"A Politicized Aesthetic" (firstprinciplesjournal.com)

Are we in a culture war? If so, then under what conditions can we claim victory? James Matthew Wilson argues in the first part of his "Treasonous Clerk" essay that the way in which the concept of a "culture war" has developed favors a situation in which conservatives make very little positive contribution, confining themselves to criticism (often superficial criticism) of the culture industry. If we draw a line across culture according to left/right political sensibilities, then conservatism paints itself into the corner of accepting only a very limited traditionalist aesthetic, while being unable to produce anything worthy of the tradition.

In brief, this is a politicized aesthetic: the reverence and deference conservatives naturally and rightly feel for inherited institutions and the legacies and traditions of their forefathers gets applied—not thoughtlessly but secondarily—to works that have accrued a handful of characteristics. First, their content is immediately comprehensible in terms of ethics; while Homer's is not a bald didacticism, one must truly be numb not to experience a kind of moral fear and awe when confronted with a full vision of the noble virtues of Achilles. I would not argue that conservatives tend to admire only artworks with patent ethical content, as if they could skip over questions of beauty or artistic achievement entirely in the rush to celebrate the stirring moral. Rather, as I shall elaborate, conservatives tend to venerate only one form of moral beauty.  

Second, much literature before the age of the novel gave absolute primacy to both public life and public virtues. As such, the classical authors remain keenly attractive to those already by nature inclined to attend to the explicit prescriptions of public and social life to the neglect of the obscure subtleties of the private sphere. If a work is Christian, conservatives seem to appreciate it more if it is "religious" than theological; if I may risk obscurity, they consistently prefer the allegorical to the ontological. Sir Walter Scott's romances are but scarcely novels in the modern sense, but are prose narratives that anticipate the techniques of the novel while retaining many conventions of classical epic and history. And, of course, Orwell's fictions were intended neither to be conservative nor to be novels at all. That his sensibility tended to exploit the genres of the fable and dystopian fantasy suggests that it was in a key way alienated from an age that loved the interiority of the novel—and his alienation is something in which his conservative readers share. They appreciate such works not merely because they are ethical in content, but also because they are concerned with external or social forms in the same way that political theory or the other social sciences generally are. 

Third, in their own right and by dint of venerability, the kinds of works conservatives tend to cherish are, in several senses, Great Books. That is, they have in themselves and in their dusty surfaces attributes of the noble or great. Here lies, I think, the decisive feature of the conservative politicized aesthetic: a somewhat isolated sensitivity to only that kind of beauty that merges with what the classical tradition called the sublime, and which we might more helpfully call the noble or grand.

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The Popularization of Tolerance [i]

(more on musical form soon, if anyone is interested)

If we take it for granted that the unity of a morally divided political body is worth working for, and that the remedy for moral division is the development of broad-mindedness, how should we inculcate this virtue in the people? I believe that we have seen the failure of simply expounding this principle by direct promulgation (preaching to schoolchildren), narrative exempla with the moral readily extractable (the after-school special), and habitual disapproval of anything smelling even faintly of "fundamentalism" (passim). Ask around and I'm sure it won't take you long to find someone who will affirm for you the absolute necessity of transcending one's own perspective while they themselves can demonstrate no idea of anyone else's. The political party which in America currently fuels itself with the sentiment (you know what I'm talking about by now, if you've been following the current administration's practice of "bipartisanship") satisfies itself and its constituents with emphatic (no doubt sincere) pronouncements of it--while often evidencing no greater understanding of their rivals' principles than their rivals do of theirs. Getting a moral principle into people's heads gets them no closer to principled moral behavior. Broad-mindedness in particular becomes nothing more than an especially stupid narrow-mindedness when it makes its way into politics by way of an explicit concept.

But didn't Joseph Addison notch down the rancor of the political rhetoric of early eighteenth century England, and encourage a common ethic of tolerance, by teaching the people to read John Locke? It seems he did. But close examination of the methods by which Addison influenced the people, and of his explications and clarifications of Locke's thinking, reveals the incommensurability of his success with Lockean principles of education.

More to follow.

The Nature of Tradition

Tradition presents itself in one of two ways, depending on whether it is viewed externally or internally: 1) as the way it has always been (let "it" be what it may), or at least the way it has been since before one's initiation into the field in which the tradition in question holds sway, and 2) as a pattern introduced into a temporal process, belonging to some subjectivity (let this be an individual or a community) which would otherwise have the possibility of being introduced into the same field in a variety of different ways. In general, it is impossible for any tradition to be regarded in both of these ways at once (since to accept the possibility of having been introduced into a field in some other way is to cease to be traditional with respect to that field), and this is the point of describing one as internal and the other as external.

But note that this description is not neutral. Rather, it requires an external perspective to imagine the possibility of both. If we would like to understand the nature of tradition while remaining traditional we will have to abandon this dichotomy.

Philosophical Hunting

Book II, Chapter 13 of the Posterior Analytics begins, “Now we have already said how what a thing is is set out in the terms, and in what way there is or is not demonstration or definition of it; let us now say how one should hunt out what is predicated in what a thing is.” That the hunt for what belongs to a thing in what it is does not differ from a hunt for the demonstrative middle is not immediately obvious, but follows from the fact that what belongs in what a thing is does not differ from what is necessary. The discussion which follows makes clear that the hunt here has the purpose of discovering what something is, that is, of finding out of the demonstrative middle what it is. The things which are predicated in what it is are hunted out, sorted, and sifted with a view to the substance of the object. Aristotle says this explicitly: “such things must be taken up to the first point at which just so many are taken that each will belong further but all of them together will not belong further; for necessarily this will be the substance of the object.”

The question about how things predicated in what it is are to be hunted out is not a question of by what means these things may be identified. Rather it is a question of the context proper to such a pursuit: “How?” here has the sense of “In what way? Along what path?” None of these attributes inhering necessarily in a thing is of scientific interest on its own account, as the stopping point of an inquiry. Rather, they have the character of an “if it is.” Knowledge of them imparts knowledge that there is a demonstrative middle. The satisfaction of the inquiry in pursuit of the that is not a stopping point, but opens on a further inquiry, in pursuit of what it is. Aristotle is not here articulating a methodology for turning up attributes which belong necessarily to something. Indeed, his position here would caution against the very notion of such a methodology in abstraction from inquiry proper, which directs itself to a middle term to learn what it is. Such a pedantic, disinterested manner of “hunting out” would differ from the “hunting out” here recommended as a sportsman's weekend out putting bullets in things differs from the patient, urgent incursions into the wild of a man who hunts for his sustenance. That is to say, it differs in failing, however many trophies it may accrue, to be the hunt—the genuine, high human activity of science which runs through and unifies our intellectual capacities, and gives them their meaning.

The Humane Critique

That the Critique of Judgment is Kant's most humane critique could be established on superficial grounds: for in it, he discusses those things which above all make us human, as opposed to being simply one or the other of those two terms which go together to make our definition (i.e., rational, animal). Surely art and purpose, more than logic or, say, digestion, are the fields in which we most eminently show ourselves for what we are as whole beings, beyond the elements of our composition. No doubt this proposition could be denied, but not from within the perspective properly called humanism, which is perhaps the same perspective from within which we may expect to grow a concern for the application of the term “humane.”

But in addition to this superficial reason, there is also the fact—an astonishing fact, when it appears within the context of a received notion of Kant as the philosopher who stole the real world away, walling it off from our pathetically grasping and clutching reason behind an impenetrable range of phenomena—that here he invites us to discover the real bases we have for judging nature as subjectively and objectively purposive. True: these bases are merely a set of presuppositions which enable judgment to expect to discover purposive organization in nature, and therefore enable it to reach out for universal empirical laws and structures. They cannot satisfy pure reason that the world is such and such. But is it humane to expect the world to satisfy pure reason? Is it not possible that, contrary to the parable of Plato, the seat of raving ambition is not in the horse but in the charioteer—and that it is he who must be reined in by the nobility of his horsemanship?