La Dolce Vita

What is better-- to live a short and glorious life, or to live a long and easy one; a short life of stunning achievments which are talked about well into history-- or La dolce vita?

This morning, the always-great Anis Shivani wrote an article about Michiko Kakutani's recent New York Times review of Ian McEwan's book Solar, describing Kakutani's review as being informed by an:  

"American moral earnestness on steroids. Fear of loathsome characters. Inability to grasp variations on traditional ways of writing the novel. Conservative aesthetics. Commitment to politically correct causes. Need to pigeonhole writers. Fear of fragmentation. Need for neat closure."

Nodding my head, I agree and wondered what Kakutani would do with Homer if he were writing today. Or Virgil... And what the hell would she do about Clytemnestra? 

Writing again about our aesthetico-ethical experience Tullio DeSantis says:

Because we experience the world indirectly, through intervening filters: concepts, explanations, thoughts, perspectives, and paradigms - mental models of the world - it is especially helpful to see them as essentially aesthetic constructions, which we choose because they please us in some way. All experience is mediated. Our brains create simulations of experience by means of chemical and electrical representation, neural patterns, and wave phenomena. Externally, our experience is transferred to us by our assimilation of familial, tribal, and cultural symbols and systems of thought. We use pre-existing words, images, memes, and explanations to process awareness and give a sense of meaning to our lives.

And Kakutani is a perfect example of someone who cannot think outside the box of the bland liberal values that are dominating our day. 

Heidegger wrote a lot about the way works of art function to light up for us--not just our values-- but the way we understand being itself. Illuminating this idea for us in terms of Greek temples and European cathedrals, Dreyfus in his lectures discusses the way that for modern people today, the ancient temples of Greece or the Medieval cathedrals are "sights"-- while for those dwelling within those paradigms however, the temple or the cathedrals stood as what one scholar has called encyclopedias of stone. Everything made sense and everything was intelligible as part of an all-encompassing world-view, and therefore their experience was utterly different from how we today experience temples or churches.

Another example Dreyfus uses is of ancient heroes and Medieval saints. In this existential scheme, Western history is not an unfolding progression of human development, but rather a history of several major understandings of being ( major paradigms or interpretations of being). None are better or worse than the others as some illuminate certain aspects of our humanity while others illuminate other aspects of our humanity. In that way, the heroes as represented in the Iliad or Odyssey don't really have it more or don't really have it any less "right" than we do. They just understood things differently.

No one summed this up as well as my partner in crime, Jack Cameron:

  Herakles, back home not long
slays wife and kids (unless I'm wrong)
and then – broad back to column – sleeps;
the spilled-blod dries, the chorus weeps.
Enter Theseus, wise, well-ranged,
...who finds our hero – not derranged -
but puzzled, rising from his nap
to carnage – Fate? Olympian trap?
Then Theseus, so moved by pity
escorts the murderer to his city.
“There there, old bean – stiff upper lip,
the gods and half-gods both do slip.
No need to be a sour puss
– why, look at my Hippolytus?"
And the modern gloss? Not 'Fate', you see:
Herakles suffered PTSD.
A brand of freedom, or bland necessity?
Neither: neurophysiology.

 

Need I say more?

This brings me back to Tullio DeSantis' work on the aesthetico-ethical experience.

As part of a translation project I was working on a few years ago for a philosophy professor at a university in Japan, I discovered the work of Wolfgang Welsch, who also writes about our aesthetico-ethical experience. In his book Undoing Aesthetics, Welsch begins-- not with Heidegger--but instead with Nietzsche:

Nietzshe showed that our representations of reality not only contain fundamental aesthetic elements but are wholly aesthetic in nature. Reality is a construct which we produce, like artisans with fictional means-- through forms of intuition, projections, ohantasms, pictures and so on. Cognition is fondationally a metaphorical activity. The human is animal fingens. (22)

Animal fingens.

Like artists or virtuostic constructors we create forms of orientation, which must be as movably and elastically constituted as reality itself is fluid and changeaful. All our forms of orientation are aesthetic in a threefold sense: they are produced poetically, structured with fictional means, and in their whole mode of being of that floating anf fragile nature which had traditionally been attested only to aestheticc phenomena and had only been considered possible with these (22).

Now, my Professor in Hiroshima is interested in this expanded notion of aesthetics as it will help him, he believes, get beyond the narrow understanding of arts and aesthetics (specifically that of "the fine arts") that has held sway (dominated) the field of art history for a century or more in Japan. Indeed, the Western concept of fine arts versus crafts was totally alien to the Japanese and runs counter-intuitive to the traditional view of the arts that have informed Japanese thought on the subject for centuries.

This is also a good starting point in understanding how the Rites served to inform Confucian ethics as a kind of aesthetic sensibility so that one did not internalize rules as much as sought to cultivate their aesthethic sensitivity in order to better "feel" right and wrong in a case by case negotiating.  I am also very interested in this topic, but more I am interested in the way Welsch is characterizing the manner in which human beings construct their various understandings of being as something which is fundamentally aesthetic in quality. I think it is an interesting point. As DeSantis writes:

As we are, in fact, discussing life as art and not art in isolation, ethical considerations arise that relate to the kinds of aesthetic choices we make – in other words ethical decisions regarding what pleases us and what repels us. To what extent can we exercise free will and ethical decision-making in the world models, paradigms, and belief systems we create? If we are free to make the best choices what will they be? Can we learn to make choices that decrease suffering and increase compassion?

How free we are to make such authentic choices is the question, I guess.

Getting back to Shivani's article on Kakutani's criticism, though, Welsch is interesting. Our post modern situation, can be viewed Welsch says in terms of an "aestheticization process." This sounds like a good thing-- as if everything is becoming more beautiful or pleasant (in the sense of a Disneylandification) but that is not necessarily all that Welsch is talking about. In what he calls surface aestheticization , Welsch describes contemporary life as being concerned with the aestheticization of urban spaces ("a program to further the kitsch"); aestheticization of our bodies and even the aestheticization of own psychological states (or "the aesthetic spiritualization of our souls"). Hence, prettified store fronts, hard bodies, and meditation retreats in Colorado as he describes it. Even our very souls become something to be beautified and improved upon.

Welsch sees this as focusing our cultural practices so that:

In surface aestheticization the most superficial aesthetic aesthitic value dominates:  pleasure, amusement, enjoyment without consequence. This animatory trend today reaches far beyond the aesthetic enshroudment of individual everyday items-- beyond the styling of objects and experience-loaded ambiances. It is increasingly determining the form of our culture as a whole. Experience and entertainment have become the guidelines in recent years. A society of leisure and experience is served by an expanding culture of festivals and fun. And whilst some of the all too strident offshoots of aestheticization, or singular aspects of the cosmetics of reality, might raise a smile, with its extension to culture as a whole, this is no longer a laughing matter.  

 Art, religion, relationships, education, political policy all must serve the greater good-- that is, it must be useful or find itself obsolete. This goes well beyond materialism or efficiency as an adjective. This last point has so much resonance, I think, when we start talking about "American Philistinism" or "Where have all the Intellectuals gone?" it is a useful place to begin-- as indeed, education is no longer viewed as something to edify but rather as something that will serve a useful purpose, and intellectuals themselves are under the gone to be Relevant. Hence, Kakutani's bland opinions?

"The Philistine not only ignores all conditions of life which are not his own but also demands that the rest of mankind should fashion its mode of existence after his own"--Goethe

Below is Tullio DeSantis' beautiful image The World is Art--with beautiful Africa right in the center.

 

Comments

[Sterling Price]

Wonderful post. What scares me in these times is the Philistinism that predominates. I'm so thankful I got through public school when teachers still taught students how to think, how to see both sides of an issue. Tullio you are so correct about our external experiences. They are transferred to us by our various assimilations and today it is that transferrence that worries me. What is getting through today? There are twenty distractions for every possible transfer. And the distractions are reproducing at warp speed. Divisiveness rules. The common green is neglected and covered in weeds it seems. Still, as individuals, we can move ahead, put up our defensive shields and, hopefully, make the right choices. I'll be thinking about this post, I know, for some time.

[Colin Liddell]

Africa beautiful??? Well, bits of it, maybe. But not the relentlessly flat, sunscorched, snake-infested plain I lived on for 6 child years (1 child year = c.10 adult years). Still we made our own amusement in those days without any help from the cosmos.