Leo Tolstoy to Leon Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

To Leon Tolstoy recently happened to come across your celebrated work entitled What is Art?, and I think that the ideas about art as expressed there do not offer a complete understanding of what art is or what it should be. Sure enough, as you yourself observe, this a very controversial question, that has been tackled by all of the best and most renowned philosophers or artists. According to you, art is neither the manifestation of an abstract and absolute idea such as beauty, or the spirit, or God, nor simply something created to give pleasure, as it was generally purported by most of the thinkers and philosophers so far. Instead it should be something intimately connected with the religions of every age and of every people, and the moral values these hold to be true.

Your argument is true insofar as both religion and art can share some common views about life, such as the intimation that there is something beyond immediate material reality, something that has a divine absolute nature. Both art and religion can reveal a different, absolute reality. But it cannot be agreed that good art should strictly follow religious and moral values. Art is such a vast territory that modernism has been able to add new esthetic values, such that are also mentioned in your work, through the poetry of Bauldelaire or Mallarme, or through the music of Wagner. These new esthetic values propose that art does not necessarily have to originate in such sources as the conventional idea of beauty, and that there can exist an aesthetics of the ugly.

According to you, these new ideas about art are the production of the rich class of society, a class that is bored and that does not believe in the moral values proposed by religion anymore. You argue against the new art that prefers non-sense to sense and confusion to meaning, because good art should do exactly the contrary, that is, offer a revelatory experience and an understanding of a certain fact or aspect of life.

But the discovery that the new art has made in the realm of aesthetics consists precisely of this, namely of the fact that art meaning can be transmitted by means of confusion, and, in the same way, that there can be beauty in the ugly.

As you say it yourself, art can serve to unite people and to realize that brotherhood of man, just like religion, through its ideas of goodness and morality. But it is likewise obvious that good art can give an account of the varied human experience and if it speaks, as you say, of nudity, sexuality or adultery, it does nothing more than to relate about human passions or emotions. I think the subject of a certain piece of art should not be confused with its final purpose. And it is to be noticed that a piece of literature, for example, which is replete with "immoral" ideas can produce the same state of elevation of the soul, just like the one that praises moral or Christian virtue. I think the most important fact is that art can reveal the truth and it does this by means of an aesthetic revelation, no matter its particular nature.

Art cannot be limited to express the moral religious values, since it can tell much more about the world we live in and about transcendental reality. It is one of the best means to speak about human experience in the world, so it should not be limited to expressing moral values, that can not afford a complete understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Reality is so vast that only an art which would be freed of limitations can comprehend it in its fullness. Victor Shklovsky of the Russian formalist school sustained that art can make those things which were familiar into unfamiliar ones, by the manner in which they are expressed. So art is not necessarily a means of throwing light upon reality, but even a means that will intentionally make things more obscure to our perceptions, so that we might understand the truth beyond the immediate reality. Truth may very well reside therefore in the confusion or the unfamiliarity of perception that modern art puts forth.

Also, it is obvious that art should be first of all free, and not submitted to rules that will constrain its form and content, and that will make it express not the truth but something that "should be." I think that the ideas about art that you express are about what good art should be like, but this is exactly what will drive us farther away from an understanding and a definition of art, because we should search for its essence in its sources and in the things that make artistic creation possible.

In postmodern theories art has lost even its representational value, so much as it is not even supposed to represent reality, or to express something coherent:

One philosophical legacy that has proved especially vulnerable to postmodern skepticism is the representational model of knowledge, the view that true beliefs represent or correspond to reality. Once metaphysical essences and epistemological certainties are discredited, reality no longer offers foundational security. In its place, a variety of alternative views have become influential, including coherence and pragmatic theories of truth, social constructivist theories of reality, conventional theories of meaning, and cultural relativist theories of rationality. What unites each of these alternatives is the assumption that there is no uniquely proper foundation for knowledge and meaning to represent. Rather, knowledge and meaning can only be given contextually rational, pragmatically useful, and epistemically fallible justifications. When so emptied of ontological and epistemic privileges the representational notions of knowledge and meaning strike many as obsolete. " (Suckla, 113)

The denial of meanings and content has itself a meaning in contemporary art, that of pointing to the relativity of what has been so far accepted without questioning. Finding meanings in reality is actually the main task that art has, and thus it can not be considered as something useless because unintelligible.