Philosophy Now - December 01 2018

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ISSUE 12

ISSUE 129 DECEMBER9 DECEMBER 2018/JANUAR2018/JANUARY 2019Y 2019

Philosophy

N

o

w

a m a g a z i n e o f i d e a s

What is Art For?

Ain’t You Got No

Holmes To Go To?

Philosophy in

Tolstoy and

Umberto Eco

Hegel and

History

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December 2018/January 2019Philosophy Now 3

Philosophy

Now

ISSUE 129 Dec 18/Jan 19

A

and philosophy on pages 6-22

EDITORIAL & NEWS

4 The Functions of Art by Grant Bartley

5 News

26 Obituary: Mary Midgley by Carol Nicholson

ARTS & LETTERS

6 A Forgiving Reason: The Secret of Holmes’ Success Tim Weldon makes some observations and deductions

11 Ockham’s Rose

Carol Nicholson on the philosophy in The Name of the Rose

14 Can Art Fight Fascism?

Justin Kaushall tells us why Adorno thought so

17 The Case Against Conceptual Art

Trevor Pateman critiques the concept of conceptual art

18 Creating the Beautiful Society

Francis Akpata on why Schiller thought art improves us

20 Should We Pursue Happiness?

Vincent Kavaloski on Tolstoy’s long search for contentment

GENERAL ARTICLES

28 Hegel on History

Lawrence Evans distills history’s grandest narrative for us

31 The Trouble with Hegel

Chris Christensen says he just stopped in the wrong place

34 Putting Animals & Humans To Sleep

John Shand has a new argument for allowing euthanasia

36 Philosophy: A Call To Action

Calvin H. Warner says it must stand up for truth & happiness

37 I Hate Philosophy!

Gray Kochhar-Lindgren shares a guilty secret

REVIEWS

44 Book: From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel C. Dennett reviewed by Peter Stone

46 Book: I Am Not A Brain by Markus Gabriel reviewed by Stephen Anderson

48 Film: Santa Claus, The Movie

Chris Vaughan peels away the festive veneer!

REGULARS

23 Brief Lives: Hermann von Helmholtz

Dylan Daniel on the philosopher behind a great scientist

38 A Moral Education: Ethics of Education in the Secular State Andrew Copson draws some boundaries

39 Philosophical Haiku: Iris Murdoch by Terence Green

40 Letters to the Editor

43 Philosophy Then: Philosophy for the Young, Medieval Style Peter Adamson plays trivium pursuits

52 Tallis In Wonderland: Brains, Minds, Selves Raymond Tallis contends that all three exist

54 Question of the Month: Is The World An Illusion? See if our readers’ answers are delusions

FICTION

57 The Light From Our Eyes

Stephen Brewer’s trio try to make sense of perception

Hegel’s History

Two clashing perspectives, p.28

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4 Philosophy Now December 2018/January 2019

Editorial

is its novelty. So perhaps we can’t really blame the art world for rewarding shock not talent. It’s required to make a living.

Many leading galleries seem to agree that as technical brilliance has been amply demonstrated throughout art’s long history, it’s unnecessary to see it demonstrated again just for its own sake. What is still interesting about art, however, is the concepts it can explore. So let’s just concentrate on the concept, says the most fashionable thinking about art. This has led us to conceptual art – art where the concept behind it, rather than the artist’s technique or a pleasurable effect, is prominent. A work needn’t be beautiful, nor conspicuously well made; it just needs to be clever. Trevor Pateman’s article pertly critiques this conceptual approach to art.

Well, the most precise medium for conveying concepts is probably language. This would make novels the ultimate form of conceptual art.

Fiction is often said to be telling lies to convey a deeper truth or to explore deeper questions. We consider some of these deeper questions in this issue, including one of the most foundational: What is happiness and how can we achieve it? Vincent Kavaloski looks at the way this question is asked in

the novels of Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, novelists often explore ethical ideas through the crises and dilemmas their characters endure, and Tolstoy’s exploration of happiness evidently falls into this category. But fiction can make philosophical connec-tions in other ways too. Here we look at intuition versus reason in Sherlock Holmes, and at various philosophical themes in The Name of the Rose, including William of Ockham’s famous metaphysical shaving kit.

Profundity and self-reflection are two of the defining qualities of great art, so really it can hardly help exploring philosophical themes. Many of the articles in this issue show how some past thinking about art can be reapplied to contem-porary problems: not only finding happiness, but fighting regrettable social trends and building a better world. In this issue I think you’ll find much that philosophy has to say about literature and other arts is useful for life in our overstuffed yet underfiltered information age.

Let me also mention the two articles taking different perspectives on Hegel’s theory of history. I find Hegel an interesting philosopher not because I think he was right about how history works, but just because he has a systematic theory of human history. To me this is just the sort of ambitious and fundamental topic philosophers should be interested in.

There is also a ‘perception versus reality’ theme scattered throughout this issue – about which fundamental topic the great Kant again had a lot to say. Indeed, you might want to play a game of ‘Where’s Kant?’ as you read this issue. Award yourself a point every time you spot him. Grant Bartley

W

hat is art for? The question of art’s function is prominent in this issue. Can it be used to challenge tyranny, or to make us better citizens? Plato

certainly thought that contemplation of beauty could lead you closer to seeing ultimate truth. Could art similarily lead you to see moral truth, between individuals or for society?

Schiller thought so, as Francis Akpata explains. And Justin Kaushall tells us how Adorno thought radical art could seismically shift awareness, and so fight fascism (and, for Adorno, capitalism too).

Among other things, Immanuel Kant’s 1790 book the Critique of Judgement is concerned with beauty in art. Kant is consid-ering how we make judgements, and one of the big questions in art used to be why and how we judge a work of art to be beautiful. But nowadays beauty is no longer art’s chief focus. This is at least in part because the function of art has changed.

You can track art’s function, very basically, by looking at who pays for it. In the medieval West, the artistic depiction of

religious ideas was paid for by the Catholic Church – so the function of art was to exalt the divine and educate the mostly illiterate faithful. Later the aristocracy started paying artists to display their wealth, status and learning in their portraits. Then the rich bourgeois merchant classes brought art for a

decorative display, again of taste and status.

Nowadays, what’s at the leading edge of art is decided by galleries, and the functions of this art include investment, prestige, and virtue signalling. The primary concern about the art with which the high-end dealers currently deal, is its marketing. In our info-overloaded world, the publicising and selling of creative work is often a bigger problem than its creation. High art has been evolving for decades to accom-modate this need. This is one reason why so much new art we see in galleries is concerned with provocation or shock:

whether it’s dead sheep, or dirty unmade beds, or stacks of oranges you can eat (all real artworks). Shock is what’s perceived to be necessary to gain attention in the modern market, and indeed that may be the case. Also, art now increasingly attracts artists who like doing that sort of thing. Away from such artful dodgers, talented artists of all kinds pour

their souls into less shocking work but you won’t have seen most of it. In this postmodern age, beauty is just one ideal among many pursued by artists, and is also seen as being a bit Eighteenth Century. Since the art sellers and curators are competing among themselves to display their fashionability, the need for high art to be ‘in the lead’ has eclipsed other artistic values. In this way, the primary point of an artwork is now not

its aesthetics (aisthetikos is Greek for ‘sensation’) or how pleasing it is to the senses – what used to be called ‘taste’ – nor is it necessarily how profound the ideas being communicated are: it

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Nussbaum Wins Berggruen Prize The 2018 Berggruen Prize for Philosophy

& Culture has been awarded to philoso-pher Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum, whose approach is inspired by her

back-ground in classical Greek philosophy, is widely known for her work on the

emotions, on ethics and aspects of politi-cal philosophy. Her development of the ‘capabilities approach’ as a conceptual alternative to other models of human well-being in economics has been

influen-tial and much debated. She is a prolific writer, author of 25 books and over 500

articles. The 2018 Berggruen Prize deci-sion marks the second year in a row that the prize, which has only existed for three years, has been awarded to a woman.

Onora O’Neill, last year’s recipient, is a famous moral philosopher who has made important contributions to the philosoph-ical discussion of ‘trust’, and who has served as chair of the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Joel Kraemer dies

Joel Kraemer died on 11 October 2018. He was the John Henry Barrows Profes-sor of Islamic and Jewish philosophy at the University of Chicago, and also held appointments at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yale University and Tel Aviv University in Israel. He was a fellow of the American Academy for Jewish Research. As you will have gathered, he was a

prominent scholar of Islamic and Jewish philosophy. Kraemer was famous for his work on the cultural transmission of

clas-sical Greek ideas to the Islamic world. He

is best known for his biography of the 12th-century philosopher Maimonides.

Scrutonising Design of Homes? The British Government has appointed an

official commission to raise the debate about the importance of beauty and good design in new housing development. According to a press release, the Building

Better, Building Beautiful Commission is intended to “tackle the challenge of poor quality design and build of homes and places.” It will suggest policy solutions so that new developments meet the needs and expectations of members of the community, to “help grow a sense of community and place, not undermine it”. It will be chaired by conservative philoso-pher Professor Sir Roger Scruton, known for his writings on innumerable philo-sophical issues, especially aesthetics, ethics and the philosophy of Kant. He is also a defender of traditional architecture and a critic of some contemporary styles in architecture, such as those of Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Communities Secretary James Brokenshire said Scruton was uniquely qualified because he was a world-leading authority on aesthetics, but

opposition MPs swiftly called for Scru-ton’s dismissal because of past remarks about sexuality, religion and other matters.

Vets Dept Resumes Vivisection Vivisection, or medical experimentation on live animals, remains a crucial issue in applied ethics with important real life relevance. A spokesman for the United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has announced that former VA Secretary David Shulkin gave verbal approval for restarting experiments on dogs, on the very day he was fired by Donald Trump in March. Shulkin himself denies having done so. The department argues that the testing was approved because it will help doctors find new ways to treat wounded soldiers. Researchers running the experiments will

• Berggruen Prize given to Martha Nussbaum

• Confusion over approval of dog experiments

• Roger Scruton to chair housing design body

News reports by Anja Steinbauer

News

remove sections of the dogs’ brains that control breathing, sever spinal cords to test cough reflexes and implant pacemak-ers before triggering abnormal heart rhythms. Critics in Congress and animal welfare campaigners argue that the

exper-iments are cruel and unnecessary.

New Research on Moral Identities In new research at Northwestern Univer-sity Professor Touré-Tillery, whose research is at the intersection of motiva-tion and self-percepmotiva-tion, has identified a crucial issue in moral behaviour. The research was reported in the journal Orga-nizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. As people perceive themselves differently in the different roles they fulfil in their lives, e.g. a parent, a manager, a friend etc., these self images make a differ-ence to their moral choices. “We all have different identities that we label ourselves with,” Touré-Tillery says. “What we were

looking at in our study is not so much what those labels are or how many there

are, but whether people think of them-selves the same way across those identi-ties.” The researchers found that people who perceive their personalities as

constant across their roles are more likely to behave ethically than those who think of themselves as different in each role. Being moral matters more to this first group because if they behave immorally, it affects how they see themselves in general, Touré-Tillery explains. Wanting to avoid

that negative self-image can motivate people to behave better.

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of Empiricism, as are Holmes’ interest in science and reliance on experimental evidence. Or perhaps we should look a little fur-ther away, in space and time? Perhaps Holmes’ careful system-atic skepticism springs from the skeptic René Descartes (1596-1650)? Also, given the times, we mustn’t forget religion. That Holmes was familiar with Scripture is as established as is his use of logical reasoning and his ironclad morality. Do his methods then reveal a kinship with the medieval metaphysical realist, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1275)? Or one could head south and back through more than two millennia, to link Holmes to Aris-totle himself, since both men demonstrated proficiency in the natural sciences and in metaphysics. Or, given Holmes’ temper-ament, choice of cases, and dramatic flair, is it more accurate to say that he belonged to the Romantic school?

It is my contention that Holmes and his methods defy easy association with any school of thought or thinker; yet in the end they come to side most closely with the philosophy (although not necessarily the theology) of one thinker – someone closer to Holmes’ French ancestry than British, and more in line with his artistic side than scientific: Blaise Pascal. Using support from the stories, I hope to demonstrate the philosophical kinship between Holmes and Pascal, and in so doing pinpoint the cog-nitive source of Holmes’ unbridled success.

H

ow did the most famous fictional detective in history triumph over evil in over fifty celebrated cases? To what – or to whom – might we attribute his success? Holmes’ creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle self-admittedly modelled Holmes’ manner and methods on the man for whom he was once a clerk, the eminent Scottish surgeon Joseph Bell (1837-1911). Of course we should give full credit to Bell’s extraordinary powers of observation and deduction. However, a careful reading of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures reveals that there is more to his case-solving than can be explained by Bell’s inspiration alone.

Holmes’ Schooling

Rightfully, much has been made of the cognitive prowess of Sher-lock Holmes: his command of common sense, minutiae-driven observation, dogged focus, summary appraisals, and power to synthesize. From what philosophical school (if any), to what system (if applicable), and to whom, among the great thinkers of history, is he indebted? Given Holmes’ citizenship and envi-rons, one could reasonably start with the philosophical tradition known as British Empiricism, and link Holmes with, say, the thought of John Locke (1632-1704) or David Hume (1711-1776). The above habits of thought are certainly characteristic

A Forgiving

Reason

The Secret of

Sherlock Holmes’

Success

Tim Weldon detects links between

Sherlock Holmes and Blaise Pascal

in the operation of intuition.

Arts & Letters

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Intuitive Bloodlines

In the story ‘The Adventure of The Greek Interpreter’ (1893), Holmes and Watson can be found discussing “how far any sin-gular gift in an individual was due to his ancestry and how far to his own early training.” To which Holmes responds: “My ances-tors were country squires, who appear to have led much the same life as is natural for their class. But nonetheless, my turn that way was in my veins, and may have come with my grandmother, who was the sister of Vernet, the French artist. Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.” So it is in the French her-itage of Sherlock Holmes that we discover his greatest inheri-tance, and much like his great uncle, even a certain artistic genius, although not as a painter (or a violinist, for that matter).

Sherlock Holmes, French? Artistic genius? How can this be? In popular culture, Holmes personifies a stereotypical asso-ciation of the modern British mind with empiricism: wholly observant, properly dispassionate, ever rational and quantita-tive; in other words, the true scientist. Such characteristics truly carry the day for the mathematician, the microbiologist, the actuary, and the accountant. Even in the area of detection, some of Holmes’ cases were seemingly solved by what could be gleaned from a magnifying glass or microscope rather than musings produced from an armchair (and Holmes is the only fictional inductee into Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry). With modern achievements in forensic science and, for exam-ple, forensic ballistics, solving crime today has become a matter for the laboratory.

Yet given the complexity of crime and its origination from human flaws, and taking into account the presence of evil (as Holmes would admit), there is more to crime-solving than simple empirical assessment. And like any good detective, Holmes was a moralist. Good and evil colored his world as they defined his métier . Evil is as mysterious as it is manifest, and in figuring out how goodness is to prevail, one needs more than a tally of physical evidence. In reality as in literary fic-tion, detectives are famous for pivoting from a hunch, or on instinct or gut feeling – all synonymous with intuition. In fact, a detective’s hunch is nothing more or less than a hypothesis as yet unconfirmed. So Holmes’ methods at once include and transcend measurements, diagrams and graphs, numbers, and formulae.

From the Latin intueri , ‘to look at’, intuition is ultimately a mystery in origin and operation. However, I suggest that detec-tives use intuition to solve cases, and would be at a disadvan-tage if they did not. In its capacity to point the way, intuition can break a case wide open and prove a stepping stone for its solution. No one knew this more than Sherlock Holmes, with his ability to reason through the material evidence of a crime and intuit beyond it. But to best understand this, we must turn to the genius of his philosophical soul-mate, Blaise Pascal.

A Philosopher of Finesse

“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart,” begins the French mathematician and philosopher Pascal (1623-1662) in Section One (Chapter Six) of his greatest work, Pensées (Thoughts , 1670). The influence of Pascal on modern philosophy is invaluable for this proposition

alone, as by it he re-opened (and left open) a door to a question that dates back to antiquity: Is reason the sole source of and vehicle for truth? Can anything give me knowledge apart from

or in addition to calculation, deduction, and inference?

Few in history have been able to make such a statement about going beyond reason from such credible foundations, with such an impressive resumé. Reported to have discovered for himself the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid at the age of twelve, Pascal published his first mathematical work at seventeen, went on to invent a calculating machine, and was heralded for his experimentation with vacuums, atmospheric pressure, and prob-ability theory. He even designed a public transport system, by horse carriage [see Brief Lives , Issue 125, Ed]. The majority of Pascal’s writings were not on philosophy or theology, but on mathematics, science and technology. (Small wonder then that a programming language was named after him.) But just as Pascal understood the inestimable value of mathematical and scientific reasoning, he understood its limits. Towards the end of his short life, scientific matters bothered him little, whilst philosophy and theology concerned him greatly.

“Things should be made as simple as possible, but not sim-pler,” said Albert Einstein. And unlike those famous thinkers whose work is defined by expansive thought in prolix tomes, Pascal’s genius is found in his simplicity. On the origin of human-ity’s existential discontent (and this may be equally applicable to our criminal inclination) Pascal writes: “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” (Pensées §136, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer). In outlining the way we think, Pascal proposed that the mind is two-tiered and operates along two tracks, though not

Arts & Letters

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without the necessary intersection:

“We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. The skeptics have no other object than that, and they work at it to no purpose… For knowledge of first principles, like space, time, motion, numbers, is as solid as any derived through reason, and it is on such knowledge, coming from the heart and instinct, that reason has to depend and base all its argument. The heart feels that there are three spatial dimensions and that there is an infinite series of numbers... Principles are felt, propositions are proved, and both with certainty though by different means.” (§110)

Furthermore, for Pascal, the course of mathematical think-ing (ésprit de geometrie), with its logic and calculation, travels along the rational track, while what we intuit or judge (esprit de finesse) advances by way of summary evaluative supposition ema-nating from our hearts (or as we might say in more modern ter-minology, from our unconscious). The effects of the former are more credible owing to their transparency to the data. How-ever, the latter, ever mysterious in both source and operation, is capable of judgment by preceding and transcending data. Whether in matters of beauty – why does the painter choose one color over another, this scene or setting rather than that?; or of good and evil – why would anyone, how could anyone commit murder? – intuition is exercised for the sake of a quali-tative or evaluative understanding. As Pascal scholar and trans-lator A.J. Krailsheimer explains:

“Just as lines, squares and cubes (or x, x2_{, and x}3_{) cannot be added}

together as being of different orders, so in the realm of human knowl-edge that which is proper to the body (the senses), to the mind (the reason), and to the heart are of different orders and must be care-fully distinguished if error is to be avoided. The heart, in Pascal’s scheme, is the appropriate channel for intuitive knowledge, for appre-hending pre-rational first principles and assenting to supra-rational

propositions, as well as for emotional and aesthetic experiences.” (p.22, Pensées, Penguin Edition, 1966.)

How difficult it must have been for Pascal, the eminent mathematician, so dependent upon logical demonstration, to advance the theory of an alternative and in the end, superior faculty of judgment! And intuition is judgment. Pascal writes, “Intuition falls to the lot of judgment, mathematics to that of the mind” (§513. Note that here, as was his habit, Pascal uses what has been translated as ‘mind’ – la raison – interchange-ably with mathematical reasoning – ésprit de geometrie). How true this is for the detective, for whom so much is at stake. In the solving of a criminal case, hypotheses must be made and attended to, and ultimately judgments must be offered and acted upon, with every subtlety accounted for in between. In his heart, Holmes understood this as he exercised his intuition with unparalleled success.

The Heart of a Detective

Holmes’ interests were as varied as his clientele, ranging from bee-keeping to Baritsu (or Bartitsu, an eclectic martial art). They inspired exhaustive research and attention, especially when con-nected with a pressing case. The diligence and intensity with which Holmes pursued the truth was often mistaken for aloof-ness, even officiousness. “Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes – it approaches to cold-bloodedness,” observes Young Samford in A Study in Scarlet (1887). Even Dr Watson reproached his old friend, saying “You are really an automaton – a calculating machine” (The Sign of Four , 1890). But in truth Holmes was anything but cold-blooded, and his manner any-thing but machine-like. In disposition he was every bit the bohemian: unconventional in profession, hours and habits (some unhealthy), temperamental, ever-inclined to drama (“Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well staged performance,” Holmes reminds us in The Valley of Fear , 1915), and drawn to the outré – hellhounds, vampires, etc.

He was capable of love (of the woman) – but only of the courtly type. This reveals the thoroughly romantic disposition of a medieval knight errant – or of a Victorian-era detective who lives to right wrongs. In method, Holmes’ stock-in-trade empiricism is literary legend: “You know my method. It is founded upon the observation of trifles” (‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’ 1891). But once the evidence was gathered, through observa-tion and the collecobserva-tion of clues, the greater difficulty lay ahead: divining motive, character analysis, moral implications – all that exceeds the grasp of any data-driven scientific analysis. As Holmes was to say: “Like all other arts, the Science of Deduc-tion and Analysis is one which can only be acquired by long and patient study, nor is life long enough to allow any mortal to attain the highest possible perfection in it. Before turning to those moral and mental aspects of the matter which present the great-est difficulties, let the inquirer begin by mastering more elemen-tary problems” ( A Study in Scarlet ).

Holmes’ labelling of Deduction and Analysis (note the capi-tals) as both science and art places him squarely in Pascal’s philo-sophical backyard, as does his theory of the moral and mental aspects of a crime. At the scene of a crime, Holmes could no

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more intuit the origin and type of a footprint than he could identify tobacco ashes by intuition; but data doesn’t commit crimes. Holmes must also reckon with what transcends the immediate data – the human factors, such as love, hate, avarice, lust, ambition, jealousy, and other nefarious motives that inspire wrongdoing – and ultimately this will provide the conduit to solving the crime. He must also reckon on how virtues and vices are revealed in or concealed by the subtleties of human behav-ior, from furtive glances to pregnant pauses. This is all the work of intuition.

Holmes professed such intuitive ability from the beginning. He admitted as much to Watson when the latter wondered just what a consulting detective does in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet . Holmes answers that his clients “are all people who are in trouble about something, and want a little enlightening. I listen to their story, they listen to my comments, and then I pocket a fee.”

“But do you mean to say… that without leaving your room you can unravel some knot which other men can make nothing

of, although they have seen every little detail for themselves?” “Quite so. I have a kind of intuition that way.”

Holmes’ achievements derive from his uncanny ability to balance the physical evidence of a case – the objective data – with its often more challenging subjective truths, into a single coherent judgment. Specifically, he was able to account for both what can be reasoned to and what can’t be, with gimlet preci-sion. ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ (1892) highlights as much, as we shall now see.

A Season of Forgiveness

“I had called upon my friend Sherlock Holmes upon the second morning after Christmas, with the intention of wishing him the compliments of the season.”

‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ is Holmes’ only Christ-mas case. The setting, introduced by Watson, is noteworthy. The virtues and sentiments of the season provide the backdrop

for the story: discussions of love and demonstrations of forgive-ness, conversion, charity and reverence, however implicit, give the adventure its uniqueness among the canon. So too does Holmes’ mindfulness of the season and his manifest understand-ing of what Christmas means with its capacity to transform lives. Given its existential import then, the Christmas theme provides the best milieu for Holmes to exercise his intuition about the human psyche.

The plot begins with the curious presence of an unloved hat. “The matter is a perfectly trivial one,” Holmes challenges Watson, “Here is my lens. You know my methods.” “I can see

nothing,” Watson’s replies, as he studies the hat. Holmes responds, “That the man was highly intellectual is of course obvious upon the face of it, and also that he was fairly well-to-do within the last three years, although he has now fallen upon evil days. He had foresight, but has less now than formerly, pointing to a moral retrogression, which, when taken with the decline of his fortunes, seems to indicate some evil influence, probably drink, at work upon him. This may account also for the obvious fact that his wife has ceased to love him.”

There is far more to the hat than meets Watson’s eye, then. From an easy rendering of the appearance of the hat, including Holmes’ then-fashionable dabbling in the pseudoscience of phrenology (that it is obvious that the man was highly intellec-tual is because the hat was quite large), the great detective moves from analysis to judgment: ‘evil days’, ‘moral retrogression’, ‘evil influence’, and an unloving wife are pronouncements ema-nating from intuitive understanding. Although each of these judgments is supported by physical evidence – for example, that

the hat has “a week’s accumulation of dust” translates into the

by Melissa Felder

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loss of a wife’s affection – implicit in Holmes’ judgment is an understanding of good and evil, of moral and immoral, and of love which necessarily transcends the evidence. If this case is to be solved, Holmes has to depend upon his intuition.

When the owner of the hat returns, Holmes’ judgments are confirmed, giving the cogency and credibility necessary for him to evaluate additional clues: a bungling commissionaire and a Christmas goose – the latter producing the priceless gem of a bur-gled Countess. But although ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbun-cle’ is named for that royal swag, Holmes is able to judge the stone in its proper context: “Who would think that so pretty a toy would be purveyor to the gallows and prison?” Balancing every nuance, his understanding of contrast unfailing, Holmes then reveals the true implications of the case with all its moral weight: “Remem-ber Watson, that though we have so homely a thing as a goose at one end of this chain, we have at the other a man who will cer-tainly get seven years’ penal servitude unless we can establish his innocence. It is possible that our inquiry may but confirm his guilt; but in any case we have a line of investigation which has been missed by the police, and which a singular chance has placed in our hands. Let us follow it out to the bitter end.”

As winding as it is wintry, Holmes’ line of investigation means, on the one hand, attending to every place where evi-dence is to be had, and on the other, interacting with every person involved. His perceptive finesse – the ability to size up straightaway the personality or psychological profile of anyone

connected with the case – proves indispensable to the freeing an innocent man.

Holmes’ encounter with the primary suspect is the story’s best example of his people skills. Tracking the trail of the gem-filled goose back to its irascible seller, Holmes and Watson come face-to-face with their primary suspect, “a little rat-faced fellow.” To expedite the inevitable, Holmes hails a cab for the trio and proceeds to lead the thief to confession by degrees:

“But pray tell me, before we go farther, who is it that I have the pleasure of assisting?” The man hesitated for an instant. “My name is John Robinson,” he answered with a sidelong glance. “No, no; the real name,” said Holmes sweetly. “It is always awkward doing business with an alias.” A flush sprang to the cheeks of the stranger. “Well then,” said he, “my real name is James Ryder.”

Holmes stokes the tension with a silent half-hour ride to Baker Street, wherein, before the home fireplace, he produces Ryder’s glistening, erstwhile booty: “The game’s up, Ryder,” said Holmes quietly, “Hold up, man, or you’ll be in the fire! Give him an arm into his chair, Watson. He’s not got blood enough to go in for felony with impunity.”

Ryder’s subsequent confession of the burglary, replete with the details and name of an accomplice, is only punctuated by kneeling contrition: “For God’s sake, have mercy… think of my father! Of my mother! It would break their hearts. I never went wrong before! I never will again. I swear it. I’ll swear on a Bible. Oh, don’t bring it into court! For Christ’s sake, don’t.” Holmes considers the penitent Ryder, lecturing and listen-ing and elicitlisten-ing more information about the crime, before unex-pectedly saying: “Get out!”

“What sir! Oh, Heaven bless you!”

Holmes’ admittedly curious rationale for releasing the thief is due to a shift in focus – again emanating from his intuition. With the framed man guaranteed his freedom, Holmes’ mind, and heart, turned to the plight of Ryder. Holmes’ decision is a hunch-inspired bet that Ryder will henceforth be guided by penitence. The wager is no whim. Steeped in the spirit of Christmas, Holmes’ decision was inspired. Ryder’s genuine plea for mercy, in Christ’s name, has to be met with forgiveness: Ryder’s future life, even his very soul (not to mention the soul of Holmes) depends upon it. As Holmes explains to Watson, “This fellow will not go wrong again; he is too terribly frightened. Send him to jail now, and you make him a jail-bird for life. Besides, it is the season of forgiveness.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” The sentence could have been written for Holmes. For in ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, the world’s greatest detec-tive displays the brilliant, albeit paradoxical, mind of one who is able to exercise reason capable of forgiveness, and forgive-ness that is reasonable. Surely, this is the mark of a mind, and of a man, who is as endearing as he is noble.

Tim Weldon currently serves as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Theology at the University of St Francis in Joliet, Illinois. He can be reached at [email protected].

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tions.” Most academic critics interpret it as a ‘postmodern’ novel, but Eco didn’t entirely approve of the label. He had distanced himself from postmodernist theories of interpretation, arguing that in the last few decades, ‘the rights of the interpreters’ have been overstressed at the expense of ‘the rights of the text’. He wrote, “I have the impression that [the term ‘postmodern’] is applied today to anything the user of the term happens to like.” Indeed, so much scholarly attention has focused on the post-modern aspects of The Name of the Rose that other themes have been neglected, although they are likely to be of more interest to the general reader. So fear not, gentle reader, in this article I will not talk about postmodern theory. Instead I will explore the philosophy of William of Ockham as a key to understanding the philosophical dimensions of the novel.

Two Williams

Eco’s detective, William of Baskerville, is a Franciscan monk who at first appears to be a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes. His name even echoes The Hound of the Baskervilles . His disciple and scribe, a young Benedictine novice, is named Adso, which sounds a little like Watson. In appearance too Baskerville resembles Holmes – he is tall and thin with sharp, penetrating eyes and a somewhat beaky nose – except that Baskerville has fair hair and freckles. Like Holmes, who used cocaine to alleviate boredom between cases, Baskerville occasionally takes drugs, chewing on mysterious herbs that he learned about from Arab scholars. “A good Christian can sometimes learn also from the infidels,” he tells Adso, “but herbs that are good for an old Franciscan are not good for a young Benedictine.”

At the beginning of the story, Baskerville astonishes a group of monks with a dazzling display of Holmesian methods when he figures out that they are searching for the Abbot’s runaway horse and also correctly identifies the location, size, and even the name of the missing horse, based on his observations of minute details and his knowledge of texts describing medieval equestrian ideals. However, when Baskerville investigates a series of murders in an Italian monastery, it becomes clear that he is not a Holmes clone. For one thing, he is less sure of himself and more skeptical about his own methods. Holmes rather arrogantly says, “I never guess. It is a shocking habit – destructive to the logical faculty” (The Sign of the Four ). Baskerville, on the other hand, says that guessing is the essence of his method. In the case of the horse, he tells Adso, “When I saw the clues I guessed many complementary and con-tradictory hypotheses.” His method of detection is neither deduc-tion nor inducdeduc-tion, but what the American pragmatist philoso-pher C.S. Peirce called ‘abduction’ – a process of making conjec-tures and eliminating those which are impossible or unnecessary. Another way in which Baskerville differs from Holmes is in his attitude toward women. In The Sign of Four , Holmes noto-riously announces, “Women are never to be entirely trusted –

U

mberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose (1980) was an international bestseller that sold fifty million copies “which puts it in the league of Harry Potter , and ahead of Gone with the Wind, Roget’s Thesaurus , and To Kill a Mockingbird ” (Ted Gioia, postmodernmystery.com). Combining elements of detective fiction, the historical novel, the philosophical quest and the father-son initiation tale, the novel has appeal for many different kinds of readers. In the blurb on the first Italian edition, Eco wrote that he wanted to reach three different audiences – “the largest market, the mass of rela-tively unsophisticated readers who concentrated on plot; a second public, readers who examined historical novels to find connec-tions or analogies between the present and the past; and a third and even smaller elite audience, postmodern readers who enjoyed ironic references to other literary works and who assumed that a good work of fiction would produce a ‘whodunit’ of

quota-Ockham’s Rose

Carol Nicholson looks at philosophical themes in The Name Of The Rose.

(WARNING: CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS.)

Arts & Letters

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not the best of them” – which Watson rightly dismisses as an atrocious statement. Baskerville, on the other hand, is portrayed as a proto-feminist with liberal ideas about women and sexual-ity that contrast sharply with the traditionalist views of Adso, who refers to “that sink of vice that is the female body”, and the elderly monk Ubertino, who believes that “it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts!” Baskerville retorts, “I cannot convince myself that God chose to introduce such a foul being into creation without also endowing it with some virtues.” Baskerville’s differences from Holmes are due to the influ-ence of his (non-fictional) friend, William of Ockham (1288-1347), whose radical philosophy laid the groundwork for the modern era and was partly responsible for bringing about the end of the medieval worldview. (Eco initially considered Ockham for his detective, but gave up the idea because he didn’t find him a very attractive person.)

While he was still a student at Oxford, Ockham’s brilliant lec-tures transformed philosophy, but he never completed his degree because he was summoned by Pope John XXII to Avignon for questioning. In 1327, the year in which The Name of the Rose is set, Ockham faced fifty-six charges of heresy, and was excommu-nicated after escaping to the protection of Emperor Louis of Bavaria. This put an end to his academic career, and he spent the rest of his life as a political activist advocating freedom of speech, the separation of church and state, and arguing against the infal-libility of the Pope. Ockham found the Pope’s pronouncements opposing poverty in monastic orders “heretical, erroneous, stupid, ridiculous, fantastic, insane and defamatory. They are patently perverse and equally contrary to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain experience, and brotherly love.” The Pope (who was the richest man in the world at the time) responded by threatening that “he was prepared to burn a town down to smoke Ockham out.” Ockham probably died of the same outbreak of the plague that kills William of Baskerville at the end of the novel. If he hadn’t, he might have met a more fiery fate.

Ockham’s Sharp Thinking

William of Ockham is best known for his famous ‘razor’, which is simply the principle of simplicity or parsimony in making judgements. As Baskerville expresses the principle, “Dear Adso, one should not multiply explanations and causes unless it is strictly necessary.” In The First Deadly Sin (1973), Lawrence Sanders gives the most succinct summary of the principle: “Cut out the crap.” In Ockham’s time there was a lot of scholastic crap to be cut. This small tool made a big difference in slicing away the elaborate ideas of essential forms, hierarchies and tele-ologies that was the intellectual foundation of the Medieval European world.

Ockham himself used his principle of simplicity of explan a-tion to make a strong case for nominalism, the idea that the world consists entirely of individual things, with no so-called ‘univer-sals’ existing outside the mind (such as, for example, an essential ‘blueness’ in which all blue things partook). Nominalism pro- vided the foundation for Ockham’s belief in free will, which he

thought could not be limited by pre-existing essences, inviolable laws of nature, or even an omnipotent God. In Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1987) Eco sums up the implications of Ockham’s philosophy by saying, “If man no longer sees a given order in

things, if his world is no longer encompassed by fixed and defi-nite meanings, relations, species and genera, anything then is pos-sible. He finds that he is free, and by definition a creator.”

Ockham was also skeptical of Aristotle’s definition of man as ‘the rational animal’, and he suggested that we might as well define human beings as ‘the risible animals’ – those animals who are capable of laughter. This idea is important in The Name of the Rose, because Jorge, the blind librarian, despises laughter for its power to undermine fear of authority, and because the only surviving copy of Aristotle’s lost work On Comedy plays a major role in the solution of the mystery.

It follows from Ockham’s nominalism that if there is no essence of man, then there is no essence of woman either. Rather, there are only individual men and women and the ideas in our minds about them (which are fallible and subject to change). Ockham did not write much about women, but we do know that he questioned the natural supremacy of men and argued for a greater role for women in the church. Baskerville understands the gender implications of Ockham’s nominalism, and he is the only character in The Name of the Rose who is able to see women as individuals rather than versions of the archetype of either the Blessed Virgin or the diabolical temptress.

A House of Desires

There is much talk about sex in the novel, but little actual sex, because the monks in the abbey have no contact with women,

William of Ockham by Stephen Lahey

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and their desires for each other are necessarily hidden. In the one explicit sex scene Adso loses his virginity in the kitchen one night to the only woman in the novel. She’s a beautiful young peasant, and the novice monk falls in love with her. When Adso confesses his sin, Baskerville responds with kindness, “You must not do it again, of course, but it is not so monstrous that you were tempted to do it… For a monk to have, at least once in his life, experience of carnal passion, so that he can one day be indulgent and under-standing with the sinners he will counsel and console… is not something to vituperate too much once it has happened.” After learning that his lover had snuck into the monastery to trade sexual favors with the ugly old cellarer for a few scraps of food, Adso is horrified and exclaims, “A harlot!” Baskerville gently cor-rects him: “A poor peasant girl, Adso. Probably with smaller brothers to feed.” Adso is heartbroken when she is burned a s a witch, though he does not even know her name. The nameless girl is significant in the story as a symbol of innocent suffering, and her fate teaches Adso a hard lesson about the injustice of the world, foreshadowing Baskerville’s own conclusions at the end.

Baskerville sees even his enemies as individuals, understanding how in each of them their sexual desire has been differently twisted into fanatical lust for money, power, or knowledge. He explains to Adso that there are many kinds of lust that are not only of the flesh and can be far more dangerous. The Pope lusts for riches; and Bernard Gui, the overly zealous Inquisitor, has “a distorted lust for justice that becomes identified with a lust for power.” Baskerville says that those who truly love knowledge understand that “The good of a book lies in its being read”; but lust simply for books, “like all lusts… is sterile and has nothing to do with love, not even carnal love.” The monastery’s library “was perhaps born to save the books it houses, but now it lives to bury them.” Baskerville concludes that Jorge’s lust for power, disguised as love of God, has turned the library, whose purpose should be to share knowledge rather than hoard it, into a ‘sink of iniquity’.

The novel can be read as a study of the seven deadly sins as different forms of lust, each illustrated by one of the characters. Even Baskerville realizes at the end that he has fallen into the sin of intellectual pride, and he laughs at his folly. He had imag-ined that the murders followed a pattern based on the Book of Revelation, but this conceit led him astray and prevented him from solving the mystery in time to save the library from burn-ing down. He asks, “Where is all my wisdom, then? I behaved stubbornly, pursuing a semblance of order, when I should have known well that there is no order in the universe.” Adso is con-fused so Baskerville says, “It’s hard to accept the idea that there cannot be an order in the universe because it would offend the free will of God and his omnipotence. So the freedom of God is our condemnation, or at least the condemnation of our pride.” Thus the most devastating implications of Ockham’s method become clear to Baskerville when he sees from this that the razor is double-edged – it destroys certainty in God as well as certainty in the order that science tries to impose on the world. Baskerville adds, “Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for the truth.” Baskerville’s laughter at himself frees him from the most dangerous form of lust, then – his certainty of having found the truth.

Medieval Modernism

The burning of the library is symbolic of the destruction of the Medieval worldview, for which some historians give Ockham the credit (or the blame). Afterwards, in giving Adso his spare pair of glasses, Baskerville symbolically passes on his knowledge and curiosity. By showing that the books are destroyed but the love of learning lives on, Eco confounds common prejudices concerning the Medieval period. He writes that “everyone has his own idea, usually corrupt, of the Middle Ages” ( Rose, postscript, p.535), which was saddled with a bad name by the Renaissance that followed.

Rather than the apparent dogmatism and immobility of the period, it was actually a time of “incredible intellectual vitality” and “cul-tural revolution.” It is astonishing to realize that the separation of church and state and the equality of women are not modern ideas, but originated in the Middle Ages. And many centuries before David Hume, Ockham criticized the idea of a necessary connec-tion between cause and effect; and even more centuries before Karl Popper, Ockham understood the scientific method as a pro-cess of conjecture and refutation. Ironically, contemporary schol-ars have claimed to discover in The Name of the Rose ‘postmodern’ ideas about knowledge and truth that are at least eight hundred years old. Unlike the traditional detective novel, The Name of the Rose does not offer comfortable reassurance of the triumph of good over evil and order over chaos. It also makes readers uncomfort-able by showing us a picture of fourteenth century Europe, in all of its brilliance and horror, as a mirror of our own age.

Eco writes, “The fundamental question of philosophy… is the same as the question of the detective novel: Who is guilty? And any true detection should prove that we are the guilty party” ( Ibid ). I don’t claim to understand this cryptic statement, but I’m guess-ing that it may be intended to accuse modern readers of not beguess-ing honest about the darkness of our own era. In The Name of the Rose, Jorge deliberately destroys Aristotle’s book on comedy - at the cost of his own life - to stop others from reading it. In a 1996 interview with Theodore Beale, Eco said, “Even our times have been full of dictatorships that have burned books. What does it mean, the Salman Rushdie persecution, if not to try to destroy a book? Even today we have this continual struggle between people that believe certain texts are dangerous and must be eliminated. So my story is not so outdated, even though it takes place in the Middle Ages. We are not better” (umbertoeco.com).

I suspect that few readers will agree with Eco that our civi-lization has made no moral progress in the past millennium, but I think he is right that his story is not outdated. The seven deadly sins are still alive and well, as are the pompous intellectuals, greedy politicians, and lustful priests. We guard our libraries with laws and pay walls that prohibit public access to knowl-edge, and persecute those who leak information. We don’t burn people at the stake any more, but we have our own methods of torturing heretics. Eco’s novel pokes fun at our arrogant modern (or postmodern) sense of superiority, and challenges us to look with the skeptical and compassionate eye of William of Baskerville, the humble Holmes with a heart, at the cruelty and hypocrisy of the world we have made, and to laugh at ourselves. © DR CAROL NICHOLSON 2018

Carol Nicholson teaches philosophy at Rider University in Lawrenceville, NJ. Her article, ‘Rorty's Romantic Polytheism’ will be published in the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Richard Rorty . [email protected]

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modernist artists such as James Joyce, Arnold Schoenberg, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan and Pablo Picasso were able to indi-rectly resist society’s unethical practices through reconfiguring the individual’s experience, and showing us how our capacity for rational thought has been subverted by society into irrationality. He argued that commercial art (pop music, Hollywood films, TV shows, popular novels, etc.) fails to challenge social and his-torical norms because it merely follows public demand. It is often infantile and formulaic. It fails to articulate any distance from society, and so is incapable of changing individual consciousness. For example, popular folk music strives to reinforce national and cultural identity through repeating narratives with which most listeners already identify (In America, for instance, these narra-tives might involve strength, independence, freedom, self-reliance: generally speaking, individualism).

Radical art must resist assimilation into the status quo. Accord-ing to Adorno, its purpose is to incite an experience of otherness – of that which falls outside the audience’s social-cultural norms. While living in exile from the Nazis in the 1940s, Adorno wrote: “there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of

A

t a time when populist movements are on the march throughout the world, why should we pay attention to art? Isn’t it self-indulgent to concern oneself with art, music, or literature when the foundations of soci-ety and of the international order are being shaken? Or can art itself really change the world?

Art Protests

Let’s look at what art can and can’t do in terms of politics. An example: in 2016, the artists Richard Serra, Cindy Sherman, Louise Lawler, Joan Jonas, and Julie Mehretu argued that it was appropriate to protest President Trump’s inauguration by sym-bolically closing art museums and galleries across the United States. The artists stated that the protest would not be “a strike against art, theater or any other cultural form. It is an invitation to motivate these activities anew, to reimagine these spaces as places where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling and acting can be produced.” The proposition caused controversy. In the Guardian newspaper (9th January 2017), Jonathan Jones argued that the protest merely demonstrated “shallow radical posturing by some very well-heeled and comfortable members of a cultural elite.” In other words, since the artists are not taking a personal risk, their political protest fails. Jones continues: “Let’s face it: art and serious culture are completely marginal to Amer-ican life. Closing museums is not likely to have any effect on those who support [Trump].” Jones ends by stating: “The real reason art strikes and fine words at the Golden Globes are futile is that they cannot do justice to the danger the world is in.” According to Jones, then, art cannot express the horrors of the world adequately. He implies that any artwork that claims to be radical merely sidesteps the concrete danger faced for instance by those who protest on the streets against nuclear war, social prejudice, or police violence, risking arrest, prison time, harass-ment, or death. At worst, artists face immaterial danger – for instance, by creating artworks that experiment with colour or line; or a work that inspires an emotional response but little else; or by developing new artistic techniques that may challenge audiences, but which only a tiny minority actually experience. In light of all this, why don’t we just accept that art is powerless in the social and political sphere? Why don’t artists just accept that they will always remain on the sidelines of radical politics?

The German critical theorist (and music critic) Theodor W. Adorno would have rejected Jones’ argument. Adorno (1903-1969) defended art’s capacity to make us aware of violence (as it appeared in capitalism and fascism), and its power to express suf-fering and hope which cannot be fully communicated in lan-guage. Art may resist injustice; not through directly achieving practical change, but by forcing the audience to become aware of the violence that governs their own history and the social order within which they and we are trapped. Art’s unique mode of resis-tance involves provoking thought rather than action. For Adorno,

Can Art Fight Fascism?

Justin Kaushall considers Adorno’s argument that radical art

radically changes consciousness.

George Orwell by Woodrow Cowher

2018

Arts & Letters

George Orwell, who literally fought fascism as a volunteer in the Spanish civil war before writing Animal Farm and 1984.

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negativity holding fast to the possibility of what is better” ( Minima Moralia, 1951, p.25). He meant that the traditional idea of beauty

should no longer govern artists’ production of artworks. Such beauty claims to promote peace and harmony and to allow tran-scendence from the everyday. In reality, however, it passes over the violence that circulates beneath the surface of polite society. One might think here of those airbrushed ads on billboards that seek to cover over the reality of institutionalized misogyny or sexual violence. Instead, true art should attempt to (nonviolently) imitate the violence of society in order to express it. Such an attempt can be seen in the dissonance of Schoenberg's music. Schoenberg, in order to express historical violence through aes-thetic form, produces a new formal technique for composing music: the twelve-tone system. This system works by rejecting harmony. Instead, dissonant works express the difference - the qualitative uniqueness - of their constituent tones. The opposi-tion between the particular tones expresses social violence. For Adorno, true artworks – those that do not shy away from express-ing sufferexpress-ing – are dissonant, enigmatic and difficult to under-stand. When we reflect on a Beckett play, for example, we real-ize that what ordinarily passes for rationality in capitalist society (the practical desire to gain as much as possible for as little effort as possible, for instance) is but a distorted version of true ratio-nality, which is not governed by practical-instrumental impera-tives, but which instead enables philosophical reflection and the experience of otherness and difference.

Art Challenges

So how can art fight fascism?

First, although radical, challenging art is somewhat marginal to Western life, it does not need a large audience in order to have some destabilizing effect. In his article doubting art’s polit-ical usefulness, Jones implied that the only experiences that count culturally or politically are ones that can be measured on a mass scale. Yet even if a single individual feels shock and horror when looking at, say, Picasso’s Guernica, the painting can be

said to have achieved its effect.

Adorno’s philosophy is explicitly formulated to resist prag-matism. Rather, “only what does not fit into this world is true” ( Aesthetic Theory, 1970, p.76). Adorno is saying that truth is in fact a moral category. This allows a true artwork to avoid con-formity and express individuality, difference, or possibility. When it adheres blindly to social categories, the work may

achieve a measure of apparent popularity, but it loses something too. Adorno argues that ethical action requires independence of mind and critical thought as well as the experience of partic-ularity (that is, of a thing’s qualitative or material uniqueness). How is art able to reach or enable this concept of moral truth? This brings me to the second reason why art is capable of resistance: artworks do not communicate ideas through con-cepts that have already become the well-worn currency of every-day speech. Rather, artworks express truth through poetic or artistic language which must keep a distance from ideology or from conventions that have been simply accepted rather than critically examined. So Adorno thinks that the best modern artworks express dissonance: that is, horror and suffering. As he observes: “Celan’s poems want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence. Their truth content itself becomes

neg-ative” ( Aesthetic Theory p.405). In this way art may indeed ‘do justice’ to the damaged state of the world.

Adorno would further argue that since capitalism strongly compels individuals to value objects in monetary terms regard-less of their intrinsic value or usefulness, true works of modern art should construct objects that are useless, and yet which have intrinsic (and non-quantifiable) value. So he arguesagainst making artworks explicitly political because that would mean that they’ve become instruments instead of autonomous constructions. For instance, although Percy Bysshe Shelley is a great poet, some of his best known works ( England in 1819, Masque of Anarchy…) to some extent use poetry to communicate a political point of view. By contrast, John Keats’ work uses themes that are part of tradi-tion in order to criticize traditradi-tion without turning the artwork into a political tool (see for instance, To Autumn, and the famous Ode to a Grecian Urn). For the same reasons, Bob Dylan is less effective an artist than Beethoven. The latter challenges our expe-rience more than the former because he is less overtly political.

This argument may appear elitist, yet for Adorno that’s beside the point. An artwork’s autonomy from society enables it to cri-tique society – specifically, through allowing a subject to realize what an object not determined by instrumental reason (or hege-monic exchange-value) would look like. Thus any work that is not sufficiently autonomous – for instance, commercial TV shows, which rely on corporate sponsors and formulaic story-lines, or most popular music, which again uses melodies that can be easily digested and recalled without much effort – must fail as art. Similarily, overtly political art tells the subject what to think, through providing a blueprint to which her experience must conform. Autonomous art, on the contrary, allows the subject to experience otherness on its own terms. It opens, rather

than closes, critical thought.

Art Opens

A universal concept is incapable of completely encompassing all the particular features of an actual object. Adorno calls this the non-identity of concept and object ( Minima Moralia p.127). We encounter this when we realize that our experience has

cer-tain conceptual blind spots – that for example, we cannot always adequately describe the material features of objects in language. Similarly, certain artworks have a significance that may be expe-rienced but which cannot be described conceptually. Concepts obscure particularity rather than expressing it.

Art can open us up to experiences of otherness. But such experiences are precisely what fascism wants to shut down and deny. How does non-identity appear aesthetically? It might show up in the art gallery when we stand baffled before an appar-ently impossible, strange, or puzzling work – such as Méret Oppenheim’s Object , constructed in 1936: a teacup, saucer, and spoon, all covered in fur.

Modern art provides an experience of otherness that cannot be determined by conventional categories. For another exam-ple, take the first stanza of the well-known poem Death Fugue by Paul Celan (probably written in 1945):

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night we drink and we drink