Responding to Tolstoy's "What Is Art?": A Critical Essay
This paper offers a critical response to Leo Tolstoy's aesthetic treatise What Is Art?, challenging Tolstoy's claim that genuine art must be grounded in religious and moral values. The author agrees that art and religion can share a sense of transcendent reality, but argues that restricting art to moral purposes limits its expressive potential. Drawing on Viktor Shklovsky's concept of defamiliarization, John Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and postmodern critiques of representation, the paper contends that art's highest function is to reveal truth through imagination — including through confusion, ugliness, and moral ambiguity — and that any definition of art must account for the full range of human experience.
- Introduction: Engaging Tolstoy's Aesthetic Theory: Overview of Tolstoy's thesis in What Is Art?
- Art, Religion, and Transcendence: Partial agreement on art and religion sharing transcendence
- The Aesthetics of the New: Modernism and the Ugly: Modernism expands aesthetics beyond moral beauty
- Art as a Mirror of Human Experience: Art's subject matter versus its ultimate purpose
- Defamiliarization, Freedom, and Postmodern Representation: Shklovsky and postmodern challenges to representational art
- Imagination as the Foundation of Art: Dewey on imagination as essential to conscious experience
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper adopts a clear dialogic structure, directly addressing Tolstoy as an interlocutor, which sharpens the argumentative focus and makes the stakes of each claim immediately legible.
- It concedes partial agreement with Tolstoy before pivoting to disagreement, demonstrating nuanced critical engagement rather than wholesale rejection.
- The author supports each counterargument with a distinct theoretical source — Shklovsky, Dewey, and postmodern epistemology — giving the paper intellectual breadth within a compact format.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates the technique of concessive argumentation: acknowledging the strongest elements of an opposing position before systematically dismantling its limits. By first affirming that art and religion can both gesture toward transcendence, the author earns credibility before arguing that Tolstoy's moral-religious criterion is too narrow to account for modernism, defamiliarization, or the role of imagination in conscious experience.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by summarizing Tolstoy's central thesis, then moves through a series of increasingly broad counterarguments: from the specific case of modernist aesthetics, to the general claim that human experience exceeds moral categories, to the philosophical point that imagination is essential to all conscious perception. It closes by invoking postmodern theory to argue that even the denial of representational meaning is itself meaningful. Each section builds on the previous, culminating in a defense of art as an unconstrained, imaginative faculty.
Introduction: Engaging Tolstoy's Aesthetic Theory
Having recently come across your celebrated work entitled What Is Art?, I find that the ideas about art expressed there do not offer a complete understanding of what art is or what it should be. As you yourself observe, this is a very controversial question, one that has been tackled by the best and most renowned philosophers and artists. According to you, art is neither the manifestation of an abstract and absolute idea — such as beauty, spirit, or God — nor simply something created to give pleasure, as most thinkers and philosophers had previously maintained. Instead, art should be something intimately connected with the religions of every age and every people, and with the moral values those religions hold to be true.
Art, Religion, and Transcendence
Your argument holds insofar as both religion and art can share common views about life — for instance, the intimation that there is something beyond immediate material reality, something of a divine or absolute nature. Both art and religion can reveal a different, transcendent reality. However, it cannot be agreed that good art must strictly follow religious and moral values. Art is such a vast territory that modernism has been able to introduce new aesthetic values — values mentioned in your own work — through the poetry of Baudelaire and Mallarmé, or through the music of Wagner. These new aesthetic values propose that art does not necessarily have to originate in conventional notions of beauty, and that there can exist an aesthetics of the ugly.
The Aesthetics of the New: Modernism and the Ugly
According to you, these new ideas about art are the product of the wealthy class — a class that is bored and no longer believes in the moral values proposed by religion. You argue against a new art that prefers nonsense to sense and confusion to meaning, because good art should do exactly the contrary: offer a revelatory experience and an understanding of some fact or aspect of life.
Yet the very discovery that new art has made in the realm of aesthetics consists precisely of this — namely, that artistic meaning can be transmitted by means of confusion, and that there can be beauty in the ugly. Modernism demonstrated that disruption of conventional form is not a failure of art but a deliberate and meaningful aesthetic strategy.
Works Cited
Hofstader, Albert. Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.
Sukla, Ananta Ch. Art and Representation: Contributions to Contemporary Aesthetics. Praeger, 2001.
Tolstoy, Leo. What Is Art? Indiana: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1980.
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