practically a hereditary Brechtian.  I've performed in and directed
political plays; I recently co-edited a book on a community-based form of
activist theater.  But I think artists have to tie their work to left
politics through their own informed choice -- not by social coercion, not by
legal sanctions, and not (as being proposed here) by theoretical fiat.
Theories lead to practices, and a theory that doesn't give sufficient
autonomy to the arts at the philosophical level won't do it when put to
practice.

T.

---
Tobin Nellhaus
nellhaus-AT-mail.com
"Faith requires us to be materialists without flinching": C.S. Peirce




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