Plato is the first champion in the Western world of the moralistic view of art—at least in the Republic and the Laws. Plato admired the poets and was himself something of a poet, but, when he was founding (on paper) his ideal state, he was convinced that much art, even some passages in Homer, tended to have an evil influence upon the young and impressionable, and accordingly he decided that they must be banned. Passages that spoke ill or questioningly of the gods, passages containing excessive sexual passion (and all works that would today be described as pornographic), and even passages of music that were disturbing to the soul or the senses were all condemned to the same fate. Plato’s concern here was with the purity of soul of the persons who would become members of the council of rulers of the state; he was not concerned with censorship for the masses, but, since one could not predict which young people would pass the series of examinations required for membership in the council of rulers and since it was (and is) practically impossible to restrict access to works of art to a certain group, the censorship, he decided, would have to be universal. The objection might be raised, to be sure, that rulers to be should not be hothouse plants separated from the influences of the outside world and that they would be better off facing all of reality, including its evils. But Plato’s view was that these influences should be kept from them during their formative years—that during this critical time, when the whole tenor of their lives was being shaped, art could be an influence for evil and had to be sacrificed in the interests of morality. In other dialogues of Plato, such as the Ion and the Phaedrus, when he was not concerned with building a state, he extolled the virtues of art and even held the artist to be divine (although madly divine), but, when it came to a conflict between art and morality, it was art that would have to go.
The most famous champion of the moralistic view of art in modern times is Tolstoy. Long after he had finished writing his novels, he fell under the influence of primitive (pre-church) Christianity, the principal tenet of which was the fellowship of all humans. This one idea became such an obsession with him that everything else, including the pursuit of art to which he had devoted his life, became subordinate to it. Almost all the literature of his own time, including all his own novels, he condemned as inimical to human fellowship by emphasizing class distinction and pitting one group of humankind against another. Even art that appealed primarily (in his opinion) to “upper class” tastes, such as the symphonies of Beethoven and the operas of Richard Wagner, were condemned as “false art.” The art that remained after these colossal excisions included such items as folk songs that peasants might sing in the fields as they worked and pictures and stories either illustrating the tenets of primitive Christianity or fostering the spirit of Christianity by promoting fellowship.
Leo Tolstoy with his grandchildren, c. 1900.© Photos.com/Jupiterimages
The moralistic view of art is still, on the whole, the unarticulated view of art held by the masses, particularly when they are under the sway of a dominant religious or political doctrine. Historically, Christianity has been suspicious of all art except those works that depict some aspects of biblical history or that could be used to further the spread of Christian belief and practice (although this is no longer strictly true). And it would probably be fair to say that the view of art held by the government of the Soviet Union (1917–91) was a moralistic one: works of fiction and poems had to praise communism or further its doctrines, and works of music had to be melodic and singable (composers such as Dmitry Shostakovich were condemned by the Soviet hierarchy in 1948 for their allegedly antidemocratic “formalism”). Whenever a culture or nation is under the sway of a dominant view, whether moral or religious or political, the tendency of the rulers of that nation is to promote it at all costs, and one of the casualties in the process is art—at any rate that great body of art that is either indifferent or hostile to the reigning dogma. Aestheticism
Diametrically opposed to the moralistic view is aestheticism, the view that, instead of art (and everything else) being the handmaiden of morality, morality (and everything else) should be the handmaiden of art. The proponents of this view hold that the experience of art is the most intense and pervasive experience available in human life and that nothing should be allowed to interfere with it. If it conflicts with morality, so much the worse for morality, and, if the masses fail to appreciate it or receive the experience it has to offer, so much the worse for the masses. The vital intensity of the aesthetic experience is the paramount goal in human life. If there are morally undesirable effects of art, they do not really matter in comparison to this all-important experience which art can give. When the son-in-law of the 20th-century Italian dictator Benito Mussolini waxed lyrical in his description of the beauty of a bomb exploding in the midst of a crowd of unarmed Ethiopians, he was carrying to its fullest extent the aestheticist’s view of art.
Few persons would wish to go so far. Even the most ardent lovers of art would stop short of saying that the value of art holds a monopoly over all other values. It may well be that the experience of works of art is the greatest experience available to human beings (though this, too, could be questioned), but at any rate it is not the only one available, and, this being the case, the others should be considered as well. There is a plurality of values; aesthetic values, although far greater, admittedly, than most persons realize, are still just a few among many. It is therefore necessary to consider the relation of the values derived from art to the values derived from other things, such as the conduct of life apart from art: no one can devote every waking hour to the pursuit of art, even if for no other reason than the need for survival, and thus the values of such mundane things as food and shelter have also to be considered. Mixed positions
The moralistic and aesthetic positions are extremes, and the truth is likely to be found somewhere between them. Indeed, art and morality are intimately related, and neither functions wholly without the other. But to trace the precise relations between art and morality is far from easy; for want of a better term, “interactionism” could be used to label the view that aesthetic and moral values each have distinctive roles to play in the world but that neither operates independently of the other.
It would be admitted, first of all, that works of literature (which will be examined first, since of all the arts the relation of literature to morality is most obvious) can teach valuable moral lessons through explicit presentation: the genre that has this as its aim is didactic literature, as exemplified by Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) by the English Puritan John Bunyan and Back to Methuselah (1922) by the Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw. But most works of literature do not exist to teach a moral lesson; possibly, Shakespeare did not write Othello merely to attack racial prejudice or Macbeth to prove that crime does not pay. Literature does teach but in a far more important way than by explicit preachment: it teaches, as John Dewey said, by being, not by express intent.