The Aesthetic (Two)

I can’t see my way toward describing “aesthetic sensibility” without making an inventory of the features that comprise “the aesthetic.” So my posts on this topic are going to meander back and forth across those two topics.

Dewey’s Art and Experience cover a lot of ground. That’s a polite way of saying it’s a mess. A kinder verdict would say the book embodies Dewey’s characteristic pluralism, offering a wide range of ways to understand art: its functions, its impact, the reasons all human societies produce it. For my purposes, that the book offers so many different versions of what art is and what it does is useful—because I want to canvas all the different ways we can think about art.

For Dewey, however, it is not clear how the book’s pluralism can co-exist with his firm declaration, at the outset, that the aesthetic is anything “that intensifies the sense of immediate living” (6; I am using the Perigee Books paperback edition dating from 1980). “[T]he work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. The art product will then be seen to issue from the latter, when the full meaning of ordinary experience is expressed” (11). Art “works idealize qualities fond in common experience” (11). “A conception of fine art that sets out form its connection with discovered qualities of ordinary experience will be able to indicate the factors and forces that favor the normal development of common human activities into matters of artistic value” (11).

Intensity, meaning, qualities, and value. Those key terms indicate what Dewey is aiming for. In Dewey’s essentially Darwinian account, “life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but because of it, through interaction with it. . . . [I]n order to live, it [the organism] must adjust itself, by accommodation and defense but also by conquest. At every moment, the living creature . . . must draw upon something in its surroundings to satisfy its need. The career and destiny of a living being are bound up with its interchanges with its environment, not externally but in the most intimate way” (13).

Dewey’s idea is that, much of the time, we are buffeted by this interchange, submerged in what William James called “the buzzing, blooming confusion” of passing time, just trying to keep our heads above water. But sometimes, Dewey says, an “equilibrium” (14) or “harmony” (14) is achieved. That achievement yields what Dewey calls “consummation” (15); it renders an experience that is felt to be fulfilled. That consummatory experience has a shape, a form, for us. It can be named, reflected upon, and identified as desirable and satisfying. It instantiates an ideal interactive relationship with the whole ensemble of beings and conditions that we sum up in the term “environment.” That ideal relationship is what Dewey claims is “the aesthetic.”

I want now to offer a long quote that leads up to that final claim that “the aesthetic” is best understood as indicating experiences that embody this satisfactory relationship to the environment. I do so because I want to focus in on several crucial moves within Dewey’s argument. (I have underlined a number of key terms.)

“The world is full of things that are indifferent and even hostile to life; the very processes by which life is maintained tend to throw it out of gear with its surroundings. Nevertheless, if life continues and if in its continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life. The marvel of organic, of vital adaptation through expansion (instead of by contraction and passive accommodation) actually takes place. Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through rhythm. Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and because of, tension.

There is in nature, even below the level of life, something more than flux and change. Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Wherever there is this coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without but is made out of relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another. Because it is active (not anything static because foreign to what goes on) order itself develops. It comes to include within its balanced movement a greater variety of changes.

Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder—in a world where living creatures can go on living only by taking advantage of whatever order exists about them, incorporating it into themselves. In a world like ours, every living creature that attains sensibility welcomes order with a response of harmonious feeling whenever it finds a congruous order about it.

For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a stage of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic” (14-15).

Lots going on here. There is the metaphysical claim that “nature” is “more than flux and change.” It is not a completely Heraclitian universe. Later, Dewey will assert that “the fact that civilization endures and continues—and sometimes advances—is evidence that human hopes find a basis and support in nature”(28). “Harmony” and “equilibrium” are achievable, it seems, because life’s desire for “stability” finds an answering “order” in nature. That order is “rhythmic” because it manifests itself even as time passes. Thus, “form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached” (14). Form is dynamic; it must be responsive to change even as it achieves some kind of stability.

The aesthetic, then, is linked to those times when we manage to find form. Using language current today (but which Dewey does not use), form “emerges” in the interaction with environment, but only in those interactions where some kind of satisfactory relationship is established. And form can only be sustained through an ongoing attentiveness to change. Like a surfer, form only avoids being wiped out by constantly adjusting to the changes of the moving wave.

Dewey–as is clear through the text’s references to Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge—is recognizably Romantic in this yoking of art to the establishment of a satisfactory relationship to nature. He also (at least in this text) shares the Romantic faith that human life and nature are not inimical, but is some way or other made for each other. (Recall that “beauty” in Kant’s aesthetic is basically the apprehension that mind and world are made for each other.)

Dewey insists “order is not imposed.” But, although he doesn’t say this explicitly, order is not discovered either. We are in the realm of “half perceive, half create” (from Wordworth’s “Tintern Abbey”), where all we need is the William James-like assertion that the world is “open.” The world enables the creation of order, the having of consummatory experiences. It neither makes form, consummatory experiences, impossible or necessary. It simply makes them possible—and the esthetic is identified as those happy instances when interaction produces harmony and equilibrium. There are potentials (“affordances” in today’s jargon) in nature that, when activated, yield consummatory experiences. Of course, lung cancer is a natural affordance, activated by smoking, and the resultant death could certainly be called “consummatory” and qualify as “an experience” in Dewey’s terms. So not all possible achievements of “form” need be thought positive.

In any case, Dewey clearly believes “life” becomes more significant, more meaningful, when ordinary experiences take form, acquire a “coherence” that also permits them to be recognized as (named?) an experience. Nick calls this “ordered intensity”—and one source here may be Pater. The esthetic points us to moments (experiences or interactions) when our sense of who we are, what we are doing, and the world (the environment) in which we are embedded is heightened. We are most alive at such moments—and there is definitely a strain of vitalism running through Dewey’s account. “Moments and places . . . are charged with accumulations of long-gathering energies” (24). Dewey warns against the “dead spots” in which “the process of living in any day or hour is reduced to labelling situations, events, and objects as ‘so-and-so’ in mere succession” (24).

Instead, we need to be conscious of those energies gathered in the present—and art is the name we give to that conscious attention. “[A]ll deliberation, all conscious intent, grows out of things once performed organically through the interplay of natural energies. Were it not so, art would be built on quaking sands, nay, on unstable air. The distinguishing contribution of man is consciousness of the relations found in nature. Through consciousness, he converts the relations of cause and effect found in nature into relations of means and consequences. . . . The existence of art is the concrete proof of what has just been stated abstractly. It is proof that man uses the materials and energies of nature with intent to expand his own life. . . Art is the living and concrete proof that man is capable of restoring consciously, and thus on the plane of meaning, the union of sense, need, impulse and action characteristic of the live creature” (24-25).

No surprise that Dewey, who in all his works advocates for “intelligence,” ties art so tightly to consciousness, to the formation of deliberate purposes. “The rhythm of loss of integration with environment and recovery of union not only persists in man but becomes conscious with him; its conditions are material out of which he forms purposes” (15). And intelligence entails not only the formation of purposes in response to environmental conditions, but also the shaping of appropriate means to achieve those purposes. Art, in the largest sense, names this conception and then enactment of “means and consequences.”

I think this captures Dewey’s primary definition of “the aesthetic” as a quality of experiences and of “art” as the conscious effort to craft such consummatory experiences. Subsequent posts will consider other ideas that get associated with those two terms. But, for now, let me finish by considering some ramifications of Dewey’s view.

First, he has a relatively benign view of nature—and the conditions within which humans live. It is not inimical to human desire. But it is also not inert, so cannot be simply passive material in human hands. Furthermore, time disrupts everything, since it precludes the establishment of persisting satisfactory states of affairs. Art, then, is the human response to these conditions. It is the conscious effort to create the best relations possible to the prevailing conditions in which someone finds him- or herself.

Second, Dewey’s view means that he is against any and all forms of aestheticism. Art is continuous with, in fact an almost ever-present feature of, all experience. We are very often striving to make our experiences satisfactory and conscious. Dewey accepts that at times we are just slogging along, mired in “mere succession,” one damn thing after another. But whenever we are more actively working to shape our relation to the environment in more satisfying ways, we are engaged in artistic activity.

Third (I find this troubling, but Nick does not), this raises for me the question of the status of the art work. Is that work a representation of a consummatory experience? Or is the work itself a consummatory experience? (This question, of course, reprises the modernist project of making the work an event, as opposed to a representation—the focus on the question of what the work “does” as opposed to what it “says” or “means.”) I think Dewey either waffles on this question—or never grasps why it could and should be asked.

Two further complications arise once we try to think about the relation of art works to the experiential definition of the aesthetic that Dewey is pushing. A) Dewey very much wants to reintegrate the aesthetic into the ordinary. He offers a sharp critique of museums early in the book (pp. 8-10). The art work, then, could be diagnosed as a symptom of the regrettable extraction of art from the everyday, an alienation Dewey decries in both the first and last chapters of his book—and that he argues is an indication of the pathologies of modern life and of capitalism. In this view, art works are not the epitome of the aesthetic, but evidence of its degradation. Yet, in other instances, Dewey clearly wants to honor the art work, not condemn it. So the question is how do you recognize certain human works as “art” and avoid the isolation of those works into a separate realm/category that distances them from the ordinary.

B) If the art work is to be understood as “an experience” and not as the representation of “an experience,” then we need some account of that experience from the artist’s point of view and from the audience’s. They can’t both be having the same experience, since the artist is crafting the work and the audience is viewing (or reading or hearing) it. Dewey is fairly good on the artist’s experience; in fact, his interactive model works especially well in thinking about an artist’s relation to the materials of his art (stone, words, musical notes, paint and canvas) and how the work emerges through tangling with the resistances and affordances those materials present. But he is (at least so far) almost completely silent about what the audience gets.

Fourth, which brings us to “aesthetic education.” Generally speaking, I don’t think the term is being utilized by Nick to designate the technical training of a would-be painter or a would-be composer. Rather, the focus is on what audiences can learn through guided exposure to art works. What—in our literary studies and art history classrooms—are we aiming to accomplish? The answer (it seems) to me that Dewey’s book suggests is we are trying to teach our students how to “read” situations sensitively and holistically (the “art” of judgment, of practical wisdom, of phronesis) and we are trying to teach them how to creatively respond to those situations. What am I facing in the here and now? What are the possible roads from here to a desirable future?

Fifth, I don’t know if there is any direct road from this view of what an aesthetic education aims for and a leftist politics. I am inclined to think not. I do think a “liberal” education tends toward that open-minded, holistic reading of situations that seems inimical to right-wing sensibilities of our day. But there isn’t a necessary connection here that I can see.

Finally, in his last chapter especially, Dewey argues that modernity makes having an aesthetic experience more difficult. I may want to go into his argument in a subsequent post. But for now I just want to register the issue: are both the project of “aesthetic education” and the opportunities for having a consummatory aesthetic experience severely curtailed under contemporary conditions? If so, why? And, more importantly, are these two things—the aesthetic and an education that alerts us to it—cures for what ails us? That may be where the political rubber can really hit the road. What would be needed would be a convincing account of the deficiencies of contemporary life (an account that would actually convince people that their lives are deficient)—and a convincing account of how the aesthetic is the path toward a better life.

The Aesthetic

My friend Nick Gaskill and I have embarked on a plan to read about the aesthetic—and talk about what we are reading over the ubiquitous Zoom. Nick is interested in “aesthetic education,” partly because his fabulous book Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) uncovered the (at least to me) surprising fact that American schools at the turn of the 20^th century developed specific pedagogies to teach pupils the different colors and their relation to one another.

But this interest is also partly fueled by a return to the aesthetic in recent work—work that Nick has been pushing me to read. In their own ways, Rita Felski’s anti-critique campaign, Caroline Levine’s book on “form,” the Joseph North history of criticism, Michael Clune’s work on judgment, Fred Moten’s development of his notion of the “undercommons,” and Saidiya Hartman’s interest in “beautiful experiments” all try to mobilize the aesthetic as a site of resistance to the dominant order.

Déja vu all over again. The 30s and the 80s were all about, as Walter Benjamin put it, making aesthetics political. [In other words, right wing triumphs in the political realm seem to inevitably generate attempts to use art against the regime.] In Benjamin’s case, that project was poised against the ways that fascism “aestheticized politics.” For Nick (inspired partly by Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories), there is not just the aesthetized politics of Trump (can’t take our eyes off the spectacle he offers daily), but also the meretricious everyday aestheticism of consumer capitalism. All dressed up and ready to spend.

Can some other (truer? proper? more tasteful?) version of the aesthetic combat its trivialization in our culture? I have had very little to say about the aesthetic over my long career—and pretty much abandoned literary criticism as soon as I got tenure in 1987. I read novels voraciously, and taught literature all the time, but I lost (if I ever had) any ability to do the kinds of things critics do, especially fancy formal readings. I became (probably always was) a “naïve” reader of texts—interested in meaning, content. I have very little avant-garde sensibility when it comes to art: I like novels with plots and characters. My taste does run to the abstract in painting, but that’s because I love vivid color, while I find the chaotic incoherence of much surrealism distinctly unappealing. Pop usually strikes me as cheap, cynical tricks, although I like Roy Lichtenstein. But give me Diebenkorn over Warhol any day.

More theoretically, I have had two problems with the aesthetic. The first is how to even define it. I knew someone who was into vintage cars. His appreciation for them seemed as fully aesthetic as mine for abstract painting. And some of those cars seemed worthy of (in fact were) being placed in museums. Yet it seemed absurd to do somersaults to show how his fascination with cars was political in any way. And I was similarly (in almost all cases) unimpressed by efforts to show me that Mondrian or Matisse was somehow political.

Instead, it seemed to me that lovers of painting and novels (for some reason) were just more prone to feel guilty about their love than those who fancied antique cars. That guilt generated their need to justify their love by painting it up as radical, as a blow for the revolution etc. That two things—a commitment to leftist causes and a love of novels—happened to co-exist in the same person in no way demonstrated that one was related (causally and necessarily) to the other. No one tries to connect my being addicted to running as exercise to my political convictions.

Worse still, in my view, was that the attempts to tie the aesthetic to politics led to gestural politics. Proving that a close reading of Moby Dick was political left you off the hook. You got to spout all kinds of rousing slogans—and didn’t have to do any of the work of political organizing and political action. “Get real,” I always found myself saying. Another reading of Moby Dick is not going to change the world. It is bad faith to pretend otherwise. And there seemed no lack of bad faith in the various art worlds out there. Parading one’s virtue stood in for rolling up one’s sleeves and actually going to work.

In fact, it seemed most artists and academics (of the literary variety) were allergic to collective, collaborative work, with all its messy compromises and inefficiencies. They were loners, pursuing their own visions in splendid isolation before presenting the finished product to the world—and feeling hurt when the world did not respond with astonished applause. The world also did not transform itself to correspond with the artist or author’s vision.

My skepticism duly registered, the point of this collaboration with Nick is (for me; I trust there will be a pay-off for him as well, but it will be a different one) to challenge these long-held prejudices of mine. There are (immediately) two reasons for me to reconsider.

One, if I have been converted by recent events to the William James view that sensibility, not reason, is the more important factor in our adopting values and commitments, then art does seem to address sensibility more directly and effectively than other modes of discourse. If the aim is to shape or transform sensibility, then attention to artistic modes seems imperative. (In my 2002 book Democracy’s Children, I argue the opposite. Basically, I wrote that since I believe my commitments have a good rational basis, it is condescending of me to assume that others’ commitments are a-rational in a way mine are not. I am still nervous about throwing reasons—offered in the public speech acts by which we try to persuade one another in a deliberative model of democracy—overboard. But it is hard to retain any faith in deliberative democracy these days, when all sides seem so determined to not ever hear other sides, and refuse to give any credence to what others might say.)

Two, the focus on tying “education” to the “aesthetic” in the phrase “aesthetic education” shifts the playing field in the right direction (I think). Now it is not the artist or critic’s performance that is political, but the shaping of sensibilities. The question is not whether the art is political or has direct political effects. The question becomes how (and why) it is useful to deploy art works as the means to developing certain sensibilities.

This pathway is fraught with many difficulties—and I warn you that, once again, a slew of posts is on the way. But this educational project is one that makes sense to me in a way that claims for the political efficacy of “radical” readings of Moby Dick does not.

Nick and I started out by reading the first three chapters and the final one of John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934). So my next few posts will try to consider features of the aesthetic—and the hallmarks of aesthetic sensibility—as gleaned from Dewey’s text.

War and Peace (Two)

Further into my journey through War and Peace, I find Tolstoy stating directly his disbelief in people’s ability to transcend their self-interest and submerge themselves in a larger cause. But with a twist, as you will see if you read the relevant passage:

“It is natural for us who were not living in those days to imagine that when half Russia had been conquered and the inhabitants were ficeing to distant provinces, and one levy after another was being raised for the defense of the father-land, all Russians from the greatest to the least were solely engaged in sacrificing themselves, saving their fatherland, or weeping over its downfall. The tales and descriptions of that time without exception speak only of the self-sacrifice, patriotic devotion, despair, grief, and the heroism of the Russians. But it was not really so. It appears so to us because we see only the general historic interest of that time and do not see all the personal human interests that people had. Yet in reality those personal interests of the moment so much transcend the general interests that they always prevent the public interest from being felt or even noticed. Most of the people at that time paid no attention to the general progress of events but were guided only by their private interests, and they were the very people whose activities at that period were most useful.

Those who tried to understand the general course of events and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism were the most useless members of society, they saw every-thing upside down, and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish like Pierre’s and Mamonov’s regiments which looted Russian villages, and the lint the young ladies prepared and that never reached the wounded, and so on. Even those, fond of intellectual talk and of expressing their feelings, who discussed Russia’s position at the time involuntarily introduced into their conversation either a shade of pretense and falsehood or useless condemnation and anger directed against people accused of actions no one could possibly be guilty of. In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.

The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in Russia the less did he realize their significance. In Petersburg and in the provinces at a distance fromMoscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of self-sacrifice and so on; but in the army which retired beyond Moscow there was little talk or thought of Moscow, and when they caught sight of its burned ruins no one swore to be avenged on the French, but they thought about their next pay, their next quarters, of Matreshka the vivandiere, and like matters.” (Book Twelve, Chapter Four)

Tolstoy, at least in War and Peace, is an odd mix of quietist fatalism (it is all in God’s hands, so human action is futile, blind, presumptuous, and never achieves that for which it aims) and radical critic of society and human depravity (a leftist Christian).

Here’s an example of his radical critique of social institutions:

“That evening he learned that all these prisoners (he, probably, among them) were to be tried for incendiarism. On the third day he was taken with the others to a house where a French general with a white mustache sat with two colonels and other Frenchmen with scarves on their arms. With the precision and definiteness customary in addressing prisoners, and which is supposed to preclude human frailty, Pierre like the others was questioned as to who he was, where he had been, with what object, and so on.

These questions, like questions put at trials generally, left the essence of the matter aside, shut out the possibility of that essence’s being revealed, and were designed only to form a channel through which the judges wished the answers of the accused to flow so as to lead to the desired result, namely a conviction. As soon as Pierre began to say anything that did not fit in with that aim, the channel was removed and the water could flow to waste. Pierre felt, moreover, what the accused always feel at their trial, perplexity as to why these questions were put to him. He had a feeling that it was only out of condescension or a kind of civility that this device of placing a channel was employed. He knew he was in these men’s power, that only by force had they brought him there, that force alone gave them the right to demand answers to their questions, and that the sole object of that assembly was to inculpate him. And so, as they had the power and wish to inculpate him, this expedient of an inquiry and trial seemed unnecessary. It was evident that any answer would lead to conviction.” (Book Twelve, Chapter Nine.)

But Pierre is saved from execution by a moment of human contact:

“Davout [the French governor of occupied Moscow] looked up and gazed intently at him. For some seconds they looked at one another, and that look saved Pierre. Apart from conditions of war and law, that look established human relations between the two men. At that moment an immense number of things passed dimly through both their minds, and they realized that they were both children of humanity and were brothers.

At the first glance, when Davout had only raised his head from the papers where human affairs and lives were indicated by numbers, Pierre was merely a circumstance, and Davout could have shot him without burdening his con-science with an evil deed, but now he saw in him a human being. He reflected for a moment.” (Book Twelve, Chapter Ten.)

This seems plausible to me; how could you look another human being in the eyes—and then torture that person, or kill him or her? Yet we know it happens.

Pierre then witnesses the execution of five other prisoners, not knowing until after they have been shot that he will not himself be executed. His response is to lose all faith in life, to sink into complete despair.

“From the moment Pierre had witnessed those terrible murders committed by men who did not wish to commit them, it was as if the mainspring of his life, on which every-thing depended and which made everything appear alive, had suddenly been wrenched out and everything had collapsed into a heap of meaningless rubbish. Though he did not acknowledge it to himself, his faith in the right ordering of the universe, in humanity, in his own soul, and in God, had been destroyed. He had experienced this before, but never so strongly as now. When similar doubts had assailed him before, they had been the result of his own wrongdoing, and at the bottom of his heart he had felt that relief from his despair and from those doubts was to be found within him-self. But now he felt that the universe had crumbled before his eyes and only meaningless ruins remained, and this not by any fault of his own. He felt that it was not in his power to regain faith in the meaning of life.” (Book Twelve, Chapter Twelve).

He is pulled out of his despair through his conversation with a peasant/soldier prisoner who tells him we are all in God’s hands. We cannot expect to understand God’s plan, but must simply affirm it and place ourselves in the hands of the divine. Tolstoy’s fatalism is offered as the solution to the problems of evil and of suffering.

War and Peace

I am currently reading War and Peace. It is good under pandemic conditions to have a nearly interminable book to while away the hours. But it must be a book that can hold you in its grip for all that time. Tolstoy is up to the task.

For the most part, Tolstoy is a cynic about human motives. He would deny that very many people are capable of throwing themselves selflessly into a cooperative enterprise—and scorns the idea (considered in my previous post) that war offers an instance of such full-throated cooperation. He insists (rather like Arendt on Eichmann’s careerism) that war offers just another venue for the petty seeking for status and preeminence that characterizes 80% of human action in his novel.

The common soldiers know nothing about the so-called “causes” for which the war is being fought, while the officers are all jockeying for advancement and motivated more by the rivalries and jealousies of their relations to their fellow officers than by any larger vision. Because society and the world of public affairs (politics, war, organized religion, the Masons; business never enters Tolstoy’s novel except in the form of the corrupt stewards who rob the aristocratic owners of estates) is so dominated by the despicable, the only happiness open to his hero Pierre is the domestic bliss that comes from marrying the right woman.

This general outlook is only tempered a bit by the remarkable meditation of Prince Andrew on the eve of the battle of Borodino (a battle that produced the most casualties of any battle during the Napoleonic wars). Andrew finds (to his surprise) a fundamental patriotism in himself, but also articulates a clear-sighted vision of war’s barbarity. He scorns the need to believe that there are “rules of war,” since the appeal to such rules only serves to hide the fact that war is murder. And he despairs when he thinks that men will ask god to bless, even aid, their acts of murder. Humans are beasts—and it is disgusting to see them dress up their bestiality as noble and honorable.

My father did join the Marines in 1942 for high-minded reasons. And he seemed, for the most part, to retain that high-mindedness through his tough years of service in the Pacific theater. Reading Tolstoy fills me, once again, with my basic incredulity. Men do this? How? And why? In one remarkable passage in his description of the battle at Borodino, Tolstoy depicts an infantry regiment standing in a field in reserve. They are also being shelled by the French. After each cannon ball falls among them, they gather up the dead and wounded, carry them off, and then close up ranks. How is it possible for men to act this way? To stand still under bombardment?

Here’s the long passage that gives us Prince Andrew’s musings.

‘Yes, yes,’ answered Prince Andrew absently. ‘One thing I would do if I had the power,’ he began again, ‘I would not take prisoners. Why take prisoners? It’s chivalry! The French have destroyed my home and are on their way to destroy Moscow, they have outraged and are outraging me every moment. They are my enemies. In my opinion they are all criminals. And so thinks Timokhin and the whole army. They should be executed! Since they are my foes they cannot be my friends, whatever may have been said at Tilsit.”

’‘Yes, yes,’ muttered Pierre, looking with shining eyes at Prince Andrew. ‘I quite agree with you!’ The question that had perturbed Pierre on the Mozhaysk hill and all that day now seemed to him quite clear and completely solved. He now understood the whole meaning and importance of this war and of the impending battle. All he had seen that day, all the significant and stern expressions on the faces he had seen in passing, were lit up for him by a new light. He understood that latent heat (as they say in physics) of patriotism which was present in all these men he had seen, and this explained to him why they all prepared for death calmly, and as it were lightheartedly.

‘Not take prisoners,’ Prince Andrew continued: ‘That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war, that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff. Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kind-hearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce. They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them. They plunder other people’s houses, issue false paper money, and worst of all they kill my children and my father, and then talk of rules of war and magnanimity to foes! Take no prisoners, but kill and be killed! He who has come to this as I have through the same sufferings.’

Prince Andrew, who had thought it was all the same to him whether or not Moscow was taken as Smolensk had been, was suddenly checked in his speech by an unexpected cramp in his throat. He paced up and down a few times in silence, but his eyes glittered feverishly and his lips quivered as he began speaking.

‘If there was none of this magnanimity in war, we should go to war only when it was worth while going to certain death, as now. Then there would not be war because PaulIvanovich had offended Michael Ivanovich. And when there was a war, like this one, it would be war! And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why. War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war. We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous. The military calling is the most highly honored.’

‘But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The habits of the military class are the absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone. All the kings, except the Chinese, wear military uniforms, and he who kills most people receives the highest rewards.‘

‘They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?’ exclaimed Prince Andrew in a shrill, piercing voice. ‘Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much. And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil…. Ah, well, it’s not for long!’ he added. Book Ten, Chapter 25.)

I will only add that since World War I, the notion that soldiers are the most honorable, “the highest class,” is no longer universally accepted. The current taboo against criticizing the common soldier stems (again only in more left-leaning circles) from a perception that they are the victims of the deplorable adventurism of our political leaders. The soldier is not to blame for the evil he does; he is caught up in forces he cannot control or gainsay. But the idea that the killing he does is not evil, but in fact noble, has far fewer adherents today than it did in 1815.