Art is not something beautiful or pleasurable, for Tolstoy, as we saw. Art may incidentally be beautiful or incite pleasure, but beauty and pleasurability are not art’s essential qualities; they do not comprise art’s definition. For Tolstoy, what does definitively identify art as art is the unifying effect it has on people:
Every work of art results in the one who receives it entering into a certain kind of communion with the one who produced or is producing the art, and with all those who, simultaneously with him, before him, or after him, have received or will receive the same artistic impression.
Yes, it does seem right that’s what we require from art — a connection with others, understanding and the sense that you have been recognized and understood. But the next passage unwittingly brings in, I think, some complications:
As the word which conveys men’s thoughts and experiences serves to unite people, so art serves in exactly the same way. The peculiarity of this means of communion, which distinguishes it from communion by means of the word, is that through the word a man conveys his thoughts to another, while through art people convey their feelings to each other.
Why should we assume that language essentially communicates people’s thoughts and experiences? It seems just as plausible that, despite the best intentions, language also miscommunicates, misses the mark, leaves things out, thinks it’s being effective and then falls flat. On a basic level, language exists for us to be able to work together and survive. Just as beauty and pleasure aren’t essential qualities in art, why should we assume that successful communication is an essential quality of language? It seems more accurate to say that the intention to communicate is essential to language. But we need only look to everyday life to see that language often miscommunicates or is misunderstood. And in the most quotidian sense, language isn’t used to communicate our thoughts and experiences, but our practical opinions about how to conduct our eating, drinking, sleeping, etc. (“I don’t want a veggie burger. Please make pasta.”) In a sense, we aren’t all that far from the cave. We just pay rent.
So, when a work of art consists of language, what distinguishes the art-language from regular language of newspapers, grocery lists, emails, Instagram captions, etc.? Why should the former necessarily convey and even recreate feelings in the reader? And why feelings specifically? Why shouldn’t art also convey thoughts and experiences in a deeper sense than language regularly does? Perhaps Tolstoy didn’t mean to delineate a dichotomy between the recreation of feelings on the one hand and the communication of thoughts and experiences on the other. But that he leaves this territory uncharted means that there is room in the darkness for these questions.
In my last post, I wrote about Tolstoy’s disenchantment with the proliferation of art that fails to recreate feelings in the person encountering the art. If art’s power is to overcome the borders between people, then art that devolves to effect, sentimentality, the deliberately strange and obscure, seems to surrender to an assumed and essential unknowability that lies in that interior region we might have once called our souls (and which we now call our minds or our inner states). This art (which for Tolstoy includes the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme), it’s true, doesn’t seem to seek communion with the reader, but to impress, surprise, render the world in strange new ways. So what it offers the reader is not a communion but an invitation to imagining the quotidian world differently. To have the communion after which Tolstoy strives is to assume that people are all similar enough to be able to know what will spark the same feelings in the readers as the ones that existed in the writers. Perhaps, art that seeks something other than communion, or that gives up on the communion Tolstoy seeks, presumes that people are essentially unknowable; all that can be sought is effect.
There’s a problem in philosophy known as Other Mind Skepticism. This form of skepticism arises from the realization that people can never have direct experience of each other’s inner states. (At least, I think that’s what it means. How can I be sure that your understanding of those words I used to describe the problem of Other Mind Skepticism are registered in your mind in the way I mean them? How can I know if I have the correct understanding of those words? … You get the picture.)
Can a person hold the belief that knowledge of another person is never immune to skepticism while also holding the belief that the quality of art that makes art art is that sense of communion? This is what I think I believe, but I have not yet been able to justify it, nor have I been able to explain how this can be the case and what it means for knowledge and art.
Stanley Cavell suggests that poetry has the capacity to cure us of such skeptical worries. In “Knowing and Acknowledging” he writes:
There is a natural problem of making such experiences known … because one hasn’t forms of words at one’s command to release those feelings, and hasn’t anyone else whose interest in helping to find the words one trusts. (Someone would have to have these feelings to know what I feel.) Here is a source of our gratitude to poetry.
What is it about poetry that breaks through our borders and makes communion possible? Why should poetry soothe the skepticism in us? What about poetry gives us either the impression of certainty or the sense that the search for certainty isn’t actually important? Why should we have the impression that other modes of speech fall short? Haven’t we all had the experience of encountering poetry that falls short of communicating anything at all?
Yet, if you’re here reading this, you’ve probably come to poetry because of an initial encounter that made clear its power. (For me, it was Poe at age 8, specifically: “And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain / Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before.”) If poetry does have such potency to counter Other Mind Skepticism, what kind of remedy is it: a momentary treatment for an otherwise natural condition of alienation, one that’s essential to being human, or does it point to a cure?
Cavell will say that such skepticism is not essential to our human condition but a way of inhabiting our condition. If that’s the case, what is it about poetry that delivers us from this tendency? Why should we be grateful to poetry?
For now, perhaps, it’s enough to pose the question. I’ll be working on formulating a possible answer.