Aeschylus, marble bust.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Already, in the preceding paragraph, mention has begun of arts other than literature. How, it could be asked, can they have any moral effects on those who view them or listen to them? Yet there are effects of these arts on the observer that, in a broad sense, are moral (as opposed to nonmoral) and that account for the attempts of many people to censor them.
Historically, the most famous supposition about the moral effect of art on its audience is Aristotle’s theory of catharsis; Aristotle applied the theory to tragedy only, but many since his day have applied it to art in general. According to this view, art acts as an emotional cathartic and achieves a “purgation of the emotions.” Certain emotions that humans would be better off without (Aristotle limited them to pity and fear, but they could easily be extended) are generated during the course of daily life. Art is the principal agency that should help to dispel these emotions. By observing works of art (witnessing a drama, listening to a powerful symphony, looking at certain works of sculpture or painting) the recipient can work off these emotions rather than let them fester or take them out in unpleasant ways on others. Art siphons off these disturbing inner states rather than letting them grow rancid.
As it stands, this view is undoubtedly somewhat crude, especially in the light of modern psychology, and fault could be found in many respects with the Aristotelian doctrine of catharsis. Yet the experience of reading, viewing, or listening to a work of art does give a peculiar release, a feeling of freedom from inner turbulence. The mere act of plunging, for a few hours, into an entirely different world when attending a play or a concert is often enough to transform, however temporarily, the tone of people’s daily lives. It is not merely that for a few hours they can forget their troubles—any form of entertainment, however worthless, might do this. It is not merely that art provides a break or interruption in the course of people’s lives at the end of which they are exactly what they were before. It is that through the aesthetic process itself, in the very act of concentrating energies on an art object of great unity and complexity and depth, a kind of inner clarification is achieved that was not present before.
It is not true, therefore, that reading novels of crime and detection leads people to indulge in a life of crime; on the whole, those who read such novels are law-abiding people, and, if anything, the reading of such novels is a substitute for aggressive activity (it is aggression vicariously experienced) rather than an incitement to it. Nor do works of art of a licentious nature usually incite people to rape or adultery; far from acting as incitements to action, they are safety valves against action by providing a kind of substitute gratification. It has been said, for example, that Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra is an immoral work because it celebrates the passionate surrender to an illicit love and the victory of this love over practical, political, and moral concerns. But is there any evidence that people who read this play will behave like the lovers in question because they read the play? On the contrary: it could be argued that reading the play has an instrumental value in that it presents another example of a complex moral situation, the perusal of which provides many avenues for moral reflection, and that the play also possesses the intrinsic value of acute characterization, dramatic power, and poetry whose imagery and intensity are among the most splendid in the English language. Again, it was said in the mid-20th century that American youth had been demoralized by such writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, in that these writers set an example of bad behaviour. But to say that they are capable of demoralizing an entire generation is certainly to attribute to them too much moral power, especially over people who have never even heard of them. Even among those who do read serious literature, the effects are probably more beneficial than harmfuclass="underline" through books the horizons of such readers have been expanded to include other ways of life than they would have previously known.
Quite apart from the ultimate effect of a work of art on people’s emotions, it would appear that the very act of experiencing the work may itself have a moral effect. If they are really concentrating on the details of a work of art and not just passively letting it play upon their senses, this effect—the heightening of their sensibilities and the refining of their capacities for perceptual discrimination—will make them more receptive to the world around them, thus raising the tone of their daily lives and making their experience of the world richer than before.
Most of what passes for aesthetic appreciation does not begin to have this effect, but its failure is only because it is not aesthetic appreciation at all—it is a kind of tired reverie rather than an intense absorption in the aesthetic object. Most people, when they hear music, simply allow themselves to be inundated by the sheer flow of sound. Such people do not actively listen to the music and are not even aware of the most elementary kind of ebb and flow occurring within it; they only receive it passively, perhaps using it as a springboard for a private reverie or an emotional debauch of their own. Music has for them not an aesthetic effect but an anesthetic effect. It is not just hearing music that will have the required effect. The aesthetic experience, which involves nothing less than a total concentration on the perceptual details of the aesthetic object, is an experience that heightens consciousness, exercises people’s capacity for perceptual awareness and discrimination, and helps them come alive to the sight and texture of the world around them. After viewers have seen an exhibition of landscapes by Cézanne, the entire world may seem to them to have changed its structure and complexion: it may, indeed, take on the look of Cézanne’s landscapes. And is not anything that increases awareness and subtlety of discernment and discrimination a potentially moral agent? Art provides the most intense, concentrated, and sharply focused of the experiences available to human beings. Because of this, art can have an enormous influence on the tenor of a person’s life, more influential no doubt than any particular system of morality. In its ability to do this, it has an effect that, in an extended sense at least, can surely be called moral. Morality transcends particular systems of morality, and art, by being for many persons the dominant influence in their lives, thus transcends them also. John Hospers