Aestheticism and Morality

Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility Author(s): George Kateb Reviewed work(s): Source: Political Theory,
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UNCERTAIN RELATIONS: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE AESTHETIC-AFFECTIVE DIMENSION
AESTHETICISM
AND MORALITY
Their Cooperation and Hostility

GEORGEKATEB Princeton University
It is only throughthe dualityof the 'masculine'andthe 'feminine'thatthe 'human'finds full realization. -Pope John Paul Ill See the power of nationalemblems. Some stars,lilies, leopards,a crescent,a lion, an eagle, or other figure, which came into credit, God knows how, on an old rag of bunting, blowing in the wind, on a fort, at the ends of the earth,shall makethe blood tingle under the rudestor the most conventionalexterior.The people fancythey hate poetry,andthey are all poets and mystics! -Ralph WaldoEmerson2
This essay grows out of a thought I have recurrentlyhad, which is that humanconductoften exhibitsa strongerpreferencefor manyaspirationsand thanfor morality.People have always behavedas if moralityhad attainments no relevanceto them when they did certainthings and pursuedcertainaims. NaturallyI do not have in mindthe obviousandoverwhelmingtruththatpeople are deliberately,unthinkingly,or impulsively immoralbecause of selfinterest,selfishness, or viciousness. I mean, rather,thatwe are all caughtup in, and carried away by, enterprises and undertakingsthat involve us in
AUTHOR'SNOTE:I thankthefollowing individuals their help in thinkingabout the issues for AmyGutmann,CaseyHaskins,Alexander raised in this article: Jane Bennett,David Bromwich, Nehamas, TracyStrong,Roy Tsao, and StephenWhite.An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1995 meeting of the AmericanPolitical Science Association.
POLITICALTHEORY,Vol. 28 No. 1, February2000 5-37 ? 2000 Sage Publications,Inc.
2000 THEORY/ February POLITICAL
idealisticway. Indeed,one is temptedto say that immoralityin an apparently we are involved in an apparentlyinnocent way. The innocence may show itself in unconsciousness of immoralityor in a rationalizationthat denies immoralityor makes it marginalor thatexpressly assertsthatthereare conthanmorality.But whetherthereis unconsiderationsof greaterimportance sciousness or rationalization-and both come in several varieties-people and thinkersconstantlydemonstratethatthey prefer,that they love, quite a numberof ideal aims more thanthey love morality.They tacitly demonstrate an, as it were, innocent preferencefor, or love of, certainthings despite the high, sometimes infinitelyhigh, moralcost, or they expresslyassertthe subordinationor irrelevanceof morality.(An incidentalrecentreminderof this critique of the Kantianlatter theoreticalpreferenceis the communitarian Rawlsiancommitmentto the priorityof the rightto the good.) concernin this essay is the powerof unawareandunrationMy particular alized aestheticismto move people to act immorallywith an apparentinnocence, althoughI also referto a few of those theoristswho rationalizethe subordination or erasure of morality and do so on ostensibly nonaesthetic grounds.Later,I also takeup specimensof whatI call deliberatephilosophical aestheticism, where the aesthetic relation to morality is more or less franklycontemplatedand where moralitydoes not always come out on top. The hostility of conscious andunconsciousaestheticismto moralityoften is, in sum, great.It also is possible, however,thata moredeliberateaestheticism in one formor anothermaycooperatewith moralityor may be its good friend. The pictureis undeniablycomplex. Let me say at the startthatI do not in this essay pay attentionto the great question of the direct influence of art (in its content,form, or style) on peoI ple's moral character. presumeto emphasize anxieties about beauty (and sublimity) other than those expressed by, say, Plato, Rousseau, or Tolstoy when they couple immoralityand much art. At this point,I wantto mentionsome of the ideals thatare,with a seeming innocence,pursuedat high moralcost. Are these idealsperhapsalso aesthetic butunknowinglyso? The humanrecordcontainscountlessinstancesof these pursuits.When one has ponderedthat recordfrom a simple moral point of of view, the idealisticor innocentdisregard moralitystandsout. (I workwith the assumptionthat people in most places and times share the same understandingof basic morality,somethingalong the lines of simplejustice pracThis is not to deny the role of deadly vices. I mean only to ticed reciprocally.) make room for motivationsthat are not wicked, motivationsthat have their own peculiarpurity,in the productionof injustice,oppression,and evil. The innocence of immoralconduct depends on its being largely unconsciously
Kateb/ AESTHETICISM AND MORALITY
immoral.To be sure,a steady streamof theorizingrunsparallelto it. Thereis whatIjust called rationalization. Only theoristscan consciously departfrom, or make light of, morality in principle. Indeed, some theorists manage to impartthe sense that the supra-moral elevation of one ideal or anotheris a compulsorymatteror an urgentone, a matterof supremeimportancethatall thinkingpeople must recognize as such. It is well to observe that when the theoreticalrationalizationacknowlto edges thatsome necessarymoralevil is required achievea nonmoralideal, little or no regretis expressed.Doing lesser moralevil to prevent,remedy,or abolishgreatermoralevil, however,does normallycarryregret.But when the end is nonmoralbutpositedas supreme,the moralcost is madeto weigh little. At the same time, I am perfectly ready to grant that moral considerations often are inadmissiblein a wide range of genuinely innocent practicesand activities. I am not a new-style consequentialist,demandingthat a moral reckoningbe made of everythingone does, thata moralaccountbe given of every minute of life that one spends. All I insist on is observing moral cost and asking why theorists(butnot only them) thinkthatit shouldbe paid, and often without regret,even when they are awareof it beforehand. Let me offer a samplingof some of the mainideals thatarerankedhigher thanmoralityandmentionthe theoristswho contribute the rationalization. to (The theorist'srationalizationmay have little or no influence in the world. Ordinarypeople are subjectto their own promptingsor are drivento act by crudeideas in the air.)Thereis, firstof all, religion,by which I meanreligion in the West. Although supposedly the origin of morality, the God of the HebrewandChristianscriptures worshipped his veryfavoritism,bloodis for thirstiness,andcaprice,notonly in spite of them.And the God madeby some Christian theologians exercises sovereign predestinationand constructs a place of eternaltorturefor many of his creatureswho are guilty of uneternal crimes. By moralstandards God is, in some respects,a practitioner wickof edness. But to call God wicked is considereda heinoussin, yet to hold God to a moral standardis considered impiety. Plato lamented the sanction for wickedness given by the poets' stories of the gods and rewrotethe stories. Correspondingly,some Catholic theologians have triedto rewritescripture to take the wickednessout of God. But some denominationsof Protestantism have reveled in that wickedness and done so with the keenest good conscience. The Pauline and Augustinianstrandshave always been strong, and wherethey are not literallypresent,theirinfluence-demythologized or scientized-persists. I think that the most interesting modern theological preferencefor God above moralityis found in Kierkegaard's vindicationof Abraham'sdecision to sacrificehis son on the commandof his God. Kierkegaardelaborateswhat he calls the "teleologicalsuspensionof the ethical"in
Fear and Trembling(1843).3 On the other hand, the power of religion to believersto performacts of war,persecution, inspirecountless untheoretical and sacrifice of all sorts is abundantlymanifest in the human record. The irony is not thatthe supposedlydivine is raisedabove the merely humanbut ratherthat the God of moralityis made to do immoralityinnocently and to sponsor the same in His adherents. A second example, ubiquitousand as old as humantime, is the readiness of people to preserveor advance a distinctivecultureor way of life at any moralcost. The stakeis as muchdistinctivenessor the differencefrom others as it is the qualityof life, althoughdistinctivenessandqualitytendto get conare fused or conflated.Doubtlessmoralarguments insertedto help defendthe idea of makinga cultureor way of life worthany moralcost, but these arguments are so easily adoptedby all sides in a strugglethatone knows thatthe stakeis not itself moral.Oftenit simply goes withoutsaying thata way of life is that which must be preservedor advanced;the imitationof innocence is complete. I suppose the model theoreticaltext remains,afterall, the funeral speech of Pericles, as presentedby Thucydides,where imperialismjustifies and is justified by the Athenianway of life, andthe way of life is held up for a To adoration. be sure,in his speech afterthe sortof mysticaland supra-moral second Spartaninvasionof Attica duringthe time of plague, Pericles utters one of the few morallycandidsentencesever spokenby a leaderof an imperialist society: "Forwhatyou hold is, to speak somewhatplainly,a tyranny;to take it perhapswas wrong, but to let it go is unsafe."4 and Closely relatedto the tendencyto rankpreservation advancementof a life higherthanmoralityis, third,the desire to preserveand advance way of the definitenessof a distinctivegroupidentity.Althoughusuallyinextricably interwovenwith a way of life, group identity can exist in the absence of a shared location. A common language, religion, or set of practices may be sharedby a physically scatteredgroupof people. But whetherconcentrated or scattered,a groupmay see its identityas a cause worthany sacrifice, with the moral cost often going unnoticed.The group is a we, a superperson,an self incorporated that is oneself enlargedto include everyone else or that is oneself and everyone else diminished, an imagined conversion of persons into a substance.Whatmattersis not merely thatthe grouplives in a certain The way but that it is of one substance,precious,unique,and irreplaceable. resultis a perpetualsense thatthe substanceis alwaysendangeredandcan be easily lost or contaminated.Theorists of race and nation specialize in this of metaphorization tribe. But whethertheorized or not, whether the moral cost is present to consciousness or not, the preservationof group identity throughgroupprideand xenophobiais a continuoussourceof immoralityin the humanrecord.Withinone society, groupidentityalso can be segmented
and show itself in caste or class feelings or in pride of membershipin one or anotherculturalgroup. Wheneverpolitics is madean end in itself, we find yet another(the fourth) ideal that produces immorality either unconsciously or with a good conscience. A starktheorizationis given by Schmittin The Conceptof the Political (1932). He would have us think that there is no proprietyin asking the questions"Whydoes armedhostilityexist?"and"Shouldit not be stopped,if possible?"Schmittinvestspolitics (as he defines it) with a natural ontological constituentelementsof the world.He says, status;it is one of the fundamental
The specific political distinctionto which politicalactions andmotives can be reducedis thatbetween friendandenemy. ... The enemy is not merelyany competitororjust any partnerof a conflict in general.He also is not the privateadversarywhom one hates. An enemy exists only when, at least potentially,one fightingcollectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.5
Neitherdifferenceof ways of life nordistinctivenessof groupidentitiesneed for be the provocationor inspiration conflict. The merefact thatthereis more than one armedgroupis sufficientto justify war.The existence of an armed group not only is tied to war,it exists for the sake of war.Schmittprovidesa pure theorizationof the abstractagon. I think that he exceeds Machiavelli, Hegel, and Clausewitz in this direction. Theoretically,there are no stakes except for winning or, second best, not losing. Does the humanrecordgive evidence of such a proclivity?Of course, the answer depends on how one readsthe record.But one has the steadyfeeling thatsenseless conflict makes at least this sense: people areattracted the pointless,the unpurposive, to espethe cially when it is extravagant, large scale, or wasteful.The more arbitrary cause of war,the better.The less one has to defend, the better.One does not hate one's enemies; the antagonismis nothing personal.One does not even necessarily enjoy fighting. Antagonismis simply the way of the world, its pointless point, its unreasonfor being. Connectedto the abstractagon is, fifth, the ideal of masculinity.Included within this ideal is a passion for adventure,risk, discharge of energy, the explorationof humanpossibility, or a will to transgresslimits or push them further. The ideal of masculinityis an ideal of heroism,virtuosity,or surprising creativity,and criminalitylooks like an integralpartof it. I have here in mind the ideal of masculinitywhen it is pursuedby associatedmen, by gangs, teams, crews, or some otherkind of group.The ideal also can be understood as an expressionof the desireto seize rather thanto be given, to exploit rather thanto conciliate, or to act only when it is difficult.The humanrecordis filled to overflowing with such tendencies.Politics supplies an arenafor them, but
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THEORY/ February2000 POLITICAL
practicallyevery sector of life is made to supply arenas as well. Pericles, Machiavelli,andNietzsche arejust some of the principaltheoristsrelevantto the codificationof masculinityas the projectof collaborativeand adventurous greatness.As theorists,they are awareof the intrinsicimmoralityof idealized masculinity,but probably-as with the otherideals I have mentioned so far-ordinary people (of both sexes) who commit themselvesto the ideal or who admireor celebrateit do not reckonthe moralcost very closely and have no interestin doing so. agon andwith the ideal of masculinCognatewith the ideal of the abstract in ity is, sixth, the passionto live for symbols, for whatHobbescalls "trifles" the thirteenth chapterof Leviathan.Hobbespresentsthreemajormotivesthat It conduce to invasiveandviolent conflict:gain, safety,andreputation. is the thirdmotivethatbedevils his politicaltheory,the motiveto securea flourishing symbolic life in which-apart from any material advantageor basic necessity-a group is accorded the prestige, honor, or deference that its membersthinkis theirdue or thatthey wanteven while half-knowingthatit is morethananyone'spossible due. If Hobbesis the greattheoristof the folly of the thirdmotive, then it also has great theoreticaladvocates,from Pericles andMachiavellito Hegel andNietzsche. Theyall knowthe moralcost andare personslive theircommon lives willing to see it paid.But when untheoretical awarenessof the moralcost is only faintlypresent,if for the sake of symbols, presentat all. I wish to add, seventh,thatthereare kinds of assertiveor self-expressive individualismthatlocate the self's achievedidentityin success in the abstract agon, in attainingmanhood on masculinistterms, or in securing symbols. thana group,tries Obviously,the games aredifferentwhenone person,rather to make his way in these endeavors.When an individualprevails,the world calls him great. The last, as it were, innocentideal I wouldmentionis radicalenvironmentalism. So far,this is mostly a theoreticalmovement.Those who arepartof it are fully awarethat they defend a cause that others find immoralor potentially so. An American poet of the recent past, Robinson Jeffers, proudly called himself an inhumanist preciselyfor the reasonthathe put the cause of natureabove humanends of any sort.6If the present-daytheoristsof "green to of, rage"are not yet prepared say thatthe preservation say, the species of of elephantsor tigersis worththe destruction humanlife even in greatquantities, then someday they will be. Sacrifice of humanends other than life is but called for now. This is no mere vegetarianism rathera readinessto suspend (to use Kierkegaard'sword about Abraham's intended sacrifice of Isaac) moralityin favor of nonhumannature.
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Otherideals thatareunconsciouslyor theoreticallyraisedabove morality can be suggested. I do not have the whole list. The reason for talking about them in this essay is really to propose that all of these ideals are, to some extent, aesthetic.None is completelyaesthetic,butall arepartlyso. Aesthetic motives help to animatepursuitof ideals thatare untheorizedbutenacted,or theoreticallydefended,at largemoralcost, thatareloved more thanmorality or areso loved thatthe moralcost does not breakinto consciousness with any force. If I am right,then the place to begin the discussion of the cooperation andhostilitybetweenaestheticismandmoralityis with the hostility,which is, I believe, the mainpartof the story.Both unconsciousimmoralityandrationalizations of the (ostensibly nonaesthetic)supra-moral helped along by are unconsciousaestheticism.A moreconscious aestheticism,on the otherhand, may be eithermore self-limiting andhence less productiveof immoralityor, by being given its propername, more easy to denounce and resist. But these last speculationsare uncertain. I say, then,thatdespiteall denials andfailuresof recognition,some partof the passion for religious faith, for the preservation expansion of a way of or life or a solidarygroupidentity,for politics as an end in itself, for the project of masculinity,for acquiringthe pleasuresof a symbolic life, for rising in the world as a great individual,or, finally, for saving naturefrom the predatory verminoushumanrace is aesthetic.All these salient (or potentiallysalient) featuresof the humanrecord,theorizedor unconsciouslyenacted, are to be accountedfor, in part,by whatI shall call aestheticcravings.These cravings, seeking satisfactionor gratification, help to swell the amountof unconscious or rationalizedimmoralityin the world. (To repeat,I am talking aboutpursuits that are immoralbut not preponderantly egotistical, selfish, or personally vicious, pursuitsthatinvolve numbersof people who act idealistically.In the case of extremistandassertiveindividualism, will to play one's role to the the limit-an aesthetic craving-often is a good deal more importantthan mere egotism or lack of scruples.) When I maintainthat unconscious aestheticism is responsiblefor a substantialamountof the world's wickedness, am I saying somethingsurprisingor somethingobvious?I cannottell. But if the claim is obvious, thenI still thinkthatit needs repeatingandexplaining.If it is surprising,then it needs explainingall the more. For the moment my theme is unconscious (or indeliberateor un-selfaware) aestheticism.Even when the immoralsupra-moral theorized,the is ideal, whateverit mightbe, is not recognizedas aestheticexcept occasionally by a raretheoristsuch as Nietzsche or Hegel, andthen not continuously.The immoralismof the lattertwo is steady,buttheircharacterization its motivaof tion as aesthetic is not steady.
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Let me now leave aside the complexities and subtletiesof theorizingthe on and (ostensiblynonaesthetic)supra-moral concentrate humanpromptings to thatneed no theorization be potent.Later,as I havesaid,I discuss a few phito losopherswho knowinglygive high importance aestheticachievementand their dubiousrelationto the claims of morality. The human promptingsare so intense that I call them cravings. What, this then, are aestheticcravings?A way of approaching question is to offer this generalization:in its most extremeforms (and they also are among the great sources of immoralism),aestheticismis the effort to get from experience (let me clumsily call it non-art)what personsordinarilyseek and often find in worksof art-high, low, or middling.Art shouldbe the site where the most intense aesthetic satisfactionsare found. As Frost says, "A story must always release a meaningmorereadilyto those who readthanlife itself as it But goes along ever releases meaning."7 for all of us, art(literaryor other)is not enough;artis notenoughart,notenoughof a good thing.We all cravethat the world give us and do for us what art gives and does-indeed, that the whatartpromisesto be. The worldbe even morefully, moreoverpoweringly, much greateraestheticurgencyis directedto life, not to art.When aesthetic towardsocial reality,theytendto desires aredirectednot towardartbutrather becomes vastly moreserious. If most peobecome cravings.The transaction ple do not live for art,then they do live for aestheticsatisfactionand seek it mostly outside of art. But it takes unrelentingexertion in either perception or action to wring aestheticsatisfactionfromlife "asit goes along."My contention aboutthe fated transferfrom artto life (or the bypassing of artaltogether) is supportedby the symptomaticfact that aestheticiansthemselves routinely go beyond works of artto include natureas suitable for their philosophy, even when they cannot persuadethemselves that natureis God's
art or design. And, in his precritical Observations on the Feeling of the
Beautiful and Sublime (1764), Kant goes beyond both art and nature to encompass almost all human social phenomena by means of his greatly extended aesthetic categories of beauty and sublimity. In so doing, he is simply more explicit than many others,even thoughhe offers little defense of his procedure. To begin with, we must ask, what is sought in works of art?Manythings, of course.In tryingto say whatis, to begin with, peculiarlyaesthetic,philosophers help us to identify essentially aesthetic inclinations. Certainobjects satisfy aestheticinclinations.On the otherhand,aestheticcravingsare acute or obsessive versions of aesthetic inclinations. Works of art, in the first instance,arethose objectsthatsatisfy aestheticinclinationsor aestheticattiEmerKierkegaard, tudes and feelings. Burke, Kant,Hegel, Schopenhauer, son, Whitman, Nietzsche, Pater, Santayana,Heidegger, Wallace Stevens,
AND MORALITY Kateb/ AESTHETICISM
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Adorno,andMarcuse,amongmanyothers,havetriedto say in whatthe peculiarly aestheticconsists and have done so by asking, among otherquestions, what attitudesandfeelings lead personsto like artandwhateverelse seems to resemble art. There is no agreementacross these writings as to what is (or shouldbe) sought in worksof art,butthereis a lot of powerfulstimulationto furtherthinking. The obvious initial answer is that people look for beauty. Burke and Kantproceed to distinguishbetween beautyand sublimityas the two essentially aestheticqualitiesin works of art,and Burkemakes much of pleasureas the passion served by beautyand of astonishmentas the passion served by sublimity. The oddity-perhaps it is an oddity-is that each of them poses the beautiful in opposition to the sublime, as if to say that the essentially aesthetic is made up of two main antitheticalaspects. That is a complication to which we eventuallywill have to attend. Startwith beauty:people want beauty.I add thatpeople not only want it but crave it, they want it not only in artand nature,and they will do wickedness to gratifythe cravingwithoutquite knowing whatthey are doing. What
is beauty? The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) nicely says that beauty is
what is pleasing to the senses, especially sight, or what charmsthe moral or intellectualfaculties.But aesthetictheory,althoughit deals withpleasureand pain, does not concern itself with primitiveunsocializedsenses. Nor does it deal solely with the purepleasurestakenup by Platoin the Philebus-among them, the sensory pleasures attachedto shapes, odors, and sounds. Rather, with the interplaybetween the senses and aestheticiansdeal preponderantly the imagination.Clearly,because aesthetictheoryconsidersverbalworks of art, its subject is not purely sensory. Indeed literatureis not sensory at all except when staged or readaloud;it is not sensory as arepainting,sculpture, architecture,and music. We can aesthetically consider, say, the Oresteia withoutever having seen it performed.But who could possibly maintainthat even the more sensory arts appeal to the primitiveunsocialized senses or solely to the cultivatedsenses? They appealforcefully to the imagination,to which the senses minister,while the imaginationis interlacedwith concepts, eithertacit or express.The imaginationwantsto be not only charmedbutalso thrilled or deeply gratified;it craves. What is imagination?Let us say only that it is the insistence that somethingbeautifulis, that something beautiful exists; or, by contrast,it is the desire that somethingbeautifulshould exist, that the attractivelypossible should be made actual. The same goes for the sublime. (I know I am being arbitrary.) Dr. Johnsonfamously says in Rasselas (1759, chap. 32) thatthe pyramids were erected "only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life and must always be appeasedby some employment."This great formulationhelps us with our question of how we should
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identify the aesthetic and hence aestheticcravings. These are cravings that than aresatisfiedonly whenwe areconvincedthatthe worldis one way rather any other, is beautifulratherthan not. And if the world is not yet what it shouldbe, thenwe insist thatit mustbe madeto conformto ourdetermination of it. Whatspecificallydo we cravewhenwe cravebeauty?I offeronly a sampling of cravings,and I depend on aestheticiansas well as common experience. And if they all are cravingsfor the pleasurethat beauty gives (to use Burke'sconcept), then the pleasureis not simple or pure,and not easily disis cussed, becausethe imagination deeply implicated.Hereis the samplingof cravings,andtheyall areobvious,presentat all levels of intellectandcultivation, and found everywhere:
A. a cravingfor form, shape, shapeliness,definition,or definiteness; a cravingfor coherenceor unity; a cravingfor purityor consistency; a cravingfor discernibleidentityand ease of identification; a cravingfor pattern; a cravingfor clarificationor sharpboundariesand starkcontrasts; a cravingfor dualism or bipolarity; B. a cravingfor style, for stylization;
a craving for decorum, for comme ilfaut;
a craving for suitability,for "fit"; appearances; a cravingfor appropriate C. a cravingfor strikingsurfaces, for color or colorfulness; a cravingfor novelty.
To put it summarily,cravings for beauty are cravings for the elements of beauty-for form (A), style (B), and colorfulness (C), whereverthese elementsareor could be found,singly or in some combination.Even more summarily,we could say thatcravingsfor beautyarefinallycravingsfor a certain sort of meaningor meaningfulness,andatjust aboutany cost (in moralityor, can we can add,truth).Only meaningor meaningfulness finally give pleasure to or appease the hungerof imagination,which often is unscrupulousin its quest for appeasement.These cravings are not the only aesthetic ones, and they certainlycan be distinguishedfrom all the nonaestheticneeds and passions that artworksand, by extension, nature and, by further extension, humanphenomenado or should gratify.At the same time, I must admitthat qualitiesmay be mixed with nonthe cravingfor some of thejust-mentioned
aesthetic desires.
Obviously, I agree with those aestheticians who extend the range of the word beauty. Thus the point is that people find beautiful not only the
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"mere"appearancesof persons and creatures,things and scenes; they also find beautiful-no matter what they say-numerous phenomena whose of beauty (to the socialized senses) is not only a matterof appearances, surthat faces, but also and mostly a matterof the inferenceor interpretation the imaginationis disposedto make.Certaincravingsfrequentlycan be satisfied only by mentalworkthatprocessesrealityin a mannerthatoften is similarto as the dream-work conceptualizedby Freudin TheInterpretation Dreams of (1900). I believe thatmanyof these cravingsareaesthetic,at least in part.The hungryperceptualand mentaldistortionsof ruthlesscondensation,arbitrary displacement, forced representation,and opportunisticrevision figure in both kinds of work, which straindesperatelyto make the world come out right. Relatedly,the extendedapplicationof the wordbeautyis equivalentto the extended applicationof the words namingmost of the elements of beauty.I hope that when I speak later of appearance,form, or shape in the way I do-and this is a very common way-I am not, by following the example of others,merely punningon these words.Thatis, I hope thatthe extendedsignifications show a proper similarity or continuity with the original ones (which are sensory). If, however,the meanings of these terms are only sensory, andthe extensionsarethoughtonly confused inflations,then aesthetics would be a small field, much smallerthancustomaryand much less interestI ing to many people. More important, would be guilty of construingcertain cravingsas aestheticthatarenot aestheticat all. Following BurkeandKant,I bet, however,that, say, the appearances, forms, and shapes, the picturesand patterns,that the imaginationmakes up give pleasuresthat are not discontinuous with the pleasuresgiven by physical appearances(and so on) in art, nature,and society. The imaginationis woven into many of the latterpleasures, too. Perhapswe could say, then, thatthese extendedapplicationsof the word beauty and of the terms that name its elements arejustified because the more sensory referents of this word and these terms are objects of the same kind of desire (or closely so) as the less sensory and the nonsensorythe desire that art and (social and often natural)reality providethose pleasuresthatcome fromtheconviction life hasmeaning,is notchaos;thedesire that thatlife be thesourceof thesekindsof pleasure. sensoryandtheimaginative The satisfactions (whereverfound) thereforeblend into each other, while each also intensifies the need for the other.The overarchingaesthetics is that of of meaning. We all are practitioners it, but too often withoutknowing it. This is notto say,of course,thatanyaspectof social (or natural) realitycan be properlydiscussedas if it were literallyan artwork-say, a literarytext or a picture,the two kinds of artthatareperhapsmost relevantin a discussion of the permeationof life by unconsciousaestheticism.To be sure,philosophers
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beautyor sublimityto bothartandreality;bothareprobedfor meanattribute However, each field toward ing, and both need and receive interpretation. which aestheticismturnsin searchof satisfactionhas its own specificity and therefore requires (to a considerableextent) different technical terms and modes of inquiry.This much is grantedby practicallyevery philosophy of aesthetics, no matterhow extensive its scope. Nevertheless,whateverrigormightclaim, people often respondto social (and natuous boundary-keepers ral) reality as if it were a text or a picturebut loaded with a burdenthat no actual text (perhapseven of scripturalstatus) or picture (perhapseven of iconic status)can carryor is designedto carry.The burdenis imposedby aesthetic craving. satisfacIn any case, we could generalizeand say thatthe most important tions of aestheticcravingsarefound in the following certaintiesof meaningfulness. First,they arefoundin the convictionthatthe appearanceof persons (in andthe appearance the extendedsense) of social occasions and situations is suitableandis as it shouldbe. The rightstyle exists. Second,they arefound in the convictionthatone's own experienceor the experienceof one's group Each or has form-the form of a story,pattern, properlyunfoldingnarrative. orcomponentis intelligiblyconnectableto all others,andall of them incident togethercompose a whole. Third,they arefound in the convictionthatone's identityor the identity of one's grouphas a distinctiveshape or form (in an extendedsense) andthatall the traitsandqualitiesfit togetherandresultin a uniqueor even superiorstyle, or they are found in the convictionthat one or others sustaintheirroles or functionsor tasks with style, with virtuosity,or with surplus energy bestowed on the perfecting of the manner of doing. Fourth,they arefoundin the convictionthatsociety's ritualsandprocedures, all customs and practices,and institutionsand arrangements are shapely or well formed,andall help to comprisea way of life, andhence thatconfusion, change or brute immediacy has been overdisorder,or rapid unpatterned come. (Recall how Socrates' Diotima in Plato's Symposium,210, places well-formed activities, laws, and customs high on the ladder of love of beauty,higherthanbeautifulbodies and souls.) All these (interrelated)achievements are sources of (often unacknowledged) beauty(in some sense), andthereforethey aresourcesof satisfaction. A largepartof the contentof the severalostensibly nonaestheticideals thatI discussed earlier is therefore,by my account, actually aesthetic. But these achievements do not only please; because they are craved, they provide intense gratificationwhen they are imagined to exist, and often will be defendedwithoutmercy;and when they arethoughtpossible, they often will be pursuedwithout mercy.The passion of the imaginationfor meaning or meaningfulnessmust encountersomethingto assuage it. How to say it? An
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aestheticvoid mustbe filled or,by contrast,super-abundant energymust find discharge aesthetically. I now wish to turnto the idea of the sublime, the companionand frequent antithesisof the idea of the beautiful.The OED is much less helpful with the sublimethanwith the beautiful.The dictionarymakesreferenceto thingsthat are high, lofty, or elevated, as the root of the word is thought to indicate. Burke and Kant are often revelatoryon the sublime, while other theorists, such as EmersonandSantayana, scarcelybotherwith the distinctionbetween I beautyand sublimity,often using the wordsinterchangeably. do not pretend to any accuracy,but I suggest that sublimity or the sublime refers to such aspects of artworks,nature,and humansocial phenomenaas the unbounded or or boundless;the indefinite,indeterminate, infinite;the transgressive; the overwhelming or overpowering;excess or extravagance;the massive; the massively ruinous;the oceanic; the abyssal;the overweeningor overreaching; the awe-inspiring,wondrous,astonishing,or unexpectedlymysterious; andthe uncanny.Not everycravingthatI said was for beautyandits elements is given an opposite in my samplingof the cravingsfor the sublime, and not every sublime cravinghas an obvious opposite in the list of cravingsfor the beautiful.But I thinkthatthereis considerablemeritin the Burkean-Kantian typology (dualism).Both philosophersnot only do some indispensablesorting and contrasting,they also highlightthe contentionthatthe aestheticfield is comprised of contradictory cravingsand gratifications. But how could the range of aesthetic objects, conditions, and situations contain opposites? (Obviously, the relevantopposite of beauty here is not ugliness butrather sublimity.)Why see cravingsfor the beautifulandthe sublime (and their various extensions, approximations,and attenuations)and hence theirplaces and sourcesof gratification equally essential to the aesas thetic field? Burke,for one, finds the question close to unanswerable:"The ideas of the sublimeandthe beautifulstandon foundationsso differentthatit is hard,I had almostsaid impossible,to thinkof reconcilingthemin the same I subject."8 fail to see that he ever does succeed in "reconcilingthem in the same subject."It is possible, however,to suggest that,like the beautiful,the sublime, too, appeals to the imagination.Whateverappealsto the imagination is aesthetic, shall we say? The beautifuland the sublime provideinitial and very broadcategoriesto distinguishaestheticcravingsand satisfactions from each otherandfromotherkinds.Both categoriesthen need to be studied for theirdiscriminations: wordsbeautifulandsublimedo not do by themthe selves all the workof judgmentthatwe requireanymorethanthe wordsgood and bad, or good and evil, do all the work of judgment that we require in moral discourse.
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If we can manageto acceptthe idea thataestheticcravingsarefor numerous and sometimes contradictorygratifications,then we have to see what would count as nonaestheticcravings (or motives or desires), whateverthe place or source of their gratifications.In works of aesthetictheory,the aesthe with the merelyanddirectlyappetitive; reflexive theticoften is contrasted necessary;the purelyinstrumenandthe primitivelysensory;the irreducibly tal, utilitarian,or expedient;the unreflectinglyhabitual,the moral, and the truth-seeking.These are nonaestheticand often are deemed anti-aesthetic. Wheneverthe urgeor motive is explainableby referenceto any of these considerations, aestheticism has been subordinatedor replaced. (We should notice, however, that an observermay, consciously or unconsciously, find the some aestheticsatisfactionin contemplating operationof any of them.) I that there is no hardand fast way of distinguishingaesthetic acknowledge considerations(andhence passionsanddesires)fromnonaestheticones. But some contrastbegs to be made. I have tried, then, to indicate what aestheticcravings are and how these cravings can never find their gratifications in artworks(and only rarely in nature as given) but inevitably will seek satisfaction in nearly all social phenomena-human relations,conditions,transactions,situations,and formations. The cravings are so intense and aesthetically un-self-awarethat, with an apparentinnocence, they regularlyproduce immoralityin human to life. In turn,the immoralityis notperceived,is repressedor attributed some other cause, or is justified but not on aesthetic grounds.The ideals unconto sciously preferred doing the rightthing and avoidingwrongare,at least in part,forms of aestheticcraving,whetherfor the beautifulor for the sublime (in any of their elements). The ideal may be religious or be invested in the preservationof a way of life or a distinctive group identity,the ideal may locate in politics or in masculinityan end in itself or the highest end or may sanctify the aspirationof a rareindividualto eminence and greatness,or the environment natural may be cherishedat the expense of humanlife andinterests. In every case, somethingaestheticis at work,andpassionatelyso, butis not recognized and hence often morally ruinousin an apparentlyinnocent or of are Gratifications soughtbeyondthe repertory artworks the dismanner. plays and effects of nature.And perhapsthe most blatantcase of all is group identity.How could we make sense more fully of phenomenasuch as xenophobiaandracismandof muchcaste andclass felling-notjust in high castes and upperclasses-except by referenceto aestheticcravings? I hadbettermakea distinctionat thispoint.I havetwo thingsin mindwhen I speak of an unconscious or unrecognizedaestheticism.First, people and
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theoristsrefuse to see thatwhen they crave and know they crave, say, form, coherence, or dualism, or the indeterminateor the transgressive,they are actuallycravingsomethingessentially aesthetic(ratherthansomethingnecessary or expedient).This is my lesser point. The second and largerpoint is thatwhen people andtheoristscrave,say, form,coherence,or dualism,or the indeterminateor the transgressive,they often representthe craving as if it were for somethingelse (andwould also tendto shunthe very wordcraving). They say thatthey seek truthaboutGod, aretryingto follow the mandatesof or nature(metaphysicallyinterpreted), aredeferringto the mandatesof tradior tion, authority, an immemorialcode. These arethe reasonsthey give themselves when they religiously violate morality,ruthlesslydefenda way of life, carryon the projectof masculinityrigidly,andso on. They do not wantto see thatsome partof the energyof commitmentto theirprojectscomes fromaesthetic cravings,cravingsfor form, coherence,or dualism,or for the indeteror minateor the transgressive some otheraspectof beautyor sublimity.Great sinceritymay lie behindpursuitof these projectsas such for themselves, but the sincerity often is accompaniedby aestheticism. to Yet,I do notmeanto reducehumanconductor supra-moral theorization aestheticism.I just wish to highlight one significantcomponent,althoughI believe that, of all explanatoryreductions,the aestheticone is the least misleading-certainly less misleading than the reduction to economic selfinterest or to an aggressive will to power. The humanrecord is not understandableunless we take into accountthe force of unconsciousor indeliberate aestheticism,while the theoreticalpromotionof supra-moral ideals also sometimes must be seen as (if only drivenpartlyby) unrecognizedaesthetic demands.The innocentassault on moralityis enormous. Does the situationimprovemorallywhenthe aestheticism self-conscious is or when it is deliberate? has greatwrongresultedfroman aestheticismthat Or does nothide fromitself orthathas learnedits own nature? Aside fromHitler, as we watch him in newsreelsand in the cinematicwork of Leni Riefenstahl and also interpretsome of his deeds and his final days, the humanrecord seems to indicatethatmost of the wrongthathas originatedin aestheticcravings for the beautifulandthe sublimehas resultedfromindeliberateaestheticism. In the grip of indeliberateaestheticism,people act immorally,unconsciously, and,as it were, innocently.One reasonfor the discrepancyin effects between indeliberateand deliberateaestheticismis thatthe aestheticmotive is almostimpossibleto own up to when the site of its gratification not artor is naturebutratherhumansocial phenomena.The motive is embarrassing. For men, it is unmanly;for women, it is insensitive.The motive also is not com-
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monly talked about;the concept of the aesthetic is foreign to the conscious experienceof most people. To be sure,thereis a fairamountof everydaytalk aboutbeauty.But the rangeis confined to artand natureor to some specific Manypeople would not activities-and also, of course, to sexual attraction. recognize themselves,however,when confrontedby the chargethatthey are It relentlessin theirsearchfor aestheticgratification. wouldseem impossible, to furthermore, try to disseminate,in a persuasiveway, the ubiquityof aesthetic motives or cravings.The doctrinewould come acrossas obscure,confused, or esoteric. Another reason for surmising that indeliberateaestheticism is a much greatersource of wrong than the deliberatekind is thatthe deliberatekind, just by being deliberate,is typically(butnot in Hitler'scase) a matterof cultivated attitudesand feelings far more than of cravings.Or,cravings seem to play a considerablylesser role. The properlyaestheticattitudesand feelings requirea measureof self-controland might tend to strengthenself-control. I would now like to say whatI meanby aestheticattitudesandfeelings (or aestheticinclinations),as distinctfromaestheticcravings.Are thereproperly aestheticattitudesandfeelings? I supposethatthe way in which to answerthe question is to see the attitudesand feelings thataesthetictheoristshold to be suitable for receptionof and response to artworks. As I have alreadymentioned,some theoristsbegin with things andconditions made to be beautiful (or sublime) and thereforeworthy of reception. Hence these theorists exclude considerationsof necessity or use and also exclude concern with the purposeof furtheringmoralityor truth,and then they ask how a personof goodjudgmentor tasteshouldreceive or respondto these objects and things. In short,they try to ascertainthe properlyaesthetic attitudesandfeelings thatconstitutereceptionandresponse.(Torepeat:most aestheticiansthen extend to naturethe properlyaestheticattitudesand feelings thatthey posit as suitableto art,anda few aestheticiansextendthese attitudes and feelings to social phenomena.)It is worth noting, however, that other aesthetic theoristsbegin with aesthetic attitudesand feelings, which they define as free of concernwith necessity,use, morality,or truthand then searchfor the objectsthatareworthyof those attitudesandfeelings, knowing from the start,of course, what they will find-the beauty (and sublimity)of art (and nature and perhaps aspects of social life). In the same text, an unsorted mixture of both approachescan be present. Either whatever is deemed beautiful(or sublime) is held to deserve receptionand response by meansof aestheticattitudesandfeelings, or whateverdeservesreceptionand response by means of aestheticattitudesand feelings is held to be beautiful (or sublime).We shouldnot worryaboutthe co-presenceof these contrasting
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approaches,whetherin the same text or across texts. There might not be a determinatetemporalsequence involved;rather,it might be an intuitionthat is then developed sequentially. Let us just take the field as it is and notice the attitudes and feelings offered, initially or eventually, as appropriately aesthetic. I would notice some of the more frequentlyrecurrent attitudes.Aesthetic and attitudesareperception,observation, contemplation; noticingand watching; staringand looking hard;studyingand waiting;takingthings in and letting nothingbe lost; stayingwiththe thingor condition,dwelling with or near it; caring aboutit while letting it be; and so on. These attitudesarouseor are aroused by essentially aestheticfeelings-appreciation; admiration;sometimes wonder,amazement,or astonishment.While aestheticcravingsarefor the meaning that the beauty and sublimity of social phenomena(above all) or providein theirform, style, or strikingappearances, in theirtransgression, to and attracted the verysameelementsor attitudes feelings, although aesthetic satisfactionin aspects of beautyor sublimity,seek out theirmost appropriate in artand, secondarily, natureandquitecautiously(if at all) in social phenomand ena. And althoughaestheticattitudes feelings areboundup with pleasure, they precludecravingand hence all the moralruinthatensues when craving does not know itself as aesthetic(or does not know itself as craving).On the otherhand,by most accounts,distanceanddetachment well with aesthetic go attitudesand feelings. Properaestheticinclinationsinvolve self-control. One is possessed by one's cravings and suffers them to instigate one's with the rightaesactions.By contrast,one receivesandrespondsto artworks thetic attitudesand feelings when these works are allowed to be externalto oneself and to affect oneself on their own terms. There is no desire to make them over. Their appealto the imaginationis not obsessive. Santayanasays that the effect of artis to release us from idolatry.9 Now, artistsmake artfor many reasons. But when the art they make deserves our reception and response, and when we carryto it properaestheticattitudesand feelings, we may begin to school ourselves in the mitigationof aestheticcravings.Art is not a substitutefor life, butreceptionand responseto it are a trainingfor living a less crazylife. Kant'sstatementin TheCritiqueof Judgment very sugis gestive: "The beautifulpreparesus to love disinterestedlysomething, even nature itself; the sublime preparesus to esteem something highly even in opposition to our own (sensible) interest.""' The moral danger usually comes when people direct their aestheticism towardhumansocial phenomena,not towardnature(ordinarily) towardart or (no matterhow morallyor quasi-morallyobjectionablethe content).If possible, we must try, when we engage with social phenomenaaesthetically,to
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bringto them aestheticattitudesand feelings ratherthanaestheticcravings. or The beholding, and with it the appreciation admirationof art,is thus the beginningof a more sane relationto social reality.Indeed,the deliberateaesthe is theticismdirectedtowardartworks (subjectto qualifications) model for a deliberateaestheticismdirectedtowardhumansocial phenomenaand,thus, the reductionof unconsciousaestheticismand its offspring,innocent wickedness. Properlyreceived, art teaches us not to expect life to give us, to a much more intense degree, what art(and nature)regularlygive blamelessly (more or less), and it trainsus to receive life, when we are drivento make intense aesthetic demands on it, as we receive art. Art, when properly received,can teachus thatwe become wickedwhenwe confuselife with art. On one hand,then,arthelps to validateaestheticism,andin not satisfying it in the way andto the extentdesired,art,so to speak,directsit to social reality. This is art's inevitableculpability.On the otherhand,receiving art as it attitudesandfeelings-is the best disshouldbe received-with appropriate cipline for respondingto social reality aestheticallyand yet not immorally. Art can correctits own influence;it meansto do so. The satisfactionsof aesthetic feelings arousedby the right attitudescan encroachon the tyrannyof aestheticcravings.Yet,as I shalltryto say,the effortto subdueaestheticcravings aestheticallyis not always successful, and even when it is successful, sometimes it is still morallydisquieting. How, then, does deliberateaestheticismshow itself? We can distinguish between deliberateeverydayaestheticismand deliberatephilosophical aestheticism. Let us begin with deliberateeverydayaestheticismas it is manifested in relationto activitiesandobjects(often the productsof craft)thatare more or less clearlydesignated(or understood)as aimedespecially at eliciting the aesthetic attitudeof observationor contemplationand the aesthetic feeling of appreciation,admiration,or wonder.(I distinguish craft objects from works of art in the conventionalsense.) These activities and objects exist to be witnessedor to be used in display andthusearnaestheticattitudes they are self-containedor and remain unmolestedexcept by interpretation; broughtinto connection with otheractivities and objects only on their own terms,and they are (or shouldbe) trulyinnocentof implicationin wrongdoing. They all satisfy the taste for form or style or colorfulness(to recurto our terms);they all canbejudgedas beautiful.Deliberateeverydayaessummary of theticismthusshows itself in ways suchas appreciation good clothes, fashfondness for shows, sights, diversions, ion, furnishings,and ornamentation; paradesand processions, and circuses (as in "breadand cirentertainment, of cuses"); appreciation ceremonies,rites, and rituals;admirationof what is of staged,played,plotted,orcomposed;appreciation the spectacudesigned, lar and theatrical;admirationof constructedobjects;appreciationof music;
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admirationof athletic contests; admirationof techniqueand virtuosity;and so on. Deliberateeverydayaestheticismeasily extends its attitudesof observationandits feelings of admiration wonderto naturalscenes andeffects and and to many creaturesandplants.(I continueto omit the aestheticismof sex. The deliberateaestheticismI have in mind is nonpossessiveand is illustrated of by a straightman'sadmiration a good-lookingman or a gay man's admiration of a good-looking woman.) I do not wish to be inflexible. I know that aesthetic attitudesor feelings and may begin in cravings, which are then restrainedand transformed, that attitudesor feelings sometimesmay lapse into cravings,as in the case, say, of sports fanaticism, obsession with fashion, or addiction to entertainment. When we succumbin these ways, we know whatis happening-we areheld therecan be no by an aestheticcraving-and we cannothelp it. Furthermore, between designatedaestheticactivities and objects and impermeablebarrier the rest of social life. Mass politics, for example, constantlyis taken in and consumed as advertisement and entertainment,with the result that the demotic erodes the democratic.The tendency to get carriedaway aesthetically is irrepressible.We are always restlessly seeking to find anywherein social reality what we expect to be given (perhapsless importantlyto the everyday self) by artworks,nature,and designated aesthetic activities and objects. Is thereanydeliberateeverydayaestheticismthatknowinglyextendsitself to social reality, apartfrom artworks,nature,and aesthetically designated activities and objects?No, not usually.I have alreadyclaimed that any such conscious extension wouldbe deemedtoo embarrassing even compromisor ing. Nevertheless, some thinkershave not been frightenedout of aestheticism. They articulate deliberate a philosophical aestheticismand,atthe same time, promisemasteryof aestheticcravingsandhence a practiceof aesthetic attitudesandfeelings thatsome (butnot all) writersclaim is morallyinnocent or innocuous. As we shall see, that promise is imperfectlyredeemed;cravings reassertthemselves with unwelcome moralresults. Or,by contrast,the philosophicalaesthetecan decide, afterseriousthoughtandnot in the grip of cravings, that beauty and sublimity (received with the properattitudesand feelings), even when implicated in immorality,are more important,more with the humanstature,andmoreconduciveto humanvitality commensurate orhappinessthanis morality(ortruth).We shouldnotice thatsome deliberate philosophicalaesthetesmay concentrateon the role of artworks,butmost of them take in society or self aestheticallyas well. The concernfor the meaningfulness that is bestowed by form, shapeliness, style, or stylization is paramount.
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One groupof thinkersholds thata society shouldbe judged by the quality exampleis WaltWhitman, it of artworks produces.An especially noteworthy who in Democratic Vistas(1871) is preparedto find moderndemocracy a failure if it does not begin to produceits own art,especially literaryart.The to artmust be inspiredby democraticsentimentandcontribute strengthening it. Above all, the artmustbe the floweringof thatsentiment.Whitmanis noteworthy because he betraysin this work a democraticanxiety in the face of Democratic Vistasshows, in some of its parts,a Whitmanoveraristocracy. come by distaste for his culture. But his greatest thinking, as in "Song of of Myself" andotherpoems andin his prefaces,is a repudiation such anxiety grows into a new philosophirepudiation andsuch distaste.The Whitmanian cal aestheticismor democraticaestheticismto which I returnlater.It also is truethatadmirersof the artof PericleanAthens and RenaissanceItaly often demonstratea deliberatephilosophicalaestheticismon the surface of their writings or so close to it as to make no difference. When a moralistlooks at most of those who use the profusionof splendid artworksas the highest standardby which to judge a society (but now I exempt Whitman),moraldismay is inevitable.The assumption,formulated or nearly so, is that beauty in the more usual sense-beauty as intrinsicto high art and presentdefinitivelyand most impressivelythere-is worthany amountof injusticeat home or abroad.Exploitationor imperialismis justified by the artit materiallymakespossible. Indeed,thereis a detectedaffinity between the energiesof artandthe energiesof imperialismandexploitation. in of Benjamin'syoking of the "documents" civilization and barbarism, the seems vindicated." seventh of the "Theseson the Philosophy of History," But we also know,of course,thatmanywritershave theorizeda deliberate and aestheticismthatgoes well beyondpraiseof artworks nature,andbeyond praise of aesthetically designated activities and objects, to reach to those aspects of social realitynot customarilydesignatedas amenableto aesthetic attitudesand feelings. More precisely, the aim of these writers is either to defend social life when in its actualityit alreadydeserves to elicit aesthetic attitudesand feelings or to advocatethatmuch of social life be made over so thatit deservesto elicit such attitudesandfeelings. A society's productionof artworksis welcomed, but more beauty and sublimity are wantedthan artworks (and also designatedaestheticactivities and objects) supply. What are some examples of deliberate philosophical aestheticism extendedto society as such? A candidexpressionof such a sentimentis not oftento be expectedin postclassicaltimes. When,therefore,we readBurkein
some of his more radical moments in the Reflections on the Revolution in
in Earlier, A PhilosophiFrance(1790), we mustbe all the moreappreciative.

cal Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
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(1757), this greataestheticianand aesthetetries to link variouspassions with the two aestheticeffects and, in the course of so doing, submitsmany social 2 phenomenato aestheticconsideration. But in A Philosophical Enquiry,he does not hold any society as a whole to an aestheticstandard; does not say he that a society is to be admiredand hence preferredwhen its institutionsand practices, when its general spirit, elicit aesthetic attitudesand rewardthem with feelings of pleasure(as beautiful),much less with the curious(and perhaps pleasurable)pain of awful terror(as sublime). Later,however,in Reflections,therearesignificantmomentswhen Burke but praises-one is temptedto say unguardedly, thatwould not be right-the aristocraticorderof Franceand Europebecause it meets an aesthetictest, a test that a revolutionarydemocracy always must fail. The most amazing honoror chivalry momentcomes when he says aboutthe code of aristocratic that underit, "Vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness."'3 The implication is that aristocratsare themselves deliberatelyaesthetic in their conductand thatthereinlies the redemptionof vice-a premeditated beauty of manner,of corporatestyle, forgives or half-forgivesvice while, perhaps, clumsiness or artlessnesscondemnsorhalf-condemnsrightconduct(which I darenot call virtue).To be sure,Burkecan turnon himself. Well afterthe passage on vice and grossness, he chides the Frencharistocracy:
Habitualdissoluteness of mannerscontinuedbeyond the pardonable periodof life, was more common amongstthem thanit is with us; and it reignedwith the less hope of remedy, thoughpossibly with somethingof less mischief, by being coveredwith moreexterior decorum.14
That Burke attributesconscious conformityto the mandatesof aesthetic attitudesand feelings to the leaders of the old orderalso comes out in his assertionthat the code of chivalry"obligedsovereigns to submitto the soft collar of social esteem, compelled sternauthorityto submitto elegance, and gave a dominatingvanquisherof laws to be subduedby manners.""5 the On otherhand,hisjudgmentof the Frenchqueen,MarieAntoinette,shows a certain theoreticalambiguity.He says,
I hear,and I rejoiceto hear,thatthe greatlady ... has bornethatday (one is interestedthat beings made for sufferingshouldsufferwell).... She feels with the dignity of a Roman matron... in the last extremityshe will save herselffromthe last disgraceandthat,if she must fall, she will fall by no ignoble hand.16
It is not quite clear whetherBurke, speaking for himself in this passage, is consciously aestheticorimperspicuously conflatingsocial role andtheatrical role. It is also not quite clear whetherhe thinksthatthe queen is acting a role
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(theatrically)or playing a role (functionally).A relatedambiguitycharacteras by izes the motivationattributed Marxto greatrevolutionaries well as to in theirfarcicalimitators-parodists the openingpages of TheEighteenthBruthereafterin the text. maire of Louis Bonaparte(1852) and recurrently In an earlypartof Reflections,Burketakesup the writingof new constitutions and remarks,in regardto the lower middle class lawyers, that"theevil of a moraland almostphysical inaptitudeof the man to the functionmust be the greatest we can conceive to happen in the management of human if affairs.""7 Whatis physicalinaptitude not a failureto be personallybeautiful to andhence fit to gracethe public stage?Burkealso attributes his opponents an indeliberate aestheticism,indeeda cravingthatis not conscious of its own aestheticismandthatwould be horrifiedto be told its truenature.He says of the dissidentclubs in England:
A cheap, bloodless reformation,a guiltless liberty,appearflat and vapid to their taste. There must be a greatchange of scene; there must be a magnificentstage effect; there growntorpidwiththe lazy enjoyment mustbe a grandspectacleto rousethe imagination, repose of public prosperity.'8 of sixty years securityand the still unanimating
Burke knows betterthan anyone the strengthof aestheticism'sgrip. He offers a deliberateaestheticismin place of an unconsciousone, andhe offers imposedby aesthetic the device of conscious conformityto the requirements attitudesand feelings to replacethe aestheticfailureof uninhibitedaesthetic cravings.That he too is, to some extent, in the grip of unconsciousaestheticism is probablytrue as well. There is a sting in Paine's brilliantmot about Burke that he "pitiesthe plumage but forgets the dying bird.""The mot is two earnedby the force of a paragraph pages before:
As to the tragic paintingsby which Mr. Burke has outragedhis own imaginationand seeks to workuponthatof his readers,they are very well calculatedfor theatricalrepreto for sentation,wherefacts aremanufactured the sake of show and accommodated produce, throughthe weakness of sympathy,a weeping effect. But Mr.Burkeshould recollect thathe is writinghistory,andnot plays, andthathis readerswill expect truth,andnot the spoutingrantof high-toneddeclamation.201
Burke is a complex and instructivecase. He theorizes aboutthe sublime and the beautifulbut also exemplifies his theoryand exceeds it. He displays aestheticattitudesandfeelings and does so across the whole field, from artworks, to nature,to social realityin all its aspects, yet sometimes he seems swept away by aestheticcravingsthathe does not fully indicatehe knows to be cravings or to be aesthetic. He goes almost too easily from theaterto
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politics andbackto theater,as if they were essentiallythe same phenomenon. His very literarystyle is so eloquentas to runthe risk of being thoughtinsinFor cere or even, at times, campy or patentlyself-dramatizing. all these reaof sons, he is, I think, one of the most importantrepresentatives deliberate philosophical aestheticism,especially in the form of a defense of a society when, unchangedfromthe way it is, it supposedlydeservesto elicit aesthetic attitudesand feelings and an aestheticismunderstood,at the same time, as a critique of any society that is, or threatensto become, unfit and unable to elicit these attitudesandfeelings. Burkeis not alone. Otherdefendersof aristocracy, whether qualified (e.g., Tocqueville) or reactive and revisionary (e.g., Nietzsche), show varyingamountsof deliberatephilosophicalaestheticism in regardto aspects of society or to societies as wholes. But Burke, in moderntimes, inventsthe sensibility and sets the standard. Next, there are writerswho urgethatmuch of social life be made over so that it deserves to elicit aesthetic attitudesand feelings. This is an activist deliberatephilosophical aestheticism.Important proponentsinclude Schiller, Nietzsche, Pater,Wilde, Marcuse, and some city plannersand utopian thinkers.They occupy all places on the politicalspectrum,andthereforetheir aspirationsand suggestions differ considerablyfrom one another.In some writers,concernfor the aesthetictakes andreceives colorationfromthe concern for greatersocial justice. In the case of Nietzsche, the aesthetic aspiration serves and is servedby what he calls life, by which he means the will to affirmlife. The stakesfor manyof these proponentsof deliberatephilosophical aestheticism are thus enormous. Existence for them is made better or made more worthhaving when social life, notjust artworks,nature,anddesignated aesthetic activities and objects, solicit and rewardthe various aesthetic attitudesandfeelings. Aestheticismandmoralitywould ideally perfect each other. Thereis, however,one strandof deliberatephilosophicalaestheticismthat is not benign,noteven benignas Nietzsche's view mightperhapsplausiblybe consideredto be. I have alreadymentionedHitler.I wantonly to say now that fascism, to some of its initiators,adherents,and sympathizers,was a consciously aestheticresponse to what they perceivedas the ill-disciplined, illdefined, swarming, incoherent, and slovenly social conditions of modern mass andsurpluspopulationsin distress.It is not only truethatfascism gratified for many people cravingsthatdid not know themselves to be aesthetic, andit is not only truethatfascism was formedandenactedby a few who were willing to say or at least imply thatfascism gratifiedtheiraestheticcravings. The relevantpointhere is thatfor moredetachedadmirers, fascism wasjustified as an aestheticphenomenon,and for them therecould be no higherkind
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2000 POLITICALTHEORY/ February
theircultivated ofjustification.They were not victimizedby cravings;rather, aestheticattitudesandfeelings gladly contemplatedfascism, and they found the it both beautifuland sublime. If the taste for kitsch characterized fascist mass following, as Saul Friedlandersuggestively says in Reflections of Nazism (1984), the tasteof some intellectualsfor fascism was not kitschybut rathersomething else-more refined and still morally lethal. Think of the admirationof especially Italianfascism felt by those such as Yeats, Pound, Lewis; it is aestheticthroughandthrough,controlledandconandWyndham scious. They tendedto thinkthatit was desirablefor political leaders(themselves possessed by aestheticcravings)to controlandsacrificepeople for the sake of a society-wide patternor projectthat appealedto the writer's own aestheticism. There is one last kind of deliberatephilosophical aestheticism that has nature,anddesignatedaestheticactivities regardto mattersbesides artworks, andobjects.Only now the matteris not social realityas a whole or in manyof its aspects. Rather,some writershave put forth the idea that the self should aspireto satisfy aestheticcriteria,shouldaspireto be worthyof aestheticattitudesandfeelings, andshouldaimto be beautifulor sublimein some sense or other. Two recent works have given influential accounts of this ideal and seem to express approvalfor it. I referto Foucault,especially in the second andthirdvolumesof TheHistoryof Sexuality(1984), andto Nehamas'sinterpretation of Nietzsche in his book, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985). A
relatedthoughtis thata person'slife is best lived when it is deliberatelylived as a coherent narrativeor story. This thoughtappearsin Maclntyre'sAfter
Virtue (1981).
beneficiarywhenthe self is madeinto In these views, the mainanticipated a work of art,or a life is lived as a story,is not society, nor is it the detached aesthetic observer.Although benefits to others may accrue, these writers have the individualpersonin view. One satisfies one's aestheticattitudesand feelings as one contemplatesoneself in process or at the end. Foucault,for example, says,
I am referringto what mightbe called "theartsof existence."What I meanby the phrase actionsby which men not only set themselvesrulesof arethose intentionalandvoluntary conduct but also seek to transformthemselves, to change themselves in their singular being, andto maketheirlife into an oeuvrethatcarriescertainaestheticvalues andmeets certainstylistic criteria.21
The arts of existence make one's existence into a work of art. Nehamas says in renderingNietzsche's view,
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a But a personworthyof admiration, personwho has (or is) a self, is one whose thoughts, but desires, andactionsarenot haphazard areinsteadconnectedto one anotherin the intimate way that indicates in all cases the presence of style.... But style, which is what Nietzsche requiresandadmires,involves controlledmultiplicityandresolvedconflict.22
Self-overcomingmay lead to self-mastery,andthe point of self-masteryis to acquirerealityin one's own eyes. One's eyes finally see and wantto see only the shaped and shapely,the beautiful. In the course of sympathetically ideal of a whole picturinga "premodern" life for a self, Maclntyreapprovesof "aconcept of a self whose unity resides which links birthto life to deathas narrative in the unity of a narrative beginSuch a life will be constitutedby involvementin signing to middle to end."23 nificantsocial practicesthatarethemselves shapely andregular,thatrequire andperfectparticular virtues,thatarehallowedby age andnot subjectto individual caprice,andthatrewardthe personwith the convictionof meaningfulness. These practices, however, may be even more meaningful to the aesthetic observerthanto the participants who, in Maclntyre'saccount, are not supposedto possess much self-consciousness.This possibility makes all the more noteworthyMaclntyre'sunfriendlyattitudeto the aestheteas a type of characterfavoredby modernity. It seems to me thatall threeconceptionsarecompatiblewith quite a lot of immorality.Foucault,Nehamas'sNietzsche, andMaclntyreall deny the possibility of a universalistmoralityanduse theirdenial as an openingto modes of individualor social life in which aestheticattitudesand feelings are morFoucaultdoes gesturetowardmoralitywhen he ponders ally unencumbered. Socrates in a late interview.He sees Socrates as proposingthat care for the self (a version of "theartsof existence")might very well lead to carefor others and thatthe best care for otherscomes from a person who first cares for himself.24 But this observationappearsas almost an afterthought. I believe that if only moral limits were respectedtheoretically,then nonmoralmotivation(at least in some sectors of life) would not cause immorality. A person's commitment,say, to performa role or a vocation in the most virtuoseway, or to takepartin a practicewholeheartedly, a vocation,role, but or practicethat was innocentin itself and also was not embeddedin a larger wicked patternor policy, could be seen as deliberateaestheticism.But the deliberate aestheticism would then be morally acceptable while also still capable of being aestheticallyadmirableto the person and to the observer. The preponderant tendency,however,in those who wanta self to be like a work of artor a life to be like a well-made story,is not merely nonmoraland not merely intent on seeing that the idea of innocentbecoming and activity
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POLITICAL THEORY/ February 2000
retaina place in the conceptuallandscapeandin life itself. Thereis ratheran eagerness to see indifference to or disregardof morality as aesthetically indispensable.Morality makes ugly throughits self-examination,through scruples, inhibitions, and second thoughts. In case after case, deliberate philosophicalaestheticismturnsinto a projectfor makingover oneself or the world. The projectsoften indicate thataesthetic attitudeshave transformed themselves into aesthetic cravings or that some aesthetic reason has been allowed to outweigh morality. Whatarewe to say afterthis surveyof cravingsnotrecognizedas aesthetic and of consciously aestheticattitudesand feelings allowed full rein?I began by saying thatthe humanrecord,in its pervasivewickedness,gave ampleevidence thatpeople rankedmany things higherthanmoralityand that numerous thinkersrationalizedthat preference.I then tried to show that unconscious aestheticismis responsiblefor a goodly portionof such wickednessin the world and thatdeliberatephilosophicalaestheticismthreatened counto I tenancemore.My assertionsareunhappy, concede. But I haveto face facts. Aestheticism, whetherunconsciousor deliberate,howevertheorizedor not theorized,is inescapable.It always will be with us. No one can resist it with full success. It may, more than anything else, provide interest in life, its motion and animation.If this last sentenceseems to be squarelyaesthetical, thenthatjustshows thatthereis no escapingaestheticismin any of the kindsI have discussed so far.Even more, aestheticism,in all its potentiallyimmoral kinds, is a significantpartof whatit meansto be human.Still, I wish to point in the direction of a kind of aestheticism I have so far only mentioneddemocraticaestheticism-and try to say sketchilywhatits cultivationcould to war contribute the side of moralityin the permanent waged on moralityby the other kinds of aestheticism. Whatis democraticaestheticism?I haveelsewheretriedto give a preliminaryversionof this idea, basingmyself on Emerson,Thoreau,and Whitman and simultaneouslytaking some thoughts from Nietzsche and Heidegger quiteagainsttheirwill. I cannothereprovideanynew elaboration, only a few straythoughts,and not many of them new, either. A place to beginis Santayana's questionfromTheSense ofBeauty (1896): It "Areall things beautiful?"25 would seem at first sight thatdemocraticaestheticism, which is a deliberatephilosophicalaestheticism, would want to The reasonwould be thatdemocratic answerthe questionin the affirmative. to aestheticismwants,by meansof aestheticattitudes, receiveall thingsin the worldas equal;thatit wantsto bestowthe variousaestheticfeelings of appre-
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ciation, admiration, wonder,andso forthon everythingindiscriminately; and thatit wants eitherto abolish taste or push it well beyond its usual exercises. (Whatis involved,of course, is not demotic aestheticism,which is a celebraI tion of popularmass artworks the highest.)The characterization havejust as given is not far from accurate.But it needs qualification. Santayanais not disposed to say that all things are beautiful,much less thatall things areequally beautiful.He does not wantto abolishtaste, thatis, discrimination.But he does supply a thoughtthat can be built on. He says, "Everythingis beautiful because everythingis capable in some degree of He interestingandcharmingourattention."26 adds,"Thingsdifferimmensely in this capacityto please us in the contemplationof them, and thereforethey differimmenselyin beauty."27 it is the firstformulation can be seized But that on by an advocateof democraticaestheticism:in effect, everythingis worthy of attention.28 advocateof democraticaestheticismthenwishes to go on to An say that the aesthetic attitude of attention often leads to the satisfaction or engenderedby (or inherentin) appreciation, admiration, some other aesthetic feeling. Everythinghas a meaningworthpondering. Democraticaestheticismis receptivityorresponsivenessto as muchof the world as possible-its persons, its events and situations,its conditions, its patternsand sequences. As a deliberatephilosophicalaestheticism,its primarymission is to devote attentionto whatlies outsideartworks, nature,and designatedaestheticactivitiesandobjects,althoughit absorbsthese phenomena in its embrace.The mission is to makethe unpromising world worthyof attention;to grantstandingto whatseems not to meritit; andto hearthe often silent or distortedappealof everyoneandeverythingfor perception,interpreand tation,andcontemplation, hence for some sortof appreciation, admiraif tion must be withheld.Democraticaestheticismindiscriminately confers on non-artthe receptionthatothersthinkonly art-high art-deserves. Greater than even admiration,however, is wonder or amazement,which everyone andeverythingcan elicitjust by being one morereality.Democraticaestheticism tries to makecravingsfor beautyandsublimityin humanrelationsconscious of themselves as aesthetic and to curb them for the sake of morality. This cause is promotedby the cultivationof aestheticattitudesand feelings thatattainenough satisfactionif the moralsense is itself cultivated;the ideal result is that aesthetic cravings,unconsciousor conscious, do not usurpthe moralself, while the aestheticself is continuouslyengagedandcontinuously appeased. Fromthe start,democraticaestheticismis awareof the difficultiesthatthe cravings for beauty and sublimity (in strict and extended senses) must and always will createfor morality,andit triesto assuagethose difficulties.I sup-
32
pose thatfact makes democraticaestheticismimpurelyaestheticor compromised by morality;actually, one of its parentsis morality.But that is the whole point: to assert morality's supremacyand then educate the sense of beauty and sublimityso thatit serves moralityratherthanharmingit. (Only in environmentalism, partaestheticallyrooted,standsa chance of defensibly perhapsmoralchallengingthe claim to supremacyof moralconsiderations; On ity itself would, on this issue, allow its own subordination.) the other hand, unmoralizeddeliberateaestheticism,an aestheticismof perfect freedom, is confined by the moral sense to artworks,nature(in many aspects), and designated activities and objects. In short, the teaching of democratic aestheticismis thatwe shouldnot expect social realityto satisfy cravingsthat no artcan satisfy andthatwe shoulddirecttowardsocial realitythe aesthetic to attitudesandfeelings thatareconventionallydeemedappropriate high art. I have itemized the elements thatfall underthe rubricsof beautyand sublimity andthateitherarecravedor yield themselvesto aestheticattitudesand feelings. As practicedby Emerson, Whitman,Thoreau,and others, democratic aestheticismtries hardto show thatnearlyeveryoneand everythingis worthyof aestheticattitudesandfeelings. They tryto show,first,thatthereis far more beautyand sublimityin the world thaneitherconventionalopinion allows or aristocraticor elitist canons of taste countenance.A revised but Second, these richeraestheticsense reducesbothcravinganddiscrimination. writersmove in the directionof saying thatmanythingsandconditions,even as if they are finally not interpretable beautifulor sublime in any plausible sense, are neverthelessworthyof attentionand also worthyof the aesthetic feelings thatmay grow by meansof attention.Althoughmuchof the worldis not aestheticin even the extendedbut conventionalmeaningsof beauty and sublimity,it is still worthyof aestheticattitudesand feelings. That is to say, by the worldas it is, notthe worldmadeover;the worldas it is, butinterpreted democraticaestheticism. the new canons of the On the firstway of looking, noticing,andinterpreting, aim is to dispel and the spirit of confident cultivationand to both conventionalperception provide a morallyindispensablesupplementto both popularand elitist aesinsights of the Emersonians(and some theticism. Some of the characteristic others) is to find beautyor sublimity where it has not been found before, to find qualityeitherincipientlyor potentiallypresent,or to find the aspiration to beauty or sublimity amid a botchedresult.The supposedlyanti-aesthetic etc.) havea kindof beauty,all the more elements (necessity,use, practicality, On interestingfor being unintended. the second way of looking, noticing,and interpreting,the movement beyond beauty or sublimity (in any plausible of sense), the practitioners democraticaestheticismsay thatthe ugly or what
33
often passes as ugly-the impure,the incompleteor inconclusive,the hybrid, the uncomposedcomposite, the definitively undefinable,the ill defined, the unstable,the heterogeneous,the random,the disorderly,the out of place-is worthy of attention and, from attention, appreciation.Of course, one is temptedto say thatin these cases, beautyor sublimity(especially sublimity) is being redefinedand reconceived,not abandoned.I suppose thatthereis no harm in putting it that way. The danger is that beauty and sublimity are alreadyroutinelyso stretchedthatmaybe we should drawa line somewhere. But the real point is that democratic aestheticism strains to submit the unbeautifuland the unsublime to aesthetic attitudes and feelings. No, all things arenotbeautiful,to revertto Santayana's nor formulation; areall beautiful things equally beautiful.But everyone and everythingdeserves patient attention,a look, a gaze, but not to be followed by an attemptto remedy or control or to make over. There is some resemblance between the democratic aesthete and Plato's promiscuous and insatiable lover of boys, wine, or honor (Republic, V:474-75). Plato says thatall those who trulylove a kind of thing love every specimen, and when they find deficiencies, they redescribethemandconvert them into furtherevidences of excellence andhence into unfailingsourcesof charm.In such insatiability,these lovers are like philosopherswho are insatiable for truth,the only object deserving insatiability.But in opposition to Plato's philosopher,the democraticaesthetestays in this world,finds it worthy of insatiableattention,and tries to appreciateas much of it as possible. The democraticaestheteaspiresto be, in Whitman'swords from the Preface (1855) to Leaves of Grass,the world's"completelover." it is love at a disBut tance; all is loved, and nothing is craved. Santayanaspeakschidinglyof the mysticalproclivityto "lose ourselvesin the satisfying vaguenessof merebeing.',29But thereis a genuinenontheological mysticism that "merebeing" can arouse in the receptive soul. Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Arendtdisplay it memorably,and it occasions one of Stevens's matchlesslate poems, "Of Mere Being,"which rendersthe inconceivable fact that there is a world, much of it unreachedby humanmeaning and untouchableby humanfeeling. "Merebeing"means thatthere is something ratherthan nothing; it also means that any given thing, present here or there, now or then, is accidental, contingent, precarious, mutable, always amenable to different viewings and interpretations, uneternal,and perishable. Democraticaestheticism,in the two main ways of looking, noticing, and interpeting,is driven, in part,by a sense of the amountof wickedness that comes from uncontrolledaestheticcravings.But if democraticaestheticism
34
is morally drivenand adheresto moralitywith such an intensity that it can are turninto moralism-a dangerthatthe Emersonians keen to let you know they are painfullyawareof-then the decisive effect is to enlargethe imagination of morality.By makingeveryoneand everythingworthyof attention andhence of one or anotherof the aestheticfeelings, it checks the tendencyto condemnationand punishment.What begins in moral anxiety sometimes ends in almost total absolution.Whatbegins in horrorends in the ascription of innocence.Because democraticaestheticismis an aestheticism,it delights in finding a field for the display of aesthetic attitudesand feelings everywhere. It takesin the whole world.It vergeson practicingan aestheticcharity piety" that Santayanaattributesto music as very much like the "Christian such, which serves, he claims, to express every feeling, no matterhow disreputable. In fact, in enlarging the moral imaginationdespite its initial moral dismay (or is it because of that dismay?), democraticaestheticism of tracesthe trajectory the teachingsof Jesus, which go from a bittercall for repentanceto the admonitionto be like one's fatherin heaven,"forhe makes his sun to rise on the evil andon the good andsendsrainon thejust andon the unjust"(Matthew6:45). The trouble, of course, is that the observeris in no position to absolve those who have hurt others, not him. Another trouble is that democratic aestheticism calls for personal reform, which consists in employing our democraticallycultivatedaesthetic attitudesand feelings in relation to all phenomena.By doing that,it dulls the urgeto change the world;it leaves the world alone because the world is sufficient as it is. It could thus settle for remainingpassive in the face of the very evil thathelpedto instigateits existence. Then, stung by such passivity and such evil, its practitionersrouse themselves to actionandthusabandontheirenlargedmoralityfor the moralThe and ity of condemnation punishment. originalmoralmotivereclaimsthe aestheticism.(The wholeheartedacceptance of practitionersof democratic violence againstslaveryby Emersonand Whitman,but not Thoreau,is cauof tionary,butwhatchoice did they have?)The practitioners democraticaestheticismthen console themselvesby saying thatunless the world were less unjust,it could not be affirmed;it could not be called innocent;it could not and admiration, wonder. innocently be the site of appreciation, Democratic aestheticism never can escape cruel dilemmas. That some largepartof the world's wickednessderives,however,from cravingsthatdo not know their aestheticism("Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" [Luke23:34]) underliesthe effort to reformindividualsby reforming theiraestheticism.The worldcannotdo withoutthe variousunconscious and deliberate (undemocratic)aestheticisms, theorized or not; we are not
35
humanwithout them, even thoughthey tend to make us not only humanbut also all too human and inhuman as well. Still, democratic aestheticism, althoughhardlyinevitableand immensely artificial,is indispensableas both an antidoteand a transcendence. Nietzsche, earlyin his life as a writer,saidthat"forit is only as anaesthetic phenomenonthatexistence and the world are eternallyjustified"'"and then radicallyqualifiedthe remarklaterin the same text by adding,"Quitegenerally, only music, placedbeside the world,can give us an idea of whatis meant by the justification of the world as an aesthetic phenomenon."32 (Does this qualificationshrinkthe assertionby makingit nearlyinaccessibleto nonmusical people or,by contrast,by exposingits own possible thinness?)The practitioners of democraticaestheticismdo not practicethe philosophical aestheticismof TheBirthof Tragedy. They do nothold thatbeautyandsublimity in the common strictor extendedsense forgivethe unforgivable. They refuse to take the perspectiveof the Nietzscheangod who needs all the ingredients to make his composition.Thatgod is not unlikethe Stoic god who "hasneed of a worldlike this.",33 Instead,they reconceivethe aesthetic.They finally say that although aesthetic cravings are hardly the sole consideration,without them the humanrecordis impossibleto decipher,andthata newly conceived aestheticismcan help us temperouraestheticcravings.But we mustalso realize that it is in the very natureof democraticaestheticismto make its practitioners (and sympathizers)move uneasily, uncertainly,even as in a daze, between moral shock and a moral indulgencethat is, after all, aesthetically inspired,in part.
NOTES
1. Quoted in The New YorkTimes,July II, 1995, A1. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures(New York:Libraryof America, 1983), 454. 3. Soren Kierkegaard, Fearand Trembling, trans.WalterLowrie(Princeton,NJ:Princeton University Press, 1941), esp. 79-123. 4. Thucydides,ThePelopponesianWar, trans.Crawley/Wick (New York:ModernLibrary, 1982), II, 63:124. See also Cleon's characterization the Athenianempire as a tyranny,ibid., of III, 37:172. 5. CarlSchmitt,TheConceptof the Political, trans.George Schwab(New Brunswick,NJ: RutgersUniversityPress, 1976), 26, 28. 6. See Nicholas Everett'sreview of The CollectedPoetryof RobinsonJeffersin TimesLiterary Supplement,November25, 1994, 10-11. 7. Letter to William Braithwaite,March 22, 1915, in Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays (New York:Libraryof America, 1995), 685.
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POLITICAL THEORY/ February 2000
8. EdmundBurke,A Philosophical Enquiryinto the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1958),113-14. andBeautiful(1757), ed. J. T.Boulton(New York: 9. George Santayana,The Life of Reason, vol. 4: Reason in Art (New York: Scribner, 1905), 120. 10. ImmanuelKant, The Critiqueof Judgment,trans. J. H. Bernard(New York:Hafner, 1966), 108. in 11. WalterBenjamin,"Theseson the Philosophyof History," Illuminations,ed. Hannah Arendt,trans.HarryZohn (New York:Schocken, 1969), 256. Politics, Modernity, discussionin StephenK. White,EdmundBurke: 12. See the instructive and Aesthetics (ThousandOaks, CA: Sage, 1994), esp. 1-7, 22-36, 68-79. I also have benefited fromDavidBromwich'sGaussLectureson the Radicalismof EdmundBurke,PrincetonUniversity, February1995. 13. EdmundBurke, Rejlections on the Revolutionin France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London:Penguin, 1982), 170. 14. Ibid., 244. 15. Ibid., 170-71. 16. Ibid., 169. 17. Ibid., 134. 18. Ibid., 156. 19. Thomas Paine, Rightsof Man, ed. Eric Foner(New York:Penguin, 1984), 51. 20. Ibid., 50-51. 21. Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 10-1 1. On the aesthetics of existence, the discussion in chapters 1 to 3 is especially pertinent. 22. AlexanderNehamas,Nietzsche:Life as Literature(Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1985), 7. For Nehamas's furtherexplorationsof aestheticismin life, see TheArt of Living: Socratic Reflectionsfrom Plato to Foucault(Berkeley:Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1998). 23. Alasdair Maclntyre,After Virtue(Notre Dame, IN: Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1981), 7. an trans.J. D. Gauthier, inter24. "TheEthicof Carefor the Self as a Practiceof Freedom," and view (January 20,1984) in TheFinal Foucault,ed. JamesBernauer DavidRasmussen(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 7. On the shift from an aestheticizedcare for the self to a more universallygroundedself-concern,see Foucault'sThe Use of Pleasure,253-54, and TheCareof the Self, trans.RobertHurley (New York:Pantheon,1986), 67-68. Foucaultsays that the shift takes place in late antiquityand the early centuriesof Christianity. 25. George Santayana,TheSense of Beauty (New York:Dover, 1955), 79. See section 31, pp. 79-82. 26. Ibid., 80. 27. Ibid. centralto the morallife. I findespecially valu28. SimoneWeil madethe facultyof attention (Intimations of Christianity) (Paris: La able the discussion in Intuitions pre~-chretiennes Colombe, 1951), 155-59. IrisMurdochhas fruitfullyexploredthis notion in TheSovereigntyof Good (New York:Schocken, 1971), esp. 34-45,64-67,84-90. Murdoch'swhole book is relevant to the purposesof this essay, althoughI do not endorsethe more religious passages. 29. Santayana,7he Sense of Beauty,80. 30. Santayana,Reason in Art, 59.
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31. FriedrichNietzsche, TheBirthof Tragedy(1872), in Basic Writingsof Nietzsche,trans. 1968), sec. 5, 52. Onthe pervasivenessof anded. WalterKaufmann (New York:Modem Library, aestheticcategoriesin the sense of historyin Nietzsche andHegel, see JoshuaF. Dienstag,Dancing in Chains: Narrativeand Memoryin Political Theory(Stanford,CA: StanfordUniversity Press, 1997). sec. 24, 141. 32. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 33. Arrian'sDiscourses of Epictetus,trans.P.E. Matheson,in TheStoic and EpicureanPhilosophers,ed. WhitneyJ. Oates (New York:RandomHouse, 1940), I, 29:277. Nietzsche gives a in rich descriptionof the "entirelyreckless andamoralartist-god" "Attempt a Self-Criticism" at sec. 5, 22. (1886), in TheBirth of Tragedy,
George Kateb teaches political theory at Princeton University.His article, "Socratic Integrity," appeared in NOMOS,XL, Integrityand Conscience (New York:New York UniversityPress, 1998).

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Aestheticism and Morality: Their Cooperation and Hostility Author(s): George Kateb Reviewed work(s): Source: Political Theory,

UNCERTAIN RELATIONS: LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AND THE AESTHETIC-AFFECTIVE DIMENSION

Their Cooperation and Hostility

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in Earlier, A PhilosophiFrance(1790), we mustbe all the moreappreciative.

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