INVITATION AND TEMPTATION
But as the artwork is offered to us, so is it taken away. Art is the experience of a moment, and that experience too is subject to dispersion. In its reconstitution of our world, the artwork offers us the sense of what our life ideally might be: a work of art. But a work of art life is not. Rather, it flows on through temporal dispersal to death. Our home in the world is temporary, our journey through time continues to its inevitable end—an end that is usually far from a consummation. The work offers us the image of a life whose style would be that integral aesthetic experience Nietzsche envisioned when he expressed the desire to so live life that he might be able when facing death to say: “Was that life? Well then, once more.” As an experientially fulfilling encounter with a transformed world, the work of art is an invitation to make our life such a work. It is a visionary suggestion of that which we might aspire to. As such it is of the utmost value and promises ever to be so.
As the image of a metaphysical revolution completed, however, it may be taken to suggest the possibility of actually carrying out such a revolution in history. Here it can only be a force for the demonic. It is one thing to offer a vision to others, for them to be able to enter into its world freely for a moment, taste of its fruits, and then leave—or simply refuse the offer. It is quite another to seek to impose that world on others—and to do so definitively. While the stylistic unity of the work may be profoundly seductive and suggestive, the articulation of a transformed world involves a thesis that is always debatable and never totally realizable. Even more, the attempt to impose that world ultimately involves denying that free spontaneity that is the vitalizing source of the dramatic significance of our lives.
The experienced vitality of the work lies in the merger of its ideal offerings of a world reconstituted with the deepest sources of our freedom. The world of the work is liberatory and salvific only to the extent that it feeds the existential roots of our being; our freely projected ideals. Insofar as those ideals are empirically diverse, to that extent the significance of their aesthetic embodiment will vary. The unquenchable vitality of art lies in its ability to speak to and for these existential sources. Apart from that spontaneous marriage of offered beauty with existential need, the reorganized world of the artwork remains alien to the experiencing subject—and, if imposed upon him or her, can only be experienced as oppressive. Art lives as an imaginative offering and an invitation to realize our dreams; it dies as an attempt to constitute a definitive and unescapable world. It lives in diversity; it dies of constraint. All impositions of order from without the lived experience of the subject are oppressive. However just be the vision embodied in the artwork, its precondition is our freedom to engage it in our own way. To impose that justice on that freedom in denying the latter destroys the meaning of the former.
In short, the stylistic unity of the work as an integral ordering of experienced meanings speaks to our deepest existential needs. The aesthetic encounter is satisfying in its own right. It takes us out of the temporal stream and locates us in a longed-for world of finality and perfection. It is, in a profound sense, the experience of heaven on earth, of the eternal in the temporal. This experience of perfection is the encounter with beauty. The beauty of the artwork is but the image and suggestion of the experience it offers. No wonder we are always attracted by beauty, drawn into its orbit, seduced by its presence, often without regard for its explicit content. Beauty is the promise of a cosmic home to which first religion and then the revolution have sought to be the answer. While the formal ordering of meanings seems to speak to our deepest needs, however, the meanings presented and experienced as beautiful are in fact quite diverse. We
do not all find the same works equally beautiful. In the selective diversity that is the actual experience of beauty we approach the political-historical limitations of the work of art. My experience of beauty may reflect the organization of meanings that is the dramatic root of my world, but the political attempt to impose my vision of the ideal on others will as a rule be experienced as a violation of the integrity of their world. The experience of beauty can be an extremely dangerous political seduction insofar as it suggests an ideal in accordance with which to mold our joint historical reality.
The uniquely rewarding experience of art is an implicit call to make life an approximation of art—and the style of the work suggests a style of life. But the specific ordering of embodied meanings is always existentially unique and politically contestable. The political relevance of the artwork must be appreciated within the limits set by a transformed reality. It can be rejected.
It can be accepted in whole or in part. It can be entered into for the duration of its dramatic development. But whether the work unfolds temporally as in music or drama or dance, or is presented all at once, as in painting or sculpture, our experience always unfolds in time. Yet the experience of art is limited. It is but a phase in our lives—however satisfying or suggestive, however pregnant with significance for our future. In a sense we leave the normal flow of events and enter into the world of the work—for a time that may seem like an eternity or like no time at all. But return to the world we must. If the work, is significant, no doubt we return changed in some sense pregnant with possibilities. That is an essential part of the work’s meaning for us. Hut the consequences that follow the work are different from the
experience as had and undergone. Accordingly, the consequences are to be judged differently. The significance of the experience of the work for the future of our lives must be considered separately from the significance of its intrinsic merits. It is here that the political-historical reality must be taken into account. The applicable criteria are not the same as those that apply to the aesthetic evaluation of the work itself. To subordinate either aspect to the other is to do violence to one of them. Aesthetic experience subordinated to political demands yields a realism as destructive of the meaningfulness of experience as is subordination of the political to the formal demands of art. This is the problem Camus is concerned with when he criticizes formalism and socialist realism. It is also the problem, in a different form, at stake in Camus’s discussion of the dialectic between freedom and justice.
The significance of the formal ordering of meanings in aesthetic experience must not be contused with the partial vision of a unified world. Similarly the temporal conditions of the experience of the work must not be confused with the pervasive temporality of our lives. Further, the relation of the individual to the work as an offered world must be clearly distinguished from the political-social struggle to reorganize historical reality in accordance with a personal or group vision. The work of art is encountered essentially individually, whereas the struggle of political rebels to transform social-historical reality will, if achieved, alter the inescapable form of our daily life. Political rebels do not offer another world for our momentary experience; they seek to definitively transform this one. If they succeed, it is no longer a matter of an offering, but of a newly constituted inescapable given.
STYLISTIC EXTREMES
All great art seeks to reconcile, Camus felt. “This effort at reconciliation was deliberate,” writes Germaine Bree, “the basic motivation for his writing” (Bree, 41).1 True artists therefore have a double concern. By the nature and condition of their work, they are committed to the human spirit and the freedom that nourishes it. They are simultaneously the bearers of a vision of beauty and meaningfulness to which they strive to give articulation. By the strength of the former they are pulled toward the mass of suffering humanity with which they feel solidarity and to which they wish to communicate an ideal that offers the possibility of creative transformation; the latter drives them toward a stylization of the immediately given, a correction of creation that will give to reality the coherence, order, and significance it now lacks,
Artists may thus find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. To opt for humanity and the ideal of total communication may be to degrade art to the level of mass taste, conformity, and mediocrity of which both American television and Soviet socialist realism provide disconcertingly clear examples.
On the other hand, to opt for that perfect expression and completeness of presentation that addresses the demand for unity may be to reduce art to an esoteric pursuit of pure stylization.