Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was extraordinary; as a journalist, Communist, anti-Communist, Leftist internee under the dying French regime while Hitler invaded, and essayist, he saw as much as anyone the consequences of opinion, of weak morality, of deference to evil.
Koestler was also a wife-abusing rapist whose treatment of women was uniformly brutal: impregnating and abandoning them to dangerous abortions, cowing them and beating them, permitting only sycophancy in them, he repels even if one admires Darkness at Noon.
Julian Barnes, whose own personality emerges from Nothing to be Afraid Of and Flaubert’s Parrot and other works as utterly decent, considered him a friend. In 2000, he and an author of a biography of Koestler fought over the deceased author’s reputation, and in their dispute one encounters again these same questions:
- Should deeds (and opinions, which can be a kind of deed) beyond the creative work of an artist or thinker matter in the consideration of that work? Does it matter that Heidegger was a Nazi? Does it matter that Polanski was a rapist? Does it matter that Anderson feels Polanski should not face justice?
- If we set an arbitrary point at which we say such things do matter -we forgive Ted Kennedy but not Polanski, or vice versa; we accept Alec Baldwin’s political declarations but not Jon Voight’s; we despise Heidegger for being a Nazi but not Sartre for defending Stalin; there are endless examples- must we accept that all arbitrarily-set limits are equivalently defensible?
These are difficult questions for which I have no answer and in which I lose interest; artists and thinkers are precisely as human as we all are, with the same preponderance of flaws, some unforgivable; what matters to me is the work. Indeed, while most of us do not commit overtly immoral acts it is easy to see how we might be detested. For example: did you vote for Obama? He has increased out use of Predator attack drones vastly; when, years from now, you opine in an interview after your latest book has been released that you loved Obama, the scores of relatives of the innocent collateral damage will loathe you and consider you immoral, and what will you say? Let your handler deal with it! And let’s not think of what our exes and enemies would say of us!
Morality and Aesthetics
But there is something interesting here: I do not think we are merely arguing about whether to, say, boycott Wes Anderson’s movies because we disagree with him. We regularly buy products from companies which do worse than sign petitions! We pay taxes which fund policies with greater negative impact than op-eds or signatures or the odious opinions of some long-dead author!
I think the greater issue is that when a thinker takes a position we consider immoral we begin to doubt the value of their work, a fact I find fascinating. In Heidegger’s case it is perhaps not surprising that we would ponder whether someone who found Hitler reasonable can be trusted to reason -though we might ask Hannah Arendt- but it is notable that we are concerned by Wagner’s anti-Semitism.
What does music have to do with racism? It seems to me that there is a common sense that art or thought of any value must have some moral core, that there is a moral basis to aesthetics without which they lose their value, that creative work implicitly expresses the morality of its creator and loses much of its meaning if said morality is dubious in itself or contradicted by the creator’s behavior.
If painting, photography, philosophy, film, literature, and so on are problematized by their creators’ failed, repudiated, or incoherent moral codes, then we must accept that morality is more integral to art and thought than we ordinarily suppose, particularly in an age of disputed moralities, of negotiable and relative moralities.
Do we restrict the requisite morality of all art to the universal proposals almost all accept: that violence is to be abhorred, that compassion is a virtue? Or do we permit more specific moralities -the morality, say, of feminism, or the “revolutionary morality” of Marxism, or the morality of Christianity- to inform the aesthetic judgement of a work?
That is, are these statements equivalently defensible:
- I cannot believe that a man who supports a child-rapist can make movies worth a damn; he lacks compassion, a sense of humanism, and an understanding of justice; everything he makes will be shallow and unfeeling.
- I cannot accept that a novel written by a rapist will have any insight into the humanistic concerns of literature; if he cannot feel for his victims, how can he feel for his characters? Everything he writes will be brutally atavistic.
- I cannot abide music which promotes extramarital sex sung by someone who has been convicted of un-Christian, immoral acts with children; it is repellant and demonstrates a soulless amorality which places him far from real love.
When do opinions become deeds? When do deeds become universally detestable? When are you comfortable stating that your morality is sufficient to judge another by? When does immorality impugn art’s credibility? Are there aesthetics without morality?
