"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.

More at firstprinciplesjournal.com

What's the use continued

My previous post may have struck you as uncharacteristically "analytic." Just keep in mind that analytic philosophy is bastardized Hegelianism and I am the intellectual bastard child of bastards crossed with bastards, trying to become somebody (maybe get my name in the phone book), and I hope you'll forgive me. And I'm not going to backspace any of what I just wrote because I'm trying to become a blogger and being a blogger means not backspacing. At least, not very much.

Why is my instinct to analyze? Why do I want to know what I mean when I say "I have a laptop?" What significance could such an analysis have for the purpose of saying what the meaning of tradition is? Well, I don't know yet. That's why this is a blog and not a book. There's no design here, just what I think when I sit down for half an hour to write in the evening, more or less moderated to bear on a line of thought. But I do believe that I will find answers to those questions which could be put about my way of proceeding and that I will find myself justified in some sense (even if it is in the sense of being brought into line from error) in proceeding as I did. If I didn't believe this I wouldn't dare expose my thinking.

So, in case you were wondering, what's the use of following this blog, if I don't even know what I'm talking about, the answer is that this blog is bound to a destiny in thought to which its author is striving to adhere. Do you believe that it is good to listen to something like that? If you do, keep reading. If you don't, the internet is a big place and I'm sure you will find on it somewhere a philosophy blog by someone who does know what they're talking about.

But the question, let's not forget, is what does it mean to have? And I wanted to approach this question by describing what I think I mean when I say that I have something. Which I'll get back to tomorrow, perhaps, now that I've unburdened my intellectual conscience.

new rule for KTL in 2010

I started this blog as part of an effort to produce more by lowering my standards. But as you can see it quickly succumbed to my usual perfectionist paralysis. I'm not giving up yet, though. I just need to keep reminding myself, as pseudonoma (to whose comment I have still given no answer) has reminded me, that it's just an effing blog.

So from now on: less deliberating and dilating, more posting. I'm going to try to post something every day, at least on weekdays, and to reply to comments within 24 hours. I reserve the right to proceed in my usual way on the gracklog, but here please expect to hear from me more often.