Author: Ophelia Benson

Right, where are we. How much ground have we conceded and how much can we keep. We’ve admitted what we’ve always known and would admit when pressed: that aesthetic opinions are opinions, not facts. Very well. That’s the sum total of our concession, and I’m sure we can all remember conceding the same thing when we were fifteen and judging the contest between Austen and Bronte or the Beatles and the Stones or folky Dylan and rock Dylan (yes, thank you, I am a dinosaur, I told you that, I said on my birthday I was 175) or NWA and Eminem or whatever it may be. De gustibus non est disputandum. Fine. Granted. But we go on disputing just the same, and a good thing too.

It’s all an illusion, but what of that? So many things are illusions, aren’t they. As a matter of fact I wrote an essay about that for TPM Online recently. We live in a great sea of illusions, that we know are illusions if we think about it, but we need to live as if they weren’t. We need to think, or half-think, or think in an ‘as if’ sort of way, that what we do matters, that our lives mean something, that there’s some point to long-range planning. It’s the same with aesthetic opinions and judgments. We need to pretend they are meaningful, or at least sort of meaningful, semi-groundable, quasi-real, or else why bother? And since not bothering is boring and depressing whereas bothering is interesting and engaging, we keep the illusion.

And then, what if they were groundable? What if aesthetic judgments were in fact factual, like judgments about evidence or documents? What if someone could prove mathematically that ‘Hamlet’ was better than Bridget Jones’ Diary or vice versa? Would we even want that? Hardly! In fact the idea is revolting. So perhaps the very ungroundedness, the subjectivity and dependence on personal experience, association, resonance – on the individual mind and self – is what we like about art? I don’t want to prove that Austen is better than King, I want to explain why she is, so if you have interesting reasons why the reverse is the case, I’m interested to hear them.

It all has to do with exploration, I think. As well as with what Schiller (and wmr in comments) said about play. Art is gratuitous, and it needs to be gratuitous to do its work, and to work. If it’s not (at least somewhat) gratuitous it stops being art – what we think of as art – and becomes something else. Vitamins, or education, or discipline, or some such. Good things, but different from art, and answering different needs and desires.

Okay, if you can’t stand to watch me preening and holding B&W up for the admiration of a goggling world, then skip this comment. But if a person can’t have a little harmless fun and self-congratulation once in awhile after toiling and slaving all week – well really. That’s all I can say. So I happened to find this very popular French site that just found B&W and is quite pleased with what it found. Sadly, the writer of the B&W-praise was so engrossed in her reading that she hurt her foot – that’s how absorbing we are. But that’s okay: if you don’t know French, you won’t have to read the compliments, because I’m not going to translate them – it would be too immodest, she said with a humble blush. But I’ll tell you this though: she says something complimentary about our commenters, too. That would be you. So maybe you should rush out and take a course so that you can understand, if you don’t already.

Ce n’est pas une blague, aujourd’hui je me suis foulée le pied en lisant un blog :( Méfiez vous du blog d’Ophélia Benson, ça y cogite très fort, et les commentateurs ne sont pas en reste. Exemple, ce billet sur la question de la séparation ou non de la raison et de l’émotion. Si seulement Ophélia Benson se contentait de tenir un blog! Mais non, son blog n’est qu’une suite d’annotations marginales du site principal butterflies and wheels dont elle est l’éditrice. On y trouve nombre d’articles fort intéressants…

She also likes the Fashionable Dictionary and the Rhetoric Guide. A woman of discernment, obviously. But – joking aside – it is pretty gratifying to have fans in non-Anglophone countries. We do – in Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, India. That’s not bad going. I’m hoping to get some African countries, and China, and Middle Eastern countries.

That’s it. End of preen – for the moment.

Very well. Fine. The convincing bugger has convinced us, not because he’s so convincing, but because our case is so hard – not to say impossible – to argue. I know that (she whined). I realize that, I understand that. But I also still say it doesn’t matter, at least not much. It’s still worth going on trying to make a case for the superiority of poetry over pushpin. Yes, that superiority is provisional and local – it’s a human superiority, not a superiority inscribed in the cosmos. It wouldn’t even convince other earthly mammals, let alone nameless entities in other galaxies. A giraffe would just think poetry is too short, and too close to the ground, and not spotted enough. A whale would think it’s too dry, and not fishy enough. What someone from the ninth planet out from Alpha Centauri would think, who knows. But since we are humans, and have human thoughts and tastes and opinions, we don’t care about that any more than giraffes care what we think of acacia leaves for dinner.

And there are all sorts of practical reasons for continuing to have the discussions, obviously. It’s how we decide what to include in literature classes, for instance. It’s how we decide what to read, what to check out of the library, what movies to go see, what to watch on tv, what to urge other people to read and watch and go see and listen to. It’s how we do anything at all, really. It’s how we choose. We don’t do it at random, not unless we have some mental quirk or other; we choose things and courses of action for a reason; we think one thing or act is better than another, and that’s why we want it or do it, or else why we think we ought to want it or do it even if we don’t quite manage. As Ovid’s Medea has it, in one of the few Latin tags I know – ‘Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.’ I see the better and approve it, but I follow the worse.

Better and worse are simply human words, opinion words, in a way that there and not there, something and nothing, E=MC2 are not, quite. That giraffe, dinosaur, limestone, star, are not, quite. The words are what we call those things, but the things themselves are what they are even if we don’t exist and never have existed. Unless they’re not, of course; unless the evil demon has my brain in a vat and I’ve imagined all of it. But my bet is that if the evil demon were going to do that it would come up with a better brain in a vat than mine – that’s my refutation of the evil demon.

That’s enough of that frivolity. At any rate. Value judgments don’t have to be cosmic or absolute or permanent or trans-specific to be worth something, do they. The cosmos doesn’t mind if you pick your nose at the dining table, but I sure as hell do if I’m at the same table. The cosmos doesn’t care what entries we include in the Fashionable Dictionary and which ones we leave out – but the Dictionary’s authors do, as do its publishers and readers, so it is worth discussing and thinking about and weighing reasons for. A century now no one will care an atom whether I spent my life watching the Home Shopping Channel on tv or not – but I do. So there we are, stuck with our provisional value judgments. Whatever.

More on the hand-waving subject. (It’s funny – I had an opportunity to engage my colleague in debate on this very issue only this morning [this afternoon UK time] but I didn’t take it. We talked on the phone about the publisher’s suggested emendations to the Dictionary, and the word ‘aesthetics’ came up almost immediately. I did think of interrupting and diverting the conversation in order to discuss the more foundational aspects, to query the very notion of ‘aesthetic reasons’ – but I didn’t. Largely because, I suppose, I was far more concerned to protect our brilliant ideas than I was to debate foundational anythings. Still, it is a coincidence, you must admit.)

Jonathan Dresner posted at Cliopatria yesterday on a subject that’s very relevant to this one – and I wrote a comment on his post without even realizing or noticing the relevance. That was stupid. The subject is Doonesbury, and Jonathan’s reaction to a war injury to one of the characters, and his reaction to his reaction.

It’s not funny: it’s very sad. Sure, it’s a little silly to be so affected, as I am, by this fiction. But that’s what great fiction does: it makes things real. B.D. is a representative of many very real people.

I actually don’t think it is silly, and I said so in my comment. I think it’s entirely understandable. I’ve been a fan of Doonesbury’s from the very beginning; it’s about my g-g-generation; we share a history. And besides that, it’s just a brilliant strip. It’s a graphic novel rather than just a throwaway bit of fluff. Yes throwaway bits of fluff are fine things! But so are keepable bits of non-fluff – and this is where we came in. Only I didn’t notice it was where we came in, as I said, until I read Jonathan’s sly answer to my comment.

I agree. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since this morning, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a (objectively meaningless waving of hands alert!) difference between being attached to a piece of literature with critical and satirical and moral/ethical elements like Doonesbury (one of the longest graphic novels ever written) and a purely sentimental story like a soap opera.

That’s my colleague’s cue to deliver a vigorous defense of sentimental soap operas, which he will be sure to do. Unless I point out that he doesn’t need to because Jonathan simply said there is a difference between the two – not that there is a difference of quality. And in any case Jonathan acknowledged the hand-waving aspect. So be it here acknowledged – there are plenty of people who can and do make a case that soap operas can be good in their own way too. But – if I had to advise someone who was about to be walled up in a prison for five years and had to choose now, this instant, between a DVD player and a set of [insert favourite soap here] or a complete set of Doonesbury books – I would advise the latter. If that’s not conclusive I don’t know what is.