Kenny Anthony. Philosophy in the Modern World: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 4

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the worth of a painting depends on the value of the thoughts that it

expresses. Ruskin sought to bear out this contention by a close examin-

ation of the works of J. M. W. Turner. In The Seven Lamps of Architecture Ruskin

set out the criteria by which he judged Gothic architecture superior to the

architecture of the Renaissance and the baroque. The ‘lamps’ are predom-

inantly moral categories: sacri fice, truth, power, obedience, and the like.

For architecture, in his definition, is the art that disposes and adorns

edifices so that the sight of them may contribute to man’s mental health,

power, and pleasure. And the essential element in mental health was a just

appreciation of man’s place in a divinely ordered universe.

For Tolstoy, art can be good only if it has a moral purpose. In What is Art?

he described the price, in terms of money and hard labour, of the artistic

ventures of his day, especially of opera. Such art, he maintained, could arise

only upon the slavery of the masses of the people; and he asked whether

the social costs involved could be morally justified. It was an art that

appealed only to the sentiments of the upper classes, which extended no

further than pride, sex, and ennui.

Tolstoy rejected the claims of earlier writers that the aim of art is beauty

and that beauty is recognized by the enjoyment it gives. The real purpose

of art was communication between human beings. While rejecting the

Romantic idea that art must give pleasure, he agreed with Wordsworth

that its essence was the sharing of emotion:

To take the simplest example: one man laughs, and another who hears becomes

merry, or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or

irritated, and another man seeing him is brought to a similar state of mind. . . . a

man expresses his feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect or love, to certain

objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of

admiration, devotion, fear, respect or love, to the same objects, persons, or

phenomena. (WA 66)

Art in the broad sense of the world permeates our life, which is full of

works of art of every kind, from lullabies, jokes, mimicry, the ornamenta-

tion of dresses, houses, and utensils, to church services and triumphal

processions. But the feelings with which these works of art infect us may be

good or bad. Art is only good if the emotions it injects are good; and those

emotions can be good only if they are fundamentally religious and con-

tribute to a sense of universal human brotherhood.

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The emotions to be communicated by art must be emotions that can be

shared by mankind in general, and not just by a pampered elite. Where this

is not the case we have either bad art or pseudo art. Tolstoy is willing to

accept that this judgement condemns many of the m ost admired works of

music and literature—including his own novels. The greatest novel of the

nineteenth century, he maintained, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which spread the

message of universal brotherhood across the boundaries of race and class.

Among the works of art Tolstoy condemned was Beethoven’s Ninth

Symphony. Does this transmit the highest religious feeling? No: no music

can. Does it unite all men in one common feeling? No, Tolstoy replied:

‘I am unable to imagine to m yself a crowd of normal people who could

understand anything of this long, confused, and artificial production,

except short snatches which are lost in a sea of incomprehensibility.’ It is

true that the work’s last movement is a poem of Schiller which expresses

the very thought that it is feeling, in particular gladness, that unites people

together. ‘But though this poem is sung at the end of the symphony the

music does not accord with the thought expressed in the verses; for the

music is exclusive and does not uni te all men, but unites only a few,

dividing them off from the rest of mankind’ (WA 249).

Art for Art’s Sake

Tolstoy’s moralistic view of art quickly became unfashionable in the

twentieth century. The autonomy of art, if not its Nietzschean supremacy,

was widely accepted: a work of art might be good art, and even great art,

while being morally or politically deleterious. The artistic merit of a work

was even held to redeem its ethical dubiety, and many countries repealed

laws that forbade the production and publication of works of art that had

a tendency to ‘deprave and corrupt’.

One of the most influential of twentieth-century aestheticians was the

Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952). In metaphysics, Croce

was an idealist, and developed a Hegelian system along with Giovanni

Gentile (1875–1944) until the two parted company in 1925 over the issue of

Fascism. Gentile became a theoretician of Fascism, while Croce, who was a

cabinet minister in both pre-Fascist and post-Fascist Italian governments,

was the leading intellectual opponent of Mussolini in the 1930s.

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For Croce, art occupies a position between history and science. Like

history it deals with particular cases rather than general laws, but its

particular cases are imagined, not real, and they illustrate, as science

does, universal truths. Croce himself distinguished between four phases

of his aesthetic theory, from the first volume of his Filosofia dello Spirito in

1902 to La Poesia of 1936. But several themes are common to every one of the

phases of his thought.

The c ore of art, for Croce, is intuition. Intuition is not the same as

feeling, whatever positivists might say: feelings need expression, and expre-

ssion is a cognitive, not just an emotional, matter. Art in human beings,

unlike emotion in a nimals, is something spiritual, not merely sensual. On

the other hand, rationalist aestheticians are wrong to see art as something

intellectual: it operates through images, not through concepts. Thus Croce

distances himself from Romantics on the one hand and classicists on the

other.

The artistic intuition is essentially lyrical. Croce explains what this

means principally by contrasts. Art is not concerned with the True (as

logic is) nor the Useful (as economics is) nor with the Good (as morality is).

It has its own object, the Beautiful, that stands independently on equal

terms with the other three. (For Croce, the notion of the Sublime was only

a pseudo-concept.) An artistic expression is lyrical only if it is concerned

exclusively with the beautiful. Thus a poem like Lucretius’ de Rerum Natura,

with its heavy scientific and moral messages, is not something lyrical, but

merely a piece of literature. True poetry must have no utilitarian, moral, or

philosophical agenda.

Views similar to Croce’s were made familiar to the English-speaking

world by R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), who translated Croce’s article on

aesthetics for the 1928 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Collingwood, a

classicist and archaeologist of distinction, became Wayneflete Professor of

Metaphysics at Oxford in 1936. He is best known for his contributions to the

philosophy of history, on which he was specially qualified to write, but his

Principles of Art (1938) was a significant contribution to aesthetic theory.

Much of the book is taken up with explaining what art is not. Art is not

mere amusement; even if much of what goes by the name of art is simply

entertainment, true art is something different. Art is not a magical pro-

cedure like a war dance. By magic, Collingwood explains, he means a

procedure for arousing emotion to some preconceived end, such as

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patriotic emotion or proletaria n fervour. Most importantly, art must be

distinguished from craft or technical skill. Art is not imitation or repre-

sentation (mimesis), for that too is a craft. Of course, a great work of art will

also be a work of craft, but what makes it a work of art is not what makes it

a work of craft.

If art were a craft, we could distinguish in it between end and means. But

if art has an end, it can only be the arousing of emotion; and this is not

something that can be identified separately from the artistic activity, as a

shoe can be identified separately from the act of cobbling. Art should not be

seen as the activity of arousing emotion, but as the activity of expressing

emotion. The true work of art is in fact the emotion in the artist himself.

Successful artists conclude their success in their own imagination; the

externalization of their images in a public work of art is merely a matter

of craft.

The inner work, the true work of art, consists in raising something

preconscious, an inarticulate feeling, into an explicit and articulate state.

Following Croce, Collingwood accepted on this basis that imagination and

expression were one and the same thing. It is through language that the

preconscious is transformed into the articulate; and in this sense all artistic

expression, in whatever medium, is essentially linguistic.

If art is the expres sion of emotion, Collingwood argues, then the

distinction between artist and audience disappears.

If a poet expresses, for example, a certain kind of fear, the only hearers who can

understand him are those who are capable of experiencing that kind of fear

themselves. Hence, when someone reads and understands a poem, he is not

merely understanding the poet’s expression of his, the poet’s, emotions, he is

expressing emotions of his own in the poet’s words, which have thus become his

own words. As Coleridge put it, we know a man for a poet by the fact that he

makes us poets. (PA 118)

Poet and reader share and express the same emotion: the difference is that

the poet can solve for himself the problem of expressing it, whereas the

reader needs the poet to show him how it is done. By creating for ourselves

(aided or unaided) an imaginary experience or activity, we express our

emotions; and this is what we call art.

Croce and Collingwood differed from Tolstoy because they regarded art as

something distinct from and independent of morality. But all three writers

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shared a conception of art as expression of emotion. Most twentieth-century

philosophers rejected the Tolstoyan view of the function of art as the

communication of emotion. Wittgenstein, for instance, wrote:

There is much that could be learned from Tolstoy’s false theorizing that the work of

art conveys a ‘feeling’. And indeed you might call it, if not the expression of a

particular feeling, an expression of feeling, or a felt expression. And you might say

too that people who understand it to that extent ‘resonate’ with it, respond to it.

You might say: The work of art does not seek to convey something else, just itself. As,

if I pay someone a visit, I don’t wish only to produce such and such feelings in him,

but first and foremost to pay him a visit—though of course I also want to be

welcome.

The real absurdity starts when it is said that the artist wants others, in reading, to

feel what he felt while writing. I can indeed think that I understand a poem, for

example, that is, understand it in the way its author would want it to be understood.

But what he may have felt while writing it isn’t any concern of mine at all. (CV 67)

The independence of a work of art from its creator became a prominent

theme, both in the English -speaking world and in continental Europe.

American critics denounced as ‘the intentional fallacy’ any attempt to

reach an understanding of a text on the basis of elements in its author’s

biography or psychology or motivation, rather than in properties to be

discerned in the text in isolation. In France, philosophers went so far as to

speak of ‘the death of the author’. The text, they have argued, is the

primary object; the notion of an author is rather an economic and legal

construct. So far as interpretation goes, the reception of a text by gener-

ations of readers may be of greater significance than any item in the

biography of the person who initially penned it.

The thesis of the death of the author has not been warml y welcomed in

British philosophical circles. But the idea that in the interpretation of a

work of art the author has no privileged status was anticipated by a

nineteenth-century Englishman. The Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough

wrote a controversial, some thought blasphemous, poem about the Res-

urrection, Easter Day. In a later poem he imagines himself questioned about

its meaning: was it intended to be ironic or sarcastic? He responds:

Interpret it I cannot. I but wrote it.

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Political Philosophy

Utilitarianism and Liberalism

n introd ucing his greatest happiness principle, Bentham was less

concerned to provide a criterion for individual moral choices than to

offer guidance to rulers and legislators on the management of communi-

ties. But it is precisely in this area, when we have to consider not just the

total quantity of happiness in a community but also its distribution, that

the greatest happiness principle, on its own, fails to provide a credible

decision procedure.

Suppose that, by whatever means, we have succeeded in establishing a

scale for the measurement of happiness: a scale from 0 to 10 on which

0 represents maximum misery, 10 represents maximum happiness, and 5

a state of indifference. Imagine that we are devising political and legal

institutions for a society, and that we have a choice between implementing

two models. The result of adopting model A will be that 60 per cent of the

population will score 6, and 40 per cent will score 4. The result of adopting

model B will be that 80 per cent of the population will score 10 and 20 per

cent will score 0. Faced with such a choice, anyone with a care for either

equality or humanity will surely wish to implement model A rather than

model B. Yet if we operate Bentham’s felicific calculus in the obvious

manner, model A scores only 520 points, while model B achieves a total

of 800.

The principle that we should seek the grea test happiness of the greatest

number clearly leads to different results depending on whether we opt to

maximize happiness or to maximize the number of happy people. The

principle needs, at the very least, to be supplemented by some limits on the

amount of inequality between the best off and the worst off, and limits on

the degree of misery of the worst off, if it is not to permit outcomes that are

gross violations of distributive justice.

Despite the problems with his grand principle, problems that he left for

his successors to struggle with, Bentham did make very substantial contri-

butions to political philosophy. He is seen at his best when he is, in the

words of J. S. Mill, ‘organising and regulating the merely business part of

social arrangements’. On such topics he can write acutely and briskly,

make shrewd distinctions, expose common fallac ies, and pack a weight of

argument into brief and lucid paragraphs. His treatment of state-imposed

punishment is an excellent example of the way in which he puts these

talents to use.

What, he asks, is the purpose of the penal system?

The immediate principal end of punishment is to control action. This action is

either that of the offender, or of others: that of the offender it controls by its

influence, either on his will, in which case it is said to operate in the way of

reformation; or on his physical power, in which case it is said to operate by disablement;

that of others it can influence no otherwise than by its influence over their wills; in

which case it is said to operate in the way of example.(P 13. 1)

Punishment, being the infliction of pain, is as such an evil, so it should only

be admitted in so far as it promises to exclude some greater evil. Bentham

rejected the retributive theory of punishment, according to which justice

demands that he who has done harm shall suffer harm. Unless the

infliction of punishment has some deterrent or remedial effect either on

the offender or on others, retribution is merely a rendering of evil for evil,

and increases the amount of evil in the world without restoring any

balance of justice.

It is true that the punishment of an offender, even if it has no deterrent

or reformatory effect, may give a feeling of satisfaction to a victim, or to the

law-abiding public. This, like any other pleasure, must be placed in the

utilitarian scales. But no punishment, Bentham says, should be imposed

merely for this vin dictive purpose, because no pleasure ever produced by

punishment can be equivalent to the pain.

Since the principal purpose of punishment was deterrence, punishment

should not be inflicted in cases where it would have no deterrent effect,

either on the offender or on others, nor should it be inflicted to any greater

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270

extent than is necessary to deter. Punishment, he says, must not be

inflicted when it is inefficacious (cannot deter) or unprofitable (will cause

more mischief than it prevents) or needless (where the mischief can be

prevented by other means).

In the fourteen th chapter Bentham drew up a set of rules setting out the

proportion between punishments and offences, based not on the retribu-

tive principle of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ but on the effect that

the prospect of punishment will have on the reasoning of a potential

offender. Bentham imagined a prospective criminal calculating the profit

and loss that is likely to accrue from the offence, and regarded it as the

function of the penal law to ensure that the loss will outweigh the profit.

The law must therefore impose punishments that are sufficient to deter,

but they should equally be no more than is necessary to deter. Punishment

should, in Bentham’s terms, be frugal.

While deterrence is the principal end of punishment, Bentham admits

subsidiary purposes, such as the reformation or disablement of the off-

ender. Reform, in the condition of most actual prisons, was and is unlikely

to be achieved; but Bentham has some proposals for particular reformatory

regimes. Imprisonment does have the effect of the temporary disablement

of the offender, but obviously disablement is most efficaciously achieved by

the death penalty. ‘At the same time’, Bentham observes, ‘this punishment,

it is evident, is in an eminent degree unfrugal; which forms one among the

many objects there are against the use of it, in any but very extraordinary

cases’ (P 15. 19).

John Stuart Mill’s political philosophy, like his moral philosophy, owed

much to Bentham, but in this area too he felt obliged to temper the strict

utilitarianism of his master. Bentham’s system, with its denial of natural

rights, would in principle justify, in certain circumstances, highly auto-

cratic government and substantial intrusion on personal liberty. So too

would the early forms of socialism with which Mill had flirted in his youth,

which had given birth to the positivist system of Auguste Comte. In his

mature years Mill attached supreme importance to setting limits to the

constraints that social systems, however benevolent in principle, could

place on individual independence. He described the Syste

me de Politique

Positive as a device ‘by which the yoke of general opinion, wielded by an

organised body of spiritual teachers and rulers, would be made supreme

over every action, and as far as is in human possibility, every thought, of

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271

every member of the community’. He denounced Comte for proposing

‘the completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever yet

emanated from a human brain’. In On Liberty he sought to set out a general

libertarian principle that would protect the individual from illegitimate

authoritarian intrusion whether motivated by utilitarianism, socialism, or

positivism.

To safeguard liberty, Mill maintains, it is not sufficient to replace

autocratic monarchy by responsible democracy, because within a demo-

cratic society the majority may exercise tyranny over the minority. Nor is it

sufficient to place limits upon the authority of government, because society

can exercise other and more subtle means of coercion.

Bentham’s ‘‘auto-

icon’’: his remains

preserved in a

waxwork in

University College,

London.

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272

There needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and

feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil

penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent

from them; to fetter the development, and if possible, prevent the formation, of

any individuality not in harmony with its ways. (L 130)

In order to place a just limit on coercion by physical force or public opinion

we must affirm, as a fundamental principle, that the only part of the

conduct of anyone for which he is accountable to society is that which

concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independ-

ence should be absolute.

The most important application of this principle concerns liberty of

thought, and the cognate liberties of speaking and writing. According to

Mill, no authority, autocratic or democratic, has the right to suppress the

expression of opinion. ‘If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and

only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more

justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be

justified in silencing mankind’ (L 130). This is because to suppress an

opinion is to rob the whole human race. The opinion silenced may, for

all we know, turn out to be true, because none of us is infallible. If it is not

wholly true, it may well contain a portion of truth that would otherwise be

neglected. Even an opinion that is wholly false has a value as offering a

challenge to the contrary opinion and thus ensuring that the truth is not

held as a mere prejudice or as a formal profession. Freedom of opinion, Mill

concludes, and freedom of the expression of opinion, is essential for the

mental well-being of mankind.

But freedom of opinion is not all that is needed. Men should be free to

act upon their opinions, and to carry them out in their lives, without

hindrance, either physical or moral, from their fellows. Of course the

freedom should not extend to the right to harm others—even freedom

of speech must be curtailed in circumstances where the expression of

opinion amounts to an incitement to mischief. But ample sco pe should

be given to varieties of character and to experiments in living, provided

these concern only the individual’s own affairs or the affairs of others ‘with

their free, voluntary, and undeceived consent and participation’. The

individual’s rule of conduct should be his or her own character, not the

traditions or customs of other people. If this principle is denied, ‘there is

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