XANTHIPPE: Call it what you will –poetry, rhetoric, imitation –it is the art of appearances, of showing the world as it really seems. And since we too are appearances, it is poetry, and not philosophy, which gives the truth of our condition.
Xanthippic Dialogues by Roger Scruton
This quote comes from a wonderful work of philosophic fiction that I heartily recommend. Ancient Greece was a very patriarchal society as everyone knows. Xanthippe was the actual wife of Socrates, portrayed in Plato’s dialogues as something of a shrew. But one man’s shrew is another man’s intellectual equal and foil. The Xanthippic Dialogues are the fictional dialogues of Xanthippe who, being female, naturally puts Socrates (“Socks” to her) in his place by standing him on his head; truth is not discovered by reason, but by art.
In reality, she asserts that we do not know the world, we only perceive it, i.e., reality is mediated by our senses and intellectual software before we subjectively perceive it. But if this is true, and clearly it is, then what are we ourselves but an appearance, the interior perception of ourselves by… who exactly? Perhaps not who, but what: being, which exists outside time and place and is therefore nameless. No one knows.
Scruton’s Xanthippe is not arguing that there is no external, objective reality; rather, she asserts that our condition is such that we cannot know it directly and therefore in a certain sense cannot know it at all. She argues that since all we know is appearance, it is art, which reflects perception not reality, that gives us the truest picture of our condition in the world. Therefore, the first truth is that reason alone will not reveal truth; it is not philosophy, but art that shines the brightest and truest light. She is arguing for vigorous realism, prudence and humility, the virtues of women, not men.
Interestingly, however, Xanthippe came to this thought (which, ironically exists only in Plato’s world of forms) , through the use of her reason. As Plotinus notes in The Six Enneads:
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul’s beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul’s becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
God created man and woman in His image. Thank goodness!
Blog No. 87: We Are Artists in a Floating World
I have learnt many things over these past years. I have learnt much in contemplating the world of pleasure, and recognizing its fragile beauty. But I now feel it is time for me to progress to other things. Sensei, it is my belief that in such troubled times as these, artists must learn to value something more tangible than those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light. It is not necessary that artists always occupy a decadent and enclosed world. My conscience, Sensei, tells me I cannot remain forever an artist of the floating world.
Quoting Masuji Ono, from An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
We live in a floating world, which is to say a decadent subjective world of pleasure and inwardness. We can no longer believe in something eternal, objective and true; we are renouncing our Hellenic-Christian past and are currently floating gently down the stream towards the rapids. This corrosion affects all, but especially the elites who created it. They have torn the idols down, but failed to replace them with anything other than a mocking posture as the culture descends into tribalism; our art reflects this.
I would gladly be proven wrong; it should be simple enough. Point to composer or painter who is the equal of major artists of the past. Where is the new Chopin or Cezanne? Phillip Glass or Andy Warhol do not come close–they only mock. This is not to say post-modern or contemporary artists are without merit of course. They can be intellectually interesting, but rarely awe-inspiring because they don’t believe in awe-inspiring. To be in awe is to understand that there are great things afoot in the world that are not captured by the mind; they are beyond reason.
I’ve heard critics wax eloquently about the “beauty” of dissonance or transgressive paintings, but these are not beauty, they are negations of virtually everything except negation, and that disheartens.
There are exceptions of course. Marilynne Robinson’s prose can rise to the beauty of poetry and she grapples with serious and very human issues. But even in greatness, today’s genius often fails because it aims so low. Compare Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to see the difference between aiming high and aiming low; Blood Meridian is great fiction, but it is the art of negation.