The things which I have seen I now can see no more - Wordsworth

I remember being an outsider at a certain social gathering one night. A group of people were talking about their love for a certain kind of music which I happen to not like. My immediate reaction was to call them - in my head - a group of snobs who think any type of music they don't like to be inferior. But this doesn't follow at all. In fact, to the people inside the group, snobbery isn't even on their minds. Snobbery seems to be something that the outsider calls those who are 'in the know', those for whom the notion of snobbery is furthest from their mind. Thus, to the music lovers, the notion of 'loving the right music' wasn't even on their mind - they were just loving the music they happened to naturally love. The question of whether or not the music fit a certain category or genre comes - if at all - as an after-thought.

It's the same with religion. Religion, as we know, is a category we use to label a certain set of behaviors, beliefs, and rituals. But to those 'inside' the religion, the word 'religion' isn't even on their minds. Their minds are too preoccupied thinking about God. The outsider calls the religious man 'religious' as an outsider. If the outsider were to ask the religious man whether he was engaging in religious behavior, the religious man himself would have to become an outside inspector of his own prior behavior. Thus, to those within a category, the category is forgotten; but to the outsider, he has nothing but the category. But an interesting thing happens if I, as an outsider, ask the music snob to explain whether or not their preferred music is actually good and beautiful. There's something about the very study that sops what was before a pure, virginal, thoughtless enjoyment of the kind of music it was most natural for him to love. We're now in the position of the outsider, conjuring up criteria, categories, and requirements: lyrical complexity, genre, voice inflection. All of these elements, which were before rightly ignored (not even consciously ignored, but, by the very nature of what's going on, being blithely ignorant of), are now classified. But do you see what's happened? The classifier now has a before and after with their enjoyment: before the classification and after. Before the classification, the enjoyer's whole psychological framework was more honest in its enjoyment: now, he is almost the object under his own microscope - and how can his previous enjoyment be dublicated in these conditions?

When I am enjoying a great movie or a great book or a great song, I am not at all thinking about whether my taste in these art forms is acceptable, mainstream, or cool. In fact, it's only after I've thought about these distractions that my previoius enjoyment is somewhat tarnished. When I read about the maddening resolve of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, why cloud my enjoyment or engrossment with petty considerations about genre, acceptability, classifications, writing style, being up to date or mainstream? The child, avoiding his mother in the closet, with a candle, face close up against a ragged copy of Treasure Island, is closer to sincere and unclouded enjoyment of art than the most sophisticated literary critic. The child isn't thinking about 'the right books' or even about books at all; to bring up the subject would be an impertinence. The child is too busy attending to the story; and the story becomes, without the child consciously noticing it, the lense through which the world is interpreted and understood.

These principles seem to me to unlock a mystery I've been trying to figure out for a long time. I'm talking about the habit we all have of trying to get our friends to enjoy the kinds of art we love. If we introduce our friend to this art for any reason, or on any ground, we are bound to become that objective classifier of systems that is so dangerous for the recovery of that old frame of mind that is so necessary for what it means to genuinely enjoy a work of art. It is so much more natural for our friend to be drawn into the music without any kind of prior justification, no excuses for parts of the art the friend might find objectionable, no pressure on the friend to feel as you did at certain times. In doing this, we build a framework though which we invite our friend to experience the art. But it was through the absence of any kind of framework that we came to love the art at all. What we build up for our friend was abscent for us. How can we expect the friend to feel as we felt if the conditions in which the friend experiences the art are one way for him, and another for us? Enjoying a song, a movie, or a book is as simple and mysterious as falling in love. It can't be forced, as if to treat it as a magic potion that, if digested, works an identical effect in any person. It is more like our taste in food. When I'm tasting the steak, I'm thinking less of the steak and more about the taste, my enjoyment resting less with the steak and more with the taste that the steak occasioned. If I find afterwards that it is fashionable to eat steak, then, if I really love the taste, this will no more diminish my love for steak than if I discovered it was socially frowned upon. But if your love adjusts to the up and and downs of social acceptance, you'll know your love was a sham.

What is art? - a theory of art from Tolstoy

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
Leo Tolstoy

In 1897, Tolstoy published a book called “What is Art?” Since I think art is a very important enterprise in human existence, I like to look to the huge intellectuals about what they think art amounts to. As a writer, Tolstoy was amazing, a psychologist of the highest order, a superb creator of personality, character, plot, pacing, balance, and philosophical meditator on the human condition, a great artist, writer, thinker. He is responsible for probably the two best books ever written: Anna Kerenina and War and Peace. The only books that I think come close to their size, scope, and psychological depth are Moby Dick or Les Miserables. But Melville and Hugo never produced a philosophy of art. Tolstoy did!

To Tolstoy, a work qualified as a good piece of art if it turned up the ‘good, true, and beautiful’ notch. However far the notch was turned was the judge of whether the work was more or less a successful artistic achievement. Have you ever read a book which was just a complete sequence of events, driven by the raw succession of empirical consequences? There are characters to be sure, and even a plot, but the narrative’s chief concern is the description of the actions of the characters and ensuring that the preconceived events in the author’s mind unfurl exactly as planed, with little to no philosophical or psychological interpretation of the events taking place or the characters undertaking their acts, thoughts, or motives. If you have, these authors have in mind a philosophy of art called realism.

In realism, everything is just transparently given; no attempt at interpretation is made, because the very transparency of the events is so self-evidently clear that the reader’s interpretation is almost compelled from without. This isn’t a bad view and it’s been around a while: at least, since Plato.

Or, have you ever read a book just for the sheer pleasure of it, and so the more pleasure you felt as you read, the more you were tempted to call the book great, or a great work of art, or a beautiful piece of art? If you have, then Tolstoy still doesn’t think you’ve got your hands on a good piece of art: that the connection between pleasure and art is facile, not necessary, and actually counter-productive to framing a society’s whole habit of mind to discern great art, and so counter-productive to the artistic health of society as a whole.

A key ingredient in art, according to Tolstoy, is that the art’s creator forges in the audience’s consciousness some emotion that excites or otherwise peaks the interest of the art’s observer or experiencer. After the emotion is established, the stage is set for the artist’s message to the audience, however that message will be said, in whatever mode the artist chooses to say it - this makes the primary aim of the artist ‘communication’: the artist is trying to say something. That something that is trying to be said are actually the emotions themselves, feelings that are trying to be manufactured in the audience by the artist, to get the reader in a certain frame of mind, the frame of mind necessary for properly contemplating the content of the artist’s themes.

A prisoner of war endures the hardships, torture, loneliness, and fear of being cooped up in a stench-filled cell, his ears attacked by the horrific screaming of prisoners in the next rooms; he is - against all odds - rescued by his comrades and shipped back home. After some years of recuperation, he is able to tell the story of his horror. If he succeeds in arousing in his audience feelings of loneliness, fear, claustrophobia, or hardship in general, he has communicated the emotion: he has made a good piece of art. The audience is ‘infected‘ by the emotion through artful retelling of a story, regardless of the medium.

With the idea of infection, another idea arises. To call a work of art better or worse than another: is it just a matter of - the greater the infection, the greater the art? It is this and the question of whatever subject is accompanying the infection, the emotional infection, the infection of feelings. Someone may instill in his hearers the solid, uncontaminated emotion of exhilaration by telling a story about a roller coaster ride; but we think that the same emotion, just as solidly infected in the hearers, but accompanied by the story of a heroic redemption of a child from the clutches of some impending danger the more artistically superior of the two.

Tolstoy also believes in a hierarchy of feelings: so that the greater the art, the better the feeling is infected, the more dramatic the story, and the higher up on the ladder of feelings the feeling is considered. The highest feeling on the ladder of feelings is the feeling of brotherhood with mankind: and the social institution that had this feeling the most was Christianity. Thus, the truly Christian work of art was the best, the kind that infected the audience with that feeling, and the feeling itself was the best feeling, and the feeling itself was set in the background that is the epic story of the Bible itself. This disqualifies Greek art as the best for obvious reasons: the Greeks didn’t prize brotherhood as high as, say, personal pride, magnanimity, strength, or masculinity. But I would say that in so far as these feelings can be given a Christian interpretation, the better the art could be, at least more in the minds of the audience than in the mind of the artist.

Tolstoy then says very strange things. He degrades the works of Beethoven and Wagner, saying they aren’t sincere, ‘too cerebral’, and that because of this ‘children’s songs’ are artistically superior. This might be a case of a theory having too much impact on what is plainly not the case. The 9th symphony is a better work of art than any children’s song, even if it were the case that the feeling of brotherhood is more fully established, since the 9th symphony is accompanied by its feelings to a better degree and it’s set to the backdrop of a more interesting subject-matter: the human condition. One could argue that the human condition is also the backdrop for the feelings in children’s songs: but I would then have to argue from my own experience - children’s songs haven’t moved me, haven’t ‘infected me’, as Beethoven has. To degrade or demote Beethoven because the feeling produced is inferior, leaving aside or ignoring ‘infection’, is puzzling to me.