cheese it, the cops!

mikesmack

oops i'm going to do to michelangelo what i've been known to do, say, to bruce springsteen: infinitely overrated. the stuff is incredibly overblown, grandiose, extremely pretentious, humorless. it was produced for the corrupt and theologically perverse catholic hierarchy, which shows. it is, in my opinion, wildly conflicted about the nature and meaning of sexuality and, in general, embodiment. michelangelo is obsessed with gigantic musculature: every fresco another schwarzenegger. it's one thing to assert that christianity and pagan antiquity are compatible; it's another to try to capture that mistake in actual images: let's turn jesus into apollo. well, something - perhaps everything -  is being severely misunderstood. obviously, this is a problem for the italian renaissance in general, and in my view many of the attempts to render these things compatible were just half-baked or yielded material of extreme or comical incoherence, which i think is at its most excruciating in michelangelo. taking the oeuvre as a whole, it's a kind of orangeish body-building mag. supposedly all the huge bodies mean something spiritual, which would just make the whole thing more ridiculous, or more self-deluded. typically for artists with his sort of neo-Platonic orientation, the work is both absolutely dependent on depicting the real world and devoted to sort of erasing its detail, so it's blank=ideal: that's what this sort of thing really amounted to. there are few artists in the whole tradition who leave me so cold. bleck:

ok, ok, incredible moments. those slave sculptures, for example.

In which Crusader AXE addresses a reasonably important issue of the day...

Neither Crispin nor I have devoted a lot of space to Pussy Riot. Probably a mistake on our part -- but I'm not writing much these days, and Crispin probably listened to their music, had the fillings fall out of his teeth, and torn between philosopher and rock critic, kind of punted. Musically, they are wretched...they make the Sex Pistols seem expert with their instruments and in a class with with the Three Tenors vocally by comparison with the Russian women. In fairness, Crispin caught on long before I did and put electrons to electrons to comment on Pussy Riot and punk and as usual, did it knowlegably and well. Me, well, he occasionally corrects my grammar and spelling errors. Which amuses me...

Which is not the point -- the Sex Pistols aren't in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because they were good but because they were a harbringer of something else. In much the same way, Pussy Riot deserves some attention. Granted, it's not like Sakharov and Solzyenitsen formed a Russian version of the Ayett Brothers. But, they're musicians, poets and intellectuals who did something in marginal taste to make a point and are getting two years in Gulag light as a result. Gulag Light is not the Russian Version of Camp Cupcake, more the Russian Version of a supermax...

So, we could pay some attention. And, the poetry is not without some merit -- reminds me of the lyrics to some of the work of the Afghansi, the Soviet era grunts facing the Muhajadeen. Worth considering. 

And, Putin is an asshole...so, why not?

you're an animal

somehow, the new york times op-ed page has become the journal of empty brain research.

The part of the brain where the instinctive “fight or flight” signal is first triggered — the amygdala — is situated such that it receives incoming stimuli before the parts of the brain that think things over. Then, in our ongoing response to potential peril, the way the brain is built and operates assures that we are likely to feel more and think less. As Professor LeDoux puts it in “The Emotional Brain”: “the wiring of the brain at this point in our evolutionary history is such that connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.”

look you've just imported the most primitive old-time dualisms into your interpretation of the imagery. human beings are torn between rationality and animality, between reason and passion. it might as well be spirit and flesh. 'the part of the brain that thinks things over': are you sure this is the clearest way to espress what you're saying? i am telling you that 'emotional' and 'cognitive' systems are just not going to turn out to be distinct. try to persuade me that you didn't just presume this dualism as a completely unjustified conceptual structure within which you conducted your resarch.  

now you want to know why rational animals like ourselves believe and behave so irrationally. does it strike you that 'the irrational part is stronger than the rational part' is just a restatement of the problem, not any sort of solution? it's exactly as though i explained why people fail to be rational by pointing out that it's because they are seized by irrationality. why is michael jordan so good at basketball? because the good-at-basketball part of him is stronger than the sucks-at-basketball part.

the fact that you call the animal in us 'amygdala' only gives a slight patina of obscurantist authority for your entire augustine-style picture of human psychology, complete with original sin. you want to account for the fact that people behave irrationally. the answer: it is the beast within. even aristotle had a more sophisticated moral psychology. but what i love about it is that no work at all is devoted to questions like: is rationality distinct from the emotions? is that distinction where we want to start, as opposed to a bunch of other possible distinctions? if you don't start by really working through the definitional questions, you'll have no idea whether you're seeing the irrational bit or not. i don't doubt that y'all are pretty sophisticated in generating data. what i doubt is that you have any ability even to become aware of your own most obvious assumptions. possibly your higher cognitive module is being seduced by your amygdala.

as hume put it, the pre-frontal lobe is and ought only to be the slave of the amygdala. or kant's theory was that we could be motivated by pure application of the executive region, which should subdue the amygdala entirely. robert louis stephenson illustrated the brain research in his novella dr. pre-frontal cortex and mr. amygdala.

vote your medicare

since supposedly democratic policies benefit 'white working-class voters,' and such voters often go republican, one concludes that they are voting against their own interests, which is supposedly irrational. so, they must be manipulated by right-wing monsters. now here are some assumptions packed into this: one's self-interest is exhausted by maximum cash. and people do, or ought to, vote in their own self-interest as they understand it. (never mind the incredibly impoverished conception of rationality.)

i am a white man. if i voted my own self-interest, i might well vote for the most extreme racist and sexist available. hard to blame me for that if you're attacking people as irrational for failing to vote their self-interest. even now, i actually do benefit from the structural racism and sexism of our culture; obviously, i should devote my vote to preserving these come what may. folks like me didn't find jim crow at all inconvenient; i don't even know what people were complaining about; we might try that shit again. say feminists are right and the republican war on women represents men's obsession with controlling women's bodies. well hard to argue that we don't benefit, among other things economically, from such control. it would be irrational for me not to support all such measures.

die, you little finnish bitch!

i think it's finally time to give up on the notion that our american children will ever test as well as children from finland or china, which of course is the only possible goal or purpose of childhood. childhood, as we know, is one of the most important arenas of international conflict, and we're just losing. for years, i've been beating my children if they don't test as well as little chu chow; i like to think of myself as a jackal father. i know my kids will only really be happy if they are out-competing singapore. but now my arms are tired. so i say we arm our kindergartners with automatic weapons and drop them in kill-bin-laden-type squads on alien schools. our children can't outthink anyone, possibly because they come from a culture with only the most rudimentary conception of education. but even our children are little americans, and americans can outshoot anyone.

mdma and power

Contrary to expectations, psilocybin decreased cerebral blood flow, particularly to brain regions that act as "connector hubs" responsible for filtering and co-ordinating the flow of information through the brain. These hubs impose a top-down control on our awareness, integrating sensory inputs and prior expectations into a coherent, organised and censored experience of the world.

thus the guardian, reporting on possible therapeutic effects of psychoactive drugs of 'abuse.' i just want to make sure that y'all are clear that connector hubs etc are metaphors. and the metaphors used for brain activity always seem to draw on whatever the contemporary technology might be. now: i guess maybe you could see on an mri things that sort of look like connector hubs. but can you see the 'top-down control' they supposedly exercise? possibly  this is a notion you are bringing to the data rather than deriving from it. when you look at an mri scan, do you see a political system? a hierarchy of powers? you might ask yourself how a connector hub, much less a whole bunch of connector hubs, exercise(s) top-down control over anything. so maybe when you say that connector hubs exercise top-down control, you mean that they effect events elsewhere in the brain, but are not by affected by such events. this would, however, sort of keep them from being connector hubs.

finally...

this is almost the first thing i've seen in the popular press that even notices that this neuro-stuff is a fad, and is more or less completely empty in many contexts.

i'm lord and master of a fool's taj mahal. who says you can't have it all?

can women really have it all? oh i don't know; this question, whatever it means or whyever y'all keep worrying about it, has persisted for decades. it's a sort of jingle; in fact it literally is a michelob lite ad from 1993.  possibly, you can't have it all because you can't stop saying the same things in unison over decades, whether they actually have any significance or not. i'd give you it all if i could distinguish amongst you and actually pick one of you out. you need to cultivate some verbal skills or possibly some imagination. or possibly you might want to acknowledge your own finitude, though i realize that that might slightly compromise your elephantine self-esteem. possibly not, however, because your self-esteem - as your therapist recommended - does not vary at all with your actions or any aspect of reality. in the words of ann romney: i love you women! remember, you (and here i'm using your collective 'you' that doesn't actually engage any of your particular features or qualities, of course) are beautiful, or you would be, if 'you' referred to anyone. anyway, if you really need it all, or could really make use of it all, take it all.

Only the poor can see clearly...

In which Crusader AXE points out that the poor can't see all that well blinded by the sweat, blood, tears and pollution; stipulates that Mitt Romney does not torture barn animals; mentions Louis Gomert and Louis Napoleon as well as Abraham Lincoln and Allan West in similar context although to different ends; and points out that Jackson's threat to hang Calhoun was more appropriate than Lincoln's mixed message of compromising force. 

here are versions of the talks i'm giving at etsu in johnson city next week: on bluegrass and pictorial realism.

what romney was right about, more or less

so one thing that dems purport to be offended about is the idea that social programs actually buy votes for their defenders by cutting checks: a kind of built-in dem political advantage. but actually they themselves use this non-stop as a strategy. there's an obama ad up right now that says ' the question is, under whose plan will you be better off?', framing the thing in terms of medicare. all the mediscare-type ads play this card, actually. obviously, not all people who receive benefits vote democratic. but both parties perfectly well understand the direct appeal to your immediate self-interest in government payments or services.

brain shit

this brain shit has just become a completely ridiculous fad. ok ask yourself with regard to any particular application - let's say naomi wolf's brain/vagina connections or whatever, or in education: what work is the word 'brain' actually doing? so an english prof puts people in an mri and makes them read in different ways. alright let's pretend that everything is ok with this whole idea. then the conclusion is: close reading is different than casual reading: look at the way the things lights up etc. now, did you know that already? let's say the brain crap fell apart and actually the two things looked more similar on scans than we thought. would that entail that casual reading and close reading aren't different after all? say the vagina/brain connection isn't at all the way naomi wolf thinks it is. would that mean that her orgasm doesn't feel the way she feels it or have the deep meaning she thinks it does? i am not arguing for an immaterial mind at all. all i'm saying is that the brain crap is completely incessant, a mere fashion, and that it rarely does any work at all. as in iraq, the evidence is fixed to support the pre-existing conclusions. but in cases like this, there is just nothing happening at all. it's just adding random functionless parts to your machine. or rather it has one function: it is a claim of epistemic authority for conclusions reached in anything but a scientific fashion. really, it functions in the same way as an appeal to scripture or to 'the rules': it's merely a power play without any actual epistemic relevance.

jihad crusade

one thing to be said for seemingly gratuitous provocation: it seems like the outrage would have to get a little old if you're just barraged by images, etc. one way to get past it, or perhaps to provoke a jihad crusade would be just to ridicule muhammad all the time everywhere. it's hard to stay pissed off all the time about what's all around you. many of us regard with perfect composure or even don't notice at all things which, were they the only or one of the few of their kind would offend us deeply. in a world full of kind helpful people that lady at the dmv would be a monster. after awhile it's impossible really to be offended that people have guns or that that porn is really gross. i picture your basic islamist hearing about the umpteenth offensive gesture and just going oh christ.

darwin refuted!

if the theory of natural selection were accurate, people would be, on average, much more sexually attractive than we actually are. just as, if we were the product of a benevolent god, we'd be substantially better morally than we actually are. it's chaos out here, baby!

should be over

as i hear this romney 47% rap, it should be fatal. there are gaffes, and then there are fatal unrecoverable errors. maybe he survives or maybe no one cares that much. but lord that is very, very bad. i have a line of opposition to a dependency society, and i've even speculated on the electoral effects of entitlement programs as favoring the democrats: that check might be at stake. but then to just go off about how people 'don't care for their own lives' is a crazily wrong turn, and the idea that you're writing off anyone who doesn't pay income tax as voters is just self-immolation. actually my idea is that a lot of people who are getting checks have their own misgivings and complaints about dependency. the way a romney campaign should interpret this is that a lot of people on welfare would prefer to be entrepreneurs or whatever. ok. but talk about class warfare: i won't represent defectives like that half of the population is the very last thing you can possibly say and be president of the united states.

i don't even think the obama campaign needs to exploit this. they should just remain relatively silent for a few days. later you can use the stuff in ads. right now, though, their case is made every time that tape is played in the media, as an anchor shakes his head.

making kerry look good

remember when the idea was that mitt romney was the most electable republican candidate, because he didn't actually take any positions? that 47% rap was just entirely screwed. folks are saying that now romney just has to win the first debate. i say this is physically and intellectually impossible. he's mitt romney and the person he's debating is barack obama. what resources of policy expertise or off-the-cuff eloquence is romney going to bring to bear? now, the thing is that if you think someone is going to be horrible and they aren't, you'l give a positive evaluation, and it wouldn't take much for romney to exceed my expectations. but if you think romney can save himself with his own tongue, you haven't been listening.

what went so entirely, horrendously wrong

so this piece in politico starts to explain, among other things, why romney's speech sucked so bad, even though people haven't seemed quite to realize that. the long and short of it is: they fired the writer (who, one presumes, is now exacting a hideous revenge by leaking the process as he sees it). it may even be that the most miserable moments, some of which are noted in my entry, were actually contributed by romney himself working under completely unnecessary time constraints.

Early Roman Kingmakers

In which Crusader AXE tips his hat to Crispin, defender of Sarah Palin as an authentic American Voice like Aimee McPhearson or Charles Whitman, and discusses the possibility that Mitt Romney is really an Israeli disinfomration operation and the riots and murders and such are really an attempt to excite sales of Salmon Rushdie's memoirs. 

libya

why crispy why haven't you had anything to say about the killings in libya and the situation in the middle east? well, i didn't want to comment prematurely and appear "unpresidential." but i will say this. it must suck to be so irascible that any random youtube video can turn you into enraged rioter, much less killer. know what i mean? i mean who can avoid, in today's global world of today, youtube videos that suck? let stuff like that disturb your equanimity and you will never again know peace for a moment. you'll just be pissed off all the time, which really is not how you want to live. it must be like pms only worse. so perhaps we should approach such people with sympathy.

new strategies in reasoning

evidently, the key reasoning strategy of nobel-prize winners is amazingly direct: from any premises whatever, your pet conclusion follows. no matter what the data, it always shows that government should be larger and more active. krugman, i have to say, is merely obsessed: he just desperately wants to be subordinated: he thinks about nothing else day or night: nothing else actually matters.

so as i understand the argument, it's that if you agree that consumption drives the economy, and if you agree that certain governmental activities increase consumption, then you are rationally obliged to agree that such activities should go forward in a slump like this one. er. look: the inference is wildly fallacious. here's a parallel argument: consumption drives economic activity. requiring every american citizen to spend 50% of their savings on amazon this weeekend would increase consumption. so you're rationally obliged etc.

possibly any measures you take will have other effects than sheer stimlation. well assessing those effects - oh, you know, doubling the deficit - might be sort of important i assessing what you want to do.

i hate it when you lecture me

speaking of my personal cult of iiird tyme out, ii'll be giving talks on bluegrass and on realism in pictorial arts at east tennessee state u on sep 26 and 27. maybe i can put the texts and even the powerpoints up on google docs? actually, the bluegrass thing, thur sep 27 in ball hall at 6 (wait. 6? won't everybody be eating? bring pizza?) will be on hippie grass like muleskinner (embedded below), as well as the seldom scene, newgrass/"progressive bluegrass", the dc bluegrass scene etc.

till the end

this is my candidate for the most beautiful performance ever recorded.

what literally kills me i think is the passage from the modulation just after 2 minutes to the end. that russell moore is something fucking else. oh what the hell, you should check this one too, in another mode.

the greatest minds of my generation

"These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified."

i want to remind you that this is a quotation - hardly atypical - from someone who has universally been greeted as a transcendent genius and his generation's greatest poet (and yet who still feels persecuted because he was booed once half a century ago). now i don't think people should have gotten all that upset by an electric guitar. on the other hand, they could reasonably have regarded the melodies as dull and the lyrics as nonsense (alright there are some exceptions). but look: what are you going to do for a generation that was convinced by allen ginsberg when he said that he and his friends were that generation's greatest minds? no doubt they equitabled themselves to richard feynman, crick and watson, willard van orman quine. i guess it's true that if you just esteem yourself immensely for no particular reason, people might believe you. give it a shot! actually, there's something to be said for being plagued by self-doubt, which is no doubt difficult when you are greeted as a demi-god.

oops!

honestly i don't know why, or even really how, the republicans nominated mitt romney, who has no position on anything and an astounding tin ear. the only strategy is a kind of modified birtherism: everything obama does is unamerican even when it's obviously not. trying to drive that grotesque innuendo home, he actually managed to accidentally hang himself instead. the republicans might want to re-think a process that saddled them with a stiff like that. it's actually possible that in a relatively evenly split country, romney could lose in something that appears to be a landslide: like, lose all the swing states.

foaming at the...mouth

i think all the ridicule made naomi wolf snap.

innovate, asshole!

a typical phrase of today: 'sustainable innovation.' maybe you find that inspiring. well, the nonsense verse of edward lear was inspiring. tourette's syndrome is inspiring. but tom friedman is just excruciatingly dull, still talking meaningless algorese. it was random grand-sounding manipulative yapyap fifteen years ago; now it sounds like elizabethan english when elizabethan english sucks. have to admit, though, that producing op-ed columns by random bureaucratic phrase-generation is a newish or newesque development.

rock the brain

from my amazing convention coverage, on condi rice: "10:11 'the crisis in k-12 education is a threat to our future," etc. well, that there sentence could have produced at any time since the early sixties. it's been a half-century-long crisis so far. we must do something, but we won't. get over it. give up. you can't force people to learn. i guess you could grab a new fad."

as this memo from my daughter's middle school indicates, we've got it! hook each student up to an mri. look! the science center lit up! 

Join us for an amazing and inspiring evening with Dr. Mariale Hardiman, our past Principal and author of
 Brain-Targeted Teaching for 21st Century Schools (Corwin Press, 2012).

On Wednesday, October 17th at 7PM, Dr. Hardiman and current RPEMS teachers will share with parents how the model has influenced instruction at Roland Park and how its components can be used at home to foster deep and meaningful engagement in learning.

The presentation with Dr. Hardiman is FREE.

Her book, which features many Roland Park teachers, is available for purchase, through 
Dr. Hardiman, at a discounted price of $30.

Checks should be written to Dr. Mariale Hardiman and can be left in the Wellness Committee mailbox by Oct 1st.
 Only these pre-purchased books will be available for pick up on the evening of October 17th and Dr. Hardiman will be happy to sign them!

Please consider buying two books and donating one to our teachers.

Babysitting will be available.

 

maybe they've realized that the most thorough ediucation is a kill shot to the temple. or maybe they ought to target persons.

white guys represent

but we've still got the $$.

Power of Punk

By Crispin Sartwell

 

The first time I saw the power of punk was in 1981 at a show by the seminal hardcore band Minor Threat. The Ontario Theater in Washington, D.C. was a plenum of swirling bodies, black-booted, mohawked, tattooed, and in furious motion. People jumped up on the stage and slammed into the band-members mid-song, which just made them play harder, if less precisely. The line between performers and audience was erased. It was so different than anything I'd ever experienced that I hardly knew whether I was feeling fear or exhilaration as I slam-danced.

    More than thirty years later, the power of punk lives on, for better and for worse. In Moscow, members of the punk performance troupe Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years for salutary sacrilege and delightful anti-Putin hooliganism. A few days before, white supremacist punk performer Wade Michael Page opened fire in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, murdering six people. In both cases, art intruded into reality; the musical became political and criminal.

     In contemporary politics, economics, and aesthetics, the levers of power are ever-more distant from the average young person. Any given suburban teen might feel extremely alienated and intuit that something is terribly wrong, but be unable to do anything about it. She'll probably have no possibility of expressing herself in mass media, for example. She can't start a super-PAC and start hiring professional videographers. She's unlikely to get elected to the state legislature. But she can participate in punk culture, express herself within it, and find an audience for her expression.

     Punk is an aesthetic repertoire available all over the world in music, graphic arts, clothing, body alteration, performance, film, dance, and festival.  It revolves around simplicity, roughness, directness, and intensity. To start making punk music, you do not need a great deal of skill: you just need a few chords, a battered amp, a ripped-up t-shirt, some like-minded reprobates, and a hundred xeroxed flyers. And because punk develops distribution channels outside corporate or state media, you can find your own audience. Indeed, in some ways punk invented the kind of do-it-yourself production and hand-to-hand distribution that now characterize the use of the internet in the arts of many world sub-cultures. Pussy Riot, justly, is a YouTube sensation.

    The performance for which Pussy Riot was arrested seems rough or even naive in its comical seriousness. But precisely for that reason, it is intense, sincere, and affecting. You don't wonder what they were trying to say, and neither does Vlad Putin.     

    The punk vocabulary is suited to the direct expression of extreme or elemental emotions and ideas. In its political dimension, having a punk identity is less a matter of whether you're left or right than of whether you're 'far.' The persona is oppositional. A punk could be an anarchist, a fascist, or a communist, as long as he's not a Democrat or Republican.

   In particular because they were intent on rejecting their sub-cultural predecessors the hippies, many early punk bands, such as New York ur-punks the Dead Boys and London's Sex Pistols, flirted with fascist imagery, putting up swastikas or barking orders in German. The hardcore scene of the early 1980s produced quasi-fascist bands such as New York's Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front, and the hilarious-yet-disturbing Los Angeles group Fear ("New York's alright if you're a homosexual").

     But it also, and more commonly and centrally, produced anarchists and anti-capitalists such as the Dead Kennedys, Crass, Reagan Youth, and the straightedge/cooperative economy icon Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat and Fugazi, around whom my chaos swarmed in '81. Since before Jello Biafra bellowed "Nazi Punks Fuck Off," there have been inter-tribal battles between right and left punks.

    Anti-immigrant, racist, and hyper-nationalist skinheads in Europe and the US have used punk music as a flashpoint for decades, and obviously real violence can emerge from these sub-cultures. But blaming the music is simplistic. And the interpretation of the music as a 'recruiting tool' of the far right wing is also simplistic: the music is a constitutive part of an entire identity, not a mere instrument of propaganda.

     It has been almost forty years since the inception of punk, but in each succeeding cohort, disaffected and determined young people take up the vocabulary and express their opposition within it, even as the style is also always being co-opted and commercialized and thus invigorating mainstream music, fashion, and advertising.

    Punk, in short, is an aesthetic tool kit available to the oppositional impulse. Like that Minor Threat show, it can be ecstatic, and it can be violent. Pussy Riot used its power for good as they careened about as colorful DIY revolutionary super-girls; Page, the punk super-villain, used it for evil. But in any case, it's high time we took punk music seriously as a creative and destructive force.

 

 

 

Beauty on the Comeback Trail

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Like monarchs, angels, and comedians, concepts fall, and rarely has a concept taken a more tragic or comical tumble than beauty. Once, it inhabited the sphere of ultimate value, glittering in the empyrean along with truth, goodness, and justice (all of which were considered by Plato or the romantic poets to be the same thing). Long about 1910, it got kicked downstairs to the department of hairstyling.  From eternal essence it got demoted to superficial appearance.

   Beauty’s pratfall was registered both in the arts and in philosophy. Picasso or De Kooning didn’t paint to make beautiful things; they painted to transform the world. And probably the last great treatments of the topic in philosophy – at least until recently – were Santayana’s Sense of Beauty (1895) and Benedetto Croce’s Aesthetic (1902).

    The reasons for the indignities heaped on beauty are complex. One of them is that, beginning in the eighteenth century (for example in Hume and Kant), beauty was conceived more and more as a subjective matter, and as conceptually connected to pleasure. By the time Santayana wrote his dissertation, he could argue that beauty was actually a kind of mistake: the person who experiences beauty attributes his own subjective pleasure to the object that causes it. If beauty is entirely subjective or in the eye of the beholder, then not only is it not an eternal concept, it is not a concept at all: ‘beauty’ means whatever anyone thinks it means, and hence it means nothing.

     In Romanticism and Modernism, the artist – think Beethoven, Van Gogh, Giacometti – was conceived as a genius, his works emerging inexplicably from his superhuman-but-ill skull to re-make human experience. The idea that someone like that was working to bring people pleasure would have seemed in the era an intolerable trivialization of art; we could leave that task to the entertainment or cosmetics industry. So beauty, conceived as a source or even a variety of pleasure, came to seem an unworthy goal.

    And it came to be associated with what we would now call right-wing politics: with the architecture and visual expressions of the Catholic Church, with the French monarchy and its rococo kitsch, with capitalism and its robber-baron art patrons, with the Third Reich (for example in Leni Riefenstahl’s undeniably beautiful film Olympia). The left turned against beauty as a whole, and in the realm of concepts beauty was pitted against justice, luxurious ornament or conspicuous consumption against subsistence for the poor and education for the masses.

    Indeed, the association of beauty and pleasure with fascism is one of the darkest episodes in the history of human consciousness. Arthur Danto, in The Abuse of Beauty, one of several important recent philosophical treatments of the topic, quotes Max Ernst, recalling the dadaists after World War I: “We had experienced the collapse into ridicule and shame of everything represented to us as just, true, and beautiful. My works of that period were not meant to attract, but to make people scream.”

 

   Yet even after the fall, beauty has never ceased to be a fundamental human experience or even one of the reasons life is worth living. And if the beauty of a rose or a sunset seems exhausted or clichéd as a subject of art, poetry, or philosophy, we have never ceased to experience such things as beautiful, perhaps with as much purity as ever, with as much of a sense of a renewal of commitment to life and to the world.

    And though such a venerable dimension of human experience and of the arts could never be entirely neglected, beauty seems to be in revival both in art and in philosophy. The first steps in making beauty viable would be to detach it conceptually from pleasure and to treat it as more than merely subjective.

    Indeed, to hold that when I find a flower or a song beautiful, I am delectating my own internal states, is a horrendous solipsistic distortion. If I say that the night sky is beautiful, I want to celebrate it, not myself, and though I may be registering pleasure (though also perhaps, many other things: awe, love, freedom, fear), I am talking about the night sky, not me, or else the point of the thing is completely lost. Indeed, the idea that I am fundamentally pursuing my own pleasure in seeking out or making beautiful things is, I would say, not only obviously false, but sad: love of things outside myself is not the same as love of myself, or else it is essentially meaningless.

    We ought to re-connect beauty to the experience not of pleasure, but of love and longing, which has been traditional since the Greeks. Plato made that connection in the Symposium, and Sappho famously said that the most beautiful thing is what one loves. But love and longing are ways of reaching out into the world: ways of devoting oneself to things and people. In love or longing, one moves toward what one loves or longs for, not into oneself, or else the love is a delusion. In the words of the Everly Brothers’ beautiful song, love hurts, and to account for love merely in terms of pleasure is extremely wrong.

    Though pleasure seems fairly straightforward, human beings have dark and twisted longings, and much of the art of the twentieth century might even be beautiful in a dark or twisted way.

    Alexander Nehamas makes some of these points in his book Only a Promise of Happiness. And Elaine Scarry, in Of Beauty and Being Just, tries to answer the political objections: the Greeks conceived justice as a harmonious or symmetrical arrangement of elements or forces, which is also the way Aristotle or the architect of the Parthenon conceived beauty.

   In short, beauty is being re-enriched as a concept, and insofar as we still long and still love, we still seek beautiful things. Perhaps beauty is not eternal. But it appears to have picked itself up from its pratfall, bruised but ready for more.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. He is the author of Six Names of Beauty (Routledge 2006).