Ancient Aphorisms (1998)

One or two of you seem to be finding my junior aphoristic scribblings a little bit entertaining (edifying?), so here are some of the earliest ones. The model back in the strange days of the mid- to late-90's was La Rochefoucauld - hence the antiquarian references to "virtue/s" (not sexual purity, but "excellence/s"), to measures of human greatness and to artists' "gifts". Hence too the slight overuse of the royally meditative, lyrico-didactic first person plural pronoun so characteristic of the bonzai philosophy I've criticised others for cultivating in their inner suburban gardens.

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It is in bad taste nowadays to point out what is bad taste.

Unless given direction as well as impetus, unless they are as it were held out before their owners for them to fix their gaze on, talents are bound to bite their owners on the back at a later date. About half the talent in the world ceases to exist before it so much as comes to light.

If your only virtue is that you are impossible to dislike then all but run-of-the-mill human beings are going to find you a bore.

Even in great people, hypocrisy casts a pall over almost all things.

The all-time most venomous human beings are those who discover their talents much too late in life, when their lives are trickling away and what is left of their talents is even less than a trickle.

Once breaking taboos for its own sake ceases to be entertaining and fashionable (as it is now) it will become boring; and the end of it will be that human beings' lives will be more shapeless and miserable than ever before.

There is a certain sort of human being who sees in himself the aggregate of every possible weakness. None of this however prevents him from conceiving of himself heroically.

Even the meekest are capable of the most ingenious simulation and dissimulation when things go incontrovertibly against them.

Timid people are liable to go through life without ever understanding that the urge to humiliate people plays an important part in the emotional economy of others, most especially those others who are their arch-tormentors and rivals.

We use the word "boring" to denigrate those who are fighting the same fight as we, but whose characters counsel more reserve than we ourselves possess or whose tactics in the fight are more subtle. We use nastier epithets to distinguish those who attach less value to victory but are nevertheless fighting with the same vehemence as ourselves.

How many exceptional human beings have been stunned into stupor by the specious argument that by championing the exception they thereby wanted to denigrate the rule?

Style, simultaneously an expression of esprit and an outlet for one’s highest ideals, is also a matter of self-concealment.

The tragedy ends. After the tragedy, questions of personal agency become more urgent and obscure.

The History of Art is a process of revolutionising taste (for example, over the past two centuries this has quite understandably often involved scandalising the bourgeoisie), which is precisely why it must be suspected that the History of Art, if not Art itself, has come to an end, viz. because taste has become something increasingly less substantial, less embodied by actual forms of life, a cultural surface phenomenon, incorporated increasingly into a meta-taste, the taste for - revolutionising taste for its own sake, actually no taste at all. We have realised that the impulse to make it new has been completely subsumed by the society-wide push to fabricate new things to turf out, but making it old is unfortunately no refuge where the little bit of purism about us can still be given its due.

In addition to the small number of individuals rebelling against existent things must be taken into account the large number rebelling against what is palpably non-existent, against conditions, institutions, “certainties”, systems of “certainties” which had their day long ago, not to mention the even larger number perfectly content to remain perfectly obsolescent. The Twentieth Century, in which the speed of social and cultural transformation has increased, is unique among the centuries for having produced so many historical misfits, so many throwbacks to past decades and centuries. (Everyone indeed is a misfit in some not insignificant sense.) What we have here is a dynamic "spirit of the times" which everyone is behind, a spirit of the times with no one to represent it.

Too few people know how to read. Even the best of us carry on as readers like "idlers in the garden of knowledge". To read actively is to experience each sentence as an accusation or a challenge.

There are certain people who despise us because we see through them, whom we despise because they too see through us. While the fact of seeing-through and being-seen-through is something perfectly normal and desirable, it is nevertheless actively concealed by most. Under normal circumstances, this makes mutual recognitions of this sort doubly abnormal and repellent. On occasions they also lead to friendship; bursting through the social veil from opposite directions you come across another human being - which can be such a novelty and such a gigantic relief that the result is a lasting alliance.

The first effect of the death of outstanding individuals is to make the quotidian look like a monstrous bad joke.

Death, nevertheless, is something about which an incomparable number of disingenuous things have been said, - something around which a greater dustheap of ill-conceived anti-psychological prejudice could hardly have amassed. The fact that it is the occasion for so much cliché, false sentiment and superstition, not its chimeric imponderability, sets it apart as something remarkable.

It is not merely the presence of paradox which is the signpost to philosophical problems, but also the absence of these things, the garden-variety clichés and platitudes, with all their accompanying mental and psychological dross.

Poetry or Philosophy. Poetry, fairly and unfairly, has been viewed as mankind's crowning cultural achievement because poetry, when practiced by its various masters, seemed in comparison to philosophy to say things more richly and appositely. Das, was die Philosophie pedantisch vor uns stellt, raunt das Gedicht uns zu - what philosophy pedantically sets before us the poet whispers or shows us with a sign. The discoveries of the philosophers who were most like poets still seem to go about with leaden feet in comparison.

Spirit of reverence. Perhaps one of the highest talents anyone can cultivate in an age in which conviction curdles, belief rings untrue and the proclamation of mysteries is a sacrilege is the talent for undisillusioned appreciation. Such a person doesn't so much set him or herself against the world, re-situating all prime values somewhere else in history, as discover a fine reason for averting his or her gaze from present surroundings.

To look on - in sad fascination. To remain silent - even if it be forever. To carry oneself as if this life were a tragedy into which one is born to play the leading role. Such attitudes remain the worthiest things which a certain calibre of human being can aspire to, most especially in ages lacking in naive self-confidence.

There are educated people who are largely incapable of enjoying art or writing until it is explained, until the vagaries of art or writing get turned into a pseudo-conceptual critical game of some variety. No doubt they would come to a better understanding of the field if they could get their heads round the idea that artists and writers are more often than not worse-read, worse-educated, altogether less objective than they. Among educated people education is nothing less than a point of honour, among artists it is often regarded as not much more than a point of reference and a weapon with which to fight for certain ideas they have about themselves.

Nietzsche in conversation. Tell obtuse people who are puzzling earnestly over aesthetic questions that are too difficult for them that the writer or artist in question was a Nietzschean without knowing it.

Nothingness yawns twice as contentedly in Australia.

Sydney is full of people who dream of going to the gym in the morning. Melbourne is full of people whose profoundest instinct is to reach for the self-help shelves in the afternoon gloom.

Forbesian. Sydney-siders behave as if Sydney were the Venice of the South Pacific, the best place on earth to confuse "good" with "sexy". Melbournians behave as if they invented stylised gloom - as if making looking miserable look snappy but also a little edifying were a service to humanity. To the Sydney-sider of seasoned experience Melbourne is like some bad-taste Europe, Europe the Art-lined purgatory where you're constantly reminded how lucky you were to escape Melbourne's hell. Overburdened with imagination and conscience, Melbournians of course finds Sydney - heaven.

We listen to the advice of others as a matter of form, not as a matter of policy. To the advice of friends we generally give half a thought - then disregard it. To that of people who leave us indifferent - we give no thought at all. To the advice of people whose sphere of experience could not conceivably encompass the dilemma or sticky situation we find ourselves in - we also give no thought at all, though we do give more than a little thought to ways of revenging ourselves for their willingness to give advice.

The scourge of those who want to know things well and yet are sincerely sceptical: the self-regard of the sincerely ignorant.

Almost all intellectual errors, misinterpretations and the like are a result of mistaking the level at which something is said.

Upbraiding others when we recognise in them weaknesses similar to our own is more often than not as close as we get to upbraiding ourselves for our weaknesses.

Sincerity is not a mark of freedom and Democritus stood things very nearly on their heads in claiming that it is. Sincerity is commonly also a mark of solid self-satisfaction and only to be esteemed when combined with notions of level and depth. The sincerity of a human being who wades about in the shallows is a phenomenon that calls to be seen through. (More fairly:- it is only to be gauged accurately when listened to against the background noise of his or her whole way of life and the ways of life of his or her world.)

The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.

The only half-tolerable patriotism is the sort that loves its country and thinks that the best thing it can do for its country is send up its country.

It is the task of the philosopher to comment upon what we subtly allow ourselves to say and disallow ourselves from saying.

Aphorisms are an advantageous way of philosophising. They express, though not at the level of what is being said, the idea that no philosophical system can encompass the length and breadth of the world. A collection of aphorisms is a halfway house between a philosophy and a chaotic assortment of metaphor; the individual metaphors are the basic element, but each points equally in the direction of philosophy, which is the endeavour to speak the whole in the knowledge that it neither can nor necessarily should be spoken.
How to explain this? A proposition which stands in a relationship of logical contradiction to another proposition can equally stand in a relationship of metaphorical complementarity to the same proposition. Philosophically however the two simply stand side by side. Philosophy in this sense is perspectival - it privileges neither the standpoint of logic (where things stand opposite their contraries) nor that of metaphor (where things can leap over as far as their contraries). Objectivity pertains to it - precisely insofar as it gives individual propositions full subjective weight. 

If a vaguely rigorous "theory of value systems" could be extrapolated from Wittgenstein's many riffs on the theme of language-games then one would have a ready means with which to disassemble so many of the pseudo-problems of moral philosophy and aesthetics. The absence of the even vaguely rigorous is perhaps the distinguishing feature of what today goes under names like "Continental Philosophy" and "Theory". Whereas an abundance of rigour and a terror of any deep-seated theory of value systems is the distinguishing feature of all “Analytic Philosophy”. Its delicious air of mystagoguery is what makes the former so attractive, the whiff of fear and soldiery what makes the latter unfashionable.

An ability to discern what goes on in the heads of others is perfectly compatible with a perfect inability to discern what is going on inside your own head. (And vice versa.) The sphere of all your self-perception and the sphere of your perception of others are incommensurable.

Women in the age of plastic exaltation. The women who are lauded with attention in this age of better things for better living through technology - the stalkers on the cat-walks and the sugarloaves in the soapies (those monumental fantasy figures of bourgeois morality writ small) - are never beautiful, though many of them are attractive. In what does this attractiveness consist? Well, if La Rochefoucauld is right when he says that attractiveness, as distinct from beauty, is a mysterious harmony between a person's features and the person's general bearing - then today's plastic-women are attractive in the sense that their regular plastic features are in harmony with the vapidity of their general bearing.

An interesting coincidence: that at about the age strong-minded women start seeing ghosts (c.60) their weak-minded husbands start behaving like ghosts.

People with an abundance of very particular habits who aren't trying to keep their niggardliness in check or to themselves must be suspected of inventing these habits as a means of attracting attention to themselves.

Physique is less important than mystique - once inside the bedroom.

Poetry, whose basis is incantation, whose origins are ritualistic, depends for its effect on the mystique of saying something eloquent. It should come as no surprise to those who have taken pause to mark the demise of religious feeling in the West over the past 150 years that poetry is becoming increasingly impossible if not downright absurd.

The exceptional talents of a large number of men and women never get recognized, not even so much as by themselves, because they spend their whole lives in insipid or unexceptional company. These people are simply never presented with their own mirror image, the brilliant man or woman in whom talent has crystallized as a sense of purpose - the only thing that might ever have led them to think more highly of themselves. It seems amazing - no one with great gifts crosses their path in the whole of a lifetime.

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.