I FIND SUSAN WOLF’S ACCOUNT of what makes a life meaningful persuasive on the whole, and do not intend to criticize it.1 What I want to address are some consequences of a particular application of it. Some may find these consequences troubling, though I myself do not.
On Wolf’s account a life is made meaningful by a subjective commitment to, or a love for, a project or activity of objective worth. The subjective component precludes the possibility of someone’s life being meaningful for reasons of which she is not cognizant (for example, because it happens to have beneficial effects), which seems implausible. And the requirement that the project be objectively valuable precludes a life’s being meaningful by virtue of a blind passion for something ridiculous, such as assembling the world’s largest ball of string. There’s an ambiguity as to whether calling a project or activity objectively valuable means that it’s of a kind we value (artistic activity, for instance), or whether it means that the project or activity is successfully completed or pursued (say, by actually producing works of artistic value). I’m inclined to think that Wolf means the latter, for she speaks of a scorned artist sustained by the thought that her work is good, and elsewhere she offers the example of a scientist’s quest for an important discovery the significance of which is compromised when someone beats him to it.
Having a meaningful life is something we value. One would think then that it ought to be a source of comfort and satisfaction, and that it ought to contribute to one’s sense of well-being. Wolf distinguishes between happiness and meaningfulness, between a happy life and a meaningful one. The pursuit of a project of objective value may involve sacrifices and disappointments at odds with living a life that is happy in any conventional sense. But in that case the thought that one’s life is a meaningful one, devoted to the pursuit of something objectively worthwhile, would at least seem to offer comfort and consolation.
I imagine that I have been asked to comment on Wolf’s lectures both as a poet and as a philosopher, and so I want to consider in particular some possible consequences of her idea of a meaningful life that might apply when the projects involved are certain kinds of aesthetic ones. In an essay on the avant-garde written in the 1960s, the poet John Ashbery remarks that religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they’re founded on nothing, which he thinks is also true of the kind of art he’s discussing. The comparison is apt, though I find the possibility less exhilarating than he does. After modernism, acting on aesthetic impulses of a certain kind involves a “recklessness,” as Ashbery puts it, which makes the possibility of failure inherent in or internal to the enterprise itself. I’m not entirely sure how to characterize the kinds of aesthetic impulses and commitments I have in mind, except to say that they are ambitious ones. Of course, like the scientist who’s beaten to the discovery to which he’s devoted his life, one can always fail in acting on commitments to projects of any sort. But in such a case, it is at least clear what would count as success in trying to fulfill the commitment, which is precisely what is unclear in the case of the kinds of aesthetic commitments I am talking about.
Let me try to clarify the point by considering a series of examples, starting with Bernard Williams’ discussion of Gauguin in his essay on moral luck. Gauguin abandoned his family in Denmark to pursue painting in Paris, an act we may reluctantly excuse on the grounds that (as Wolf might put it) his aesthetic commitments gave him reasons to do what he did additional to his moral reasons to support his family. But as Williams suggests, our verdict would be different if he had turned out to be an untalented hack gripped by a delusion that he was engaged in work of artistic significance, something not precluded by the intensity of his passion for art. The example shows that the meaningfulness of a life depends not just on one’s commitments but also on one’s success in acting on them. But this, too, is potentially misleading: Gauguin’s achievement is so nearly universally recognized that we might suppose success in pursuing aesthetic aims to be typically so clear-cut. Let’s consider then three other examples, in which the status of the artistic accomplishment is increasingly problematic.
In The Banquet Years Roger Shattuck describes a dinner held in Picasso’s studio in 1908 in honor of the painter Henri Rousseau, attended by, among others, Apollinaire, Gertrude and Leo Stein, Marie Laurencin, and Alice Toklas. Rousseau is now regarded as one of modernism’s canonical figures, though an anomalous one, but at the time his work was dismissed by art journalists as fraudulent, and the banquet has been interpreted “as a lampooning of Rousseau, as a magnificent farce organized for everyone’s enjoyment at [his] expense.” Moreover, Rousseau’s own assessment of his own and others’ work, as when he described himself and Picasso as “the two great painters of this era, you in Egyptian style, I in modern style,” seems close enough to delusional to make history’s subsequent verdict on his work appear, from the vantage point of 1908, far from inevitable.
Or consider the French poet, novelist, and dramatist Raymond Roussel, whose works describe imaginary tableaux in minute and stupefying detail. His first publication was dismissed as “more or less unintelligible” and “very boring,” and while he remains largely unknown, he’s had a distinguished list of champions, including the surrealists, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Ashbery. Yet the achievement to which this list testifies falls short of his own assessment of it, for he claimed to his psychiatrist Pierre Janet that he was the equal of Dante and Shakespeare, and that he had to close the curtains of his room when he wrote, lest the intense light emanating from his pen endanger the world outside.
Consider finally the “outsider” artist Henry Darger, a reclusive Chicago janitor who gained prominence when an epic narrative of over fifteen thousand pages, The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, profusely illustrated with hundreds of watercolors and drawings, was discovered after his death in 1973. His work, the paintings and drawings in particular, has had considerable cultural effect, inspiring, for example, a book-length poem, Girls on the Run, by (who else?) Ashbery. And while Darger’s work is undeniably powerful, simultaneously innocent and sinister, with vibrant coloration and complex compositional qualities, it is also unsettling in ways that have little to do with aesthetics: it can be extremely violent, and the girls are often depicted with male genitalia, quite possibly because Darger didn’t know any better; and it is unclear whether what one sees in looking at it is the fulfillment of an aesthetic commitment or the manifestation of a disturbing psychological compulsion. Probably the right thing to say is that it is simply indeterminate which it is.
These are extreme examples, and the three artists described seem oblivious to the possibility that they might be affected by delusions. But they are meant to suggest something that is true of more typical cases as well: namely, that it is difficult to distinguish, from the vantage point of the artist, between the successful achievement of serious aesthetic aims and the delusion that one has them and that they’ve been achieved; and this difficulty complicates the question of whether one’s life is meaningful or wasted. One has to work, as it were, in the shadow of an awareness of the latter possibility. One can of course always be mistaken in thinking that one has fulfilled commitments one has undertaken, whatever their nature. What’s distinctive about the kinds of aesthetic aims I’m talking about is that the possibility of delusion is internal to them, and that by their very nature, clear criteria for success in fulfilling them are lacking. Stanley Cavell makes a similar point in “Music Discomposed,” when he suggests “that the possibility of fraudulence, and the experience of fraudulence, is endemic in the experience of contemporary music,” a possibility he takes to be inherent in the very nature of the kinds of musical compositions he’s discussing. I think Cavell is responding to the popular suspicion of the 1940s and 50s as to whether avant-garde music, painting, and so on were really art at all (“Why, my kid could do that if she’d just stop drawing Thanksgiving turkeys and stoop to it!”), which in retrospect seems quaint. Of course they’re art. But the question remains whether in any given case the art is of significance or importance.
None of this is meant to suggest that aesthetic value isn’t objective, or at least as objective as Wolf takes it to be. The judgments others make of my work or I make of others’work can be objectively correct, and they need not be subject to the inherent possibility of self-deception or delusion I’m talking about. The possibility I have in mind seems viewpoint-dependent (as Cavell’s worry about fraudulence doesn’t), one that appears from my first-person perspective as an artist, and that neither the phenomenological character of my subjective commitments nor the assurances of others suffice to dispel—since the former could be the same whether or not the work succeeds, and (quite apart from banquet Rousseau-like worries) a too ready acceptance of my work by others could well be a sign that it has failed. Something comparable occurs in arguments for philosophical skepticism, where a crucial premise is my inability to rule out some outlandish hypothesis like, for instance, that I’m a brain in a vat. You know perfectly well that I’m not, but the problem is how I could know this. Ordinarily, if you know something and inform me of it, I can thereby come to know it, too. But this doesn’t work in the case of skepticism, and it doesn’t work in the artistic case either. I don’t want to press this comparison too far though, or treat the possibility of aesthetic delusion as merely a special instance of a general skeptical worry, for while it is perfectly alright for me to ignore the skeptical possibilities as ridiculous (even if I cannot rule them out in a principled manner), it is part of the nature of artistic endeavor that I cannot dismiss the possibility of delusion or self-deception out of hand.
How disturbing is this? Even if it jeopardizes my ability to derive satisfaction and comfort from a life based on aesthetic commitments, and of appealing to the non-moral reasons that flow from them, I do not myself think that it is cause for much concern—it is simply a predicament I have to live with. (“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.” T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton”) But if the reader finds it unsettling, there are several possible ways to handle the problem within Wolf’s framework. One is to take the criterion of success in fulfilling aesthetic ambitions to be a readily recognized competence. A second is to take it to be acceptance by a suitably constituted community. And a third is to take it to be helping maintain the artistic enterprise you are engaged in, whatever the ultimate importance of your own work. (“ . . . one who marched along with, ‘made common cause,’ yet had neither the gumption nor the desire to trick the thing into happening.” Ashbery, “Sortes Vergilianae”). I don’t find the first two strategies appealing, and the third is hard to spell out, but for reasons of time I will not explore them here. I will close instead with an illustrative anecdote. In 1968 I was driving across the country and stopped in Iowa City to see Ted Berrigan, who had just begun a year of teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In those days there really was a distinction, as I don’t think there is anymore, between academic and nonacademic poetry, and it seemed odd to think of Berrigan, the presiding figure of the quintessentially nonacademic second generation of New York School poets, teaching at what many considered, perhaps unfairly, a main training ground for academic poetry. Naturally I wanted to know what he thought of his students, and he said they were fine, except that they all wanted to be minor poets, which he took to betray a crippling lack of ambition. It is ironic then that that’s what Berrigan, who died in 1983, is—a minor poet, something I mean as high praise. Major poets are such because of the range and depth of their accomplishment and influence, but to be an enduring minor poet—as opposed to just a representative figure of a certain period and milieu—is a tremendous achievement. All the same, I’m not sure how much satisfaction Berrigan would have taken in it.
1 I am grateful to Carla Bagnoli, Tom Bamberger, William Bristow, John Godfrey, Edward Hinchman, James Longenbach, Charles North, Susan Stewart, Arthur Szathmary, and Susan Wolf for discussions and suggestions.