"All Art is Quite Useless": The Essence of Truth and the Ethical Responsibility of the Artist

Walter Pater discusses experience in his conclusion to The Renaissance. He writes: “At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic (551). Pater is referring to a phenomenon more accurately described by Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” published in 1873—the same year as The Renaissance. In this essay, Nietzsche asserts that truth itself is merely a metaphor, that is when we name something, the truth of that label is merely illusory; it is not truth-in-itself. Both Pater and Oscar Wilde assert that art has no external function in-itself. It is autotelic. I argue, however, that the assertion that all experience is metaphor is not enough to claim all art as merely for itself with no ethical responsibility incumbent upon the artist.

Nietzsche’s discussion of the formation of what I would describe as concrete abstract concepts is very similar to Pater’s assertion that the critic has “no need to trouble himself with the abstract question what beauty is in itself, or what its exact relation to truth or experience” (546). Nietzsche provides the following example regarding honesty:

We call a person ‘honest,’ and then we ask ‘why has he behaved so honestly today?’ Our usual answer is, ‘on account of his honesty.’ Honesty! [. . .] We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called ‘honesty’; but we know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which now designate as ‘honest’ actions. (1174)

The same can be applied to beauty, and Pater recognizes this. We know nothing of any essence of beauty; it is impossible for us to describe beauty—or any abstract concept—in language. Thus, Nietzsche comes to the conclusion that truth itself is “[a] movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms [. . .] which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (1174). In other words, Nietzsche argues that the totality of our experience begins as metaphor, and through repetition, it solidifies.

Pater writes, “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought,” and Nietzsche’s claim certainly falls in this category. But Pater’s claim that art exists for itself is only partially consistent with a belief that we cannot know the essence of things. If all experience is metaphor, then it is incumbent on us as the ones who experience the world to create meaning and, more importantly, an order. Through this conception of truth—the fixed, canonical, and binding—Nietzsche sees

the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries—a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world. (1175)

This order, which includes the privileging of oppositions, is what allows a viewer to interpret and provide meaning for a work of art. It is what allows us to debate what even constitutes art. If we think of art the same way Ferdinand de Saussure thinks of language, then we see that meaning floats free from the signifier, that is meaning is always impermanent and arbitrary. Therefore, it is natural to see the responsibility of meaning creation on the shoulders of the viewer, the reader, the listener, etc. This is something we do every day—we throw off any intentions of the author and create meaning as we see it in a text.

But there is an inherent problem in leaving the discussion there. The suggestion that we ultimately have no control over language or meaning is closely tied to the existentialist (and nihilist) proposition that the universe is ultimately meaningless. According to Nietzsche and the postmodernists in the 20th century who follow him, this is true. However, if left here, this discussion would imply that there is absolutely no ethical responsibility on the part of the communicator. If we return to Kant’s categorical imperative, we will see that the model of meaning set forth by Nietzsche and Pater actually does absolve the artist, or any communicator for that matter, of ethical responsibility. Under Kantian ethics, the only ethical responsibility an individual has is to himself. The individual must make decisions based upon whether or not his action can be universalized. If we adhere to Pater’s belief that art is autotelic, under Kantian ethics, there is never a situation where the artist would be held ethically responsible for his or her art because the object itself is without meaning. It is incumbent upon the viewer to place meaning onto the object.

Kantian ethics has a difficult time justifying itself in a reality that is completely subjective. This is because there can be no objective truth which the subject can gauge his actions against. In Kantian ethics, the subject must have the ability to universalize his or her actions, that is make them objective. In Nietzsche’s explanation of reality, this is completely impossible. Enter Emmanuel Levinas and his concepts of alterity and The Other (Totality and Infinity). The Levinasian Other is not the same as the Lacanian Other or even the post-colonial Other, though anthropologists use the term alterity to describe cultural otherness. There isn’t time to explain all the differences (which I do not fully understand anyway), but Levinas’ concept of otherness is important to this discussion. For Levinas, the Other is not knowable. That is, we cannot know the quality of otherness of someone else (Totality and Infinity). I am Other to all of you, and you to me; however, none of us can be each other so we can never know what the Other is fully. In Levinasian ethics, the subject’s responsibility is to the Other—not to himself. Ethics is something outside of subjectivity just as the Other is; therefore, ethical responsibility precedes any objective search for truth. This makes much more sense in the context of Niezsche’s proposition because it binds the subject who exists in a reality where seemingly “everything is permitted” as Camus would say. But Camus also notes that simply because “‘everything is permitted’ does not mean that nothing is forbidden” (67). This adheres to an ethics of responsibility. Therefore, the same can be said of the artist. If art is autotelic, then the artist’s first responsibility must be to the Other. If the artist creates something that he knows will disgust, terrify, offend—with absolutely no other purpose but that—then the artist must question whether or not he is upholding his responsibility to the Other. This, of course, is a question that is quite difficult to answer, and would probably make for good discussion on Tuesday as we discuss Dorian’s ethical responsibility (or lack of.)

Works Cited

Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus. 1955. New York: Vintage International, 1991.

Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Pittsburg: Duquense University Press, 1969.

Pater, Walter. “From The Renaissance.” 1873. Prose of the Victorian Period. Ed. William E. Buckler. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. 545-53.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” The Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. 1171-9.