Arts and Crafts

The generally accepted definitional distinction between art and craft is that the latter is a use-object, while the former isn’t. Another distinction, pertaining to the mental process of the artist/crafter rather than to the fate of the object produced, is that crafters begin with a finite notion of what their object should be—ostensible artists, however, do not begin with a finite concept of what their produced object will be. Crafts belong to the level of the mundanely purposive—art-objects occupy a different territory.

But if the concept of purposiveness did not pertain to art at all we would have no concern for it, because it would inspire no feeling in us. Summarizing certain of Kant’s arguments in the third Critique, Will Dudley writes that “Nature appears beautiful precisely when it appears as if its forms had been arranged for the purpose of pleasing us…” Though there is no evidence that reality and nature were in fact constructed for the purpose of pleasing beings like us, Kant argues that we need to encounter life as if it were purposively constructed with beings like us in mind.

I think the answer to the question of the sense in which art is purposive lies in investigating and developing the relationship between part and whole. Crafts, or use-objects, are characterized by the purposiveness of the whole object—the completed craft is a conglomeration of parts in which the part-hood of the parts is necessarily subsumed under the general purposiveness of the entire use-object. Parts, in crafts, exist only insofar as they serve the overall given finite use which the object is intended to carry out. Put differently, individual formal properties of use-objects do not call attention to themselves. Individual formal properties of art-objects, be they scenes or characters in novels, the foreground of a painting, particularly soulful guitar solos in competent rock songs, or the torso of a statue, do. The parts of art-objects are significant in a way that the parts of use-objects are not.

A physical rock, for example, is a seamless conglomeration of fragments whose particularities are lost in the general task of being a rock and doing whatever a rock might do. (Achieving rockness?) This basically amounts to being used as a barbaric tool by animals (human and non) or just sitting on the ground. There is rockness, but there isn’t artness, because purposiveness is different in use-objects than it is in art-objects. Use-objects are formally purposive, whereas art-objects have a purposiveness of form. We can summon an idea of rockness that conceives of the Idea of a rock in all of its various permutations, more or less. Trying to achieve a similar type of formal knowledge about art, an Idea of artness, doesn’t work because art is not characterized by the same purposiveness that rocks are. Art-objects are rather the fruitfully chaotic products of disparate, singular formal properties, each with its own purposiveness in tow.

With art-objects, the relation of parts to the whole is not conglomerative, but agglomerative. The integrity of the part-hood of individual formal aspects of art-objects remains intact—the parts of art-objects do not exist only to be subsumed under the broader finite telos of the whole. Rather, the art-object is a bristling agglomeration of detailed formal properties, each with its own telos which resembles but is not identical to the telic properties of the other formal properties of the art-object. An agglomeration, by the way, is a cluster of elements which, though occupying the same space, cannot be said to totally cohere—correlativity without coherence or causation. The purposiveness of art-objects is a purposiveness of form, while use-objects’ purposiveness is a formal purposiveness. In crafts, the form of the final product is all—in art, the form of the final product is only an incidental agglomeration of parts—each of which carries its own distinct purposiveness.

The purposiveness of art-objects, the purposiveness of form, exists in numerous formal aspects simultaneously. Thus the purposiveness of the totality of the art-object is as multiple as are its formal elements—what grounds the art-object is the indistinct but still powerful force of the purposiveness of form. The formal properties of art-objects form a relative unity, whereas the formal properties of use-objects form a total unity. The reason for the difference between the internal schemas of the two kinds of objects is that art-objects have no formal purposiveness; the totality of the art-object, considered as a definite whole, has no distinct purpose. But, since it cannot escape the concept of purposiveness entirely, it is necessary that art-objects be subject to a different kind of purposiveness—the purposiveness of form, with form understood in typical spatiotemporal terms.

The lack of formal purposiveness in art-objects results in this state of affairs, which is characterized by the agglomerative relative unity of the disparate elements comprising the art-object. Just like the definite formal telos of use-objects decreases the singularity of the individual formal properties of the object, the persistently indefinite formal purposiveness of art-objects results in the definiteness and singularity of its parts. The purpose of art-objects is a showing off of their intricately realized parts.

Why Schooling Hurts Everyone

I am coming to terms with some decidedly unpleasant truths about the profession I’m sliding into. Academic philosophy has nearly nothing to do with wisdom, truth, or thinking, and lots to do with, in the technical Harry Frankfurt sense, bullshit, technicality, and basic workmanship. We (they?) are meant to push existent conceptual chunks around without an even over-the-shoulder acknowledgement or explanation of why pushing verbal/conceptual pieces around matters. I came to graduate level philosophy motivated by a why, in search of an atmosphere conducive to an attitude of fervent why-ness, and have met only people who know how to ask how and, at best on rare days, show how. This is the most succinct and accurate assessment of training for professional philosophizing that I can come up with—at its best it can show you clearly how to critique existent words by means of other words, none of which matter to you in any earnest, prickly, intensely human sense. At its worst (i.e. most of the time) it foggily plows through concept-clusters which are nearly impossible to care about even when they’re being explicated clearly.

It took some time, but I am now more or less at peace with the fact that being visibly put off by smug contentment with bullshit is impolitic in graduate seminar rooms. Still, it would be nice to have the truth of the situation frankly laid out at the beginning of semesters—i.e., we are transmitting a lexicon to you pre-professionals which should matter about as much as graphs matter to economists, which, if you’re exceedingly lucky, you will eventually have the privilege of shoving towards waves of initially receptive and enthusiastic and then rapidly frustrated and finally apathetic students.

Again, I realize all of this now and accept it—I realize that the difference between college philosophy and, say, microeconomics is one of degree and not of kind. There is as little truth involved in the former as in the latter.

This would be easier to accept if the philosophers would a) not be called philosophers and b) admit it up front. Actually, admitting anything suggestive of a plan, a compass, an expected port of call, would be comforting—but it would also imply and presuppose deep reflection and a level of comfort with publicly displaying one’s strict attachment to one’s intellectual conscience, in a Nietzschean sense, which of course prohibits one from either tolerating the profession or flourishing in it.

An atmosphere of decreased hostility toward truth in college philosophy spaces would be interesting because there is almost nowhere in American life where truth can breathe, let alone flourish. I get the sense, just from reading people’s faces and reading between the lines of what oozes out of their mouths, that people are ready to be preached to and, insofar as they are conscious enough to want anything that corporate America cannot cram into them, I think want to be preached to by a righteous person.

Of course, the concept of righteousness still existing as anything beyond one doing one’s mechanical bourgeois duty or beyond some irrelevant religiosity is either laughable or incomprehensible to nearly all. This is at the root of nihilism, I think. Once God died, the concept of righteousness steadily lost its meaning, ending up finally in its present condition as a set of letters signifying either nothing or some antiquated ontotheological novelty. Can human beings live in this condition of estrangement from righteousness? Yes. Can they live good lives? Only if the concept of good is stripped of all of its qualities except hedonistic ones, meaning stripped of most of the things that have been attached to ‘the good’ for most of the period of recorded Western history (i.e., reflectiveness, passion, profundity…).

Perhaps I am misguided in my analysis of the academic situation, but the simultaneous lack of righteousness and crushing boredom and disillusionment seem to be causally connected. Should people really have to pretend that education is important? Is it crazy to suggest that professors (gulp) profess things well enough that boredom doesn’t hang in lecture halls like an unhappy cloud? People go through the motions in secondary school, at their jobs, and in most of their social interactions with peers, friends, even their main squeezes—should they do the same in their extravagantly expensive philosophy courses?

It’s unavoidable, I think, because, given how dutifully untruthful life is everywhere outside philosophy classrooms, it would be foolish to expect the proceedings inside of philosophy classrooms to be much different.

This is not a new development. Since Socrates, power structures and the truth have been at odds. Being executed was the ultimate affirmation of the truth and righteousness of Socrates’ way of life and of his eponymous Method (which is hardly ever used by professional philosophers, by the way). As Kierkegaard wrote—the crowd is untruth. But what today for us isn’t crowd? Young people, on some level at least, want to engage with something that isn’t the crowd. This is probably why most of them enroll in philosophy courses (aside from their being required, of course). Now, insofar as writing down complex webs of vaguely related conceptual slogans requires sustained mental exertion, in a limitedly mimetic (i.e. unthoughtful) sense, what happens in philosophy classes is not crowd, if only because people usually don’t sit down and take erratic notes in crowds (it would be awkward and cumbersome).

One cannot be righteous without truth, and one cannot be very truthful and get a job. Hostility to truth goes hand in hand with our utter estrangement from the notion of righteousness playing a motivational role in life. One need only read one of John Taylor Gatto’s books or listen to one of his interviews to see how American society, taking its cues from 19th century Prussian social organization, has been designed to eradicate both truthfulness and imagination, to make us optimally easy to control. And really, who has ever been easier to control than the contemporary American citizen? Johan Fichte, Kant’s successor as chair of the philosophy department of the University of Berlin, and Hegel’s predecessor, wrote about the necessity of instituting regimented public school systems to squelch true independence and imagination in the Prussian youth. Isaiah Berlin cites Fichte as one of the major intellectual sources of modern authoritarianism for a reason. This innovative form of social control compensated for Prussia’s lack of natural resources to make it the most feared military power in Europe, responsible for some of the most destructive wars in history.

Now, we in America of course are far removed from such unappealing things, aren’t we? Actually, not really, considering that a) we have perfected, starting with kindergarten, Prussia’s signature form of mandatory, intentionally boring schooling, which is only somewhat attenuated in college classrooms and b) having the most powerful, expensive, and reckless military force in history. In late September of 2010, an American Predator drone killed four Pakistani militants, and hardly anyone noticed, despite the fact that a) we’ve declared no war on Pakistan, so that military action there is even less legal than that in Iraq and Afghanistan and b) America is officially using robots to kill people, no small step in the history of the human enterprise.

In this context Nietzsche’s true importance emerges—both as a critic of the dictatorship of what he called ‘pale atheism,’ which means a postmodern secularism utterly devoid of righteousness, and the kind of systematic and institutionalized boredom, seriousness, and unrighteous gravity of the Prussia of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, which so overwhelmingly dominates educational discourse in America that when their bitter critic Nietzsche, who appeals so strongly to whatever love of liberty still exists in American youth that he is granted a token and ambiguous place in curricula, he is reduced to concepts and, evil of evils, ‘themes.’

The profound irony of a revolutionary thinker like Nietzsche being incorporated into a thoroughgoingly Prussian educational power structure, if one modestly leavened by flickering strands of American libertarianism, is just one of many frustrating realities hiding just beneath the surface of institutional efficiency, waiting for those Nietzscheans who have imagination enough, despite years of schooling, to think with their hearts as well as their minds, and to have the gall, as Nietzsche did, to be as un-German as possible.

Disgust

What is the place of disgust in society today? In previous times, ones more completely saturated with religious ethics, where sinning was thought to be a real thing that barred you from heaven and sent you to hell, it was clear what we should be disgusted with—sin, sinning, and sinners. Now we don’t tend to view the concept of sinning as altogether relevant, which of course doesn’t mean that there aren’t still people who offend in the same way that sinners used to, just that the criterion for evaluating them is no longer valid. The way we evaluated behavior in the past isn’t valid anymore, but people aren’t as different as our evolving conceptual frameworks are, meaning that people, the basis for all moral and ethical ideas, are the same things now that gave rise to the idea of sinning in more unironically theistic ages. Sinning was hated, feared, reviled, and scorned—people, behaviors, and concepts must now, still in our atheistic age, be deserving of similar energy, if with a different set of vocabulary and evaluative criteria, but those feelings and impulses are still there.

We can’t have outgrown the impulses that gave rise to the way we evaluated things for two thousand years. I don’t think we’re all up to the challenge of becoming gods ourselves, of replacing the old value structures and inserting ourselves there instead, mainly because, in contrast to Christian ages, our post-Christian values and societal-goals are not openly discussed, because they are so untenable and new. If we had social gatherings every week in our communities to openly discuss the trials and tribulations of continually becoming the overman, of self-legislation and all those other Nietzschean ideals, then I think our atheistic age would be more tenable, concrete, and altogether less atomized.

The danger of post-Christian life is its atomization—there is no unifying principle which we all more or less agree on and collectively aim toward. There are, no doubt, basic concepts like goodness, decency, political stability, and so forth, but those have always been around and cannot sustain a society—I’m talking about something on the level of our previously existent drive toward heaven. Today, our ideals and deepest spiritual convictions are all resolutely private matters; as if something so important could be kept so strictly out of view without it withering away or becoming so vague and buried inside of us as to lose all meaning or relevance. This is one of Nietzsche’s most salient points—that atheism must not become pale, dim, self-satisfied and passionless; that there must, even after God’s death, be a source of genuine spiritualism and, above all, righteousness, in the collective mind and which friends and family members can, in community, delight in and strive toward. One of the more interesting things Nietzsche tries to do is maintain a sense of righteousness in spite of the recent death of God, the former fountain of all righteousness. His task is our task, even though we aren’t aware of it and we’ve mostly failed at it.

Christianity, like all religions, is a myth, one that we have become too rationalistic to really believe in anymore or allow to guide or behavior, motivate us, and serve as the telos of our lives. We need a new ultimate why which we can all believe in. The absence of such a why has resulted in such widespread ironism that it is either impossible or silly to be in any sense earnest or sincere in public anymore. Irony, as Kierkegaard described it in his inimitable way, is the “first and most abstract qualification of subjectivity.” It is also a product of the subject negating actuality because it does not contain enough reality to suit him. In our time the actual contains little, if any, reality for an unprecedented number of people that the age is so drenched in ironism that the collective judgment of general humanity scarcely rises above descriptions like ‘shallow’ ‘superficial’ ‘flimsy’ ‘pale’ etc.

The question then is how to make the actual (or the givenness of experience) more real, or less absurd, than it so clearly is. We expect the actual to disgust us but we are not surprised or disgusted with the disgust. We are in some sense shocked when we are not disgusted by the lack of reality contained in a given slice of actuality. Whenever I meet someone who is capable of being honest, engaging, interesting, and generous with his past in an at least quasi-reflective way, I am indeed shocked. I expect everyone I meet to be wantonly vapid, and am right most of the time. The result is my personal outlook being deeply, probably terminally ironical, because my given actuality, to my mind, is so eminently negatable.

This isn’t in any way a modern or post-modern (or post-post-modern) problem—Socrates’ very existence was irony, as shown by how relentlessly he negated everything around him through his world-historically unprecedented use of dialectical reasoning. He subjected his interlocutors, who were held in high regard and paid well to impart their knowledge to youths, to such devastating dialectical skirmishes that they were reduced to having to admit their ignorance. Socrates reproached mankind for its vain belief in the possibility of knowledge, but that was all—he only negated the actual, without making any kind of positive contribution. Socratism, as Clitophon pointed out, can’t really help us achieve virtue.

Of course any words like virtue, temperance, piety, wisdom, effort, or whatever else, are so laughably beyond the scope of being used today that no one brings them up in social situations or in educational institutions in an un-ironic way. Or, when they are used unironically, as in a student asking a question about virtue, the professor drones on about nothing and no one knows what the point of listening to the windiness coming from their mouths is, even though after the wind stops issuing forth those present all nod soberly as if something important just happened. But, for the most part, no overtures toward honoring or deciphering those old buzz-words is made, and educational institutions, even higher education in philosophy, even (and especially) graduate seminars, content themselves with bandying about absolutely indecipherable streams of irrelevant nonsense, which are either unaddressed or limply taken up and never addressed straightforwardly as being the kind of nonsense that it is, under the banner of pluralism—i.e., no one thing is right, diversity is the only thing that matters, and passing any kind of judgment whatsoever is beyond unthinkable.

The problem with pluralism, diversity, or relativism or whatever contemporary slogan we use as the fulcrum for the fact of our gathering together, is that they are in a very important sense not pluralistic, diverse, or relative, but rather, in a real sense, absolutist. For a relativist, everything is relative except the fact that being an absolutist is absolutely wrong—i.e., any real opposition is beyond the pale. At its root, the kind of pluralism guiding our educational institutions, which are at least allegedly meant to provide our unprecedentedly context-less students with some kind of tangible psychospiritual fabric from which to weave the essence of their subsequent lives to an extent sufficient to make them good citizens (a concept that of course has, like most others, become utterly unintelligible), is paper-thin in this sense: it provides for a merely apparent rather than substantive diversity and pluralism. We defend to the very death a person’s right to look and act bizarrely, but not to present truly upsetting or radical ideas. We are too anxious at the prospect of thinking to permit this. A genuinely pluralistic discourse would not be boring, because the basis of what was going on would have constant attacks against it, whereas just about every second a student spends in our educational institutions is boring because no thinking is happening or is expected to happen, since the debate doesn’t exist and, if it did, no possible challenge to it would be given anything more than token consideration.

Again, what is the place of disgust in our society? We are disgusted with basic crimes, and that’s just about it. But what an imprecise animal we’ve become if we cannot apply any righteousness to the finer elements of social intercourse and reserve it all for glaring violations of law. We’ve become so proud of ourselves for ‘tolerating’ difference, and so intolerant of those who do not fit into this rapidly ossifying paradigm of tolerance in extremis, that we’ve more or less forgotten what real difference sounds and feels like. Too much focus on accepting marginal sexual practices, racial identities or economic situations has sapped us of our ability to identify or engage divergent thought. Obviously sex, race, class, and sexuality should never be used to subjugate a person—but an individual who has made it to college, in the overwhelming majority of instances, already knows this in her mind and heart—why dwell on it to the exclusion of sophisticated, self-confident dissent?

Most educational experiences consist in appreciating what the power structure has deemed important from the corpus of thought that has already happened, and almost nothing more than this is required of the future citizens who are paying tens upon tens of thousands of dollars for a college education. Most students, of course, want nothing more than to have some facts and concepts tossed at them which they will eventually volley back to the instructor in a somewhat varied form. But some are foolish enough to think that college education is different from the regimented, purposefully boring, imagination-squelching schooling of grades 6-12. That is six years of hardcore, institutionalized boredom, and it is very widely recognized that those years will be unfulfilling, desperate, and pointless, existing only to permit one access to college. So those few college students who made it through that gauntlet and have enough energy and righteousness left in them to really tackle some higher level books will find out a) that this kind of energy will narrow down the number of friends they will be able to have in college quite drastically and b) the professors who aren’t threatened by rigorous, confident, yet irreverent writerly energy are equipped and permitted to do little more than agree that collegiate actuality contains a degree of reality which is thoroughly negatable, and to perhaps commiserate with the stranded student about the general hopelessness of society.

All of this is to say that the notion, which I think still exists, of secondary and, more so, higher education having anything whatsoever to do with untethered critical thought, with the possibility of valuing, is more or less absurd. No one receives or is expected to receive any kind of moral instruction or to even witness or absorb any kind of righteousness during their educational experiences. They are of course expected to drink obscene amounts of alcohol, develop superficial friendships based on shared experiences of being so drunk that they don’t remember what happened, engage in meaningless and semi-anonymous sexual encounters, talk mainly about sporting events, either professional or ones housed in their enormous and enormously expensive college stadiums, mainstream entertainment cartridges, and, every few weeks or so, give an at least over-the-shoulder acknowledgement to basic literacy.

There is a familiar and to some trite problem in philosophy of how to make space for value in a world of fact, but I don’t think we’re too familiar with it or that the ideas behind the question are that trite, if its general phrasing might be. When do people feel that they are engaged in something, or near something, or have heard of something, that smacked in any sense of whatever the word ‘value’ might mean? Value basically means some phenomenon that points to nothing beyond itself, that isn’t replaceable or reproducible or instantly forgettable. But what in our lives today as we lead them isn’t replaceable or instantly forgettable? Of course even asking questions along this line makes one smirk because the notion of value has been so thoroughly excised from our experience that acting as if it might mean something smacks of religious quackery. But these ironic atheists, which I count myself as too, have to stand on some ground, don’t they? And when you smirk or laugh at some misguided fool, don’t you have to at least in some sense know something they don’t? Well, what do the pale atheists know that the post-post-modern seeker after virtue doesn’t? They know that they do not know, just like Socrates did; but was Socrates really a good enough role model to still be the texture of our souls even today?

Nietzsche certainly didn’t think so—he thought that Socratism represented the death knell of all that was great about Greek culture. This is not to say that Socratism is not important or significant to the human enterprise—it was perhaps an inevitable development and is eminently worth absorbing into oneself, but it is not sufficient to constitute the fulcrum of a world-view, because irony is not enough to live on, and as Kierkegaard submitted, Socrates’ very existence was irony. Nietzsche thought that the Socratic tendency of reasoning about everything negated the very possibility conditions of value or valuing—because value can never be estimated or reasoned over, it has to just be. Reason = virtue = happiness has led us astray, Nietzsche says, and this has culminated inevitably in nihilism. We’ve lost touch with the ability to experience value because we’ve become too Socratic, and need to get in touch with a pre-Socratic sense of life.

But it is I think less useful to go into philosophical history for answers than to use the present and what one conceives of the future to be. The history of philosophy, after all, is primarily the history of a series of errors, of bad answers to badly stated questions, and can often confuse more than clarify, frustrate rather than inspire. Studying doesn’t necessary have much to do with wisdom—the recognition that studying might be important is I think a precondition for wisdom inhabiting a person, but that should be more or less the extent of it. Scholarship cannot yield much else besides more scholarship—Husserl famously declared that facts can only produce other facts; a fact which is now presented at students in a classroom who take note of it and move on. That is sort of disgusting and it is also the main thing that happens in the primary place where thinking is allegedly happening.