Dewey, Art As Experience (1)

Ok, the first of at least three posts on Dewey’s Art as Experience.

This post will focus on one objection to Dewey’s position. Then my next post will take up another objection, along with Nick’s rejoinder to that objection. And the third post (finally!) will explain how Dewey’s book has helped to clarify my own thoughts on the aesthetic.

Objection #1: What Bertrand Russell calls “Dewey’s metaphysics of organism” in his section on Dewey in A History of Western Philosophy. Dewey assumes that situations have an intrinsic unity—and meaning. One long passage, early in Art As Experience, suggests that metaphysics even as it also indicates why Dewey turns to the aesthetic to overcome the alienation, the compartmentalization, of modern life.

“Life is compartmentalized and the institutionalized components are classified as high or low; their values as profane and spiritual, as material and ideal. Interests are related to each other externally and mechanically, through a system of checks and balances. . . . Compartmentalization of occupation and interests brings about separation of that mode of activity commonly called ‘practice’ from insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from work, of emotion from thought and doing. Each of these has, too, its own place in which it must abide. Those who write the anatomy of experience then suppose these division inhere in the very constitution of human nature. [This paragraph summarizes the position Dewey is writing against.]

Of much of our experience as it is actually lived under present economic and legal institutional conditions, it is only too true that these separations hold. Only occasionally in the lives of many are the senses fraught with the sentiment that comes from deep realization of intrinsic meanings. We undergo sensations as mechanical stimuli or as irritated stimulations, without having a sense of the reality that is in them and behind them: in much of our experience our different senses do not unite to tell a common and enlarged story” (20-21, my emphasis).

Dewey’s position is spelled out in the essay “Qualitative Thought” (from Philosophy and Civilization). Each situation is initially encountered through our grasping its “quality”—and that quality is singular, not plural. Everything follows from this assertion of the “unity” of the situation. “The underlying unity of qualitativeness regulates pertinence or relevancy and force of every distinction and relation; it guides selection and rejection and the manner of utilization of all explicit terms. This quality enables us to keep thinking about one problem without our having constantly to stop to ask ourselves what it is after all that we are thinking about. We are aware of it not by itself but as the background, the thread, and the directive clue in what we do expressly think of. . . . If we designate this permeating qualitative unity in psychological language, we say it is felt rather than thought. Then, if we hypostatize it, we call it a feeling. But to term it a feeling is to reverse the actual state of affairs. The existence of unifying qualitativeness in the subject matter defines the meaning of ‘feeling.’ [This sentence is the metaphysical assertion.] The notion that ‘a feeling’ designates a ready-made independent psychical entity is a product of a reflection which presupposes the direct presence of quality as such. ‘Feeling’ and ‘felt’ are names for a relation of quality” (99, Dewey’s emphasis). “When it is said that I have a feeling, or impression, or ‘hunch,’ that things are thus and so, what is actually designated is primarily the presence of a dominating quality in a situation as a whole, not just the existence of a feeling as psychical or psychological fact. . . . All thought in every subject begins with just such an unanalyzed whole” (100).

That feelings are relational—and created out of the encounter between self and world—suits the pragmatist interactional model that I heartily endorse. What I object to is the notion that the world (as parsed out into situations) possesses a “qualitative unity.” It seems to me more obviously right to say 1) that situations are multi-voiced, presenting a welter of components that do not cohere into any clear unity; 2) that the emotions produced by situations are equally plural, ambivalent, mixed, ambiguous. Literature (among the arts) attends most carefully to this difficulty of simply understanding or naming one’s emotions; 3) that it is devilishly difficult to define the boundaries between one situation and another. The whole situation model is too visual and static, coming damn close to the “spectator theory” that Dewey usually and rightfully scorns. Our most important situations—marriages, careers, parenthood—unfold over long periods of time and encompass an astounding range of emotions, purposes, actions, and undergoings. Forging a unity out of such long-range projects seems to me to fail to experience them in their full complexity. It’s like Leon Edel’s reduction of Henry James’ life to his rivalry with his brother William. A unified explanation, yes; a plausible one, no.

Dewey’s stake in this insistence on unity seems, to me, encapsulated in the assertion that “human hopes and purposes find a basis and support in nature” (28, Art As Experience). I find myself unable to believe that romantic and optimistic position.

Here’s my alternative view, which I derive from how I understand the pragmatism of William James. In our interactions with the environment in which we find ourselves (crucially a natural and a social environment), we do (through acts of judgment) assess our surroundings and the possibilities those surroundings might afford and might frustrate. Those acts of judgment are certainly some kind of mixture of thought and feeling, thus making a hard-core distinction between those two would be a mistake. But those judgments are also almost invariably partial.

What any one person “sees” at a particular moment—and how she projects what is possible to do at this moment (in relation to long-term projects as well as to immediate concerns of comfort)—is determined by a number of factors (temperament, cultural conditioning, physical health, commitments to oneself and to others etc.)

But the “creativity” displayed in considering how to move from this moment to the next always only activates one of the plural possibilities that this moment actually affords. Our actor may be aware of some of these possibilities; but that she sees all of them is highly unlikely. We prize creativity precisely because it reveals possibilities to which we ourselves have been blind. To use James’s terms, our attentions are selective; we only see part of what the moment holds. There is always “more” that we do not see. As a psychologist, James was interested in how attention selects, in how we fail to see some things even as we focus in on others.

Finally, the real (if we need to identify a pragmatist metaphysic) displays itself insofar as it enables or frustrates the attempts by the agent to make certain possibilities actualities. Thus the stress on “experimentation” and “fallibility.” We cannot know for certain in advance if this course of action will bear fruit. We have judged that this line of action id possible and have predicted that it will have these outcomes, these consequences. But we might well be wrong.

Thus, “nature” is not aligned with human purposes; it simply does not inevitably frustrate such purposes. Nature is neither beneficent nor malign. It just is. It’s only significant feature, in this view, is its plasticity. What nature can or cannot afford is not written in stone. Work upon nature can change what is possible. The lesson from today’s environmentalists is that we have probably been too sanguine about the human powers to change nature. There are deleterious consequences to our work upon nature that we have failed to take into account. A heroic, Promethean pragmatism needs to be tempered with more attention to the unfolding (over time) of harmful outcomes of actions that look like short-term successes.

In short, I am saying that if a situation can be identified as a singular situation, and if it is seen to possess a “qualitative unity,” that is because our judgments are selective. In our interactions, we carve out something we call a situation from a more chaotic flux (James’s buzzing, booming confusion), and it attains a unity in relation to the purposes, desires, and consequent actions that are activated in relation to it. My metaphysic is (and I think this is James’s metaphysic) a mixture of Heraclitus and Darwin. The flux part is Heraclitus; the locked into perpetual interaction within a dynamic, non-static nature is Darwin. Dewey—and lots of commentators besides Russell have made this point—sometimes follows the Jamesian metaphysics, but in other cases adheres the residual Hegelianism in his thought—which leads to the positing of all-embracing unities.

Does any of this matter? Is it—as James would insist that we ask—a difference that makes a difference? Who cares if the unity exists (as Dewey says) in the subject-matter (meaning “out there” apart from the human agent) or if unity is forged by the human agent in her interaction with the environment? I don’t really see (but, then again, I am not all religiously minded) that it makes much difference if I believe the world is attuned to my purposes or not. So long as I have the experience of some interactions actually yielding outcomes close to those which I was aiming for, that seems more than enough. The proof is in the pudding. You win some, you lose some. Beyond that, I don’t feel the need for some kind of cosmic guarantee, some assurance of alignment beyond what everyday interactions yield. Others, it seems, feel differently (including at times William James). They want to know that the universe looks kindly on, and deigns to respond to, their needs and the efforts to satisfy those needs.

More consequential, at least for me, is the problem of humanism. To say that nature (a problematic term, by the way, and one which Dewey has great things to say about on 151-52 of Art As Experience) is not unified must not come to mean nature is inert. Rather, nature is pluralistic precisely because it is composed of multiple beings with their own purposes, their own ways of acting. In short, the term “nature” must be understood as something that is “assembled” in the same way that Bruno Latour thinks of “society” as being assembled. To deny nature has a unity is to open the way to an understanding that humans are not alone on the planet—and to underscore the complexity of the multiple relationships that encompass “being with others” (human and non-human).

Dewey’s version of the interactionist model needs to be disconnected from his overly credulous faith in modern science and technology. His belief in unity drastically—and dangerously—underestimates the resistance offered to human actions by the world—and the costs to other creatures and to multiple locales if those resistances are ignored or overridden. We are learning now that those costs also redound to we humans as well.

There remains the psychological question. Are we always inclined to forge a unity out of what the world presents to us? Maybe we could positively interpret the fragmentation of so much modern art as not a continual lament about the failure to attain “unity of being” (Yeats’ term for what he sought), but instead as an attempt to recognize multiplicity. Celebration of diversity, even of incompatibility. What could be more PC than that? What would it mean to unlearn our habits of productivity, or eagerness to turn every moment to account? To simply let go (as Isabella Tree and her husband have done at Knepp—as described in my previous post). The results can look chaotic—and are certainly not “composed” in ways that are recognizably beautiful according to traditional canons of beauty.

Dewey is not necessarily hostile to such speculations. The interactionist model is more than compatible with a stress on cooperation, interdependency, and appreciation for the different roles various participants might play. To simply master the world to serve one’s own needs is coming to look more and more like a Pyrrhic victory, ultimately self-defeating. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could learn that attending to others’ needs is the best path to serving our own? That may be too benign an interpretation of the prevailing state of affairs. Competition exists alongside cooperation and interdependency in a fully Darwinian world. But the fact (where my metaphysic takes its stand) that both competition and cooperation exist, just as the flux and achieved unities also both exist, works against any sense of unity, of being able to identify a single quality that characterizes our experiences.

Wilding

I still owe myself a long post on Dewey’s aesthetics and my last conversation with Nick Gaskill on that topic. Nick and I are now going to move on to some other writers.

But before I get to that, I have to write at least a short post on Wilding by Isabella Tree (NYRB Books, 2019). My friend John Kucich put me on to this book—and now I have been buying copies for friends. It’s an enlightening read, but (better than that) an exhilarating one. It also gets me out of my rut, having me read something on an entirely new subject for me.

Basically, Tree is narrating the history of the conversion (by herself and her husband) of their large (3500 acres or 5.4 square miles) farm into a nature reserve. They began the process of re-wilding their land in 2000; they own such a huge parcel—just miles from Gatwick Airport in Sussex, England—because her husband is an aristocrat who inherited the family estate that dates back to the 1700s. The estate is called Knepp.

For starters, “nature reserve” is really the wrong term. Basically, the idea of “wilding” or “rewilding” is to get land to return to what it would be without human interference or management. Hence, “return to” is not the right term either. What the land will become if a hands-off approach is taken is unpredictable—and certainly not calculated to be anything that resembles what it might have been in 1650, 1750, 1850, or 1950. The whole environmental context has changed and is always changing. So what you will get if you let things go is just what you will get.

Of course, to say there is no human interference or management is also not completely accurate. For starters, the acreage has to be fenced because one key—and another piece of human interference—is the introduction of animals. Central to the whole project is the establishment of herds of herbivores: deer, cattle, pigs, and ponies. The basic idea is that flora without fauna leads to unbalanced environments. You need to establish the full food chain, from plants, fungi and insects all the way up to carnivores. However, given their locale and the limited footprint, they have not seen fit to introduce carnivores, which means they have to cull their herbivore herds.

Tree is good at describing the various decisions made and their rationale, admitting limitations and set-backs. But mostly the story she tells is of spectacular success—so much so that at times I felt skeptical. But it is a tale of balance—and of intense interaction/interdependency. By not trying to set conditions that would insure the flourishing of this or that endangered species, the result is the emergence of any number of species that were not expected to arrive. What the experiment produces is an astounding wealth of life at every level, from the twenty-two species of dung beetle, to the reappearance of long-departed turtle doves and nightingales, to the flourishing of wild ponies. And the landscape changes from year to year as it rebalances itself in relation to species that had been threatening to become over-dominant and to changes in this year’s as opposed to last year’s weather. The whole story is one of a dynamic eco-system—and that dynamism, with its unanticipated interactions among different players, yields a dramatic tale that makes for a great read.

One big takeaway is that forests thrive when they are subject to constant clearing by herbivores. Tree is adamant the “closed-canopy forests” are not the ideal they are often taken to be. Meadows and marsh-land—what we often see as “scrub”—are richer, more ideal, environments. The pictures in the book show land that is not picturesque or what has come to be considered “beautiful” or “natural” or “untouched” in contemporary sensibilities. A fully occupied landscape—Darwin’s tangled bank—is not
“pretty,” but it is vibrant and teeming with life.

Tree’s book also offers an environmentalist screed. A small part of the critique is directed at certain foibles of the environmentalist community—in particular, targeted conservation efforts that aim at the tunnel-visioned salvation of one or two species instead of taking a holistic approach, and at the whole notion of “invasive species,” as if the evolution of a landscape can be flash-frozen at some chosen moment of time.

But the main target is industrial agriculture and the demented governmental policies (and subsidies) that sustain it. The wilding project itself is not about or enabled by walking away from governmental support. Even if Tree and her husband could not garner governmental monies for their experiment, they still would have to contend with extensive governmental regulation about how they could manage their property. The government (mostly the EU in their case, but also the UK) is neck deep in land management, almost all of it directed toward agricultural productivity. Tree is most convincing that these policies—products of the post-war Green Revolution—are destructive and counter-productive in just about any terms you can imagine: economically, scientifically, environmentally, and in terms of both efficiency and nutrition. It’s a crazy world out there, full of perverse incentives that have trapped farmers into a system that doesn’t serve them well and certainly doesn’t serve the food consuming rest of us.

There’s got to be a better way—and there is. Now it’s a question of re-aligning government policies and governmental monies to put that better way into practice. As always, the obstacles to change are formidable. But Tree certainly makes the case that all involved would be better off if change was effected.

The great thing about the book is that, while awaiting more global change, it is the story of wonderful, tangible success in its own particular locale. Instead of belly-aching about how bad things are, here is someone making things better, offering up a demonstration project of an alternative pathway.

Inevitably, I guess, Knepp has now gone in for eco-tourism. Some way of paying the bills still has to be found. However, in the time-honored English fashion, the grounds are also just free to walk via the footpaths that so often traverse farms in that country. The land itself, like the book about it, invites us to enjoy a world that stands in marked contrast to the one we usually walk in.

Sentimentality and Apocalypse

Despite the effort of feminist critics, Eve Sedgwick most notable among them, fear of sentimentality (one of the most persistent hallmarks of a modernist mindset) still rules the roost in almost all “serious” fiction. I remember figuring out around age 14, when I first started reading classics like Hemingway, Joyce, and Hardy, that I could be sure that I was reading the “good stuff” if it all ends badly. “Poetic justice” and “happy endings” belong to the Victorians and Hollywood. They were banished in any fiction post 1890 that aspired to “high” status—and such seems to still be the case. Bad things happening to good people is the rule.

One reason for abandoning sentimentality, one I find myself very much in tune with, is the determination to avoid any hint that suffering pays dividends. The classic Christian plot, of course, reveals how redemption is won through suffering. And classic fictional plots offer all kinds of variants on the ways that characters grow in wisdom or strength or sympathy through various trials, physical and/or mental. Not to mention suffering that serves as atonement for various faults, thus washing them clean and making the character “worthy of” a happy ending.

The modernist sensibility is that suffering is meaningless. It does not make people better—and it does not make the world better. Suffering is just outrageous, all too common, and offering nothing but the cup of bitterness. In fact, there is something obscene about all efforts to turn suffering to account, to make it serve some purpose. One must resolutely turn one’s back on any sentimental way enlisted to make suffering pay dividends.

The sentimentalist, in other words, lies. He makes the world out to be better than it really is because he takes suffering, which is inevitable, and makes it palatable.

Anti-sentimentalism, as many have pointed out, comes with a kind of machismo pride: I am man enough to face up to the harsh truth that others try to shirk. My objection is that manning up seems to also entail admitting there is nothing that can be done about it. It becomes sentimental to think there are ways toward a more just world.

Anti-sentimentalism also alters the form of narratives. Traditional plots often turn on character development. To put it most simply: they show characters learning from and being changed by experience. As Aristotle put it way back when: characters are shown as moving from good fortune to bad, or the reverse. It doesn’t have to be that schematic, but the point is that experience matters, that neither character nor the world are eternally the same. Things and people change—and plots are ways of registering and accounting for those changes. The anti-sentimentalist view tends toward stagnant, determinist, fatalism. Things are always just about the same: the good suffer, injustice prevails, there is nothing much in the way of improvement to expect or hope for.

It’s this hopelessness that makes me like the John Dewey quote about sentimentalism that I offered a few posts back. Here it is again: “Education and morals will begin to find themselves on the same road of advance that say chemical industry and medicine have found for themselves when they too learn fully the lesson of whole-hearted and unremitting attention to means and conditions—that is, to what mankind so long despised as material and mechanical. When we take means for ends we indeed fall into moral materialism. But when we take ends without regards to means we degenerate into sentimentalism. In the name of the ideal we fall back upon mere luck and chance and magic or exhortation and preaching; or else upon a fanaticism that will force the realization of preconceived ends at any cost”(Reconstruction in Philosophy, 73).

No surprise, of course, that Dewey, optimist that he is, believes change for the better is possible. But I want to take up two different thoughts prompted by his statement.

First, that grand ideals like “justice” and “equality” are sentimental if unmoored from concrete ideas about how to put them into practice. And such sentimentalism leads directly to preaching and exhortation, along with fuzzy thinking that avoids all consideration of means. I have no more to say on that score. If the shoe fits . . .

Second, if one has no concrete steps to be taken, I think the form “magical thinking” takes is apocalyptic. The writer cannot imagine how to transform the world of injustice and suffering he presents. But the writer also declares this state of affairs is unsustainable and, therefore, will come down with a crash at some unspecified point in the future through some unspecified chain of events. This is the dream of revolution, but it has become the garden variety claim that current levels of inequality must lead to drastic political upheavals, that current levels of greenhouse gases must lead to transformative environmental disaster, and (of course) to the well-worn belief that economic crisis must lead to the collapse of capitalism.

Waiting for the apocalypse is not a politics. “To profess to have an aim and then neglect the means of its execution is self-delusion of the most dangerous sort” (Reconstruction in Philosophy, 72-73). Kant’s categorical imperative gets all the attention, but I have always preferred the “hypothetical imperative” myself. Basically, Kant says we fail one test of reason when we don’t will the means toward an end. As I explain it to my students, if your goal is to pass the test on Friday morning, the hypothetical imperative says you must study on Thursday night. If you go out to the bars, you are being irrational by Kant’s account.

Now, it is true, neither Kant nor Dewey pay enough attention to the case where one wills the means (after having thought carefully about them) but is powerless to put those means into action. Apocalyptic thinking is a delightful refuge for the powerless, for those who can’t make their desired courses of action a reality.

But there is no reason for such powerlessness to rule supreme in fiction. We seem to be suffering from a debilitating case of fatalism (suffering and disaster are inevitable and there is nothing we can do about it) combined with a severe lack of imagination (an inability to entertain, at least in thought, pathways toward a better future). The only means of transformation we seem currently able to credit is catastrophe. And Dewey would claim that predilection is every bit as sentimental as an Austen or Dickens novel that offers its characters a happy ending.

Cakes, Ale, and Mellon (2)

My post on the Mellon Foundation’s announcement that it would orient all its future funding decisions toward projects that advance social justice generated a conversation on Facebook. You can read the give-and-take by going to my FaceBook page.

Here I want to make my position clear (which is hard because I have mixed feelings on the topic)—and elaborate on my rationale for those feelings.

Let me state my opinion at the outset—and then the rest of the post tries to explain that opinion. Mellon has been the biggest foundation funder (by orders of magnitude) of work in the arts and humanities for many years now. It was especially important because it funded institutions—museums, theaters, dance companies, learned societies, universities, small presses and the like—as well as individuals. And (this is my big point) is was one of very few places where people in the arts and humanities did not have to justify their work by reasons external to the work itself. You certainly had to convince Mellon that the work you were doing was of excellent quality and make a case that it was deemed significant and superb in the relevant field, but you didn’t have to claim external benefits.

Why is that important? Because the arts and humanities cannot exist in a market society unsubsidized. The major source of subsidy is the educational system, from kindergarten through to universities. 95% (to pick a plausible number out of thin air) of artists and humanists will make the majority of their income from teaching. And that means the arts and humanities are continually burdened with making the case that they are pedagogically useful. The insistence that that case be made—accompanied by an increasing skepticism about that case—is familiar to anyone who works in these fields. So Jessica Berman is absolutely right that we need to be adept at making that case since we will be called on—repeatedly—to make it.

But that need to make the case means the arts and humanities are continually and increasingly on the defensive, trapped within a game they cannot win but must play. Thus the endless shouting into the wind about the benefits of a liberal arts education. I am not saying those arguments are untrue. I am simply saying they never convince the people who demand that we make those arguments even though they have closed their minds to them long ago. It’s a pointless, frustrating, undermining game. What a relief it was to not have to play it to secure support from Mellon.

Now let me tell you a true story. I taught in the Humanities Department of the Eastman School of Music for eight year. My students were all aspiring musicians. Because I am deeply committed to the notion of an informed citizenry, my classes there were usually designed to give students an understanding of the state of these United States. At the end of one semester, a promising young pianist came to tell me he was going to abandon music because the world was in too bad a shape for him to continue in good conscience. I hope that you would in a similar circumstance be as horrified as I was.

That was not what I meant at all, I hastened to tell him. I want you to be an informed democratic citizen, but I never intended to make you think you should give up trying to become a concert pianist. You have an enormous talent and the world needs great pianists. Your first responsibility to yourself and to the world is the nurturing of your talent.

Here comes the hard part. I don’t think Beethoven and golf are significantly different as human endeavors. Both are difficult, intricate, capable of being endlessly fascinating. To become a master of either you need to be obsessed to the point of being a bit crazy, certainly to the point of neglecting much else that most of us think part and parcel of a well-rounded life. Both deliver something to the practitioner (discipline, interest, satisfaction/frustration) and to those who enjoy watching/listening to adept practitioners (fandom, pleasure, the joy of watching something very difficult being done superbly well). I don’t really see (despite the somersaults we go through—and it is always somersaults if Adorno is our guide) that claims about why Beethoven should be in the school curriculum but not golf hold water. If it’s complexity and mental agility and an ability to pay close attention that we are after, golf could do the trick just as well.

This last point is driven home (admittedly to my despair) by the fact that sports are a much larger presence in our schools than the arts and humanities. Certainly in terms of money spent, sports (at least from ninth grade on) garner much larger budgets. And when (as is seldom the case, but not never) sports have to justify their presence in the curriculum, they offer reasons that echo the ones trotted out to justify the liberal arts. Reasons about mental discipline, learning to work with others etc. (Side note: isn’t it wonderful that Stanford has dropped eleven sports instead of cutting the music department? Let’s hope other universities follow their lead.)

What about social justice? I hate to think of the somersaults that are going to be required to demonstrate that work on Beethoven will contribute to social justice. (As I said in my first post, I predict the route taken will be to make Beethoven more available to audiences traditionally unexposed to him.) Some authors (Dickens, Carolyn Forché) are going to be much easier to link to a social justice agenda than others (Nabokov, Jorie Graham).

Even with the more obviously politically relevant authors, I think the rationale is often a subterfuge. I think of all the work in the past thirty years about Melville’s relationship to slavery. Solid work—but driven, I think, primarily by an interest in Melville not by an interest in slavery. Melville was not an important figure in abolitionist circles; if you are really interested in the history of slavery in the US, of attitudes toward it, and its practices, Melville is way down the list of places you would go. He only acquired any significance long after slavery was abolished, and our investment in him now is disciplinary (having to do with the canon) and aesthetic (in the sense that we think him a superb novelist). Yes, we want to know about his reactions to slavery—but not because they tell us all that much about slavery and abolition efforts, but because they tell us about Melville who we think is significant enough as an artist that knowing more about him is worthwhile. What drives the scholarship is not the advancement of social justice, but the advancement of our knowledge of Melville.

I know I am going to be misunderstood on this point. So let me state it in different words. Literary studies bestows authority on certain figures; it has a canon. Efforts to break open that canon—and to examine the processes that go into its formation—are (I think) directly political. But such efforts have been modestly successful. The undergraduate curriculum, even for majors, remains mostly canonical. And scholarship, while certainly more historicist over the past forty years, still tends to be anchored by one or two “major” figures even as it explores less honored (or taught) writers. It is the authority attached to those major figures that still matters greatly—with its assumption that 1) learning more about those writers is a self-justifying scholarly motive in the discipline, and 2) that what those major figures thought and did is significant because of who they are. (The kind of circular reasoning about significance that drove Barbara Herrnstein Smith crazy in her attack on aesthetics, Contingencies of Value.)

To state for about the millionth time in my lifetime, my basic take on this relationship between art/scholarship and politics. I just don’t buy that writing about social class in Dickens is political, and certainly don’t see it as an advancement of social justice. Political work engages in changing institutions, in working on facts on the ground. Scholarly work can change political opinions, just as Dickens’ novels can, but we have a very attenuated sense of the political if we think that our job is done when we teach Bleak House and write an essay about its views of social responsibility. If, in fact, our reason for being in the classroom and doing our scholarship is political, then we are acting in bad faith. If you really take politics as your primary motive in life, then making art or writing literary criticism is not what you should be doing.

I don’t think we advance social justice one iota if we confuse direct political action with the indirect attention to political questions that can occur in our classrooms and in our scholarship. So my fear is that Mellon’s insistence that we tie our work to social justice will just abet this confusion of the direct with the indirect. It is hard enough to be honest about our motives for what we devote our time and energy to. And it is equally hard to be realistic about what our work can and cannot accomplish. I think Mellon’s new orientation will encourage comforting lies we already too often are tempted to tell ourselves.

To be blunt: I hate the gestural politics on display at the Whitney and in the halls of the MLA. It’s cheap in the sense that it costs its practitioner nothing and seems mostly directed at garnering the approval of his peers. There are, of course, notable exceptions—Banksy, James Baldwin, and Edward Said come to mind immediately—so I need to be careful not to claim that it is impossible for art and scholarship to be political. But it is damn difficult.

If our work as artists and teachers is not political, what is it? I have backed myself into a corner here, pushing me toward an answer I would have scorned most of my (misdirected? misunderstood?) career. (In short, I was as committed, maybe even more so, to literary studies’ efforts to be political–and thus avoided saying, to myself or others, what I was actually practicing everyday as a teacher.) Cultivation of a sensibility of open-ness and appreciation.

Another story to indicate what I mean. Some years back I discovered that all the students in a class I was teaching had never seen “Casablanca.” My deepest commitments were brought home to me. I didn’t deeply care if they never read Pope’s “Epistle to Man,” but to never see “Casablanca” would be to go to the grave without having passed through life. My goal as a teacher was to open eyes to the richness of the word and the life it was possible to live in that world. To move my students toward the “quickened consciousness” Pater extolled. That goal did mean I wanted them to see how cruel, how unequal, how unjust the contemporary world is, but bringing that point home was part of the larger project of their seeing “life” and “the world” in all its many-sided splendor and squalor. And it is in the arts that that splendor and squalor are most fully on display.

This last point brings me back to cakes and ale. William James was interested in what he called “moral holidays.” He did not mean the term pejoratively. He knew that everyone of us grants ourselves such holidays. So how do we justify them? Peter Singer is the utilitarian philosopher who makes the absolutely stringent case against such holidays. There is no way, Singer argues, to justify spending $150 to see “Hamilton” when that same sum, given to Oxfam, can feed 40 people. No cakes and ale without an obligatory side dish of guilt.

Singer’s challenge returns us to my Eastman student’s crisis of conscience about playing the piano. We can do somersaults to justify our cakes an ale. Even when admitting they are no good for the world or even to ourselves (sugar and alcohol?), we will talk about psychological well-being, letting off steam, all work and no play, etc. etc. Because, of course, we all do take moral holidays.

My utopia is a world where we are relieved of the felt necessity to justify the holidays. They are just good in and of themselves. (Of course, traditional aesthetics keeps returning to this issue of intrinsic value again and again.) There is nothing wrong about pleasure, about things that fascinate us by their intricacy and difficulty (we can imagine the “holidays whisperer” crooning in our ear.)

Hannah Arendt, with her obsession with amor mundi (love of the world), approached these issues in a somewhat different way. She talks about the “freedom from politics” as among the freedoms to be protected and cherished. One hallmark of totalitarianism is that everything becomes political; nothing gets to escape signifying one’s political allegiances, and one is either applauded or persecuted for every single taste or action. We are in a bad way when wearing a mask during a pandemic becomes politicized. Zones of the non-political are liberating in the way that “moral holidays” are.

Just think of how dreary a world without music, without novels, without holidays would be. That world would certainly be hard to love. That’s all the justification we need. More importantly, it is all the justification we are going to get. All the other rationales are threadbare, barely plausible.

Mellon used to be a place where you didn’t have to do lip service by trotting out those all too familiar rationalizations. Apparently no more.