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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
This article tries to provide elements of discussion and reflection rather than answers to the following question: for many centuries or even millennia, man, at least in so far as prehistory and history have recorded it, made a close connection between the beautiful, the true and the useful and he sought an aesthetic response in the minute manifestations of his daily existence as well as of his intellectual life. Today, and even more so for just the past fifty or one hundred years, art seems to be relegated to specific domains, expelled from the daily life of the average person. Yesterday, and for centuries and millennia, mankind was not satisfied with the fact that a house, a temple, a church, a fortification or a castle were lodgings, proper places to hold reunions, strong-holds built for a particular purpose, it was equally important that they be beautiful; a key did not only have to open a lock, a carriage had not only to run, a bit to control a horse, spurs to reassure the rider, a glass pane to close a window, a table to have a place setting, a chest of drawers to contain clothes, clothes to cover the body, a pen to write, a manuscript to transmit the signs of the alphabet—no, it was also necessary that these signs, that manuscript, the pen, the spurs, the bit, the key … be designed and decorated in such a way so as to evoke in the persons who merely saw them, without even using them, an affective emotion of beauty. Nor was it enough that science or a technique be true or useful, they had also to be beautiful.
1 Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 2, p. 484 (1971 Edition).
2 I believe that all readers know that the case of Praxiteles, about whom almost nothing is known, is an exception. It is due to the modern tendency toward a cult of the artist that we have rediscovered, after the fact, in the dust of accounting and notarial archives, the (often doubtful) names of a few painters and cathedral architects and sculptors.
3 I am for instance thinking of Blaise Pascal's title: "Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide faites dans des tuyaux, seringues, soufflets et siphons de plusieurs longueurs et figures: avec diverses liqueurs, comme vif-argent, eau, vin, huile, air etc., Avec un discours sur le même sujet, où est montré qu'un vaisseau, si grand qu'on le pourra faire, peut être rendu vide" … etc. (eight more lines of title) in a moving typesetting.
4 This concerns the unicity of the clear thought: the human brain can generate only one clear idea at a time (at one precise moment in time). Cf. my Comment mon cerveau s'informe, Robert Laffont, 1974.
5 That is why and how platonic faith has been and remains fertile. But of course there is a followup to this story, and this continuation is simply the obverse of this fertility of faith in the unitary and fundamental simplicity of the world: When man's brain is busy seeing certain aspects of the real, he does not see the others …
Many other things ought to be said here to suggest the nature, the wealth and the depth of this belief in (this will for) a unitary world. For instance, one would have to note that we are dealing here with an elitist belief or will, which is intellectual, philosophical, university-centered, stemming from Socrates and Plato—and not from the popular current, which was conceived, felt and transmitted in the popular masses. This popular current (albeit mythical and surreal) but pluralist (absolutely non-unitary) is based on daily observation of the vegetable and animal world, its multiplicity, its diversity—and thus it is based on the strategies which Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant have called the strategies of the ruse. Cf. André Varagnac, Civilisation traditionelle et Genres de Vie, Albin Michel, 1948. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Les ruses de l'intelligence, la "méthys" des Grecs, Flammarion, 1974. For the bulk of the people, the real is only what Plato declared to be only the reflection of the real. The bulk of the people do not try to understand the world (the universe, nature), but they limit themselves to "cohabit" with it. To achieve this they "scheme" and "deal" with it (schemes that are constantly renewed, deals based on cults and not on techniques). Looking at it this way, what we call art today is a cult process: it represents the force for supplication or domination, it allows prayer or possession (domination). A beautiful picture of the Virgin makes one believe in the "existential" reality of the Virgin, releases faith and prayer. Wall paintings are not only, as it is traditionally accepted, an incantation that serves to paralyze and bend the spirit of the living animal, but also a prayer that serves to appease (to avoid the vengeance of) the spirit of the dead animal.
6 The word "technique" appears in the French language only in 1750 as an adjective and 1836 as a substantive noun (cf. Dictionnaire Robert, 1970, p. 1754). In the Littré Dictionary (1875), "technique" is defined by the word art, and this word occurs five times in five lines, while the definition of the word "art" by Littré does not contain the word "technique" one single time in twenty lines. (We already said earlier that the role of the word "art" is the same in the English language).
7 The French census of 1975 placed 59,075 persons who were active in the "socio-professional" category of "artists." This category includes neither merchants of art objects nor civil servants working in "cultural affairs" or museums, nor professors of art nor art historians. On the other hand, it does includes actors in theatre, dance, cinema and television.
8 Commenting on these attitudes in L'art et l'âme, Flammarion, 1960 (especially p. 15 et passim) René Huyghe agrees that the artist does not know his work nor recognize himself in it until after its completion. But it does not result, in general, that this work is, for anyone, a source of interest or emotion. The artist himself cannot always say, "I congratulated myself when I recognized myself."
9 Opus international, No. 22, January 1971, p. 19.
10 Especially in those cases when a "masterpiece" is recognized as such by mankind throughout time and space, it seems absurd to me to say that it is because it was "made" to "last" (as if the will to make it last assured its lasting); one must simply accept and recognize that many (or at least a certain amount of) images, forms and objects which are capable of moving men belonging to a certain time and place, are also capable of moving men of other times and places. Such are the living beauties of bodies, of faces and of landscapes.
11 Cf. Opus, journal cited, Nos. 17 & 22.
12 Delacroix, Journal, 22 March 1847.
13 In the world of literature, as in painting and in sculpture, these ostracisms prevent the distribution of original works, which, had they been published at another moment of time, would then and even now have had a great success. Thus one could not find in France today a publisher who would accept to publish a tragedy like Le Cid or a novel like La Maison de Claudine. These com mercial pressures, market controls and cliques find an echo, in those countries with a totalitarian government, in the monolithic relentless dictatorship of the party in power.
14 Alfred de Musset, La coupe et les lèvres, 1830.
15 Fichte, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche. Cf. André Glucksmann, Les maîtres penseurs, Grasset 1977, and Bernard-Henry Lévy, La Barbarie à visage humain, Grasset 1977.
16 1564, the death of Michelangelo.
17 Ernest Renan, La prière sur l'Acropole, 1885.
18 Plato, Timaeus.
19 Cf. Roger Caillois, Babel, orgueil, confusion et ruine de la littérature, Gal limard 1948.
20 Baudelaire, Le voyage (since 1860).
21 Alfred de Musset, Rolla.
22 Of course, there is no reason why 20th century man should hold on to the naive beliefs which our ancestors held and which are clearly contradicted by observed reality and the experimental science of our time. It is, on the contrary, a matter of finding in myth what was and remains today a valuable lesson; all that which experimental knowledge has achieved today and which today gives answers to the questions asked by man and which science itself asks and does not solve.
23 Cf. the books of Maurice Clavel (Ce que je crois, Delivrance, Ce Juif de Socrate, etc….), of Bernard-Henry Lévy (La barbarie à visage humain), of André Glucksmann (Les maîtres - penseurs, op. cit.), of Guy Landreau and Christian Jamblet (L'ange). And also, of course, the "old ones", Albert Camus, Jacques Ellul, Raymond Aron, Georges Friedmann …
24 Nobody is more aware of the benefits of science that I am. (cf. Le grand espoir du XXe siècle, Machinisme et Bien - Etre and in this same journal "Three Comments on the Near Future of Mankind", Diogenes, No. 32). But on balance the positive does not exclude the negative. There is no doubt that science could and should, could have and should have brought us the advantages of efficiency without forgetting or denying what it ignores, without ending up in the dreary plain of a planned consumer society and without feeding and supporting the pride of the master thinkers … see below.
25 In France, Pierre Vendryès (Vie et probabilité, Albin Michel, 1940) is one of the movement's pioneers. W. Ashby, L. Von Bertalanffy, Mesarovic … are classics. In French, one can read: J. Lesourne, Les systèmes du destin, Dalloz, 1976; B. Wallisser, Systèmes et modèles, introduction critique à la théorie des systèmes, Seuil, 1977.
26 Edgar Morin, La Méthode, Volume I: La Nature de la Nature, Seuil, 1977. Here we have a critique of science and of "rationality," such as I have formulated myself in Les Conditions de l'esprit scientifique, Gallimard 1966, but with less vigor and breadth.
27 Just as the crisis of art and science is already centuries old, so their reconciliation and their renewal cannot be rapid. The majority of men and their leaders still hurl themselves in the direction of totalitarian science, too frequently conceived as a magic power. The War of the Roses is thus not yet over: King Richard III has not yet reached the final act.
28 The charm of information received in a virginal brain is wellknown by us all: they are childhood impressions, The House of Aunt Léonie and the famous "petite Madeleine" of Marcel Proust.
Art and beauty are the realities, the information and the messages which put us back in touch with our childhood (or widowhood) and bring about within us this molecular tempest (emotion) which touches our brain (which creates a structure in certain groups of neurons).
29 E. Morin, op. cit., p. 155 et seq.
30 Shakespeare, Richard III, final scene.
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