How do you define art?

Thanks for reading it. I just have to get it in script form and find a producer.

 

hmm, well I am also reading the page, and I know enough about Tolstoy’s later life as a moralistic pamphleteer, who even disavowed his great novels, to wonder these things.

 

My take is that art was foremost in his mind. Your take is that morality was foremost in his mind. How do we reconcile these two positions?

(Just to mention - I have also read his A Confession)

 

I've just read Tolstoy's pamphlet. Seems to me that he argued morality was an essential component of art? I re-read his take on what he meant by religion and morality in creation of art and it still strikes me as arrogance masquerading as universal truth.

Also, his dissection of King Lear is a repetitive with a singular perspective. Each of those scenes could, and have, been analysed with entirely different conclusions. To suggest that Lear is deficient because, amongst other reasons, the ending included Cordelia's death rather than resolution of her dispute with her dad is, in my opinion, more than just a bit obnoxious. One of the greatest failings of any artistic endeavour, in my opinion, is the promotion of the notion that good wins over evil, that conflict can be resolved and that endings should signify the completion of some moral merry-go-round. Leave me with your anguish, your inconsistencies. My interest is in the frayed edges and ambiguous morality; we can make up our own minds.

With all that, this is an interesting discussion. I'm interested to know what Shakespeare's answer was when confronted by Tolstoy's assault on his artistic merit. Pardon ye olde English but I think it went something like, "I'm dead already. Leave me the fuck alone."

 

I’m not a Tolstoy expert, so I am going off what I know of him, and what he wrote in this pamphlet. He explicitly says that art must serve the purposes of morality and religion. Doesn’t he?

 

What some see as arrogance I see as astute intellectualism. Tolstoy does not humble his mind. His mind was always at work. He does not come to any of his conclusions without deep introspection, intellectual reflection, and reasonable analysis. This includes his conclusion that “God exists.” There is no blind faith, no false belief, for him.

In his A Confession, it takes him dozens of reflective pages to come to the conclusion that “Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.”

For Tolstoy, for things to be without meaning was painful, and he could not lie to himself.

Maybe that is how he reacted to Shakespeare’s works. In all things, Tolstoy cannot settle for less than truth, and he had to find for himself what was true and what was false.

 

i don’t think shakespeare thinks of tolstoy at all

 

i'll bet your shampoo doesn't have any eyes of newt or toes of frog in it

 

Well it wasn't really meant to be read for enjoyment, I don't think. I'm considering watching Titus (1999) for a dose of Shakespeare.

 

Later-years Tolstoy and Ayn Rand (Alice O'Connor née Alisa Rosenbaum), like the Third Reich and the Soviet borg, both tried to define "legitimate" art through a gray filter of moralism. History bears out none of them.

 

I think this is a gross misinterpretation of Tolstoy's philosophy. And it kind of makes moralism a bad word. But I wonder if you are familiar enough with Tolstoy’s “moralism.”

It wasn’t about blind adherence to whatever the Church was saying. It wasn’t about rigid dogma or prudishness. And he considered censorship to be “an immoral and irrational institution.”

His morality was this: To serve the cause of truth and love.

He considered “Truth is the Perfect perceived through reason” and here is what he had to say about love:

https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/09/09/leo-tolstoy-on-love/#:~:text=profound%20spiritual%20kinship.)-,He%20writes%3A,it%20in%20any%20other%20way.

None of this detracts from the central core of his ideas about art:

Art should transform perception into feeling

He did not put conditions on this. He did not say, but only if the art agrees with Christian theology. When he talks about religious feeling, he is not talking about the Church. He is talking about the “highest well-being attainable by men” which “is to reached by their union with one another.”

Yes, he associates this with the Christian spirit – i.e. the aim of Christianity is the union of mankind - but it also ties in perfectly with his philosophy of art:

Also important to note that early editions of What is Art? had to pass through the Russian “spiritual censors” and, as Tolstoy writes in the Preface to the first edition to appear in its true form, the:

You'll have to expand on this to have me consider it.

 

Every time I read or listen to something by Ayn Rand, I'm captured by her raw passion, her disdain for the hand-wave. Even if some of the things she says are completely insane, I've got high respect for the woman.

I'm listening to "Philosophy: Who Needs it?" right now, and I swear you don't even need attribution for half of the things she writes, because they're so gosh darn Randian:

I guess my point is that I see the attempt of defining art in itself as at least honourable.

 

My attitude toward her is the same as toward Freud. Both of them came up with some really bizarre notions, especially their final conclusions or philosophies. But along the way they both had some really great ideas and observations. I'll say the same about her as I've said about him—it's the ideas, not the conclusions, that I admire. Her insights about freedom and totalitarianism are excellent, as you'd expect of someone with good common sense who escaped from a place like the Soviet Union. And she wrote some amazingly insightful things about what makes people become servants of a massive state, or of smaller movements within one that lean toward the totalitarian. I even like her ideas about rational selfishness, but what I thought she meant by that (that I assumed a lot of other people were misunderstanding) don't always seem to be what she really meant. Or it's hard to tell.

And yeah, when she makes those bold, flat statements about what art is, as in her Romantic Manifesto or some parts of The Fountainhead for instance, I wonder if I really understand what she meant. Because often it doesn't sound all that rational to me, but like plain old-fashioned childish selfishness. And most people I've known who really love her seem to use her ideas as little more than a blanket excuse for self-centeredness with nothing rational about it (such as understanding that if you shit on people they're going to pay you the same respect). I suspect many of her fans are just selfish people who use her writing as justification for it.

 

But if you want corroboration, just scan down a page for the word bromide. You won't go more than a page without seeing it at least once.

 

By "filter of moralism" I mean the notion that art is "good" (or, indeed, "art" at all) if it fulfills certain rules or values about the nature or purpose of art, and otherwise "bad" (or not art). It is the fact of judging by checklist, rather than the specific value system applied in the judgment, that makes someone a moralist.

I see this reflected all the time in genre-centric critique groups. On the whole, most of the rules of thumb I hear regurgitated in such groups may arguably, in some cases, make a work more salable (or at least more able to find representation) in today's dying market, but they also make it more predictable and boring to me, more Hollywooden — still art, just not very interesting to me. I'm stirred by unconventionality and by non-banal reflections of emotional or moral truth. Such fiction cannot be written well to templates and rules of thumb à la paint-by-numbers.

History has validated much that the artistic moralists I mentioned did not accept as "good" or "art." Let's just start with Klimt, who was or would have been deemed decadent and bonfire-eligible by all of the four I mentioned.

Rand became who she did in large part because she emerged from the psychopathy of the Bolshevik Revolution, but no less because well before that, she was an Aspergian child (who became an Aspergian adult) who simply did not possess or at all relate to natural human social/emotional intelligence — and therefore invented a value system that made of it a vice, and virtues of the attributes in which she excelled. Even in the highly sympathetic biography by Barbara Branden, these unstated truths become clearly evident. Branden did not have the experience to recognize what she was seeing and describing (some of it second-hand from Rand's reminiscences to her), and so she communicated a larger picture than she realized. I find her (Branden) by far the most sympathetic figure of the entire extended "Collective." She was the least self-righteous and (eventually) least in denial.

 

Yes, I have her to thank for adding (in my ninth grade, 50+ years ago) that sense of bromide to my vocabulary. One of the 2-3 dozen explicit guidelines for the critique group I lead is: "We do not traffic in the bromides of low-end genre critique [. . .] nor in the cookie-cutter thinking they promote."

 

Huh. Yeah, I can believe that. Do you have any confirmation of it, or is it conjecture? It would explain why she's so incredibly smart in some ways and yet so not with the being of the human. Wow, I just went full-on Buffyspeak there!

I haven't read it yet, but here's an article:

• Ayn Rand Had Asperger’s Syndrome

Ok, I've read it now. I find many parts of it difficult to follow, probably because the sentences are complex and often filled with double-negatives and other confusing things. Too many variables in each sentence, and not enough clarity. But the parts I could understand sound pretty sound. I'm ready to believe she was indeed autistic, and that it explains a lot about her and her ideas. Now I hope to find more articles.

Here's an interesting thread on a message board where they talk about autism:

• Ayn Rand @ Wrong Planet

Some very interesting takes.

 

A couple of threads courtesy of everyone's favorite website:

• Autism is a biological form of Ayn Rands objectivsm
• Ayn Rand page that sounds very Aspergers-related...

I find this fascinating. I feel like I'm beginning to understand her better now.

 

While the article is quite interesting, I don't believe it comes anywhere close to making the case that she was an Aspie.

I've forgotten many of the details in Branden's book that led me to the insight, but for one prominent one, young Alisa did not get along with other children — specifically, they baffled her. Some of that owed to her markedly higher general intelligence, but that's always a factor in Asperger's as well. Then IIRC there's the way she describes how some characters could not understand the "normies" around them. And yes, her binary and exclusively rational moral judgments contribute to the picture, as the article suggests. She had to develop a hyper-reliance on rationality to compensate for the intuitive emotional insight she lacked. (I've noted that very trait in an Aspie friend I evidently just lost over a seeming trifle, who may or may not be diagnosed but was clear to me from our earliest interactions.) Rand was physically clumsy even as an adult. Her eye contact was forced when it wasn't wonky. Watching some of her filmed and videotaped interviews and appearances, she feels like other Aspies I've known, including a family member. Regardless of formal diagnoses, Aspie is as Aspie does.

A clinician can go up and down a diagnostic checklist and perhaps reach certainty or perhaps not. But it's one of those things where when you're experienced with the genuine article, you don't get confused about it. There are of course degrees, but still. In Rand's day we had less understanding of what constitutes normal and natural, and had much harmful cultural legacy to overcome, and Asperger's wasn't even a concept then.

FWIW I've chatted with a clinician or two who shared my perception.

There's a lot more interesting stuff than this one insight in Branden's book. She was a partially recovered member of Rand's inner circle and personality cult, and came as close as anyone has to humanizing the icon. (Which is one reason all the Randians hate the book. [The Passion of Ayn Rand, 1986, 2013])

Rand had surprisingy limited and conventional tastes in music, art, and jewelry. She and her much younger lover/enabler Nathaniel Branden (Nathan Blumenthal) were both at pains to create a quasi-mythical and non-Jewish public persona — which, to be fair, was common in their era because of American anti-Jewish discrimination.

The book also exists as a movie with Julie Delpy and Helen Mirren. The movie naturally lacks much of the nuance and detail found in the book.

 

The biography and the insight helped me to view her with greater empathy and compassion, even though she did great harm to many. I don't mean by giving them permission to be egotistical assholes but by instilling a moralism every bit as harsh as the one it rebelled against, being simply the same system with the values inverted. That's not actually innovative at all. It's just heavily rationalized adolescent defiance.

Youngsters who lacked her antisocial degree of innate egotism-without-empathy, who had some remnants of self-recognition and natural human impulse to caring for others, would compare themselves invidiously to her cardboard heroes.

More than anything else, she typified a cult leader.

 

Did she really lack empathy though? I don't know a lot about her personal life, but people often say her heroes lacked empathy, and as I recall they didn't, they were just careful about who they would grant it to. Some people on a couple of those threads said the same thing, wich makes me think I might be right, but I'm not sure. It's been a long time, I'd need to re-read some things to check. I do remember being somewhat confused about the motivations of the heroes at times. Maybe understanding that it's asperger's would really help with that.

Yes, the group around her really did seem cultish, and still does. A couple of times I popped in briefly at one of the websites were she gets discussed, and it felt very much like a cult. Thanks for telling me the info came from that book. I remember seeing trailers for the movie years ago. I might end up getting the book, I'm interested in her and want to try to understand.

 

She had empathy for certain people, as long as they followed her rules, but she could turn it on a dime. She and her acolytes were increasingly drawn into a value system of her own making. There was a moral right and wrong to everything, including artistic expression/appreciation and sexual attraction and forms of expression.

It's not inherently Aspergian to lack empathy; the characteristic lack is intuitive ability to read cues and to behave as others behave — to interact "naturally." Even cue-reading and appropriate behavioral responses can be learned by study, as long as they fall within a recurring repertoire. Indeed it's the life study of most Aspergians to learn how to consciously read what others recognize by intuition, and to emulate "normal" language and behaviors. Aspergians may learn to exhibit high social and behavioral competence in a corporate, military, or sometimes medical environment. Particularly the first two operate on a limited and structured range of norms and interactions. A Randian world can be attractive to people looking for clear rules. But true believers in such a rigidly anti-altruistic cult, unless they possess near-sociopathic self-confidence, end up repressing their "immoral" or ignoble feelings as much as people in any rigidly altruistic belief system. Different rules, same mechanism.

Rand never questioned herself. Whatever she wanted was by definition the moral truth, and she constructed elaborate rationalizations — not least about why it was a noble moral necessity for her to conduct her years-long sexual-romantic relationship with Nathaniel Branden under the coerced acquiescence of their respective spouses. And then later to discover that Branden was a morally degenerate heretic to be disowned and shunned after he dared begin a similar but secret relationship with a younger and more nubile acolyte. (Whom he later married after divorcing Barbara.)

Later in life, he described the Collective as a mother-hen cult. That's putting it too charitably, I would say.

I don't want to lead this further OT, but it does all tie in to the appreciation / evaluation / criticism of art through the lens of all-encompassing morality.

Randists and their ilk almost invariably go for literalism in art. They don't understand the appeal in anything else, lacking the receptors for it, and so it's immoral. Bouguereau is a big favorite, along with artrenewal.org

 

I just reached the part of the book where her sexuality is discussed. The sample you can read online is very long, I'm up to page 34 now and I'm not sure how much more there is. So far it's fascinating, and going in with the idea that she may well have been an aspie is helping to clarify a lot of things.

I ran across that idea several times on the threads I linked to earlier. And from what I've read so far it seems she really did (as you've said) only like people who share her values almost exactly. Even people of unusual intelligence (like her) who fail to share her exact likes and dislikes earn her instant contempt. And yet, if a "common person" (she normally despises them) shows an interest in learning about philosophy or how to solve problems the way she does, she seems to have infinite patience with them and to be willing (even eager) to spend long hours in deep conversation, carefully explaining things so they understand the steps of solving the problem.* So yeah—very black-and-white value system, based largely on simple random chance (whether other people share her precise likes and dislikes), and yet in the right circumstances a very deep concern to help them (as long as they're interested in her forte). I guess she couldn't help having such a bipolar value system and despising people different from her.

* But of course that's the mentor/student relationship, with her in the dominant role and them supplicating to her superior knowledge and intelligence. I had exactly such a relationship with a guy who loved Rand and recommended her to me (my mom also loved her and told me I should read her books many years earlier). He did become a mentor to me, but it became apparent that he wanted to always be the authority, even in areas like art or writing where I knew a lot more than him. At one point, getting exasperated with the situation, I asked him "Do you always need to be the mentor?" He gave me a stern look and replied "Yep," in no uncertain terms. A true Randian I suppose.​