What Is Art? Tolstoy and Plato

Tolstoy: Art is communion

At the turn of the twentieth century, and after fifteen years of cogitation, Count Leo Tolstoy published his polemic What is Art? (1898; Penguin 1995) Although it is a question that has occupied the minds of philosophers for millennia, Tolstoy’s answer is at least unusual in that it leads him to the conclusion that none of his own work, with a couple of minor exceptions, was art. Nor, he contends, was the work of Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe or Ibsen. Nor was the music of the late Beethoven, Wagner and the Romantics. Liszt, Brahms, Strauss and Berlioz are also dismissed, as, in the plastic arts, were Raphael, Michelangelo’s “absurd Last Judgment” and the Impressionists.

The reason for Tolstoy’s wholesale dismissal of contemporary art was his sociological understanding of how art had evolved. A transformation described by the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim—who began his research in the sociology of religion in 1898—is a continuum from the sacred to the profane. Putting to one side the Greeks, in the Christian era art arose in the bosom of religion. Although Durkheim did not specifically address the question of art, his theory would include art within the sacred. Just as religious belief was formed through collective rituals, art is also found in the intersection between the sacred and the profane. With its own prescriptions and proscriptions, art is another form of “communion”; part of the cosmology and taboos of everyday life.

For Tolstoy, the argument is presented in this way: “The activity of art is based … on [the] capacity of people to be infected by the feelings of other people.” (Tolstoy.1995:38) Think of laughter, or expressions of sorrow. Art is also an affective expression that is infectious; it must elicit a reaction because it is “a means of communion among people”. If it is not affecting, “the expression will not be art”. (Tolstoy.1995:37)

By stressing the notion that art, as with language, arises socially, as a “communion” between participants—the artist and the audience—Tolstoy rejects, in a long critique, two traditions stemming from German Idealism. He is against the subjective intuitionism of Kant and his followers. This posits that beauty is something within the mind, a “disinterested pleasure” devoid of practical usefulness. He is against Hegel’s objectivist notion—“still more foggy and mystical … if such were possible” (Tolstoy.1995:33)—that art is part of a Zeitgeist, a “spirit of the times”. This is something that manifests itself in different forms in different ages. Although socially based, and not reducible to the mind, the inevitability and “objectivity” of the dialectic are dismissed.

The ethical underpinnings to communion come from Tolstoy’s interesting and unusual amalgamation of Christianity with anarchism. His naturalistic translations of the Gospels excise the divine, the supernatural and the miraculous, and leave a tract on “brotherly love”, benevolence and sympathy. As the anarchists might further point out, this is a form of sociality, in the form of “Mutual Aid”, the very opposite of egoism. In this aspect Tolstoy was a follower of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), from whom he borrowed the title of his book War and Peace. After Tolstoy’s death, the ethics of anarchism were developed by Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). This was a naturalistic ethic emancipated from religion, building on Proudhon’s notion that “property is theft”.

Even though the Gospels and Christianity are central to Western culture, Tolstoy wants to make the more general sociological point that it is from religious traditions that an ethical standpoint arises. From this communion, different though it might be in different cultures, judgments in art will be made:

The appreciation of the merits of art—that is, of the feelings it conveys—depends on people’s understanding of the meaning of life, on what they see as good and evil. Good and evil in life are determined by what are called religions. (Tolstoy.1995:42)

In short, it is from a religious understanding of the sacred that art is judged. For the Greeks, says Tolstoy, “in earthly happiness, in beauty, and strength”, for the Romans and Chinese, “sacrifice … for the good of the nation or the glorification of … ancestors”, for Buddhists, feelings “which elevate the soul and humble the flesh”. (Tolstroy. 1995:43)

Although this might sound like cultural relativism, Tolstoy is equivocal, because he also believes in cultural universals:

Great works of art are great only because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone. The story of Joseph, translated into Chinese, moves the Chinese. The story of Shakya-muni [about the Buddha] moves us. The same is true of buildings, painting, statues, music. (Tolstoy.1995:81)

Christianity rejected all hedonistic and pagan art. Good art depicted sermons, prayer and the life of saints. The gradual rise of the profane gathered pace with the Renaissance in the fifteenth century. A perversion of Christianity replaced icons with portraits of princes, popes and wealthy patrons. And it was no coincidence that this involved the rediscovery of the Greeks. As Tolstoy understood it, the elevation of hedonism heralded the profane:

Having recognised pleasure—that is beauty—as the standard of what is good, people of the upper classes of European society returned in their understanding of art to the crude understanding of the primitive Greeks, already condemned by Plato. (Tolstoy.1995:48)

In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, (1912. English translation 1915, George Allen & Unwin. Second edition 1976) published just before the First World War and his own coincidental death, Durkheim contends the central problem for contemporary society is the decline in the sacred. Because the profane cannot provide the foundations for moral regulation—cannot provide a coherent answer to “the meaning of life”—the consequence is normlessness, what he termed anomie.

This theme of alienation from the sacred is central to Tolstoy’s polemic on art. It also takes centre stage in Anna Karenina (1877), where the climax is anomic suicide. As Tolstoy saw it, the feelings of his aristocratic circle

came down to three very insignificant and uncomplicated feelings: the feelings of pride, sexual lust, and the tedium of living, And these three feelings, with their ramifications, make up almost exclusively the contents of the art of the wealthy classes. (Tolstoy.1995:61)

Anna’s tragic end was a precursor to the tragedy for art. The anomic causes were the same. There is the pride in the paintings of popes, kings and dukes. In novels and dramas, there is sexual lust. The tedium, the meaningless of life, is all that is left. The contrast to this decadence, as portrayed in Anna Karenina, is the semi-autobiographical Konstantin Levin. At one with the peasants on his estate, he is the harbinger of Tolstoy’s own feelings of communion. On a visit honouring the recent marriage of his daughter, Tolstoy joins the “labouring man”, a man of “unperverted taste”, not a cultured man whose “sense of artistic perceptions is atrophied”. (Tolstoy.1995:115) In What is Art? Tolstoy describes the contrast in these terms:

This singing, with shouts and banging of scythes, expressed such a definite feeling of joy, cheerfulness, energy, that without noticing it I became infected by it … That evening an excellent musician, famous for his performances … came to visit us and played Beethoven … …

… the women’s song was true art, conveying a definite, strong feeling. While the … sonata of Beethoven was only an unsuccessful attempt at art, containing no definite feeling and therefore not infecting one with anything. (Tolstoy.1995:116)

Tolstoy’s criticism of “representationism” in art is that training in imitation and realism does not foster feelings of expressiveness. Indeed, superfluous detail disrupts infectiousness. Forget convincing illusions; the basis for artistic appraisal is the degree of sincerity, and the clarity in which it is conveyed. This “is always present in popular art”, and “accounts for its powerful effect”. “It is almost entirely absent in our upper class art, ceaselessly fabricated by artists for reasons of personal gain or vanity.” (Tolstoy.1995:122)

Such “counterfeit art” has three main sources: extravagant remuneration, the art critic and art schools. Expressiveness cannot be taught. Feelings cannot be “called up”. In music, for example, the most seductive of the “counterfeits” is Wagner. Here representationism takes the form of imitating the noise of animals, hammering on anvils, the dissonance of unstructured atonal themes. The extravagance and complexity of Wagner’s Bayreuth productions “precisely proves that it is a matter, not of art, but of hypnosis”. (Tolstoy.1995:111) In the plastic arts, and literature, the slippery-slop of pleasure inextricably leads to “the licentiousness of sexual lust” or the violence of patriotism. (Tolstoy.1995:130) Where portraiture conveys brotherhood—the simple everyday “feelings of merriment, tenderness, peacefulness”—Tolstoy is accepting. He admires Victor Hugo, Dickens and Dostoevsky. Of modern painters, he admires virtually none. “The art of our time … has become a harlot.” (Tolstoy.1995:150)

With his beloved peasant’s sickle, Tolstoy cuts a swathe through the arts. What falls might be seen as a reductio ad absurdum. It is also clear that it is on a moral standpoint—from his anarchistic Christianity—that his judgments on what is art rest. Art is a communion between the participants in a social process, a ritual that is circumscribed by a particular ethic. In the West, if Tolstoy is to be accepted, genuine, as opposed to counterfeit, art will be imbued with brotherly love and the simple and happy joys of life. To engage the audience, the artist must elicit these feelings and infect his audience with this morality. Because this theory is sociologically based, emphasis is placed on the relations—the social interaction—between individuals. The object produced—the work of art—is constituted by these relations. There is no psychological reduction. Art is not subjective. It does not arise, nor is it judged, in the mind. But neither is it objective, in the sense of a realist investigation into the character of the object—the painting, the poem or the score. What is art rests on the social act of creation, not the thing created.

Plato: Art is deception

The conflation of ethics with aesthetics, of morality and beauty, is not new. Nor are questions about the artist and audience (the subjects), the social context (the relations) and the work itself (the object). These have been debated since the beginning of philosophy. It is sometimes called the subject-object relation. One way to understand this question is to make an excursion back to Plato’s Republic. This will turn out to be congenial ground for Tolstoy, for funnily enough in Greece, at the time of Plato, the profanity of art was challenged in a strikingly similar way.

In part ten of The Republic (around 380 BC; Penguin, 1967) Plato constructs a conversation between Socrates and Glaucon (an older brother of Plato) on a theory of art. The two briefer dialogues at the end of this discussion consider that part of the mind to which the artist appeals, and the moral effect. Here the artist is certainly not on the side of the gods, and the choices to be made are between good and evil, between the sacred and the profane. Because the artist is a conjuror who can “deceive” us with his illusory “tricks”, his appeal is to the inferior part of the mind. The best part of our mind is grounded in reality. It is from calculations based on “measuring, counting and weighing” that opinions are judged. The artist—poets and painters—appeal to the worst part of our mind, the “irrational and lazy and cowardly”. (Plato.1967:382) Because their work has a “low degree of truth … creating images far removed from reality” (Plato.1967:383)  they are rightly refused admittance to the Republic. Morally speaking, the ideal state should resist the corrupting power of the artist. By giving free rein to the instincts of Eros and Thanatos, the effect of poetry and drama is to indulge empathy in anger, sex and misfortune: “Bad taste in the theatre may insensibly lead you into becoming a buffoon at home.” (Plato.1967:384). The only poetry in the Republic should be “hymns to the gods and … praise of good men” (Plato.1967:384) in “lyric” and “metre” alone.

The underpinnings to this moral critique—the profanity of art—are found in Plato’s metaphysics and theory of knowledge. The greater part of his theory of art addresses these ontological and epistemological issues. To establish the case that art is illusion, Socrates’s starting point is metaphysics. An ontological distinction is drawn between universals and particulars. The universal essence of a thing is its form. We have, for example, the notion of a bed or a table. This is the class of which there are many particular instances, but there can be only one universal form. When the carpenter makes a bed, although he “has his eye on the appropriate form”, (Plato.1967:371)  he is always making a particular example, he can never make the universal form.

“Platonic forms” are not without ambiguities. The ontological distinction posits two worlds: the “physical world”, and a different reality called the “intelligible world”. This includes “pure thought” and “mathematical reasoning”. The physical world is a world of particularity. As Socrates describes it, these “particulars are objects of sight but not of intelligence, while the forms are objects of intelligence but not of sight”. (Plato.1967:271) Each particular thing in the physical world corresponds to a “unique form which we call an ‘absolute’ reality”. (Plato.1967:271) Although this might suggest that these essences, or forms, are reducible to mind—a mind understood as not part of physical reality—this is not Plato’s contention. That would make the form a particularity, part of a particular mind. As with all “two-world” arguments, obscurity remains. If distinct, how can one world relate to the other? And how can the “absolute” be made intelligible without the use of terms found in the physical world?

Returning to the carpenter and his bed, Plato contrasts his enterprise with that of the artist. Although the artist is also a craftsman of sorts, he does not make particular things—“real things” such as beds—but produces reflections of real things. Metaphorically speaking, all he is doing is taking a mirror to reality. Everything he creates is an illusion, a representation of that reality.

From this ontological distinction between pure form and reality, between the universal and the particular, Socrates distinguishes between three “sorts of beds”, and the place of the artist in this scheme of things. First, there is the pure form. There can be only one of these—the universal—for if there were more than one, these would be superfluous and replicate the same ideal character. The second type of bed is the multitude of particular beds made by carpenters. In the third, the artist simply “represents what the other two make”, a representation that “stands at third remove from reality … third in succession to the throne of truth”. (Plato.1967:374)

Though not of a visual sort, the poet also deals in representations. In writing and in drama “the tragedians and their chief, Homer” (Plato.1967:375) only portray or act that which is real. They also “merely manufacture shadows at third remove from reality”. (Plato.1967:376) One would never expect Homer to provide real cures in medicine. One would never question him on life-and-death issues of military strategy, on matters of state or of education. No schools have arisen from his teaching. In terms of practical reality, he has added nothing.

It is at this point in the conversation that Socrates’s theory of art moves from the ontology of art to the epistemology of the illusion. Nothing much more is said about the contention that truth must reside in the form, not the physical world. Rather, a contrast is made in the physical world between the true beliefs of the craftsman and the illusions of the artist. Because the craftsman deals in physical things, a pragmatic consideration of use is presented as the touchstone of truth. “Quality”, “beauty” and “fitness” in manufacture are always “judged by reference to the use for which man or nature intend for it”. (Plato.1967:378) The flute maker, for example, always defers to the opinion of the flute player. The artist, by contrast, deals in shadows and images, not right or wrong. His portrait of the carpenter requires no more than holding a mirror to his image; an ignorance that requires not the slightest knowledge or appreciation of his craft.

Tolstoy and Plato were both responding to the advent of “modern art” and its profanity. For Tolstoy this was Impressionism and the Romantics. Cubism, conceptual art and the decline in the representational were to come later. The “modern movement” in Plato’s case was also revolutionary, the invention of illusion. The critique of the profane, from a sacred standpoint, is illustrated by a comparison between Egyptian and Greek art. In Egyptian art the depiction of figures in profile was for a sacred reason. As E.H. Gombrich sums it up in Art and Illusion:

Only the complete embodiment of the typical in its most lasting and changeless form could assure the magic validity of these pictographs for the “watcher” who could here see both his past and his eternal future removed from the flux of time. (E.H. Gombrich. Art and Illusion. A Study in the psychology of pictorial representation. Phaidon. 2012:107)

In Plato’s language, they were an attempted rendering of an Ideal. Consistent with his theory of forms, Plato was particularly attracted to the Egyptian notion of an absence of change and degradation over time. Perfect things—the forms—avoid the Heraclitean flux of historical decay. The pictograms—the wall paintings and bas reliefs—of the Egyptian artists were not simply a record of everyday life, Gombrich observed, but a universal embodiment of “a potent presence, the dead ‘watching’ the work on his estate”, in a “timeless present”. (Gombrich.2012:105-6) The sacred function of Egyptian art meant mimesis was never the intent. The Great Sphinx was not the illusion of god, but the “watchful guardian in her own right”. (Gombrich. 2012:103) In some pictographs the enemy, or slave girls, might appear face on, suggesting the depictions were of less significant figures, not subject to this taboo. Other figures might suggest movement and lifelike poses. But these illustrations were never developed because they had little place in a religious tradition intent on rigid forms and the elimination of ambiguity.

The influence of Egyptian culture on the Greeks is a matter of debate. In Early Greek Philosophy (1971), John Burnet argues that in philosophy it was virtually none, and in mathematics some. The situation in art, however, was entirely different. As Gombrich points out, in the sixth century BC, Greek figures, following the Egyptians, are “stiff and frozen”. By the fifth century their legs start to move and “their masklike smiles soften”. By the fourth, “their bodies receive a slight twist, so that life seems to enter the marble”. (Gombrich. 2012:99) Similar illusions occur in painting, as is evident in the surviving pottery: the “discovery of foreshortening and the conquest of space in the fifth century and of light in the fourth”. (Gombrich:2012:99-100) In 250 years the Greeks had revolutionised art. Plato looked on this “modern movement”, not as a miracle, but with despair. He “looked back with nostalgia at the immobile schemata of Egyptian art”, says Gombrich. (Gombrich 2012:107) He railed against his compatriots who found Egyptian art unconvincing. “Plato considered that Egyptian relief represented certain satisfied postures.” (Gombrich. 2012:114) It was something closer to the ideal. Consistent with its intent, it had less room for ambiguity, and dispensed with illusionist tricks such as the particularity of a perspective. Sculpture and painting were clearly part of the cultural mix of literature and drama. Plato is critical of both. “It is surely no accident,” Gombrich goes on to argue:

that the tricks of illusionist art, perspective and modelling in light and shade, were connected … with the design of theatrical scenery … the poet’s vision and insight comes to its climax and is increasingly assisted by the illusions of art.  (Gombrich. 2012:112)

Tolstoy’s arguments against “modern art”, also presuppose an objective standpoint. But is it possible to make aesthetic judgments? Certainly, the sociological task, if difficult, is clearer. One can objectively describe how art is socially constructed in a culture. One can add, as Gombrich has done, the psychology of pictorial representation that underlies this process. Such a theory—on the causes and effects—would address the origins and social functions of art. It would not, however, provide a basis for the aesthetic evaluation of art. It could not be used as the objective basis for a Platonic or Tolstoyan polemic. It might be extended to suggest all such disputes about merit are also socially constructed; that it is not, in principle, possible to have a theory of art as aesthetics. This is not a move that Plato or Tolstoy would happily make. Fighting against this relativistic conclusion, Plato and Tolstoy are one. The difficulty is that neither of their conceptions of art avoids the implication. In both theories, the work of art—the object—is confused with, or subsumed by, its relation.

This confusion of object and relation is the genesis of relativism. It works against the development of a realist theory of aesthetics, and often reduces the debate to a morass of moral conflict. This conflation of aesthetics with morality has remained the case since the days of Plato. Tolstoy’s case against modernism rests on the social relation of communion. Plato’s case against modernism rests on the relation to an ideal. For Plato, a work of art is not even a thing, only a reflection of a thing. For Tolstoy, the issue is more down-to-earth: there is no metaphysical dualism, simply the sociological observation that art can only arise in a milieu of a certain sort. The question remains whether this impasse of relativism in their critiques can be avoided.