Appearance, Reality, and Beauty
Friday 05 January 2024
Some years ago in a blog post, Science and the Hero’s Journey. I made an argument about the role of art in civilization, and, more specifically, the role of art in Western civilization. This was a rare blog post that had an outcome for me. As a result of this post I was contacted by one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies and invited to submit an article to the encyclopedia on this theme. (The article “Science and the Hero’s Journey” — the text is completely different from my blog post with the same title — has since been published online, and should be out in paper this year.) I have thought about building on this argument, as I have not yet stated it in full, but as the idea is deeply embedded in my conception of civilization, its exposition requires the exposition of where I am so far in understanding civilization (and where I’m at changes frequently).
Recently reading Clive Bell’s Art (I discussed Bell’s Civilization: An Essay in newsletter 261, and Art in newsletter 264) got me thinking again about the role of art in Western civilization. I started skimming some books on philosophy of art that I already have to see what light they could shed on Bell’s account of art. The problems here could easily capture my attention. I have been concerned that if I take too much of a detour into aesthetics I will squander time on something that will not come to fruition in my other work, but this, I realized, would not be the case. When studying civilization, nothing is irrelevant. Moreover, aesthetics, is, I believe, centrally important to the most abstract way of understanding Western civilization, so it demands exposition at some point. But what do I mean by “the most abstract way of thinking about Western civilization”? Why should I not want to give a concrete account of Western civilization exhaustively cashed out in particular details? This is where I get tangled up in a lot of ideas about civilization to which I have not yet given an exposition. I will try to explain what I mean, but by way of a detour — a detour through Ruth Benedict’s detour.
The last three paragraphs of chapter III, “The Integration of Culture,” in Benedict’s Patterns of Culture explains her methodology in choosing to examine in detail some rudimentary civilizations rather than focusing on more highly developed civilizations. Here is a condensed quote:
“It is one of the philosophical justifications for the study of primitive peoples that the facts of simpler cultures may make clear social facts that are otherwise baffling and not open to demonstration. This is nowhere more true than in the matter of the fundamental and distinctive cultural configurations that pattern existence and condition the thoughts and emotions of the individuals who participate in those cultures… This does not mean that the facts and processes we can discover in this way are limited in their application to primitive civilizations. Cultural configurations are as compelling and as significant in the highest and most complex societies of which we have knowledge. But the material is too intricate and too close to our eyes for us to cope with it successfully. The understanding we need of our own cultural processes can most economically be arrived at by a detour… We need all the enlightenment we can obtain from the study of thought and behaviour as it is organized in the less complicated groups… a few cultures understood as coherent organizations of behaviour are more enlightening than many touched upon only at their high spots… We must hold ourselves to the less ambitious task, the many-sided understanding of a few cultures.”
Consider this methodology from the opposite end of examples of civilization: instead of starting from the simplest and most rudimentary, start from the largest and most complex examples, and, if we do this, we would find that we are considering social agglomerations that have been put together in very different ways — different histories not only mean different traditions, but also different institutional structures that arise as progressively more complex and sophisticated institutions are slowly built up from distinct predecessors.
The simplest civilizations that Benedict chose as her examples have in common their relative proximity (in time and in condition) to hunter-gatherer nomadism: these cultures are the first step beyond hunter-gatherer nomadism into a sedentary way of life in which human beings have taken control of their food supply, and meet their other needs through small industries supported from the surplus made available from agriculture. The largest and most complex civilizations — the examples of civilizations available to our inspection today — are many steps removed from hunter-gatherer nomadism; all are not only complex in themselves, but have passed through complex histories that have shaped their institutions. Given different starting points and different histories, one could well imagine that civilizations don’t have much in common, that each civilization is as unique as a snowflake (Boas and Spengler held this view, though in different ways, and for different reasons), and all are like Benedict’s analysis of rudimentary civilizations in their stubborn particularism.
However, civilizations have similar selection pressures working on them and similar human needs to satisfy. As they grow larger, if successful, new selection pressures come into play, such as transportation and communications, diplomatic prowess, and so on. Institutions are established in an attempt to mitigate the selection pressures, and the ongoing tension between acting selection pressures and institutional mitigation defines (in part) the history of a civilization. The institutions of different civilizations are all different in detail, but when we pull back and view the big picture the details that differ fade into the background and the similarities can become evident, even though these similarities seem little more than an echo of each other, since the institutions have their different histories that color their appearance. The most obvious example is perhaps the most illustrative: biocentric civilizations begin with agriculture (in newsletters 267 and 268 I formulated the replacement thesis and a corollary that attempts to account for the transition from biocentric civilizations to technocentric civilizations), and agriculture is everywhere different in detail, given the different staple crops in different geographical regions, and the different farming practices necessary to their cultivation, but alike in the big picture.
I might also mention pastoralism, though strictly pastoral peoples rarely develop the elaborate social institutions and technologies of settled agriculture; agriculture is the seed of civilization, and agriculture can assimilate pastoralism to its way of life, while pastoralists have a more difficult time assimilating agriculture into their way of life. The shepherd in an agricultural civilization is something of a nomad, and often lives a life of transhumance, isolated in mountain pastures for much of the summer, but he has his role within agricultural civilization.
The extreme particularism that Benedict attributes to rudimentary civilizations might be related to the particularism of a given form of agriculture, but, again, when we pull back from the particularism we see societies that are institutionally equivalent. One way to pull back and see the big picture is for the individual studying the milieu to change their perspective; another way to pull back and see the big picture is to look at the historical record of the civilizations that have endured the longest. Particularism is subject to selection pressures, so that any society that endures and expands develops away from its tribal particularism toward values and meanings that converge upon the universal. As we ascend from geographically regional and temporally parochial basal civilizations (cf newsletter 173) to ever-larger and longer lasting agglomerations of related civilizations, related in space and time, and thus more comprehensive as we ascend (agglomerated civilizations are first mentioned in newsletter 180), not only does the civilization under consideration extend to a greater spatial and temporal extent, we also ascend through increasingly less specific, more comprehensive, and more elusive and ephemeral central projects. This ascent to a more elusive central project — elusive because it becomes more abstract and less closely related to the origins of any one civilization in an agglomerated civilization — is one of the chief reasons that it is so difficult to identify and to provide a clear and unambiguous exposition of a central project.
Because civilizations are complex, and central projects are subtle, becoming more subtle over time, it is easier to prefer a reductivist account. The reductivist account, in turn, isn’t wrong, but rather incomplete. That is to say, it is part of the truth of civilization, but it is not the whole truth of civilization. In some contexts a fragment of a theory is adequate, but in regard to civilization, it is the connections among all the diverse manifestations of human effort that form the warp and weft of social texture, so that leaving out some aspect of human life in a fragmentary theory of civilization is like pulling a thread that unravels a weave.
Western civilization is a construct that consists of many civilizations — indeed, many levels of civilization, as the ascent through increasingly abstract central projects has stripped away much of the particularism of the basal civilizations that were the root of Western civilization. The basal civilizations don’t disappear, but they become submerged within the larger civilizational construct. Here is a point on which my views have developed rapidly just in the past few months. I previously thought of submergence as an unusual event in the history of civilization, when large conquering empires assert their dominance over weaker powers, but now I have come to see that submergence is part of the overall structure of civilization. French civilization is submerged within European civilization, and European civilization is submerged within Western civilization. (If you like, you could say “embedded” instead of “submerged,” but I have already worked through a lot of these problems in terms of submergence, so that is what I use.)
Islamic civilization is also a construct that consists of many civilizations, and here what I wrote above about different histories is important: Western civilization and Islamic civilization have distinct histories that have resulted in distinct institutions and distinct developmental pathways for these civilizations. Western civilization has its origins in West Asia, and over the millennia it moved steadily westward, mutating at each important historical juncture. Because of this, the structure of Western civilization approximates a series, i.e., a sequence of related civilizations distributed in time. The expansion of Islamic civilization was so rapid that it effectively covered over Arabia, West Asia, and North Africa in one fell swoop, and because of this history the large scale structure of Islamic civilization approximates a cluster, i.e., a sequence of related civilizations distributed in space. Both Western and Islamic civilization are agglomerated civilizations, but their histories make them distinct — though not beyond analysis. Within the cluster-like organization of Islamic civilization, there are many series of civilizations, and within the series-like organization of Western civilization, there are many clusters of civilizations.
That was the detour; now back to art. In my blog post of some years ago I wrote that the central project of Western civilization at its most abstract is the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. We find this already in ancient Greek philosophy, and the some concerns continue to mold our intellectual experience to this day. Of course, in a multi-layered civilization, most people are more invested in the central projects of their basal civilizations closer to home, but insofar as their concerns ascend beyond the immediate concerns, the tradition in which they express themselves is that derived from the philosophy of ancient Greece.
The pursuit of truth, beauty, and goodness is the central project of the construct of Western civilization, which is different in detail from the central project of every particular civilization under the umbrella of Western civilization, but it is still there, however abstract and ethereal, and when we call upon ourselves for the best that is within us, this is where we find ourselves. This is what I wrote in my blog post:
“The core of western civilization is constituted by a small number of philosophical presuppositions about truth, beauty, and goodness. These philosophical presuppositions are a result of the application of the fundamental metaphysical idea of western philosophy — the distinction between appearance and reality — to the true, the beautiful, and the good. The relationship of these concepts to the beautiful is the most conflicted and problematic, hence the beautiful has a special status in western civilization as a point of contention where rival conceptions of appearance and reality have battled for the essence of the western tradition.”
Plato, from whom so much of the Western philosophical tradition derives, had a problem with the beautiful, and that is the nub of our difficulty with the beautiful, and its expression in art. Plato’s ideal republic would have exiled poets, legislated the scales that musicians could use, and looked down on the plastic arts as producing imitations of imitations, since the whole of the sensible world was, for Plato, an imitation of the ideal world. The Iconoclastic Controversy in Byzantine civilization is a perfect example of the extent to which beauty and its relation to art can be the center of conflict in a civilization, and this example seems to confirm Byzantine civilization as a part of Western civilization. The beautiful, then, is a particular problem for Western civilization (the good and the true are also contested, but not to the degree of the beautiful), but not necessarily the same problem for other civilizations. Certainly the good, the beautiful, and the true have their roles in play in other civilizations, but these are seen through a different philosophical lens. Given this way of looking at the abstract central projects of agglomerated civilizations, we can see schematically that there could be a civilization in which the pursuit of truth was the central dilemma, or in which the pursuit of goodness is the central dilemma, and this all within the framework from which Western civilization derived. I suspect that adjacent civilizations that derive from the same West Asian roots are most likely to share this framework, even if the meanings and the valuations differ. Given this interpretation of Western civilization, you can understand that Bell’s Art made an impression on me by reminding me of these aesthetic problems at the foundation of Western civilization.
