The Viconian view treats history as if it were a cycle like the seasons, like the flooding of the Nile, like the paths of the planets and the movement of the stars. It treats history as if it were a thing, not an event. Things may be annihilated, but it makes no sense to speak of them as if they had just begun, had gone halfway, or were nearly over. We don’t say: Hurry, the statue has just started. The world moves, according to Vico, like the brightly lit glass ball in the ballroom; its phases begin and end, but it revolves only to come round again. The pattern itself is a cultural invention. This moving image makes romantic a tawdry gym. Nevertheless, Vico’s separation of historical mind from historical matter, which Croce applauded, allows us to see how much more important the invention of logic was, for example, than that drawn-out war on the Peloponnesus; how extraordinary even the creation of a new notation can be, like that which was finally devised for music; how like the discovery of the wheel is the Socratic conception of the soul—no longer shadow, blood, or breath, but a thoroughly abstract entity; how fundamental, in short, are the forms of the mind, how weak the so-called solid, simple facts.
That man must eat to live. That everyone must die. Really hard items. Dissolve into a dew, like Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle, do they? then evaporate entirely, only to be gathered together in soft clouds and driven against the mountains, where their rain enriches the rivers. The linear view of history is based upon the linear life of man, but where man’s life draws an arc like an arrow’s drooping path, the purpose of providence is to pull him out of his dive just in time. Vico’s pagan view of history, however, sticks close to those rhythmical alternations that beat back and forth within life, and that seem to express long, slumberous lengths of Egyptian time and the continued quiet begetting of the generations, as well as the more tumultuous periodic conflagrations imagined by the Greeks.
So there is the stuttery voice of God, the clap of thunder, mutter in the mountains. The bomb drops, the ice cap cracks, and we hear the hundred letters of Joyce’s lightning bolt punctuate the periodic appearances of the prankquean; we hear it as written on Finnegans’ wind:
It was of a night, late, lang time agone, in an auldstane eld, when Adam was delvin and his madameen spinning watersilts, when mulk mountynotty man was everybully and the first leal ribberrobber that ever had her ainway everybuddy to his love-saking eyes and everybilly lived alove with everybiddy else, and Jarl van Hoother had his burnt head high up in his lamphouse, laying cold hands on himself. And his two little jiminies, cousins of ourn, Tristopher and Hilary, were kickaheeling their dummy on the oil cloth flure of his homerigh, castle and earthenhouse. And, be dermot, who come to the keep of his inn only the niece-of-his-in-law, the prankquean. And the prankquean pulled a rosy one and made her wit foreninst the dour. And she lit up and fireland was ablaze. And spoke she to the dour in her petty perusienne: Mark the Wans, why do I am alook alike a poss of porterpease? And that was how the skirtmisshes began.
Countless cosmologies have been crowded in here, as if Joyce had hired a hall.
But that is the cruelty. We have to enter this labyrinthian fiction, with its arbitrary cosmos, its made-up laws, and its compacted lingo; we have to pull over our heads a cover of concepts and sleep like H. C. Earwicker himself the sleep of these syllables, before we can encounter the truth: that the world away from this work, the world we really eat and sleep and sweat and fight and screw in, is a fiction, too; but a fiction that fails to acknowledge its nature and is therefore and for that reason unreal; because the secret at the center of Finnegans Wake is written on a piece of paper which a hen, it’s said, has scratched from a midden. Yes, the writer has woven our lies around us like binding lines of evidence. He convicts us of culture.
The prankquean has got God’s goat for the third and last time. Here is how the skirtmisshes endupped:
For like the campbells acoming with a fork lance of lightning, Jarl von Hoother Boanerges himself, the old terror of the dames, came hip hop handihap out through the pikeopened arkway of his three shuttoned castles, in his broadginger hat and his civic chollar and his allabuff hemmed and his bullbrag-gin soxangloves and his ladbroke breeks and his cattegut ban-dolair and his furframed panuncular cumbottes like a rudd yellan gruebleen orangeman in his violet indigonation, to the whole longth of the strongth of his bowman’s bill. And he clopped his rude hand to his eacy hitch and he ordurd and his thick spch spck for her to shut up shop, dappy. And the duppy shot the shutter clup.
Whereupon the thunder punctuates the prose, and shortly Joyce concludes: “And that was the first peace of illiterative porthery in all the flamend floody flatuous world.”
Nature is a lot like the blank page, the blank sky: there is a terrifying latitude to Nature, an immense indifference, which we symbolize by means of the sea and its implacable, impersonal, monotonous repetitions. If there is one thing we know about the world as it would be without us, it is the massive unconcern it has for us when we are present; for if we believe that the stars rule our lives, or that God’s in his heaven, or that times return wearing the same face as the clock, or that certain disgusting objects are edible and some surely splendid ones are not, or that we ought to sacrifice virgins or use the elderly as bait for wild beasts, or circumcise ourselves or scar our cheeks, or kneel in front of tatty statues or wear a veil or feel that some people are base and unclean and others are like Shirley Temple … and so on until we reach leeks, as in Hobbes’s little list; Nature would not lift a correcting hand, wrinkle a discriminating nose or raise a disapproving eyebrow. It lets us behave like fools; it lets us live among lies and think we’re in a field of lilies; it lets us rape and call it marriage, enslave and call it soul-saving; it doesn’t even go hoot when we call someone a godlike king or pope or saint or buddha. Not only that, but many civilizations, many systems of ideas, many philosophies and many works of art, many physical sciences and versions of psychology, many different sets of laws and views of politics and economics, can flourish and seem to sustain a society, allowing a people to reach what we think of as the highest cultural heights—the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Chinese, the Hindoos, Englishmen, Bostonians, Southern belles—while contradicting one another so baldly, so continuously, so extremely, at almost every point, that we know most of them must be largely false—namely, every opinion but our own.
Although there has always been an honorable tradition in philosophy which holds that it is better not to believe at all than to believe badly—the list is long, from Socrates to Montaigne, from Nietzsche through Wittgenstein—philosophers have also been eager merchants of ideas. Still, they are wily. They commit only that part of the head where the hat rests. You cannot say, when you see one on the street, “Ah, there goes a person who believes that existence is a property.” By the time we have reached ideology (where ideas are organized and administered by bureau clerks), another nature has been glued firmly over whatever is otherwise out there, so that Nature will now appear to support a history of point and purpose, to provide moralities for man which thoroughly demean him, and to offer status to the undeserving, and false hope to the trodden down.
The significance of cultural diversity is not that there are no universal truths, no objective morality, no general standards of taste; rather, it is that Nature is not their underwriter; it has no cosmology, no theology, perhaps no ontology of its own, nor is it made of Number, as the Pythagoreans suggested; and despite some suspicions to the contrary, Nature does not speak German. If we want walls on which to hang our values, we shall have to build them ourselves; but now the difference will be that we shall be beguiled by our cultural language only in the way Finnegans Wake beguiles us, and our standards supported the way Finnegans Wake supports its; for concerning fictions, as we know, many sorts of fine assessments can be made. Meanwhile, we shall enjoy all the advantages of doubt—a healthy, well-muscled mind among them. Who knows what we shall see when the mists of meaning lift? who knows how far we may be able to hear as ideological noise is redu
ced, all that white static cleared? Perhaps we shall even, now and then, receive the distant ding of the Ding an sich itself.
V
THE BABY OR THE BOTTICELLI
We are to imagine a terrible storm like that which opens Verdi’s Otello. The pavement of the piazzetta is awash. Saint Mark’s pigeons are flying about, looking for land. The Venetian sun has gone down like a gondola in the lagoon. As we wade along in the dying light, a baby in a basket passes. It is being swept out to sea with the rest of the city’s garbage. So is a large painting, beautifully framed, which floats its grand nude by us as if she were swimming. Then the question comes, bobbing like a bit of flotsam itself: Which one should we save, the tiny tot or the Tintoretto? the kid in the crib or the Canaletto?
It may be that during two thousand or more years of monsoons, tidal waves, and high water, this choice has not once actually presented itself; yet, undismayed, it is in this form that philosophers frequently represent the conflict between art and morality—a conflict, of course, they made up in the first place. Baby or Botticelli. What’ll you have?
Not only is the dilemma an unlikely one; the choice it offers is peculiar. We are being asked to decide not between two different actions but between two different objects. And how different indeed these floating objects are. The baby is a vessel of human consciousness, if its basket isn’t. It is nearly pure potentiality. It must be any babe—no one babe but babe in general, babe in bulk—whose bunk is boating by. Never mind if it was born with the brain of an accountant, inflicted with a cleft palate, or given Mozartian talents: these are clearly irrelevant considerations, as are ones concerning the seaworthiness of the basket, or the prospect of more rain. One fist in this fight swings from the arm of an open future against the chest of a completed past.…
… A completed past because we have to know the pedigree of the painting or it’s no contest. If it is the rosy nude who used to recline behind the bar in Harry’s, or just another mislaid entrant in the latest Biennale, then the conditions of the case are fatally altered and there is no real conflict of interest, though the blank space behind the bar at Harry’s will surely fill us with genuine sorrow each scotch-and-water hour. It is not between infant and image, then, that we are being asked to choose, but between some fully realized esthetic quality and a vaguely generalized human nature, even though it is a specific baby who could drown.
It is the moralists, of course, who like to imagine these lunatic choices. It is the moralists who want to bully and beat up on the artists, not the other way around. The error of the artists is indifference. Not since Plato’s day, when the politicians in their grab for public power defeated the priests, the poets, and the philosophers, have artists, except for an occasional Bronx cheer, molested a moralist. Authors do not gather to burn good deeds in public squares; laws are not passed by poets to put lying priests behind bars, nor do they usually suggest that the pursuit of goodness will lead you away from both beauty and truth, that it is the uphill road to ruin. Musicians do not hang moralizing lackeys from lampposts as though they were stringing their fiddles; moralizing lackeys do that.
On the other hand … We know what the other, the righteous hand is full of: slings and arrows, slanders and censorship, prisons, scaffolds, burnings and beatings. To what stake has Savonarola’s piety been bound by the painters he disgraced? Throughout history, goodness has done more harm than good, and over the years moralists have managed to give morality a thoroughly bad name. Although lots of bad names have been loaned them by the poets, if the poets roast, they roast no one on the coals, only upon their scorn, while moralists, to their reward, have dispatched who knows how many thousands of souls.
The choice, baby or Botticelli, is presented to us as an example of the conflict between Art and Ethics, but between Art and Ethics there is no conflict, nor is this an instance, for our quandary falls entirely within the ethical. The decision, if there is one to make, is moral.
The values that men prize have been variously classified. There may be said to be, crudely, five kinds. There are, first of all, those facts and theories we are inclined to call true, and which, we think, constitute our knowledge. Philosophy, history, science, presumably pursue them. Second, there are the values of duty and obligation—obedience and loyalty, righteousness and virtue—qualities that the state finds particularly desirable. Appreciative values of all kinds may be listed third, including the beauties of women, art, and nature, the various sublimes, and that pleasure which comes from the pure exercise of human faculties and skills. Fourth are the values of self-realization and its attendant pleasures—growth, well-being, and the like—frequently called happiness in deference to Aristotle. Finally, there are those that have to do with real or imagined redemption, with ultimate justice and immortality. Some would prefer to separate political values like justice or freedom from more narrowly moral ones, while others would do the same for social values like comfort, stability, security, conditions often labeled simply “peace.” But a complete and accurate classification, assuming it could be accomplished, is not important here. Roughly, we might call our goals, as tradition has, Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Happiness, and Salvation. (We can reach port, sometimes, even with a bad map.)
If we allow our classificatory impulse to run on a little longer, it will encourage us to list at least four customary attitudes that can be taken toward the relationship of these value areas to one another. First, one can deny the legitimacy or reality of a particular value group. Reckless pragmatists and some sophists deny the objective existence of all values except utility, while positivists prefer to elevate empirical truth (which they don’t capitalize, only underscore) to that eminence. It is, of course, truth thinned to the thickness of a wire, which is fine if you want to cut cheese. The values that remain are rejected as attitudes, moods, or emotions—subjective states of various sorts like wishing, hoping, willing, which suggest external objects without being able to establish them. I happen to regard salvation values as illusory or mythological, since I deny any significance to the assumptions on which they are grounded, but other people may pick out different victims.
Second, we might accept the values of a certain sphere as real enough, but argue that some or all of them are reducible to others, even eventually to one. Reductionism is characteristic of Plato’s famous argument that virtue is knowledge; of Keats’s fatuous little motto, Beauty is Truth; of materialists and idealists equally. Rather than reduce moral values to those of happiness, Aristotle simply ignored them.
Third, we can try to make some values subordinate to others. This is not the same as reduction. One might argue that artistic and moral values are mutually exclusive, or unique, and yet support the superiority of one over the other. There are, however, two kinds of subordination. One asserts that X is more important than Y, so that when one has to choose between them (baby or Botticelli), one must always choose the baby. When designing buildings, for instance, beauty regularly runs afoul of function and economy. The other sort of subordination insists not only that X is more important, or “higher” in value, than Y, but that Y should serve or be a means to X: the baby is a model for the baby in the Botticelli. The slogan Form follows function is sometimes so understood. I take crude Marxism to require this kind of sacrifice from the artist.
Fourth, it is possible to argue, as I do, that these various value areas are significantly different. They are not only different; they are not reducible, but are independent of one another. Furthermore, no one value area is more important, abstractly considered, than any other. In short, these various values are different, independent, and equal.
This does not imply that in particular instances you should not choose one over the other and have good reasons for doing so; it is simply that what is chosen in any instance cannot be dictated in advance. Obviously, if you are starving, whether your food is served with grace and eaten with manners is less than essential. Should you skip dinner or lick the spilled beans from the floor? Should you choose to
safeguard a painting or the well-being of its model? Should you bomb Monte Cassino?
That attachment to human life which demands that it be chosen over everything else is mostly humbug. It can be reasonably, if not decisively, argued that the world is already suffering from a surfeit of such animals; that most human beings rarely deserve the esteem some philosophers have for them; that historically humans have treated their pets better than they have treated one another; that no one is so essential he or she cannot be replaced a thousand times over; that death is inevitable anyhow; that it is our sense of community and our own identity which lead us to persist in our parochial overestimation; that it is rather a wish of philosophers than a fact that man be more important than anything else that’s mortal, since nature remains mum and scarcely supports the idea, nor do the actions of man himself. Man makes a worse god than God, and when God was alive, he knew it.
Baby or Botticelli is a clear enough if artificial choice, but it places the problem entirely in the moral sphere, where the differences involved can be conveniently overlooked. What differences?
The writing of a book (the painting of a painting, the creation of a score) is generally such an exacting and total process that it is not simply okay if it has many motives; it is essential. The difference between one of Flaubert’s broken amatory promises to Louise Colet and his writing of Madame Bovary (both considered immoral acts in some circles) is greater even than Lenin’s willingness to board a train and his intended overthrow of the czar. Most promises are kept by actions each one of which fall into a simple series; that is, I meet you at the Golden Egg by getting up from my desk, putting on my coat, and getting into my car: a set of actions each one of which can be serially performed and readily seen as part of “going to lunch.” I may have many reasons for keeping our date, but having promised becomes the moral one.
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