In any case, the effect of great works of art upon a reader or viewer or listener can hardly be described as merely hedonistic. No one would presumably wish to deny that art can and should give us pleasure, but few would wish to assert that pleasure is all that it should give us. If one were to ask, “How did viewing Picasso’s Guernica affect you?” and the reply was, “I found it pleasant,” we would conclude that the reaction to the painting was, to say the least, inadequate. Great art may please; it may also move, shock, challenge, or change the lives of those who experience it deeply. Pleasure is only one of many kinds of effects it produces. Art as a means to truth or knowledge
One of the things that has been alleged to be the purpose of art is its cognitive function: art as a means to the acquisition of truth. Art has even been called the avenue to the highest knowledge available to humans and to a kind of knowledge impossible of attainment by any other means.
Knowledge in the most usual sense of that word takes the form of a proposition, knowing that so-and-so is the case. Thus, it can be learned from sense observation that the sun is setting, and this is knowledge. Is knowledge acquired in this same sense from acquaintance with works of art? There is no doubt that there are some propositions (statements) that can be made after acquaintance with works of art that could not be made before: for example, that this performance of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was 47 minutes long, that this painting predominates in green, that this piece of sculpture originated about 350 bce. The question is whether there is anything that can be called truth or knowledge (presumably knowledge is of truths, or true propositions) that can be found in works of art.
Literature is surely the most obvious candidate, for literature consists of words, and words are combined into sentences, and sentences (at least declarative sentences) are used to convey propositions—that is, to make assertions that are either true or false. And works of literature do certainly contain many true statements: a novel about the French Revolution conveys facts about the series of events; in a verse of the English scholar and poet A.E. Housman (1859–1936), it is said, “The tears of all that be / Help not the primal fault.” Since literature contains statements, it would be surprising indeed if at least some of them were not true.
But the relevance of this fact to literature as an art is extremely dubious. If an 18th-century novel gives a true picture of English country life of that time, this makes it useful to read as history, but does it also make it a better novel? Many, at any rate, would say that it does not: that a tenth-rate novel might give more facts about 18th-century life than a first-rate novel of the same century. For that matter, many of the propositions in a novel are, taken at face value, false; it is false, for example, that there was a foundling named Tom Jones who had an uncle named Squire Western. The thousands of pages of description in novels of fictional characters, ascribing to them thoughts and actions, are all false, since these characters never actually existed. (Some philosophers have preferred to say that propositions about fictional or nonexistent entities are neither true nor false.) Yet this fact in no way impugns their value as literature. Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale, sets part of the action on the seacoast of Bohemia, but the fact that Bohemia has no seacoast does not damage The Winter’s Tale as literature, though it would as geography. The fact that Milton used the outdated Ptolemaic astronomy does not make Paradise Lost less valuable, nor does the nonexistence of the lands described in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) in any way diminish Swift’s work. There is no doubt, then, that works of literature can contain true statements and false ones. But it is tempting to ask, What does their truth or falsity matter? Literature is not astronomy or geography or history or any branch of knowledge, particular or general.
Many would hold that the above statements are indeed irrelevant, as are any that encroach upon the domain of science, but, they would add, there are other assertions that matter a great deaclass="underline" for example, the statements in which a worldview is presented in a poem or drama or novel. The main burden of the ancient Latin poet Lucretius’s De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things”) is a presentation of the materialism of the Greek philosopher Democritus (460–370 bce), and an embodiment of the worldview of medieval Roman Catholicism is the very warp and woof of Dante’s Divine Comedy (written c. 1308–21)—and such considerations, it would be contended, are relevant to these works as literature.
Lucretius, engraving of a bust.Spencer Arnold—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
In reply, however, it might be said that while it is true that these worldviews must be understood and taken into consideration in the reading of these poems and that they cannot be understood or appreciated without knowing them, the truth or falsity of these views still does not matter aesthetically. If Lucretius’s view is true, then Dante’s must be false, and vice versa, since they are incompatible, but, in order to appreciate the poem, it is not necessary to know which (if either) is true. Appreciating art, unlike taking a stand for or against a cause in life, does not require a yes or no to statements. It requires only that the viewers look and appreciate, that they experience as richly and fully as possible the feeling and attitudes involved in the worldview that is presented. Philosophers and scientists are concerned with whether the Democritean materialism of Lucretius is true; appreciators of art are concerned only to capture the feeling appropriate to the worldview in question.
Many statements in works of literature are not explicitly made at all but are implicit: Hardy never tells in his novels what his worldview is, but it emerges rather clearly before the reader is halfway through any of them. Probably the most important points made in works of literature that contain a central thesis are implicit rather than explicit. How, in that case, can it be determined what thesis it is that is implied? In a court of law, if someone says, “She didn’t say it exactly, she just implied it,” the judge would be likely to rule that this was insufficient evidence of slander, since the person did not actually say it. Still, many statements in daily life are not stated but implied—in the sense that they are intended. The trouble lies in proving that the speaker intended them, since no one else is in a comparable position to say what the speaker’s intentions were, and in the case of deceased authors there is no evidence of their intentions other than what they said. One is doubtless on safer ground, therefore, saying that many statements are implied in the sense that they are suggested (whether the speaker intended to do so or not) by the tone of voice and the juxtaposition of the words used. Thus, “They had children and got married” suggests, though it does not state, that they had the children before they were married; any normal user of the English language would tend to construe it thus. And it is surely no overstatement to say that Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels suggests that the author was misanthropic or that the novels of the French author Marcel Proust (1871–1922) suggest a pessimistic view of love and other human relationships close to that of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). Serious readers of literature will become increasingly sensitive to what is suggested in the works they are reading.