mills

Marcel Proust, whom I’ve quoted before, cited by Alain de Botton, whom I’ve also mentioned a few times. This is a great distillation of the redemptive power of art: imaginatively turning anguish into thought can be a means not merely to some sort of wisdom but also to overcoming suffering. This is true of any real value system.

Perhaps when Murdoch says art can be a “false shortcut” she means that art cannot replace suffering; it can help redeem grief, but those who seek art instead of experience, for fear of grief or timidity, gain nothing but a pose.

Irish Murdoch, quoted in an excellent post by B. Michael titled “Art, Love, and Sex - Iris Murdoch.” Murdoch, a novelist as well as a philosopher, makes this assertion against art in conjunction with a Platonic emphasis on the importance of love, which B. Michael very lucidly explains: if transcendence is our goal, does art offer a false shortcut while love, and sex, are better starting points for “moral attention”?

It is an interesting and open question, and I’ll only say this: I have sometimes felt in museums like someone looking for a clue, some bit of sculpted gnosis which will help me ahead of myself, beyond myself, as though this or that painting or novel can spare me the anguish of experience and bring me to an unearned understanding. This is art as a tool for attaining depth one lacks.

On the other hand: some speak of art as a means to do just that, and philosophy might be considered the same: we encode more wisdom into our species and at a faster rate than painful experience, which must be lived by every individual, permits. We learn by doing, but by sharing we spare others. When Kundera says art takes suffering and redeems it by turning it into existential wisdom, we might note that religion, philosophy, and all humanist disciplines attempt to do the same.

B. Michael’s post is worth reading.

From Iris Murdoch’s encapsulation of modern philosophy in “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” The full quote:

In the philosophy of Sartre we find the same solitary moral agent [as in Ordinary Language philosophy], and the same emphasis on the moment of choice, but displayed in terms of a dramatic Hegelian psychology. One might say that whereas Ordinary Language Man represents the surrender to convention, the Totalitarian Man of Sartre represents the surrender to neurosis: convention and neurosis, the two enemies of understanding, one might say the enemies of love; and how difficult it is in the modern world to escape from one without invoking the help of the other.

She is taking here of the tension between reductive philosophical thought such as Ordinary Language philosophy, which amounts to a ratification of convention and tradition, first linguistically then conceptually, and is thoroughly conservative (but has the enormous value of making total sense and not being vague, dramatic bullshit), and more expansive metaphysical work like that of Sarte and the Existentialists. Their work is progressive, liberating, anti-convention; it tears apart the old and promises to usher in new, vibrant, experientialist attitudes; the downside is that it leads to neurosis, crippling self-obsessions, alienation, and near-nihilism.

Even if you’re not into philosophy, the art you love reflects this dialectic, the central aesthetic-ethical-philosophical dialectic of the 20th Century. Convention and neurosis. Convention and neurosis.

Think of your friends and your parents; your teachers and your neighbors; of Rockwell and Pollock; of artists and writers and politicians: convention and neurosis. Murdoch’s genius is in this observation: we want to escape both, and it is hard to get away from one without relying on the other.

To avoid the neurotic, obsessive, narcissistic worldview of the young, we become adults: emotional deadened, more conservative (I don’t here mean in an American political sense); to escape the derangement of too much self-indulgent freedom, we accede to constraints we would have howled against a decade before.

This works both ways: to avoid the stifling convention of settled, claustrophobic married life, we have neurotic sexual habits, affairs and indiscretions; to escape the crushing mundanity of working life, we gamble or speed or blow our money on toys.

But what makes her more than merely smart is not just that, but that she sees something else: convention and neurosis aren’t just intellectual problems or lifestyle constraints, they are the enemies of understanding and of love, related concepts in Murdoch’s view.  It’s as profound as almost anything I’ve read, and I think about it often as I bounce between convention and neurosis, control and decay, values and whims, morals and freedom.