The Aristos

by John Fowles

  41 Science is what a machine can or might do; art is what it will never do. This is a definition of what art should and must be to mankind; not a denial of the already proven fact that science can perfectly well manufacture what can pass as art.

  42 A good scientist cuts the umbilical cord between his private personality, his emotions, his self, and his creation; his discovery of a new law, or phenomenon, or property. But a good artefact is always a limb, a branch, a second self. Science disembodies; art embodies.

  43 It is tempting to treat artefacts as phenomena that can be best apprehended when scientifically analysed and classified; thence the sciences of art history and of criticism. From this springs the illusion that all art is contained within the science that can describe, appraise and categorize it; thence, the ridiculous belief that art is finally ‘inferior’ to science, as if nature is inferior to natural history.

  44 This scientization of art, so characteristic of our age, is absurd. Science has shaken off the fetters of art, and now fetters art. Above all it scientizes the inmost characteristic of art – mystery. For what good science tries to eliminate, good art seeks to provoke – mystery, which is lethal to the one, and vital to the other.

  45 Of course I do not wish to deny the utility of a scientific criticism, a natural history, of art. But I should like to see destroyed the notion that art is a pseudo-science; that it is sufficient to know art; that art is knowable in the sense that an electronic circuit or a rabbit’s foetus is knowable.

  46 Different tools and languages; different superficial notions of what is vital in existence, therefore different superficial aims; different minds; yet all great scientists are in a sense artists and all great artists are in a sense scientists, since they have the same human aim: to approach a reality, to convey a reality, to symbolize a reality, to summarize a reality, to convince of a reality. All serious scientists and artists want the same: a truth that no one will need to change.

  47 All symbolization, and all science and all art is symbolization, is an attempt to escape from time. All symbols summarize; evoke what is absent; serve as tools; permit us to control our movements in the river of time, and are thus attempts to control time.

  But science tries to be true of an event for all time; while art tries to be an event for all time.

  48 Neither the scientifically nor the artistically expressed reality is the most real reality. The ‘real’ reality is a meaningless particularity, a total incoherence, a ubiquitous isolation, a universal disconnection. It is a sheet of blank paper; we do not call the drawings or equations we make on the paper the paper. Our interpretations of reality are not ‘the’ reality, any more than the blankness of the paper is the drawing. Our drawings, our equations, are ultimately pseudo-realities, but those are the only realities that concern us because they are the only realities that can concern us.

  49 The practice of an art, or arts, is as essential to the whole man as a knowledge of science. This is not because of what art is but because of what art does to the artist.

  50 All artefacts please and teach the artist first, and other people later. The pleasing and teaching come from the explanation of self by the expression of self; by seeing the self, and all the selves of the whole self, in the mirror of what the self has created.

  51 In any good education science and art must hold equal rank. They do not hold equal rank today because the majority of scientists are not true scientists, that is heuristic pursuers of knowledge, but technologists, or analytical appliers of it. The technological view of life is one that of its nature imposes a highly mechanical and empirical approach within its own field; the danger now is that this approach is made to all other fields as well. And to the human turned technologist art must seem a highly dismissible activity because neither it nor its effects can be assessed by any easily verifiable method.

  52 The true scientist never dismisses, depreciates, or condescends to art; I consider this an almost fundamental definition of him. And conversely, of the true artist.

  53 Already, in America especially, we see the attempt to turn art into a kind of pseudo-technology. In the hideously misnamed ‘creative writing’ courses the notion is spread that it is sufficient to learn the technique to achieve the value, and there are now increasing hosts of writers and painters characterized by a very distinctive pseudo-technological hollowness.

  54 Their artefacts are cleverly assembled and fashionably neat, neatly fashionable, and yet the whole is never more than the sum of the parts. When the technique is praised, everything is praised. There is a spotless eggshell, but no meat.

  55 Of course most good and all great artists show skill at techniques. But the pseudo-technological artist is like an angler who thinks the essential is to be able to handle a rod and bait a hook; but the true essential is to know a river to fish in. The thing comes first, then its expression; and today we are faced with an army of cleverly-trained expressers all in pursuit of something to express; a crowd of expert anglers futilely casting in the middle of a ploughed field.

  56 A counter argument is this: granted that the ability to express is not the same as the expression of something valuable, a person trained to express is still better equipped to perceive the valuably expressible than an untrained one. I believe the contrary: that the teaching of command of special techniques limits vision rather than extends it. If you train someone to be an angler using special techniques, he will see the world in terms of angling by those special techniques.

  57 A young would-be artist trained to ‘create’ in the style of this or that successful modern artist will begin to gain that artist’s sensibility as well as his techniques; and this always present but never so probable prospect of being endlessly imitated, of endlessly imposing his sensibilities and views of life on impressible young ‘trained’ minds, must seem one of the most disagreeable facing the genuinely serious and gifted artist.

  58 Being an artist is first discovering the self and then stating the self in self-chosen terms. The proper school of any art should have two courses: a museum course and a craft course. The museum course simply teaches the history of the art and the monuments (all past masters) of the art; the craft course teaches the basic practical essentials, the syntax, grammar, prosody, paint mixing, academic draughtsmanship, harmony, instrumental ranges, and the rest. All teaching or advocating of a style, a sensibility, a philosophy, is pernicious; is pseudo-technology, not art.

  59 Show the young sailor how to sail; but don’t so falsify the compass and the chart that he can sail only in one direction.

  60 To be an artist is not to be a member of a secret society; it is not an activity inscrutably forbidden to the majority of mankind. Even the clumsiest, ugliest and most ignorant lovers make love; and what is important is the oneness of man in making artefacts, not the abyss said to exist between a Leonardo and the average of mankind. We are not all to be Leonardos; but of the same kind as Leonardo, for genius is only one end of the scale. I climbed Parnassus once, and between the mundane village of Arachova at the foot and the lovely summit, quite as lovely as the poets have always had it to be, there is nothing but a slope; no abyss, no cliff, no place where wings are necessary!

  61 A child is not excused from games and physical training because he is not brilliant at them. Only one child in ten cannot be taught music. Poetry has nothing to do with recitation, with learning by heart or reading texts for examination purposes. Poetry is saying what you are in words in rhythmic patterns. Visual art is the same, but in shapes and colours instead of words.

  62 An artist, as we understand the word today, is someone who does by nature what we should all do by education. But all our modern technology-biased systems of education concentrate far too much on the science of art, that is, art history and art categorization and art appreciation, and far too little on the personal creation of artefacts; as if diagrams, discussions, photographs and films of games and physical exercise were an adequate substitute for the real thing. It is useless to
provide endless facilities for the enjoyment of other people’s art unless there are corresponding facilities for creating one’s own.

  63 Freedom is inherent in the best art, as it is in the best science. Both are essentially demolishers of tyranny and dogma; are melters of petrifaction, breakers of the iron situation. To begin with, an artist may oppose merely because he has the power to express opposition; and then one day his own expressed opposition expresses him. His art enlists him. The poem I write today writes me tomorrow. I find the scientific law; and then the law finds me.

  GAMES

  64 Games, sports and pastimes that require rules and social contact have become increasingly significant in the last century. It was calculated that something like one hundred and fifty million people watched on television the final of the football World Cup in 1966. As with art, we may tend to regard games as a rather unimportant leisure activity. But as leisure increases, so does their influence on our fives.

  65 Games are far more important to us, and in far deeper ways, than we like to admit. Some psychologists explain all the symbolic values we attach to games, and to losing and winning them, in Freudian terms. Football consists of twenty-two penises in pursuit of a vagina; a golf club is a steel-shafted phallus; the chess king and queen are Laius and Jocasta; all winning is a form either of evacuation or of ejaculation; and so on. Such explanations may or may not have value in discussing the origin of the game. But for most players and spectators a much more plausible explanation is the Adlerian one, that a game is a system for achieving superiority. It is moreover a system (like money getting) that is to a certain extent a human answer to the inhuman hazard of the cosmic lottery; to be able to win at a game compensates the winner for not being able to win outside the context of the game. This raison d’etre of the game is most clearly seen in the games of pure chance; but many other games have deliberate hazards; and even in games technically free of hazards the bounce, the lie, the fly in the eye exist. The evil is this: from instituting this system of equalizing hazard man soon moves to regarding the winner in it as not merely lucky but in some way excellent; just as he now comes to regard the rich man as in some way intrinsically excellent.*

  66 The prestige coveters have always tried to seize sport as their province. This is especially so in times of peace. Much has been made of the nobility of the early Olympic Games, in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, and of their later corruption under the Romans. But the sprig of olive was already too large a prize. Competition, the need to keep equal and the drive to do better, haunts mankind. But there are plenty of real fields for competition without inventing artificial ones.

  67 Sport is an opportunity for personal pleasure, a situation where beauty may arise. But what is being contested is never prestige. Simply the game. The winner has more skill or more luck; by winning he is not in any sense in any game necessarily a better human being than the loser.

  68 Almost all the great popular sports of the world come from Britain. But what Britain has not been able to export is the amateur ethos of the game. Most foreigners, and now many Britons, want to win at any cost within the rules; and they keep to the rules only because a game without rules is war.

  69 There are means-orientated societies, for whom the game is the game; and ends-orientated societies, for whom the game is winning. In the first, if one is happy, then one is successful; in the second, one cannot be happy unless one is successful. The whole tendency of evolution and history suggests that man must become means-orientated if he is to survive.

  70 The primary function of all the great human activities art, science, philosophy, religion – is to bring man nearer the truth. Not to win, not to beat another team, not to be invincible. The contemporary fuss about amateurs and professionals is nothing. Any sportsman who plays mainly in order to win, that is, mainly not for the pleasure of playing, is a professional. He may not want money, but he wants prestige, and prestige of this sort is as dirty as gold.

  CULPABILITY

  71 It is an old saying that crime depends on society; and no doubt the cynical answer, that society depends on crime, is equally old. One of the grimmest modern statistical facts is that not only is crime on the increase, but even on the increase relative to the population increase. And the problem of culpability is, to both society and to an education in humanity, of very far from academic significance.

  72 There are two extreme views. One is that all criminals have complete free will; the other is that they have none. We live socially in accordance with the first belief; most of us, as individuals, tend to believe in the second.

  73 A judge says to a criminal: the crime you have committed is a dastardly one. But he should say: the action you have done has harmed society, and is a sign that you have a diseased or deficient mind; I apologize to you in the name of society, if insufficient education is to blame, and I sympathize with you as a fellow human, if hereditary factors are to blame; I will now ensure that you have the best possible treatment and care. In the world as it is, no judge would dare to be so preposterously humane because he knows perfectly well that a judge is a dispenser of law, not of justice. We speak of the policy of the nuclear deterrent as if it is a terrible one to have to live under. But ever since the institution of law we have lived under a policy of the deterrent; not under a true human justice. An offer to try to cure is certainly not a sufficient practical deterrent to crime; but neither is a total refusal to try to cure a sufficient social response. There is a mean; and at present we are nowhere near it.

  74 A sick man can reasonably hate society for sending him to prison; but not to hospital.

  75 In a truly just world, cupability would clearly be a scientific, not a moral, calculation. No society is innocent of the crimes committed in it; we know very well that we call the biologically innocent legally guilty simply for convenience. The old argument here is this: if people start believing they cannot help committing crimes they will start committing those they could have desisted from.

  76 But if we concede that a great majority of criminals are not responsible for their crimes, which are really committed by factors over which they have no control (genes, environment, lack of education), the way is free to treat them as we treat any other person who is seriously ill. In genetics we are still helpless; but we can control environment and education. And the education in humanity, which must be designed to alleviate a chief cause of all crime, the sense of inequality that makes social irresponsibility almost a courageous revolutionary gesture, is plainly best suited to establishing such control.

  77 An important obstacle to the prevention and proper treatment of criminals is the emotional way in which we view ‘sin’ and ‘crime’. The one is of course a legacy of Christianity; and the other of Greek-Roman law. Both concepts are thoroughly outmoded and widely harmful.

  78 They disseminate a shared myth: that an evil deed can be paid for. In one case by penance and remorse; in the other, by accepting punishment. Remorse gives a pleasurable and masochistic illusion that one is, though superficially evil, fundamentally good. Penance and punishment (which share the same root etymologically) appear, when they are completed, simply to define the correct ownership of the crime – and very often its proceeds. I have paid for my house and I have paid for my crime are unhappily similar sentences in their implication.

  79 Sin throws an aura of impermissibility round many pleasures. In other words, it glamourizes and heightens them, since to forbid or deny any pleasure greatly increases its enjoyability, on both physical and psychological grounds. The chief ranters against ‘sin’ in history can be numbered among its leading coun-tersupporters. ‘Crime’, in the free-will significance law attaches to the word, is merely a legal equivalent of the religious term.

  80 It is of use to examine the existentialist position on culpability. An existentialist says: As well as my good actions, I am my past bad actions; I cannot deny them; if I ignore their having taken place, I am a coward, a child; I can only accept them. From
this some modern writers have argued that by deliberately committing a crime and deliberately, without remorse, accepting that I have committed a crime, I can best demonstrate my own existing as a unique individual and my rejection of the world of the others, that is, hypocritical organized society. But this is a romantic perversion of existentialism. I prove I exist not by making senseless decisions or committing deliberate crimes in order that they may be ‘accepted’ and then constitute a proof of the ‘authenticity’ and uniqueness of my existence, because by so acting I establish nothing but my own particular sense of inadequacy in face of external social reality; but I prove I exist by using my acceptance of past and bad actions as a source of energy for the improvement of my future actions or attitudes inside that reality.

  81 Existentialism says, in short, that if I commit an evil then I must live with it for the rest of my life; and that the only way I can live with it is by accepting that it is always present in me. Nothing, no remorse, no punishment, can efface it; and therefore each new evil I do is not a relapse, a replacement, but an addition. Nothing cleans the slate; it can become only dirtier.

  82 This view of crime is invaluable because it encourages freedom of will; it allows the criminal to believe he can choose, he can shape and balance his life, he can try to be his own master. Joined with the help to be given by psychiatry, it offers the criminal his best chance of never coming back through the prison gates when he is released. We need to ban the dreadful ogres of penal law and penitential religion from our prisons; and we need to regard the period immediately after release in the same way as we regard the same period after a stay in hospital. It is one of convalescence; and no released prisoner should be expected to be capable of immediate normal function in society. He will need economic and psychological support.