7/30/2019 weitz art who needs it.pdf http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/weitz-art-who-needs-itpdf 1/10 Art: Who Needs It? Author(s): Morris Weitz Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1976), pp. 19-27 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3332006 Accessed: 01/12/2010 23:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=illinois . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Aesthetic Education. http://www.jstor.org
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Art: Who Needs It?Author(s): Morris WeitzSource: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Jan., 1976), pp. 19-27Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3332006
Accessed: 01/12/2010 23:41
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
Is there really anything left to say on the topic assigned: "The Uses of
the Arts in Personal Life and Professional Practice?" Philosophersand
critics have long ago exhausted the varieties of the first uses; and
ProfessorBroudyhas already said most of what is useful on the second
of the uses as well of course much of significance on the first because,after all, his mind, like his heart, is in philosophy. Since I cannot hopeto improve on what the great historical philosophers and critics or
some of the fine contemporaryeducatorshave said, all I can do usefullyis to remind you of some of the issues, both central and peripheral,that are involved in the problem posed.
First, there is the distinction between art as created object as againstart as consumer object. I take it our question relates to the latter, so
that we are not especiallyconcerned with what art does to its producers.
However, I must confess that I find that problem as fascinating aswhat it does to those of us who cannot do more to art than respond to
it. Certainly some artists have been intrigued by the problem, so much
so that certain major writers at any rate have devoted whole novels
or novellas to it. I think, for example, of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man or Thomas Mann's Tonio Kr6ger. Both ask, as other
writers do, What is the price of becoming a total artist, hence of for-
saking the ordinaryconcerns and emotions of life? The cost, they find,
MORRISWEITZ is professor of philosophyat Brandeis
University. Amongthe
important volumes he has written are Hamlet and the Philosophy of LiteraryCriticism; Philosophy in Literature; and Problems in Aesthetics, ed.
This paper was presented at a three-day interdisciplinary conference "The Uses
of Knowledge in Personal Life and Professional Practice" held at the Universityof Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in September, 1974, upon the occasion ofProfessor Harry S. Broudy's retirement as professor of philosophy of education
of this rejection of art, rather a variant on it, to provide a minimum,ornamental place for the arts in our lives and in our schools. Art, ac-
cording to this view, has no real use; but taken in small doses, it causes
little harm. Like play and sport, it relaxes tensions and allows us to
returnrefreshedto the serious concernsof life.
Aristotle offered a ploy of this sort, though of course in a more
sophisticated vein. Tragedy at least has a use, to purge us of the emo-
tions of pity and fear that, put into the context of his book on govern-
ment, serves as a therapeutic to the citizens of a healthy body politic.Plato, he suggestsin the Poetics, is wrong in his interpretationof art as
false and his fear of art as emotionally harmful. And Tolstoy, he would
have said, is also incorrect in his insistence on true, simple emotional
art rather than difficult ideational art. Tragedy, for example, thoughnot quite philosophy or science- episteme- is in its universality at
least an approximation of knowledge and truth. Anyway, it is better
than history so far as knowledge is concerned. Thus, for him art has a
use, rather two uses: to teach us certain truths in a non-abstract,
easily understood form; and to relieve us of tensions that could beharmful outside of the theateror the world of art.
There are, to be sure, other theories of the uses of art that challengeand repudiate Plato's or Tolstoy's stringent views or Aristotle'ssensible
compromise. From Plotinus on, philosophers have tried to find an
inexpugnably high place for art in the hierarchy of values. For Plo-
tinus, art is primarily soul invested in matter - a creative act that
brings both the artist and the spectator closer to reality. Thus, the use
of art in personal life is like the use of philosophy: to facilitate the
journey to the One. With a single thrust, then, that devoted follower ofPlato demolishes his master'sanimadversionson the falsity and degra-dation attributed to art. However we assess the metaphysical, mystical
premises of Plotinus's argument for the divine analogue of art, we
cannot but applaud his as the first of a series of stunning victories for
the declaration that art has a great use in human affairs- to remind
us of the presence of soul in matter or, in more contemporary terms,of the creative process in the imagination as it labors over mundane
matter.
Aquinas also finds the radiance of soul in art, as a constant reminderof the divine in creation. For him too, art has a primaryuse in human
life- to rendervisible or empirical religious truths; and, in its integra-tion of sensuousmaterials, to make art possible for all who can see or
read even though they are not capable of assimilationof abstract truth
but not for philosophy. The actual uses of art must be as multiple as
the varieties of response or exploitation of the arts. What, therefore,would be important is not a mere survey of these but the formulation
of a generalizationor hypothesisabout the cause and effects of art and
life. Freud, for example, offered such an hypothesis- that art is a
form of sublimation, both to the artist and to the spectator, a kind of
substitute gratification of basic libidinal desires we cannot realize in
our lives. Art, along with alcohol and religion, is an escape-valve for
our bottled up miseries,sharedby all who cannot have their civilizationwithout its discontents. Freud'sis a brilliant theory; and for all I know,it may be true. The great difficultywith it, as Popper and others have
taught us, is that it is no scientific hypothesis at all, rather a piece of
artistic fiction in its own imaginative right, posing as a scientific law
but without the requisitepossibilityof disconfirmation.All the philoso-
pher can say of Freud's theory- or of any other theory- is that if it
were a scientific hypothesis, subject to refutation, and if it were true,that fact would reduce the normative question to nonsense.For there is
no point in asking how art ought to affect our personal lives if as amatter of fact there is only one way it does and no other way it might.
Fortunately, for me anyway, there is no scientific law about the uses
of art. This deficiency allows the philosopher or whoever to continue
his perennial exhortations of normative answers to our posed question.And by way of courtesy,it allows me to state my own deep convictions
about what art should and can do, if only we let it. Here, then, at last,is my answer to What are the uses of the arts in personal life and pro-fessional practice?
For me, the great gifts of the arts to our lives are the two of enlarge-ment and intensity. Each of the arts in variousways opens up by means
of its actualities of visual, verbal, tonal, or emotional and intellectual
worlds created by the artist infinite imaginative possibilitiesof experi-ence and at the same time an awarenessof the richness of the texture
of actual experience. This is what I mean by enlargementand intensity:the expansion of the realm of possibilities for personal experience and
the intensification of the experiences already had. Philosophy achieves
this too but only on an intellectual level, governed as it is or should be
by standardsof objective truth. Some art, for example, great works of
literature, can satisfy this demand for truth. But all art, including
literature, goes beyond the stringenciesof the quest for truth in its own
exploration of largelynon-intellectual enlargement and intensity. Paint-
ing, for example, creates universe on universe of different ways of
seeing the world or a non-existent world the artist creates for himself,as in abstract painting or surrealism.An individual painting representsa visual world that in its concentration on one way of seeing intensifies
our own vision as it invites us to participate in a new visual experience.Whether it is a Giotto or a Martini, a Leonardo or a Raphael, a van
Eyck or a van der Weyden, a Picasso or a Matisse, a Jackson Pollock
or a De Kooning, we are given a new way of looking at our world
or the world created by the painter which at the same time changes and
intensifies our present perceptual responses.What greater gift can artbestow on us than to make us see for the first time and to see differentlyat the same time? We all know what it is to look at a Cezannelandscapein which his intensityof vision and form is so serenelymonumental that
we cannot but marvel both at his created world and at the inevitable
difference it makes to our present and future perceptions. His land-
scape invites us to see nature the way he does as it forces us to see what
we thought we saw but only glanced at, and with a visual intensity bor-
rowed from him. If, therefore, we transform our omnibus question of
the uses of art to What does a Cezanne landscape do for us? theanswer is that it changes our vision of the world. This, I submit, is no
mean achievement. An Einstein or a Kant can also change our visionof the world but only in a figurative sense, because theirs are truly
conceptual changes, not changes in visual experience, especially if we
take seriouslyas we must the distinction between mathematics or ideas
and images as basic to physics and philosophy. Cezanne, on the con-
trary,literally changes or invites us to change the way we see the world
assignment regarding professionalpractice. For if you believe as I do
that among the deprived are, in addition to the underdeveloped and
underprivileged,what I call the underperceivers,then those of us who
are teachers of the arts have deep obligations to work out the requisitesfor an education into the uses of the arts that will accommodate and
pay homage to the visual as well as to the traditionally accepted eco-
nomic, moral, and intellectual capacities of our fellow beings.
Literature, too, has for its primary uses the enlargement of the
imaginative possibilitiesfor experience and the intensificationof presentexperience. Of course these are not the point of literature or why it
should be. Like any art, literature is autonomous; it needs no reason
other than itself to exist. Consequently,no theoryof its uses or effects-
whether factual or normative- can ignore this autonomy without vio-
lating the nature of literaryart. This is not the appropriate occasion to
probe the nature of literature or even to call into question whether it
has a nature. I take it that all of us know what it is and shall concen-
trate on what it can do for us if we let it. And what it can do is, as I
suggest, to present an enormous range of verbal, emotional, and idea-tional possibilities for future experiences as well as a deeper intensityinto our present experiences. Consider any novel, poem, drama you
wish, whether you like it or not, if it is any good, and there are plentythat are, each of these, in the dramatic, human world it invents and in
the verbal materials out of which it is created, contains world picturesor themes that remain just that or sometimes suggest theses about the
way the world is. The different, even opposing, world pictures- quite
independently of their truth or falsity or of their being taken by the
reader to be true or false to reality-open up new possibilities forthought and action. Who can read Oedipus Rex or Candide or Four
Quartets or Anna Karenina or A la recherche du temps perdu without
responding to the vast arrayof actualized world views and experiences
presented in these masterpieces as imaginative possibilities for our
world and as intensive probings of our own paltry range of actual
experiences? We may not glean hard truths from these works but we
do learn about how the world could be and very well may be for all
we know. This is not to imply that no literaryworkscontain true claims
since it is obvious that many do; and these truths, though presented
differently from the arguments of pure philosophy, often vie with
philosophical truths. Indeed, some works of literature, for example,Greek tragedy, supersedephilosophyto proclaim truths about man that
the philosophers wrongly rejected. It is a fact, I think, that there is