Some snippets from Master Kung (Confucius) - as he appears in Karl Jaspers' beautiful, simple summation in *The Great Philosophers* (Trans. Ralph Manheim, 1962):
Without learning, all other virtues are obscured as though by a fog and degenerate: without learning, frankness becomes vulgarity; bravery, disobedience; firmness, eccentricity; humanity, stupidity; wisdom, flightiness; sincerity, a plague.
Manners and music are fundamental. The essential is to shape men's nature, not to quench it. The ethos is fashioned in men's association with each other and in government.
A nation can be guided only by custom, not by knowledge.
A man is awakened by the Odes, strengthened by the *li* [imperatives of conduct], perfected by music. - Mere form, like mere knowledge, has no value without the originality that fulfils it, without the humanity that is enacted in it.
Confucius advocates self-mastery, not asceticism. Nature requires to be shaped, but violence can only harm it. Even hatred and anger have their place. The good man can love and hate in the right way. For example - He hates those who themselves are base and slander those who are above them; he hates the bold who know no morality; he hates the reckless, bigoted fanatic.
**What makes a place beautiful is the humanity that dwells there. He who is able to choose and does not settle among humane people is not wise.
Towards friends - Take no friends who are not at least as good as yourself. Loyalty is the foundation. Friends should - loyally admonish one another and tactfully set one another right. Friends can be relied on - Even if the season be cold, we know that pines and cypresses are evergreen.
When an appeal is made to the laws, it means that something is not in order. - When it comes to hearing complaints, I am no better than anyone else, says Master K. What interests me is to see that no complaints arise.
Do nothing overhastily; that will not succeed. Do not consider the small advantage, for no great work can prosper in this way.
**The political conditions must be such as to make effective action possible. Where the prevailing state of mind leaves no room for effective action, the true statesman remains in hiding.
All goodness, truth, beauty are combined in the ideal of the superior man (gentleman, chün-tzu). Noble in birth and endowment, he has the manners of a gentleman and the wisdom of a sage.
The character, cast of thought, gestures of the superior man are described. He is contrasted with the inferior man. The superior man is concerned with justice, the inferior man with profit. The superior man is quiet and serene, the inferior man is always full of anxiety. The superior man is congenial though never stooping to vulgarity; the inferior man is vulgar without being congenial. The superior man is dignified without arrogance; the inferior man is arrogant without dignity. The superior man is steadfast in distress; the inferior man in distress loses all control of himself. The superior man goes searching in himself; the inferior man goes searching in others. The superior man strives upward; the inferior man strives downward. The superior man is independent. He can endure long misfortune as well as long prosperity, and he lives free from fear. He suffers from his own inability, not from others' failure to understand him. He avoids all competition, but if it must be, then only in archery. He is slow in words and quick in action. He is careful not to let his words outshine his deeds: first act, then speak accordingly.
Master K is conscious of facing a great alternative: to retire into solitude or to live in the world and try to shape it. His decision is unequivocal - A man cannot live with the birds and beasts. If I do not live with men, with whom shall I live? And - he who is concerned only with the purity of his own life ruins the great human relations.
In their private lives these two hermits found purity; in their retirement they found what the circumstances demanded. I am different. For me there is nothing that is possible or impossible under all circumstances.
The nature of man is called *jen*. *Jen* is humanity and morality in one. The ideogram means "man" and "two," that is to say: to be human means to be in communication.
**Jen* is the all-embracing source. It is through *jen* that the particular virtue becomes truth. And *jen* is the source of the absolute untainted with expedience - The ethical man puts the difficulty first and the reward last.
In youth when the vital forces are not yet developed, guard against sensuality; in manhood, when the vital forces have attained their full strength, against quarrelsomeness; in old age, when the forces are on the wane, against avarice.
Only the highest wise men and the lowest fools are unchangeable.
Truth and reality are one. The mere idea is as nothing. The root of human salvation lies in the "knowledge that influences reality", that is, in the truth of ideas that are translated into an inner, transforming action.
When he does not understand something, the superior man is reticent.
When Lao-tzu taught that one should repay hostility with good deeds, Master K answered - With what then shall we reward good deeds? No, reward hostility with justice, and good deeds with good deeds.
Those who are capable of self-mastery, who have learned to do what is good and to know what they are doing, will always be few. The people, on the other hand, can be led to follow something; they cannot be led to understand it.
When asked "What is the first thing to be done in order to promote a renewal in disastrous circumstances?" Master K gave a remarkable answer - Words must be set aright. What inheres in words should be brought out. The prince should be a prince, the father a father, the man a man.
Master K refrains from all direct statement on metaphysical questions. Though such an attitude may be put down as agnosticism, it does not signify indifference to the unknowable, but rather a reverence which is unwilling to transform intimation into pseudo-knowledge or lose it in words.
**3 Death offers no ground for emotion, it is not situated in any field of essential meaning. He can indeed lament premature death - That some things germinate but do not flower; that some things flower that do not mature - alas, that happens. But - To die at nightfall, that is not bad. Death has no terrors - When a bird is dying, his song is mournful; when a man is dying, his speech is good.
Master K could lament - The superior man suffers that he must leave the world and that his name is not mentioned. My way is not followed. Whereby shall I be known to posterity? Ah, no one knows me! - But he quickly consoles himself - I do not grumble against heaven, I am not angry with men. I have searched here below and I am in communication with heaven. Heaven knows me. - He contents himself with his lot - To learn and unceasingly practice, does that not give satisfaction? And if companions come to you from far away, is not that too a ground for rejoicing? And not to grow embittered if men do not know you, is not that noble too? - I will not grieve that men do not know me; I should grieve only if I did not know the others.
The one thing over which a man is master is his own heart. Good or ill fortune is no yardstick of a man's value.
Zilu said: 'If the Lord of Wei were waiting for you to run the government, what would you give priority to?' The Master said: 'What is necessary is to rectify names, is it not?' Zilu said: 'If this were to take place, it would surely be an aberration of yours. Why should they be rectified?' The Master said: 'How uncivilised you are. With regard to what he does not understand the gentleman is urely somewhat reluctant to offer an opinion. If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate. If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished. If deeds are not accomplished, then the rites and music do not flourish. If the rites and music do not flourish, then punishments do not hit the mark. If punishments do not hit the mark, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. So when gentleman names something, the name can definitely be used in speech; and when he says something, it can definitely be put into practice. In his utterances the gentleman is definitely not casual about anything.'
Master K did not turn away from the world to concentrate on himself. He devised no economic institutions, no legislation, no special form of government; he was passionately concerned with something that cannot be directly willed but only fostered indirectly, something on which everything else depends: the spirit of the whole in the ethical-political state and the inner make-up of every individual man as a part of the whole. He had no fundamental religious experience, no revelation; he achieved no inner rebirth, he was not a mystic. But neither was he a rationalist; in his thinking, rather, he was guided by the idea of an encompassing community, through which man becomes man. His passion was for beauty, order, truthfulness, and happiness in the world. And all these are grounded in something that is not made meaningless by failure and death.
What did Master K do? Unlike Lao-Tzu, he entered into the business of the world, driven by the idea that he was called to improve human conditions. He founded a school for future statesmen. He edited the classics. But still more significant: In China, Master K was the first great flaring up of reason in all its breadth and potentiality - and this in a man of the people.
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ethics. Show all posts
Friday, May 14, 2010
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Gilles Bouche: Copenhagen - What Could Have Been
The following text is a translated and slightly adapted version of the second part of a two-part piece which I wrote while the Copenhagen climate change conference was taking place and which was published on the website of Forum magazine – the magazine which, very roughly and mutatis mutandis, comes closest to being Luxembourg's Monthly. It was born of a feeling of frustration with much of the media coverage of the conference – including the coverage by said magazine. What frustrated me was what seemed to me an absence of analysis, a failure to understand or even make an effort to understand the science and politics of climate change, a fortiori a failure to help or even make an effort to help the reader to such an understanding, hence a failure to fulfil what seemed to me one of the main functions of journalism taking climate change as its topic – the function of continuously working at closing the gap between scientists and nonscientists, politicians and nonpoliticians, experts and non-experts. What frustrated me was what seemed to me a failure of journalists to do their job as mature and rational people should want to do their job and to treat their readers as mature and rational people should want to be treated.
Journalists indeed tried to close a gap, but not the one between experts and nonexperts. They tried to close the gap between nonexperts present and nonexperts absent. Instead of informing, they entertained. They tried to capture the atmosphere of the conference, they tried to give us a sense of what it was like to be there, of what it would have been like to be there, of what we were missing out on by not being there. The conference as experience, the conference as spectacle. Instead of cutting through the confusion, journalists were happy to express their inability to do so as the truth about the conference, as what was to be experienced at the conference.
A telling anecdote: Well toward the end of the conference, a journalist blogging for New Matilda, one of the better magazines, found the time to ask a scientist what he was thinking about the 1.5 degree C guardrail, the target advocated by many developing countries. The scientist bluntly said that meeting this target was virtually impossible. The current atmospheric composition, without any further increase in atmospheric CO2, is already bound to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C. This answer clearly left the journalist flabbergasted, which he would not have been, had he cared to have a glance at the literature.
The question which I tried to answer tentatively in the article was: How can one assess whether an agreement reached in Copenhagen is a good agreement? What criteria should an agreement meet? I considered two criteria: what I called “adequacy” and “fairness”. Talking about adequacy is fairly straightforward. One mainly has to listen to what scientists have to say. The science constrains the choice of an adequate target (such as the 2 degree C and the 1.5 degree C guardrails) and determines the choice of the means (in form of a CO2 emissions budget and CO2 emissions reductions) necessary to meet the target. Talking about fairness is more difficult, for obvious reasons. It presupposes a some conception of ethics, and ethics is a mess.
In the article, I mostly confined myself to relating the position of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), which advises the German government, as laid out in its excellent special report Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach. The WBGU recommends a principle-based attitude to fairness and identifies three main principles: the principle of equity, the principle of financial capacity, and the principle of mitigation capacity. The basic idea behind a principle-based approach to the distribution of emissions rights is of course that emissions rights should be distributed according to certain principles, but also that divergences from the distribution thus obtained are admissible, but should be justified, notably by invoking further principles. The advantage of a principle-based approach is hence that one starts with simplicity and introduces complexity step by step. Though of course, I do not think that the same issues cannot be approached from many different angles.
Finally, I refer to, resp. recommend, the following literature:
McKinsey & Company, An Australian Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction (February 2008).
PIK et al, RECIPE: The Economics of Decarbonization (2009). http://www.pik-potsdam.de/research/research-domains/sustainable-solutions/research-act-intl-climate-pol/recipe-groupspace/working-papers/public-working-papers-from-the-recipe-project/?searchterm=recipe
WBGU, Solving the Climate Dilemma: The Budget Approach (July 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_sn2009_en.pdf
WBGU, The Minimal Compromise in Copenhagen: A Target – But Still No Plan of Action, (20 December 2009). http://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_presse_09_05e.html
***
What are the hallmarks of a good agreement? (Trans. CS)
In part 1 of this post I suggested that an agreement in Copenhagen can be assessed on at least three general criteria: according to appropriateness, fairness and effectivenss. Whether an agreement is appropriate depends firstly on whether the chosen target and secondly on whether the chosen means are appropriate.
Appropriateness
There is an important asymmetry between overall targets and the means of achieving them. The choice of target is constrained by scientific facts, though it is not completely determined by them. It is and remains a political decision, reflecting a value-judgment (which doesn’t mean that we can’t rationally or critically discuss said value-judgment). Scientists only make pronouncements about the conditions for reaching a given target and what the consequences of the target are, i.e. what leads to the target being reached and where the target itself leads in its turn. The choice of target itself is the business of political decision-makers.
Two targets have been going the round in Copenhagen, both expressed in terms of an upper limit on global temperature increase relative to preindustrial times. The EU and the G8 among others are advocating the adoption of a 2 degree C guardrail, originally recommended by the WBGU (German Advisory Council on Climate Change) in 1995. The Alliance of Small Island States, whose very existence is threatened even in the unfortunately optimistic scenario of a 2 degree C temperature increase, insist on the adoption of a more stringent upper limit of 1.5 degree C. They enjoy the support of many developing countries and indigenous peoples.
Either target will be difficult to meet. To this day, global temperature has already increased by 0.8 degree C relative to preindustrial times. The current atmospheric composition is set to lead to a global temperature increase of 1.3 degree C over the next decades - an increase of 2.4 degree C if the cooling effect of short-lived polluting particles - the so-called global dimming - is discounted.
While science constrains, but does not determine the choice of target, the choice of means (at a general level which doesn’t exclude differing transpositions to less general levels) is completely determined by science relative to a politically determined target. Hence scientists at the WBGU tell us that, IF we are to have a 67% chance of remaining within the 2 degree temperature barrier, we will have to remain within a global CO2 budget of 750Gt for the period 2010 – 2050, with very low emissions or even negative emissions after 2050. In 2050 annual global per capita emissions should average 1t. If you commit yourself to the target but not the means, you either hold a different scientific view (which of course has to be scientifically based if it’s to be genuinely scientific), or you’re being straightforwardly irrational.
In all probability no global CO2 budget will be settled on at Copenhagen. Instead, reference will likely be made to the recommendations of the fourth IPCC report and commitments to national reduction targets. So to assess whether an agreement is appropriate given the picture provided by the WBGU you have to do a few calculations and derive a commitment to a global budget from commitments to national reduction targets. However, deriving a commitment to an exact global budget is impossible because of the way national reduction targets are currently formulated.
National Reduction Targets
At least three kinds of target are in current use: Annex I countries such as the US and the EU (the latter of course acting as a unified bloc) formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes over specified time-periods, in the case of the EU over the periods 1990 – 2020 and 1990 – 2050. Most non-Annex I countries with reduction targets on the table formulate these in the form of percentage reductions of annual emissions volumes relative to a Business As Usual projection within a specified timeframe. Many non-Annex I countries, e.g. China and India, formulate reduction targets in the form of percentage reductions in the CO2 intensity of national economic production, i.e. reductions of emissions volumes divided by GDP, again within a specified timeframe.
The way Annex I countries formulate their reduction targets already makes deriving a precise global CO2 budget impossible. To do so you would need a precise emissions trajectory. Stipulating a lowering of emissions by 30% by 2020 relative to 1990 restricts but doesn’t determine the emissions trajectory within the relevant timeframe. It would be theoretically possible to meet the target by doing nothing until 2019 and then suddenly lowering emissions by 30% in the final year. This would result in an emissions trajectory corresponding over the entire timeframe to emissions volumes far higher than for a scenario involving continuous reductions. In general it’s the case that the earlier reductions are undertaken, the lower the volume of emissions.
Clearly other additional factors make deriving an exact CO2 budget impossible, e.g. the fact that many non-Annex I countries don’t have to put any emissions targets on the table at all - understandably so, in the context of the Kyoto Agreement.
Fairness
Comparisons between the reduction targets of different Annex I countries – which is to say comparisons between reduction targets formulated on the same model – are already quite complicated. Assume we want to compare the targets of the US and the EU. The EU has put a 20 – 30% emissions reduction on the table for the period 1990 – 2020. The US has put a 17% emissions reduction on the table for the period 2005 – 2020. To compare the two targets, the thing to do is to calculate them relative to the same timeframe. Which timeframe do we choose though? If we take 1990 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the US of – 3%. If we take 2005 – 2020, we get a reduction target for the EU of 13 – 24%. This means: if we take 1990 as a base-year, the American target looks very modest indeed, something that the European media gladly points to time and again, as if the American preference for a different base-year involved the USA in a simple sleight-of-hand. They nearly had us fooled! If you take 2005 as a base-year, then the future efforts the US and the EU have indicated they are ready to impose on themselves seem to be roughly in the same ballpark. This still doesn’t mean that the burden of effort is fairly distributed. Shouldn’t the EU be rewarded for past efforts?
It gets even more complicated though. Reduction targets thus specified only relate to national emissions totals, not national per capita emissions. If, on the other hand, you look at per capita emissions over the period 1990 – 2020, then it turns out that the EU is putting forward a reduction of 24 – 33%, the US a reduction of 29%. The two targets are in the same ballpark. If you take per capita emissions over the period 2005 – 2020, then the EU reduction target of 14 – 25% contrasts with a far more ambitious American target of 27%. The game has changed. And the reason for that is clear: population is rising in the US (as it is in Canada and Australia) and is stagnating in the EU.
This, however, doesn’t mean that the US is in better stead ethically or environmentally than the EU. (At most, it means that the EU could take on a little more, maybe also that the Europeans need to get down off their high horse.) What’s important of course is not just percentage reductions of per capita emissions, but above all absolute per capita emissions; on that front the American numbers (20 tonnes per capita per annum) are well above European numbers (9 tonnes p.c p.a). The EU is again in a bit better stead.
The calculations get more complicated again when financial capacity and mitigation capacity are brought into the equation. Per capita GDP in the US is about twice as high as in the EU (since the latter’s eastward expansion) – which might lead you to think the US was capable of achieving greater reductions. (Mind you, you’d have to take into account other economic factors as well such as national indebtedness.) On the other hand, it could be claimed for example that the US (along with Canada and Australia) have fewer opportunities for mitigation in the transport sector because of longer-distance transport needs. See how complex the issue gets.
As a provisional conclusion we can state that the unsystematic way national emissions reduction targets are formulated makes evaluating an agreement according to the criteria of appropriateness and above all fairness a difficult business. Couldn’t we do all this better? Couldn’t we use a very simple algorithm to derive national reduction targets (in the form of national CO2 budgets) from the global budget? This is precisely what the WBGU suggests in a special report. However, before we turn to the details of the proposal, we need to turn quickly to another question.
Ethics and Cynicism
There is an important asymmetry between the criteria of appropriateness and fairness. It is clear that the criterion of appropriateness will play an effective role in the negotiations in Copenhagen. Many nations might have different views about which goal is appropriate, above all whether 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C is an appropriate upper limit. No one though disputes that an agreement needs to be appropriate. Otherwise we plainly wouldn’t need an agreement.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Review: Harry Redner's Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures
Harry Redner’s account of aesthetic life in his book of the same title is one to which the classic dictum of Lichtenberg applies: Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. Replace “good taste” with the more awkward “sense of aesthetic value” and you have Redner’s guiding insight in a nutshell: giving an account of what art is means avoiding all artful pleas for one’s own taste. It means submitting taste to multi-dimensional critical scrutiny on the highest intellectual level. Redner, in short, always has his reasons at his disposal. In Aesthetic Life he is never tempted to evade careful explanation of his whys and wherefores with picturesque rhetorical gestures or baroque theoretical artifice, or by sprinkling the names of the classics across the page.
The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.
In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.
In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .
Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)
Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.
The book’s subtitle, “the history and present of aesthetic cultures”, gives further clues to his intentions. The key to Redner’s aesthetics is the idea that aesthetic life is historically and socially formed - thus pre-formed, reformed and deformed – in ways that can be generalised about. The present becomes something like a necessary perspective on these socio-historical travails; aesthetic history for Redner cannot but be the history of the present, which for him means a tale told from the point of view of a time, our own, when the coherence and indeed the practical survival of aesthetic life are radically in question. The argument follows the pattern of Ethical Life (2002), which culminated in the claim that contemporary ethics is subject to a number of painful and historically unprecedented paradoxes, in large part because of the way free markets and the activities of modern states have displaced and rationalised (often rationalised away) the multiple ethical ideals of the past.
In each of the major divisions of this new book, Redner deploys a suite of basic aesthetic categories. They provide the machinery of his view of aesthetic life and his method in large part is to explain what he means by them, put paid to associated theoretical misconceptions, then deploy the machinery in his own account of how art works. The latter he does with some flair and considerable intellectual afflatus.
In Book 1 he presents what he calls the elementary aesthetic qualities, as well as a three-fold division between the constitution (composition, construction, fabrication), presentation (performance, exhibition) and reception of art. The aesthetic qualities include, among others, humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude. Redner thinks of them as something like the raw material of our experiences of art, anthropological universals which play a part in everyday life but are also aesthetically elaborated in line with the guiding ideas of individual cultures. (Simplifying considerably, jokes are the source of comedy; daily sing-song develops into honed musical art; speech-making and yarn-spinning flow over as epic narratives and novels; proverbs and the metaphorical tidbits of day to day speech take on definite aesthetic form as poetry; and they each do so in ways that fit with the evaluative interpretations that dominate a culture’s view of reality.) A highlight of this part of the work is the swift and effective overhaul Redner performs on the problem whether aesthetic qualities are subjective or objective, roughly – is beauty (or humour or any basic dimension of aesthetic value) in the eye of the beholder or in the beautiful object itself? The answer is neither and both. Beauty is not statically either in the beholder or the object, it comes to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way social norms and aesthetic standards are absorbed by individuals, then subsequently transformed and sent into social circulation again. Another way of putting it would be to say there is no fundamental subjective (inner, psychological) or objective (outer, material) grounds to which to reduce judgments about whether something is beautiful, funny etc. Aesthetic judgment is intersubjective, taking place within a framework of evaluative interpretations that are supplied but not mechanically determined by a wider culture. So at last that old chestnut has been plucked from the fire of philosophical wrangling. . .
Book 2 makes a categorial distinction between art, high art and great art – forms between which Redner intends to make no invidious comparison. By “art” pure and simple he means the aesthetic life of tribal peoples, as well as the folk and popular arts of historical cultures. “High art” is the product of literate civilisations which do things like create cities, form states and found elaborate social institutions. “Great art” is high art raised to a higher power of self-consciousness and loosened from its traditionalist moorings. The great art traditions, among which Redner includes those of Greece-Rome, China-Japan, India, Islamic Persia and modern Europe, are the traditions which develop a sense of their own historicity and a self-reflexive language of aesthetic criticism, together with a strong sense of the individual artistic personality. (In cultures that support a great art tradition the notion of artistic personality begins to shape what it means to be an individual in the first place.)
Book 2 takes us right up to the threshold of the present, with the aesthetically fateful twentieth century just closed. The main fact of recent aesthetic history for Redner is that the great art tradition of modern Europe has been brought to a (somewhat definitive) end, having been subject in the course of the twentieth century to a severe devaluation of its highest aesthetic values; though multiple threads of the tradition are still there to be grasped, by century’s end no strong sense of art’s purpose or direction remains intact. Here is where Redner sees a role for criticism, which, as the argumentative apparatus of Book 3 tells us, is the concerted artful practice of analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Great criticism comes into existence – at least it did so at the height of the European great art tradition - when critics formed the vital point of interconnection between practicising artists and academic scholarship. A re-vitalised criticism is what aesthetic life is crying out for today given the pervasive sense that aesthetic value judgments have nothing but a flimsy subjective basis and the enormous question mark posed by the dominant cultural institution of our times – a homogenised culture industry of elephantine global proportions.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Age review of John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation
John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilisation runs two intersecting arguments. The first is that civilised culture comes into existence where material and spiritual prosperity mutually enhance each other. The second is that “any ambitious account of civilisation has to be an account of how we should live, individually and collectively.”
The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.
Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.
Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.
As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.
He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.
Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.
There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.
Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.
One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.
“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”
There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.
His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?
Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.
The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.
Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.
Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.
The emphasis there is on the “should”. Armstrong says at the outset that he is not much interested in civilisation as an historical or sociological phenomenon. What he’s after is the essence of civilisation and the essence of civilisation, he hopes, can function as a source of cultural idealism in a world in which such idealism feels like it is under permanent attack.
Out he comes and says it, with his characteristic directness: philosophy can and should be the basis of all civilised aspirations, the goal of philosophy being the realisation that the good, the beautiful and the true are one . . . Civilisation ought to make us wise, kind and tasteful. And the purpose of the economy is to promote exactly that.
Armstrong basically wants to define civilisation as whatever makes personal self-development possible. Within that limited compass, he has plenty to say. How you deal with the little things in life and how you enjoy yourself are under-recognised parts of what it is to be civilised. Healthy civilisations are those which imbue routine activities with the qualities of works of art. Civilised societies are those which help individuals develop a sense of sophistication and refinement. They support “good accumulation”, money-making with a sense of higher purpose. They even improve the quality of relationships.
As in his earlier Secret Power of Beauty, Armstrong’s strength is in condensing complicated thinking into the clearest simplest terms. In Search of Civilisation contains a topnotch 2 page summary of Freud’s case in “Civilisation and Its Discontents” and a mildly amusing modern adaptation of Aristotle’s ethics.
He’s also good at teasing out both sides of cultural conflicts that materialise partially in individual life. His chapters on “decadence” and “barbarism” genuinely do something with those over-wrought nineteenth century terms; if you thought you could do without your inner bogan or your inner dandy then according to Armstrong you mistake the way modern civilisation necessarily produces both.
Several of Armstrong’s observations have a sort of low-key reflective heft: the specialised world of art scholarship can be as culturally dispiriting as plastic statuettes of Michelangelo’s David; a bit of old-fashioned sublimation of desire is not just good but downright noble.
There are a couple of problems with tone. For one, Armstrong can sound sanctimounious when he speaks on behalf of his readers. When he assumes too easily that his own professed longing for civilisation resonates with “our” deepest needs and concerns, “our” humanity, he sounds like Tony Blair transported into a philosophy tutorial.
Though not exactly irrelevant to his theme, the grace, charm and material comfort of Armstrong’s own way of life are put on display with a mite too much self-satisfaction, gently suggesting that he himself embodies the civilised ideal his book sets out to explain.
One-dimensional expressions of ardour for civilised things are a second problem. Armstrong’s intention is clearly to avoid dry philosophical technicality. But surely he might have found other ways of doing so than avowing that he is “penetrated to the depths of his soul” by so many things? Sometimes the intrusions of authorial personality simply seem, well, a bit embarrassing. They make the book too much about Armstrong and not enough about civilisation.
“Perhaps we are inescapably marked – when it comes to ideas – by early life. . . My deepest fear is of loutish bullying and, close second, of appealing for help and being told the problem lies in me. Uncritical emphasis upon ideas like difference and equality is terrifying. . .”
There are also some broader failings related to the substance of Armstrong’s thinking about civilisation. Because he chooses not to engage with the problem of civilisation historically, he doesn’t acknowledge that the very concept might have changed radically under modern social conditions.
His stated aim is to re-make the “tarnished idea” of civilisation. But how is this possible without recognition that we live in an increasingly globalised world that has all but effaced former boundaries between cultures? How does it differ from nostalgia if it doesn’t face up to the paradoxes with which technology confronts the aesthetic and ethical ideals of old?
Because Armstrong doesn’t qualify his argument about the virtues of materialism, he overestimates the way economic success can be a neutral second pillar of civilisation alongside spiritual prosperity. The possibility he doesn’t consider is whether contemporary economic life in a high-tech globalised world has a radical potential to act as a sort of acid for dissolving the forms of culture and civility that ground the life of civilised communities.
The results are all around us. The “civilising” content of the cultural past is re-packaged as another sort of economic product. As that content is made available in relatively cheap standardised form to masses of people the world over, it is evacuated of a large part of its meaning. Nor is the high-minded re-assertion of the civilising mission of high culture likely to do any good under such conditions. High culture is well and truly catered for as a niche product within a mass market, which is ultimately where Armstrong’s work takes its place. - It is not just that the petunia in the onion patch is unlikely to convince the onions to become petunias. We’ve got to the bizarre point where the petunia’s attempts to convince the onions sow the seeds of more onions.
Armstrong’s sections on the contribution of material prosperity to civilisation represent the real weakpoint of his thought. Where the rest of his book is often psychologically canny, in the sections on culture’s relationship to money Armstrong wants to deal with a large-scale social conundrum without bothering with the detail of how societies work. His few nods in the direction of economics are unconvincing.
Nor does the book engage enough with the collective side of the enterprise of civilisation that on Armstrong’s account is supposed to be the complement to the individual side. The organisations and institutions of civilised life hardly make an appearance. But without them the book’s notion of civilisation looks more like a personal idyll than a coherent ideal.
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