Context
From The Arts of the Beautiful
Etienne Gilson
In the Encyclopedie francaise we
find this quotation by the historian Lucien Febvre: “Assuredly, art is
a kind of knowledge.” The present book rests upon the firm and
considered conviction that art is not a kind of knowledge or, in other
words, that it is not a manner of knowing. On the contrary, art belongs
in an order other than that of knowledge, namely, in the order of
making or, as they say, in that of “factivity.” From beginning to end,
art is bent upon making; this book says nothing else. The only question
is why its author went to the trouble of writing it. The reason
is found in the adverb used by Lucien Febvre, “assuredly,” for indeed
the immense majority of men considers it evident that art expresses and
communicates cognitions of some sort, either concerning the world of
nature or concerning the world of man. For, they feel, did it say
nothing, imitate nothing and express nothing, a work of art would at
least impart to us information about its author. That view is by now so
widespread that it has worked its way even into classrooms. About forty
years ago, in the state of Virginia, looking with admiration at the
good marks given a little schoolgirl by her teachers, my eye was caught
by a remark of the teacher of modeling: “Frances is a good child, it’s
a pity she cannot express herself in clay.” Frances was eight or nine
years old; she only lacked the gift so lavishly bestowed by nature upon
Michelangelo and Donatello. KNOWING VERSUS MAKING Although,
as I believe, this current interpretation of art is erroneous, I must
admit that it gives satisfaction to most people. Moreover, if it is a
mistake, it is a harmless one, at least in the sense that its
consequences in no way affect moral life. But mental disorder is
something bad in itself, so I felt a sort of urge to put my own ideas
in order, first of all for myself, but also for the benefit of those
others among my fellow men who may have an uneasy feeling on the
subject. It would not be fair to conceal the fact that this
book calls for the revision of a certain number of ideas. Even should
most people concede as immediately evident the proposition that art is
concerned with making, not with knowing, they would, nevertheless,
proceed to assess works of art in terms of knowledge and intellection,
as though the act of making them, that is to say, of causing them to
be, was irrelevant to the philosophy of art as well as to esthetics. Nobody
is ever wholly wrong. Moreover, it is impossible to describe a general
situation without running the risk of neglecting innumerable exceptions
or of overlooking shades of thought which it would be only fair to take
into account. Still, I do not think I am betraying the real intentions
of most of those who write about art, by saying that their chief
concern is to turn it into something that can be talked about. In order
to succeed, they have to interpret an act of production as if it were
an act of expression and of communication. A single example
will help to make this point clear. Everybody has heard of the famous
portrait of Whistler’s Mother. To most of those who look at it, or who
see one of its so-called “reproductions,” it is chiefly a
representation of what the mother of Whistler looked like at the time
he painted her portrait. This is what they call knowing what a painting
is about. Nobody concerned with art, however, will admit that
there is nothing more to a masterpiece than a good imitation of what it
represents. The first portfolio of the Seminars in Art series published
by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York begins, therefore, by
making this point quite clear. In painting that portrait, the chief
concern of Whistler was not “to paint a likeness of his mother but to
do something quite different.” What was it? According to John Canaday:
“Its real subject is a mood, a mood compounded of gentleness, dignity,
reflection, and resignation,” which the artist attempted to convey by a
certain choice and arrangement of shapes and colors. In short, Whistler
resorted to composition in order to convey that mood, and composition is the most important element contributing to “the expressive quality of a painting.” Now,
it would no doubt be a great improvement if people would see paintings
in that manner. Yet there is a still more decisive advance which they
refuse to make. For indeed, when the question is asked about the
correct title of that famous painting, the correct answer is that
Whistler himself insisted on calling it an Arrangement in Gray and Black.
The point is, why should an arrangement in any kind of colors and
values be interpreted as a composition expressing a mood? If we take
Whistler’s words at their face value, as indeed we should, the subject
of the painting is no more a mood, or the expression of a mood, than it
is a likeness or the production of a likeness. The primary subject of
the painting is to be an arrangement in gray and black; now an
arrangement is also an arranging, and that is what Whistler’s portrait
essentially is, namely, an arrangement of certain colors freely chosen
by the artist and resulting from a series of acts calculated to produce
it. In other words, to Whistler the painting was something he had made,
and his art had been the very making of it. It is noteworthy
that even an institution dedicated to communicating sound art
appreciation to the public should shy at what is, after all, simply a
matter of fact. Our whole teaching of the fine arts, where they are
taught, follows the same pattern. We confuse teaching art with teaching
art appreciation, as if it were possible to form even the most confused
notion of art without having at least attempted to practice one of the
arts. In the order of the fine arts, knowing is making. This does not
mean that the rest is unimportant—it may even be necessary—but it does
mean that what is not directly relevant to the making of a work is about art, not art itself. Such is the justification for stressing a truth so
self-evident that it may very well seem meaningless to repeat, but
which needs to be restated from time to time because it is continually
being forgotten. Even those who hold it to be true disregard it as soon
as they begin to discourse about the nature and meaning of art. The
problems they are interested in are those of Realism, Expressionism,
Abstraction, the Artist as a Social Critic, or as a Visionary, and many
similar ones. What most men are interested in is the work of the art
rather than the art that wrought it. SOPHISM OF MISPLACED COGNITION It
is hardly necessary to add that all those points of view on the fine
arts are legitimate. Many others could be added, such as the psychology
of artistic creation, the biography of the artist and even the history
of the fine arts which represents today such a large portion of the
book trade. I have not the slightest objection to them provided such
disciplines do not mistake themselves for what they are not. For the
philosopher, these various points of view constitute a dangerous
temptation, in that they make him forget the specificity of art as a
making activity and cause him to overlook its true nature. Others have
a good excuse for overlooking the creative nature of art, since in
itself art is a relation between the artist and his work, of which
outsiders know very little. Having little to say about it, they fall
back on that aspect of art which is an object of knowledge and provides
a fitting matter for talking and writing. But the philosopher has no
such excuse. As he deals with the principles of knowledge and of
reality, the fact that he can say but little about them (since they are
principles) does not authorize him to overlook them or to mistake them
for other notions. This is why it has seemed useful to recall the very
essence of art conceived in its true nature, that is to say, the art
that makes things (ars artefaciens) rather than the things which art makes (ars artefacta). In
addition to the criticism of “obviousness,” another reproach I
anticipate is that of anti-intellectualism, and indeed I fail to see
how it could be avoided. If art is not knowledge, but something
else, then all those who hold it to be a certain mode of cognition will
inevitably decry as anti-intellectual any philosophy of art that simply
describes art such as it is. Hence the recent protests raised against
“the fear of knowledge” in interpreting the nature of art. But there is
a confusion at the bottom of the controversy. One could perhaps
describe it as the “sophism of misplaced knowledge,” for which idealism
is but another name; for indeed idealism ultimately consists in saying
that everything is knowledge, even reality itself. Idealism is endemic
in the minds of philosophers for the simple reason that if reality is
our knowledge of it, then we have no need to learn what it is, for it
would be enough for the mind to know itself in order to know reality. From
the point of view of idealism, since knowledge is all, you cannot
pretend that something is not cognition without, by that very fact,
sinning against the mind. Such philosophers, and there are plenty of
them, resemble those aggressors who declare themselves attacked when
somebody invites them to leave the country they have invaded. PHILOSOPHY AND ART I
can think of no remedy for this situation. I only beg to observe that,
personally, I can find no anti-intellectualism in the proposition that
art is not cognition. On the contrary, if art is not cognition,
one sins against intelligence by pretending that art is something which
in fact it is not. The proper function of understanding is to know
things as they are. In order to refute the notion that art is not
essentially knowing, but making, one would first have to establish
that, by merely thinking a statue, a painting or a symphony,
corresponding works of art would actually exist in reality. Now,
precisely, that is true of cognition. To think of an idea, concept or
notion is enough to cause it to be. In the words of Saint Anselm, to
think of God is enough to make him exist in the mind, which is the
realm of knowledge. The question is, is it enough to cause God to exist
in the mind in order to cause Him to exist in reality? Leaving that
problem to theologians, we can at least observe that the idea of a
novel is not a novel, and that in order to cause a novel to exist, one
has to write it. Now to write is not to know; it is to produce
something which, once produced, will become an object of knowledge.
There can be no anti-intellectualism in refusing to ascribe to the
fecundity of the human intellect something which it is not in its
nature to achieve. To place each and every thing where it belongs by
virtue of its very essence is the proper function of the philosophical
mind. There is a grain of truth in every error. In this case,
it is true that without intelligence and knowledge, there is no art,
but the same applies to all that man knows, or does, or makes, and it
does not follow from that fact that for man to do or to make is the
same thing as to know. Nor does it follow even in cases when that which
has to be made is the expression of knowledge. A book of philosophy, or
of science, or of history needs to be made, even if books of that kind
have for their proper end the formulation of some knowledge and its
transmission from the mind of the author to the minds of other men. It
takes art to write a book, or a lecture, or a piece of effective
advertisement. In fact it takes art to do or to make anything as well
as it should be done or made. There is or should be art in every doing
and making, and where there is art, there certainly is knowledge,
intelligence and even invention. The precise point that I intend to
make is that, since their end is the making of beauty, the fine arts,
that is to say the arts of the beautiful, all and always appeal to
intelligence and to knowledge, not for their own sakes but for the sake
of beauty. A painting can represent any object, a poem can teach
philosophy as Lucretius’ On Nature, or agriculture as the Georgics of Virgil, or theology as Dante’s Divine Comedy.
The fact remains that every ingredient entering the composition of a
work of art, be it even truth, is there in the relation of matter to
form. In Lucretius as well as in Dante, philosophy is the handmaid of
beauty: philosophia ancilla artis. It is to be hoped
that this will not be taken to mean that, in itself, truth is the
handmaid of beauty. In itself, truth is nearer to being (which is the
first principle) than beauty is, but in art—and when the artist
remembers the proper end of his own activity qua artist—it is
necessary that truth and knowledge should become subservient to art as
matter is to form. The proportions according to which knowledge and
beauty should enter the structure of the work of art are the artist’s
business. Art history is eloquent witness to the inventiveness of men
in a domain which is the proper possession of the artist. As to the
consumer of beauty, he is perfectly free to give his preference to the
kind of art he likes, with this reservation, however—the more he
delights in art for the sake of information, documentation,
demonstration or contemplation, the less he is likely to enjoy beauty
for its own sake. If there is in this world a single man knowing all
that is useful to know in order to fully understand the historical,
philosophical and theological meaning of the Divine Comedy,
that man is highly privileged indeed, but it is not impossible to
imagine a man possessed of that thorough knowledge of the meaning of
the poem and yet incapable of experiencing it as the thing of beauty it
essentially is. The perfect artist is not he who puts the highest art
at the service of the highest truth, but he who puts the highest truth
at the service of the most perfect art. It simply follows from this
that art is not the highest of the activities of man. Still it is one
of them, and no other can take its place. If art is the making of
beauty for beauty’s own sake, there is no imaginable substitute for it.
