KENNETH BURKE

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) was a major literary critic and thinker for most of the twentieth century. His writings went far beyond literature, encompassing aesthetics, music, and the social sciences, synthesizing everything that interested him via an integrated theory involving the rhetoric of symbolic action. In his first, heady essay collection, the 1931 Counter-Statement, he wrote with skeptical wit about “The Status of Art,” dismantling many of the field’s presumptions, standards, and judgmental certainties, and concluding, in true essayist fashion, “We advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness.”

The Status of Art

(1931)

In the nineteenth century, when much was brought into question, many things previously called good had to be defended—poetry among them. Wherefore the slogan of Art for Art’s Sake which, though it was often pronounced with bravado, clearly had about it the element of a “justification.” With the development of technology, “usefulness” was coming into prominence as a test of values, so that art’s slogan was necessarily phrased to take the criterion of usefulness into account. The strategy of the artist is understandable enough. Against the accusation that art was “useless” he pitted the challenge that art was important to those to whom art was important. Nevertheless, his position could readily take on the appearance of a “last stand.”

The original doctrines of art’s “uselessness” were not offered as attacks upon art. Kant, in proposing “purposiveness without purpose” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck) as a formula for the aesthetic, had no intention of providing a “refutation” of art. His formula did, however, mark the emergence of the “use” criterion which was subsequently to place all purely intellectual pursuits upon a defensive basis. His proposition could be readily perverted: if the aesthetic had no purpose outside itself, the corollary seemed to be that the aesthetic had no result outside itself. Logically there was no cogency in such an argument, but psychologically there was a great deal. And the damage was perhaps increased through attempts to justify art by the postulating of a special “art instinct” or “aesthetic sense.”

On the face of it, this was a good move. For at a time when instincts were gaining considerably in repute, and no complicated human mind could arouse us to admiration so promptly as the routine acts of an insect, what could be more salubrious for the reputation of art than the contention that art satisfies an “instinctive need”? The trouble arose from the fact that the “art instinct” was associated with the “play instinct,” thus becoming little more than an adult survival from childhood. The apologists, still in the Kantian scheme, associated art with play because both seemed, from the standpoint of utility, purposeless. But in an age when “work” was becoming one of society’s basic catchwords, art could not very well be associated with play without some loss of prestige.

Perhaps Flaubert’s constant talk of toil was prompted in part by a grudging awareness of the new criterion. At least, his complaints serve to make this form of “play” a colossal task. Remy de Gourmont saw the issue clearly enough to use a complete reversal of standards in his defense of art, ridiculing the “serious” as a democratic preference, and insisting that the things of essential human value were gratuitous, hardly more than unforeseen mutations, qualities obtained in spite of society, and worthy of cultivation even though they might be found, not merely useless, but positively subversive to social ends. The position was vigorously taken—and doubtless De Gourmont’s able championship of the symbolists had much to do with the advancing of their experiments. De Gourmont was bright; he was very handy with ideas; he could carry the discussion aggressively into the territory of the enemy. He made one think of literature as a risk, a kind of outlawry, with the notable exception that the outlaws were in reality the true preservers of the good. Art would eventually be driven into the catacombs, he said, thus associating the artist with both rebellion and virtue at once. It was not until shortly before the war, however, that De Gourmont became an “authority”—and his influence collapsed soon afterwards as he was prevented by death from bolstering it up with new books. For many of the critical and philosophical matters he treated had since been handled in other terms and with more thoroughness by other men—and his fiction, necessarily restricted by his cloistered existence, could not bear the diffusion of his great productivity and his attempted breadth. Furthermore, ironic detachment is a difficult position to uphold when men are being copiously slaughtered—and De Gourmont’s enlistment in the cause of the Allies implied the renunciation of his earlier doctrines. Disciples of Art for Art’s Sake might advocate art as a refuge, a solace for the grimness about them, but the spirit of social mockery could no longer fit the scene. One can mock death, but one cannot mock men in danger of death. In the presence of so much disaster, there was no incentive to call art disastrous.

But if De Gourmont had seen the issues clearly enough to realize that one might best defend art by calling art “immoral,” most critics attempted the compromise of defending art as “amoral” or “unmoral.” Their invented adjective probably did wonders to assist the introduction of new social values and to procure, for many an artist’s ethical innovations, asylum from the law. The word was needed, as the artist’s position was a particularly difficult one. The scientists of the nineteenth century, despite the thoroughness of their attacks upon traditional values, could be very circumspect in their methods. Though the tenets of anthropology, for instance, might imply the discrediting of orthodox religion, one could discuss them adequately without handling the matter in this light at all. Art, on the other hand, must be first of all “forceful.” The artist, in dealing with ethical revaluations (as he naturally would, since the characteristics of the century would be as fully represented in him as in a scientist or an inventor) had to make those conflicts explicit which the scientist could leave implicit. He got his effects by throwing into relief those very issues which the scientist could treat by circumlocution, implication, and the mystical protection of a technical vocabulary. Thus, whereas science for the most part was permitted to progress in peace, the artistic equivalents of this science produced a succession of scandals.

An incident in Flaubert’s trial indicates the nature of the artist’s predicament. The prosecuting attorney selected among others a passage from Madame Bovary which described Emma undressing in the presence of her lover. The rhythm of this passage very obviously contributed to the effect, since it suggested her impatience as she struggled with her garments, and her final impetuosity as she rushed across the room to embrace him. The prosecuting attorney read this passage with feeling—and the better he read it, the worse the case for Flaubert. The defense lawyer, however, sought to remove the impression by reading the same passage himself and interpolating remarks of his own which ruined the passage as literature. The more ineffective he made it, the more pardonable Flaubert became!

The term “unmoral” was a valuable discovery for handling the situation. By this subterfuge (surely no one thought of it as such) the artist could plead immunity from judgment by any code of practical ethics. In keeping with the doctrine of the “unmorality” of art, we must distinguish between virtuous conduct and virtuous sentences, we must not restrict art as we should restrict its equivalent in actual life, we must not limit the laws of the “beautiful” by the laws of social behavior. But “unmorality” was in the end a much greater danger to the prestige of art than “immorality” could ever have been, since it implied once again the ineffectiveness of art.

As a matter of fact, art exerted a tremendous influence upon the changing morals and customs of the Western world, but its contribution to the “transvaluation of values” was minimized because of this apologetic adjective. Art was, as De Gourmont said, “immoral.” It was, that is, using its expressiveness as a means of making people seek what they customarily fled and flee what they customarily sought. And there is no greater evidence of art’s “immorality” than the bourgeois-Bohemian conflict which characterized the century. The issue was indeterminate and fluctuant, but in the main the disciples of Art for Art’s Sake were Bohemians, prepared on many occasions to outrage the bourgeois.

In some respects they were struggling to alter the moral code in keeping with the changes brought about by science and technology (a tendency which, in its purely artistic manifestations, is to be seen in the extending of the “beautiful” into the realm of the previously repugnant). In this they were really working for the bourgeois interests, though the bourgeois public was prompt to resist them. In other respects, however, they were not devanciers at all but were, like such men as T. S. Eliot today, the preservers of older standards which the bourgeois themselves were attempting to discredit. Baudelaire was attacked as a destroyer of the earlier moral code, but as a matter of fact he was opposing the new social code. Baudelaire is a “sinner” and what is more alien to the new social code than the concept of sin? Baudelaire courts poverty, lamentation, sullenness, a discipline of internal strife; his concerns are the concerns of an early Christian anchorite voluntarily placing himself in jeopardy—and what could be more “conservative” than this, what more unlike the young Californian with his benign circle of culture, progress, and prosperity, or his football conception of discipline? In most instances the division was not so intense, the artists being the defenders simply of older humanistic doctrines overlooked in the rising intensity of economic strife. In general they tended towards Pater’s belief that ethics should be a subdivision of aesthetics. The artists were innovators and conservators at once, advocating many requisite alterations of morality while attempting to preserve many cultural values of the past which seemed equally requisite. Thus can such an innovator as Eliot be found saying: “We fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”

In general, therefore, a division between artist and bourgeois was emphasized. And here again the alignment was greatly to the detriment of art, as many trivial artists, and even some artists of rank, chose to exploit this division by making their opposition more picturesque than ominous. Hence arose the “aesthete” whose adherence to the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake served to associate the doctrine with many effete mannerisms. Wilde is perhaps the purest symbol of the type—and Wilde is as responsible as anyone for the weakening of the bourgeois-Bohemian conflict. The next generation of authors married at twenty, courted the strictest conventionality of dress and manners, and tended to consider a few years in business as the new educational equivalent of the European tour.

The bourgeois-Bohemian conflict had another unfavorable feature in its alliance with the rise of symbolism. Symbolism contained one important alteration in method. In emphasizing the emotional connection of ideas and images, it tended to suppress their commoner experimental or “logical” connections. Instead of saying that something was like something else, the symbolist progressed from the one thing to the other by ellipsis. He would not tell us that a toothache is a raging storm—rather, he might advance directly from the mention of a diseased tooth to the account of a foundering ship. Objects are thus linked by their less obvious connectives. This is, of course, an over-simplification of symbolist methods, but it is roughly indicative. Whether it is correct or not, however, the fact remains that while the artist was attempting new departures in methodology, he was not matching his imaginative experiments with their equivalents in critical theory. To an extent he was probably uncertain as to the exact critical principles underlying the new tendencies. And taking his cue from the earlier moral conflict between bourgeois and Bohemian, he now widened the conflict to include questions of method. Far from pleading with his public, the artist heightened his antagonism: hence his readiness to épater le bourgeois. Art now took on a distinctly obscurantist trait, not because it was any more “obscure” than previous art (nothing is more obscure than an after-dinner speaker’s distinctions between optimism and over-optimism, yet no one is troubled by them) but because the public had not been schooled as to just wherein the clarity of such art was to be sought. The vagueness of the issue made a good deal of slovenly work possible—and even men in sympathy with the movement had to confess themselves “defeated” by many of its proponents.

Closely allied with the “mystification” of the new movement, came the tour d’ivoire or “pure” art movement. The most pretentious writing, that is, was done by men whose methods and preoccupations seemed certain to limit their reading public considerably. They were “experts,” and nothing was more abhorrent to a civilization of specialists than artists who likewise were specialists. (It seems that, beginning with the pre-historic bard, the artist had always been a specialist, but people never resented the fact until, by becoming specialists themselves, they became less fit to follow him.) In any event, the rarity and electness of “pure” art seemed—in an age of propaganda—negative, retiring, and powerless. What was the value of neglected excellence, when the world was glutted with crude fiction? Had not the spread of literacy through compulsory education made readers of people who had no genuine interest in literature? Would not this group henceforth form the majority of the reading public? And would not good books pale into insignificance, not because they had fewer readers than in the past (they had more) but because an overwhelming army of bad readers had been recruited? The Art for Art’s Sake slogan now began to apply more specifically to the art of the minority, those writers for whom, so far as the vast public was concerned, the publication of a new work was like putting a bottle out to sea.

A masterpiece, privately printed in a limited edition of two hundred copies, seemed to furnish some cause for derision. Yet The Little Review had a much larger circulation than the magazine published by Goethe and Schiller. And one must recall that most of the works fed to the public are purely derivative, and as such can constitute the bridge between the “rare” writer and the public at large. The same basic patterns of thought can be exemplified either in subtle ways or in a crude form for the consumption of millions. Through such derivative processes, for instance, the public of today is undergoing the influence of nineteenth century writers whom, for one reason or another, it would not at all care to read. It is coming to accept methods which, but a few years ago, were confined to the most “abstruse.” In general the “rare” writers will serve as “sources,” for only a man whose attitudes arise from the persistency of his character can be expected to work with them until they have acquired a forbidding distinction and to express them with such thoroughness and penetration as makes his work unacceptable to the majority. The vulgarizers, however, the epigons, the “steppers-down” will adapt this source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation; and similarly the group that turns to “minority” art may be a “pivotal” group. They need not be “pivotal” in the sense that they enjoy particular social, political, or economic prestige—but purely in the sense that they are more articulate and enterprising in the assertion of their views and the communication of their attitudes. Nor must we, recalling Eliot’s statement, assume that one cannot be an influence except by “succeeding.” The rôle of opposition is by no means negligible in the shaping of society. The victory of one “principle” in history is usually not the vanquishing, but the partial incorporation, of another.

As for the concerns of a “neglected minority,” it is hard to understand how any cultural movement could begin otherwise than in a very restricted quarter, spreading by radiation from the few who are quickest to sense new factors in their incipient stages. Astute politicians, it is true, will tell us that a political movement must arise “from the grass roots.” It must, they say, spring up spontaneously in various parts of the country, a party serving merely to consolidate it into a united front. But the artist exploits human potentialities in a different way than a politician. If thirty million people are eager for a trip to the country, a book might gain great popularity through enabling them to imagine that they were in the country. Yet not one of them would have to know that their weariness with city living was the cause of the book’s appeal. The politician, on the other hand, could not safely back a new bond issue for the suburbanizing of his city until his constituents’ preferences were clearly and vocally established. A politician seeks to ally himself, actually or apparently, with issues which to his mind the people consciously advocate. An artist can appeal tremendously by the utilization of motives which both he and they are unaware of. It is obvious that a situation must be widespread before a method for handling it can find general reception. But it is the situation, not the method, that rises “from the grass roots.” Let the situation be tinder, and the method may “catch like wildfire”; but the spark is not integral to the situation, it must be added. The “times were ripe” for a Byron; but Byronism radiated from an individual. A slogan is not widely effective because it rises spontaneously in every part of the country (it is usually one man’s invention); a slogan is widely effective because it is appropriate to a widespread situation. And thus a work of art may at times be confined to a minority, not because of either its virtues or its defects, but purely because the particular situation with which it is dealing is not generally felt. Indeed, by the time the situation has become generally felt, this particular work of art may still be inappropriate for another reason: it may happen to have dealt with the situation in conventions which have since altered. And thus it will serve, not in itself, but in the suggestions it gave to a writer of the day who “translates” them into his contemporary conventions.

II

Perhaps none of the issues so far discussed had so adverse an effect upon the status of art as certain “causation” theories which seemed to place art as a kind of by-product, the result of more vital and important forces. Doctrines of psychology, economics, and world history have all been used with nearly evangelical zeal to undermine the sanctions of the “impractical.” Thus, the psychoanalyst’s analogies between art and dream-life, while not formulated as an attack upon art, readily came to serve as one. For how could we transfer to art the dream relationship between frustration and wish-fulfillment without seeming to indicate a fundamental ineffectualness on the part of the artist? The doctrine could be manipulated to reveal the artist purely as a “thwarted” individual who was compensating for his inabilities by dreaming of triumphs.

In noting the similarity between art and dream-life, the psychoanalytic critics failed to note the important dissimilarity, an oversight somewhat justified by the fact that the theorists of individualism in art had themselves made the same omission. They did not consider that, whereas a dream is wholly subjective, all competent art is a means of communication, however vague the artist’s conception of his audience may be. Thus, the analogies summarily dismissed the important qualification that day-dreaming generally makes exceptionally bad art. The many aspects of analysis, discovery, observation, diction, revision, tactics in presentation, which are anything but “day-dreaming,” were wholly ignored. And in their eagerness to point out the artist’s maladjustments, the psychoanalytic critics did not take into account the elements of strength often implicated in such maladjustments. Maladjustments were too readily assumed to be evidences of weakness. But there is much in Nietzsche, for instance, to indicate that his maladjustments arose from his searching perception of issues which were wholly unnoted by his more “fit” contemporaries. Is it a sign of “weakness” to see with such intensity that one can disclose “conflicts” and encounter “defeats” where hackmen find nothing?

Again, few considered the fact that, by psychoanalytic tenets, practical activities as well as imaginative ones can constitute “compensations” for frustrated conditions. To every poet who became a poet after failure in business, there are at least a hundred business men who became business men after failure in poetry. And psychoanalysis had given many instances of deflection and frustration in practical life. Nothing was more prevalent in its case histories than examples of intense practical activities stimulated by the pressure of an unsuccessful love affair or some unavowed desire. A cruel impulse can be “sublimated” into a philanthropic act as well as into a philanthropic poem. Napoleons themselves were credited with such “inferiority complexes” as were supposed to motivate the artist.*1

And if the artist turns to art rather than to business or baseball, his choice need not have anything negative about it. Eliminate the medical terminology and you eliminate the disease. The great amount of annoyance which an artist generally undergoes to establish himself in his craft would indicate a very positive preference for this craft. Far from being “in retreat,” he must master ways of exerting influence upon the minds and emotions of others. Could anything be less like regression, though one were to write on a desert island? True, one cannot devote himself greatly to a single pursuit without endangering his competence in others, though the predicament applies as much to engineering or farming as to art. An artist such as Beethoven, whose musical attainments seemed to require great specialization and concentration, would necessarily become a bungler in other aspects of social intercourse. The intensity of his character gave him greater turmoil than most men must learn to subdue by the compromises and tactics of social advantage, while the many hours devoted to music left him much less opportunity than most men require to perfect themselves in social matters. Thus his specialization in music could lead to his inadequacy in other things, and his inadequacy in other things could give him further incentive to specialize in that pursuit wherein he was a master—the interactions are too confusing for anyone to dare call the inadequacies exclusively a “cause” and the art exclusively an “effect.” A man may become aesthetically entangled because of some sexual difficulty—but he may as truly become sexually entangled because of some aesthetic difficulty; and many a prowler would gladly sacrifice his night if he could but write a good paragraph by doing so.

Art must have a subject, and a spontaneous subject. And what could be a more spontaneous subject for the artist than the matter of his maladjustments? Is not every man concerned primarily with his “problems”? Is the case different with the scientist, the explorer, the business man? Is not genius, in whatever channel it appears, distinguished by the persistence of its preoccupations—and are not man’s preoccupations essentially a matter of volition, and hence of frustration? And that a man, let us say incestuously troubled, should express this trouble in his art, is no more an indication of weakness than that a man raised in Australia should paint Australian landscapes.

And as for the “escape” of art, there is much to indicate that the artist is, of all men, equipped to confront an issue. The very conventions of art often provide him with a method for freely admitting experiences and situations which the practical man must conceal. And psychologists of other schools have noted that whereas intensity of fear or pain will generally produce in most people a kind of “stereotypy,” a mental and physical numbing which leaves the individual almost without memory of the painful or terrifying event, great artists have shown capacity to keep themselves receptive at precisely such moments. They may bear the full brunt of an experience without psychological evasions, because their attitude enables them to feel partially as opportunity what others must feel solely as a menace. This ability does not, I believe, derive from exceptional strength; it probably arises purely from the “professional interest” the artist may take in his difficulties; and I cite the distinction, not as evidence of unusual power on the artist’s part, but simply as evidence that the need of “escape” by subterfuge is more natural to the man whose problems are exclusively practical than to the man whose outlook upon his difficulties is partially aesthetic.^*2

Ironically enough, the point on which the psychoanalytic critics paid the highest tribute to art turned out to be perhaps the strongest attack of all. I refer to the great emphasis upon intensity of experience which such criticism associated with the work of art. There is no reason why the enjoyment of a work of art should not be intense, to be sure; the danger arose from the fact that actual and imaginative experiences were not distinguished. Now, once one is taught to seek in art such experiences as one gets in life itself, it is a foregone conclusion that one must discover how trivial are artistic experiences as compared with “real living.” A mere headache is more “authentic” than a great tragedy; the most dismal love affair is more worth experiencing in actual life than the noblest one in a poem. When the appeal of art as method is eliminated and the appeal of art as experience is stressed, art seems futile indeed. Experience is less the aim of art than the subject of art; art is not experience, but something added to experience. But by making art and experience synonymous, a critic provides an unanswerable reason why a man of spirit should renounce art forever.

The economic attack upon art arose in an equally roundabout and unintended manner. It involved essentially a theory of meaning, though it might have become more defensible dialectically had it been developed with a clearer understanding of its basis. Noting that certain great works of the past were “imperiled” by subsequent changes of history, critics influenced by the tenets of evolutionism held that to appreciate a work we must understand the environmental conditions out of which it arose. The Greek tragedies are now unsatisfactory to most of us, the “genetic” critic argued, because we are too unfamiliar with the structure of Greek society implicated in these tragedies. To “restore” the full value of these tragedies, we must steep ourselves in their social context.

The point is irrefutable. Insofar as a social context changes, the work of art erected upon it is likely to change in evaluation (though the genetic critic does not tell us whether we should also apply his method to an artist whose reputation has risen with the years—whether we should, by placing Melville in his times, “restore” to him the inferior position he held among his contemporaries). If Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, makes a sly gibe at some current political intrigue now forgotten, the modern reader must have the relevant environmental facts of this intrigue restored for him by editorial annotation before he can appreciate the full “meaning” of Swift’s sentence. It may also have “meaning” as fancy, which is its meaning for a child, or for a reader lacking the editorial annotation, or for one of Swift’s contemporaries unaware of the political intrigue Swift had in mind; but for its full meaning as Swift meant it, we must perceive its equivocal nature. An element of Swift’s social context was here involved in his meaning, the words themselves not being an adequate statement of the situation. Similarly a knowledge of Plato’s archetypes may be useful in reading of Wordsworth’s clouds of glory; the Divine Comedy uses aspects of scholastic thinking which are no longer current and the recovery of which is essential; when we read, “Speak to it, Horatio, you are a scholar,” we must know, or be able to infer, that erudition was once supposed to enable its possessor to talk with ghosts.

In some cases the matter to be recovered is so remote, is in a channel of thinking or feeling so alien to our own, that even a savant’s “restoration” of the environmental context is not adequate. This is always true in some degree—though historical relativists have tended to make too much of it. For in the last analysis, any reader surrounds each word and each act in a work of art with a unique set of his own previous experiences (and therefore a unique set of imponderable emotional reactions), communication existing in the “margin of overlap” between the writer’s experience and the reader’s. And while it is dialectically true that two people of totally different experiences must totally fail to communicate, it is also true that there are no two such people, the “margin of overlap” always being considerable (due, if to nothing else, to the fact that man’s biologic functions are uniform). Absolute communication between ages is impossible in the same way that absolute communication between contemporaries is impossible. And conversely, as we communicate approximately though “imprisoned within the walls of our personality,” so we communicate approximately though imprisoned within the walls of our age.

The historical approach may have affected the status of art slightly by questioning art’s “permanence” (a roadbed was not expected to meet the same rigorous requirement). But the “practicality” shibboleth, as introduced by the economic critic, converted this genetic theory of social contexts into a causation theory, with economic forces as prime movers and art as a mere “result.” If art arises out of a social context, the economic critic argued, art is “caused” by the social context. And thence, by simplifying the concept of social context to exclude all but political and economic factors, he could interpret art as the mere reflection of contemporary political and economic issues.

To begin with, the theories of meaning that underlie the historical or environmental approach could not properly be converted into a system of causation. If I say that “white” has certain connotations because snow is white, I certainly am not saying that a work of art using these connotations is “caused” by snow. I am simply saying that the meaning of white to an Eskimo will differ from its meaning to a mid-African, and that a work of art constructed about the mid-African’s connotations of “white” may be inappropriate to a reader who approaches it with the “white” experiences of an Eskimo. Or if people hold a certain doctrine, a work of art can exploit their belief to make them, let us say, feel terror; if they hold the opposite doctrine, the work of art can similarly exploit this opposite belief to make them feel terror. The work that arouses terror by exploiting the one belief will be imperiled at the hands of any reader who holds to the opposite belief; but could we say that either work is “caused” by the belief which it exploits?

Reduced to its essentials, the encroachment of a causation doctrine here seems to be statable as follows: Changes in art occur concomitantly with changes in political and economic conditions; therefore the changes in art are caused by the changes in political and economic conditions. At times the process is removed one step further, the changes in art being attributed in turn to changes in economic conditions. Now, it is not very sound dialectic to assume that, because two things change concomitantly, one can be called exclusively a cause of the other. If mere concurrence can prove causation, why could not an opponent assume from the same facts that the changes in art and ideas caused the changes in economic conditions? We know, for example, that the feminist “aesthetic” served as preparation for the enfranchisement of women: here is an obvious example of an attitude’s affecting a change in social structure.

In one sense, art or ideas do “reflect” a situation, since they are a way of dealing with a situation. When a man solves a problem, however, we should hardly say that his solution is “caused” by the problem to be solved. The problem may limit somewhat the nature of his solution, but the problem can remain unsolved forever unless he adds the solution. Similarly, the particular ways of feeling and seeing which the thinker or the artist develop to cope with a situation, the vocabulary they bring into prominence, the special kinds of intellectual and emotional adjustment which their works make possible by the discovery of appropriate symbols for encompassing the situation, the kinds of action they stimulate by their attitudes towards the situation, are not “caused” by the situation which they are designed to handle. The theory of economic causation seemed to rest upon the assumption that there is only one possible aesthetic response to a given situation, and that this situation is solely an economic one.

Our argument is not intended as a plea for free will. It may be true that, if we knew every single factor involved in a stimulus, we could infallibly predict the response. It may be true that, despite our “illusion of liberty” we are rigidly determined in both our thoughts and our actions. Even if we grant the validity of this principle, however, the doctrine of the economic determination of art need not be conceded. For by any principle of universal determinism, there would be no hierarchy of causes whereby economic manifestations could be called causally “prior” to aesthetic manifestations. Economic and aesthetic manifestations alike would be caused by the “nature of things.” If determinism is extended to such cosmic proportions, art need have no complaint. For by the tenets of determinism as so extended, every factor of experience would be equally involved in the causal chain, being indeterminately cause and effect, the effect of one event and the cause of another. And in a scheme whereby we “all go down together,” the appropriateness of art has long ago been established, as in the ethical teachings of the Roman Stoics. Drive the logic of economic causation to the point where economic determinism becomes cosmic determinism, and the detractors of art are necessarily silenced, for their own detractions become but the output of the universal mill, their preferences mere personal choices devoid of “absolute” sanction.

Yet recent years have witnessed an attempt to manipulate precisely this argument of cosmic determination in such a way that the pursuit of art can be discredited and the criterion of “use” once more put forward. I refer to Oswald Spengler’s “morphology of history.” While accepting the logical conclusion of cosmic determinism so far as the attempt at a hierarchy of causes is concerned, and thus placing economic and aesthetic manifestations on a par, he proposes nonetheless to draw forth an exhortation for the abandonment of art as ineffectual. The evidence by which he supports his thesis has been brought into question, but that need not concern us here, as we are examining primarily the dialectic of his proof. We are discussing the logical issue as to whether the thesis, even if established, would justify his exhortation to abandon art. The steps of his argument are worth following in detail, as his work is the most ambitious schematization of its sort, and its dilemma is typical of the dilemma confronting all such programs.

Over against the H. G. Wells concept of history as a straight line progressing from savagery to modernity, Spengler opposes the concept of numberless cultural systems, each of which has followed a cycle of its own, growing, flourishing, and decaying in a fixed order or “periodicity.” These cultural cycles, by Spengler’s doctrine, evolve in an irreversible sequence through “spring, summer, autumn, and winter” aspects, any “season” of one culture being comparable with the corresponding season of any other culture. These analogous stages of different cultural systems are called “contemporaneous”; and by aligning the stages of our own cultural cycle (that of Europe and European America, which Spengler dates from about 1000 A.D.) with the contemporaneous stages of other cultural cycles, Spengler claims to produce a series of co-ordinates for determining which of the cultural seasons is now upon us.

Homer, in the Greco-Roman cycle, would be contemporaneous with the northern sagas in our own, this era always being “rural and intuitive” and marked by the “birth of a myth in the grand style, expressing a new sense of divinity.” Spring gradually metamorphoses into summer, a period of “ripening consciousness” and of the “earliest urban and critical stirrings”—the pre-Socratics of the sixth and fifth centuries being “contemporaneous” with Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes. In autumn the city assumes a leading position in the life of the culture. This is the age of “enlightenment” (Socrates and Rousseau) in which the traditional code is now subjected to a rigorous questioning, although it is still powerful as a religious and creative force. The mathematics characteristic of the culture is now definitely formulated, and the “great conclusive” metaphysical systems are constructed (Plato and Aristotle having their contemporaneous parallel in Goethe and Kant).

But each culture, while exemplifying the laws of growth and decay common to all cultures, is a self-contained unit, talking in a language addressed to itself alone. When it has passed, it leaves us its monuments and its scripts, but the experience which these works symbolized has vanished, so that subsequent cultures inherit a body of rigid symbols to which they are psychically alien—much the way one of Jung’s typical extroverts would be alien to a typical introvert. In this sense, ancient Greek is as undecipherable a language as Etruscan, since there is no word in the Greek vocabulary which corresponds, in its cultural background, to the word which we select as its equivalent in any one of our modern languages. Consider, for instance, the difference in content between “man” as one of a race who stole the fire from heaven and “man” as a link in the evolutionary chain. It is not hard to imagine how a work of art arising out of the one attitude could be “alien” to a reader in whom the other attitude was ingrained.

Spengler lays great emphasis upon this cultural subjectivism, and even insists upon the subjective element in natural science. He characterizes the science of any given culture as the conversion of its religion into an irreligious field—such concepts as “force” and “energy,” for instance, merely being an altered aspect of the omnipotent and omnipresent God conceived at an earlier stage in the same culture.

The growth of science is also the evidence of a radical change in a culture’s evolution. At this stage, the intellectualistic, critical, and irreligious elements of the culture gradually rise to the ascendancy. The emotional certainty of the earlier epochs, when religious, metaphysical, and aesthetic systems were built up spontaneously, is now past. The culture becomes a civilization. “In the one period life reveals itself, the other has life as its object.” In place of the city we have the metropolis, and the “ethical-practical tendencies of an irreligious and unmetaphysical cosmopolitanism.” Winter, thereby, is upon us. Hellenistic-Roman Stoicism after 200—returning to our concept of the contemporaneous—is paralleled by ethical socialism after 1900. The theatricality of Pergamene art is matched by Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner—and Hellenistic painting finds its equivalent in impressionism. The American skyscraper, instead of being looked upon as the evidence of a new “dawn,’’ is interpreted by Spengler as the symptom of decay corresponding to the “architectural display in the cities of the Diadochi.”

Spengler thus finds that the high point of our culture has been passed, while we go deeper into the closing period, the era of civilization. With intellectualistic elements predominant, we are no longer fitted for the production of great works of art, but for the technical exploits, for economic, commercial, political, and imperialistic activities. We are, like Rome, which was the civilization of the Greek culture, ordained to be superior as road-builders and inferior as artists. And by his doctrine of cultural subjectivism, even those great works of art which our culture in its more youthful and vigorous stages produced as the symbolization of Western-European experience will become alien as this experience itself recedes before the rise of other cultures having other modes of experience to symbolize.

In conclusion, then: (a) Even the greatest works of art are couched, not in the language of “mankind,” but in the language of a specific cultural tradition, and the loss of the tradition is like the loss of the dictionary; and (b) since art is inevitably inferior in an era of civilization, we are invited to abandon all hope of further artistic excellence in our cultural cycle.

Let us consider first Spengler’s subjectivist argument. In discussing each cultural cycle, he finds some dominant trait which characterizes the entire mode of experience peculiar to the culture. Arabic culture, for instance, is “Magian,” our own is “Faustian,” and the Greco-Roman is “Apollonian.” He then shows how these dominant traits manifest themselves in all the various aspects of a culture’s “behavior.” The Apollonian trait can be expanded as a sense of the “pure present,” a concrete “thisness and hereness,” which is to be found equally in the repose of the Greek temple, the “corporeality” of Greek mathematics, and the Greek indifference to time (the Greeks had no system of chronological reckoning comparable to our method of dating from the birth of Christ). The same attitude naturally resulted in the development of sculpture into a major art. In contrast, Faustian culture has a pronounced historic sense, a mathematics of function and time, an “aspiring” architecture; and it has developed music into a major art. In painting, the “corporeal” mentality of the Greeks led to the exclusion of sky-blue as a color, and the disinterest in perspective; while the Faustian culture, with its feeling for distance, showed a marked preference for this very blue, and developed perspective exhaustively. Spengler considers this as evidence of totally different subjective states; yet could it not, as well, be used to indicate a very fundamental kind of similarity? If blue and perspective are employed by the Faustian for the same reason that they are rejected by the Apollonian, does not this argue a common basis of choice? It is to grant, categorically, that blue and perspective symbolize for both cultures a sense of distance. A genuinely subjective difference between cultures would be undetectable, for it would involve a situation in which the symbols could be employed with directly opposite content. Blue and perspective could then, for the Greek, mean pure present; and we could have formed the Greek temple, rather than the Gothic cathedral, as our symbol of aspiration. The aesthetic symbols of an alien culture could give us no clue as to the mode of experience behind them.

Furthermore, why should Spengler stop at cultural subjectivism? Why not accept epochal subjectivism as well? If a difference in the traits of a culture involves a difference in the content of its expressionistic symbols, does not his division of a culture into seasons indicate that each season symbolizes a mode of experience peculiar to itself? If a culture speaks a language of its own, then each season has its own dialect of that language. What “vested interests” would this savant save who would so willingly sacrifice an entire culture?

The fact is that epochal subjectivism would interfere with his two major conclusions: cultural subjectivism and aesthetic defeatism. Spengler’s division into spring, summer, autumn, and winter is at bottom the formulation of four subjective types, four typical modes of experience which occur in each cultural cycle. Thus, subjectivity is seen to produce its alliances as well as its estrangements. And contemporeaneous epochs of different cultural cycles might even be considered to have more in common than different epochs of the same culture—our “irreligious and cosmopolitan” winter, for instance, being nearer to the same mode of experience in the Greco-Roman cycle than to its own “rural and intuitive” spring. At least, there is more of Apuleius than of Beowulf in the modern Weltanschauung. Epochal subjectivity, looked upon in this way, would tend to counteract the estrangements of cultural subjectivity. Cultural subjectivity would not be an absolute condition, but an approximate one—and the modes of experience in different eras of the world’s history would be capable of an approach towards identity.

Epochal subjectivity, furthermore, would constitute a sanction of the modern artist. It would force us to recognize that winter, purely by being a different mode of experience from spring, summer, or autumn, is categorically entitled to symbolize this mode of experience in art. For we must remember that Spengler is applying the Hegelian concept of the Zeitgeist. He holds that every age has its particular character, which is manifested in all its activities. There is an Urphenomen, a kind of Reality x, a “time-spirit”—each specific activity of an age being a different mode of this time-spirit. As Pater once expressed the same idea: “In every age there is a peculiar ensemble of conditions which determines a common character in every product of that age, in business and art, in fashion and speculation, in religion and manners, in men’s very faces.” One might explain this ensemble or consistency (if there is such) in behavioristic terms as the result of mutual interaction, since certain attitudes developed in art can be converted into their equivalents in engineering, business, athletics, marriage customs, etc., while each of these in turn can similarly affect the others. Spengler prefers to discuss the matter in his vocabulary of metaphysical mysticism—whence the Zeitgeist concept which has made his entire project seem malapropos to more realistic thinkers. But whether one consider the consistency of an age as the manifold manifestation of a time-spirit or as the result of mutual interaction among all our modes of thinking, feeling, and acting, the fact remains that the entire concept places all manifestations of the age upon the same level: any activity, that is, be it intellectual, emotional, practical, or what not, is symbolic of the era in which it takes place.

The noteworthy point is: How does Spengler, out of his system, draw the conclusion that modern art must be “inferior”? Inferior to what? Inferior to the art of “spring,” or “summer,” or “autumn”? But spring art was a manifestation of the spring era, and thus why not winter art for a winter era? There is no question of superiority or inferiority here—the only problem Spengler’s system equips him to discuss is not a matter of “excellence” but of the “symbolic” or the “representative.” Which is “better”—a left shoe for a left foot or a right shoe for a right foot? There is no criterion of comparative excellence in his scheme of the symbolic or representative. He can ask only that a work of art typify the characteristics of the era out of which it arises. His logical machinery provides no step beyond the observation that in spring we must have the symbolizations of spring and in winter the symbolizations of winter. To emerge with a judgment in such a case would be like concluding, after an explanation of the earth’s seasons as being caused by the planet’s revolution about the sun, “therefore winter is ‘inferior’ to summer.”

That art is beset by questions of method is undeniable. That much of our best art today has an “intellectual” aspect seems equally well established. That we are exposed to many conflicting influences, that tentatives have in many instances replaced canons, that our culture is no longer “thoroughbred”—all such can be admitted. In the mere listing of such issues, however, we must realize how much better “fitted” are our contemporaries for dealing with them than were the writers of the “rural and intuitive” era. The earlier writers omitted many aspects of thinking and feeling which, by Spengler’s own schema, have since come to the fore. Their cultural “youth” did not equip them to symbolize the fundamental concerns of our cultural “senectitude.”

The fact is that Spengler has loaded the dice against us. His analogy of the seasons contains an implicit judgment. If we but select another analogy, an analogy with the pejorative connotations reversed, the result is entirely different. We might, for instance, instead of accepting his interpretation of the culture-civilization dichotomy, consider the earlier stages of a cultural cycle as periods of upbuilding, of pioneering, of grim, hard-working zealotry. Culture, we could say, struggles and wrestles with its environment and its mental confusions to amass an inheritance which civilization, coming after, has the opportunity to squander and enjoy. When a culture is in full swing, it is not only politically and religiously intolerant, but aesthetically intolerant as well. In Leckey’s studies of late Rome, for instance, there is much to indicate that living conditions in this decadent “era of peace,” before the new turmoil that came with the growth of Christianity, were in many ways picturesque and delightful. Spengler’s whole conception of values contains his conclusions in advance. Which may, it is true, be the predicament of us all—but is more vicious in his case because he masks his personal choice as the inescapable verdict of all history.

III

In times of revolution, it is usually the best features of the old régime that are attacked. Vandals, swarming upon a city, will select the finest monuments to topple and leave inferior things unharmed. It is, perhaps, some such psychology which has led many to bring up art for judgment while the harsh aspects of our civilization awaken them to joyful prophesyings.

Most remarkable of all, however, is the fact that the doctrines of art’s ineffectualness have flourished in a period noted for its intense utilization of art. As rapidly as “pure” science became applied science (as technologists, carrying out the possibilities opened up by “pure” scientific speculations, utilized scientific principles for the invention of countless unnecessary commodities) just so fast has “pure” literature become applied literature, to the end of making people want these same commodities. For what is our advertising, what is our “success” fiction in the average commercial magazine, what are our cinematic representations of the “good life” but a vast method of determining the criteria of a nation, and thus its conduct, by the assistance of art? And if, as in modern warfare, the fundamental aspirations of our “pure” scientists are derided, similarly in the use of art to promote a belief in the primary cultural value of material acquisitions, the fundamental aspirations of the “pure” artist are derided. The proper complaint here, however, is not that art has been ineffective, but that a certain brand of art has been only too effective.

Still, we should not be driven by the excesses of our opponents into making too good a case for art. Such was, perhaps, much of the trouble in the first place. One cannot advocate art as a cure for toothache without disclosing the superiority of dentistry. Our program is simply to point out that the criterion of “usefulness” has enjoyed much more prestige than its underlying logic merited. Otherwise the issues are left precisely as vague as we would have them; thus:

No categorical distinction can possibly be made between “effective” and “ineffective” art. The most fanciful, “unreal” romance may stimulate by implication the same attitudes towards our environment as a piece of withering satire attempts explicitly. The rarest work may have more influence upon the shaping of society than a work read by millions. A book, as De Gourmont would say, is alive until the last copy is destroyed. We do not, however, presume to glorify “rare” art at the expense of “popular” art. And it would be unjust to assume that the “minority” interests of today are necessarily the “majority” interests of tomorrow. Minorities are not exclusively “ahead” of their times; they may be “behind” their times, “counter” to their times, “aside” from their times. They can arrogate to themselves no corner on worth. There are some forms of excellence (such as complexity, subtlety, remote inquiry, stylistic rigor) which may limit a book’s public as surely as though it were a work on higher mathematics. But where directness, picturesqueness, humor, and power are concerned, such qualities seem to fall easily within the range of a general appeal. We ask only to leave the entire matter vague—to say that a work may be popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, unpopular and bad. It may be widely read and ineffectual, widely read and influential, little read and ineffectual, little read and influential. It may usher in something of great value; it may “keep something alive”; it may represent the concerns of a few people living under exceptional conditions. It may, in fact, do all of these things at different times in its history, or in its action upon different kinds of readers.

We advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness. A century of “refutations” is salutary at least in emphasizing the fact that art has not been “refuted.” For the rest, the artist’s ability to express himself in art would be enough, in most instances, to keep him at his vocation, though he felt it a positive offense against mankind. Art needs nothing by way of “sanction” but the neutralizing of its detractors. It needs no “dignity” beyond the mere zero of not being glibly vilified. To the artist, the belief that the ways of influence are devious and unpredictable, and that “anything can happen” should be sufficient justification for devoting himself to his purely aesthetic problems, solving them according to his lights, and letting all other eventualities take care of themselves.