Commentary on Tolstoy's What is Art? (chapters 1-4) 

Tolstoy’s What is Art?

    Ever since I can remember, art has been an important part of my life, from the tales of the Brothers Grimm and Andersen to songs to movies that deeply moved me and were partially prägend – forming me as copper is formed into a penny. At college I learned to read many “great” works and to love them: from Homer to Sophocles to Plato, Dante, and Shakespeare. Although I studied philosophy, I have come to believe that the deepest truths are communicated through art, which when it does what it ought is in touch with the inner life; and that philosophy at its best depends on this deeper dimension of the inner life.

    One of the artists whose works I learned to love was Leo Tolstoy. Not, I confess, War and Peace. It held my interest well enough for a few hundred pages but I just couldn’t finish it. But I did read, and later re-read, Anna Karinina, pitied Anna and was involved in Levin’s spiritual development. I read the late novel Resurrection, found it did speak to me, but not enough to re-read it, and now I have a hard time remembering it. This is probably due to my limits as a reader than the merits of the books. I did learn to love the shorter fiction: The Death of Ivan Ilych, Father Sergius, Master and Man, Strider, and Hadji Murat – and many of his folk tales. His contempt for sex in stories like A Kreutzer Sonata and Family Happiness is, well, interesting but too dark for me.  He was a damned Puritan, no doubt, believing that sex inherently cannot be transformed by love or, conversely, that love requires celibacy or at least seeing sex an unpleasant duty necessary to people the world. But his Confession, What I Believe, and his (somewhat idiosyncratic) translation of parts of the New Testament are of permanent religious value for seekers like myself.

       His What is Art? is also of permanent value, in spite of his streak of contrariness and his rather dry summary of aesthetics in chapter 3. I want to try to say why.

       I think the way he frames the central question is right on: What is art good for? What is its deepest purpose? The view he thinks is wrong is this: the purpose of art is to give us pleasure. The tradition had disguised this as beauty – the purpose of art is to make that which is beautiful. He rejects the classical French view that there are objective (formal) standards of beauty, finding the source of the emphasis on beauty in the subjective though disinterested pleasure it gives more worthy of criticism. According to the English sentimentalists, to experience x as beautiful is just to experience a certain kind of pleasure. And for this very reason He argues that pleasure – entertainment in modern terms –  cannot be the intrinsic end or natural fulfillment of art. For Tolstoy that reduction cannot make sense of why art is important. First, beauty (pleasure, entertainment) is subjective. The qualities required to understand art’s important are objective, matters of truth, not taste. Tolstoy used a homegrown analogy with food. An account that focused only on what tasted good to particular people would be of no use in telling us what was essential: whether the food was healthy. A diet filled with sugar and ultra-processed foods might taste good to the people who have been brought up on it, but the question is whether it is nourishing to the body. What makes food good, i.e. nourishing as well as tasty: that is the question. Analogously, the question of art concerns its role in human life, how it works for good (health) or evil (loss of health) of the human person as a whole. That some art is analogous to fast food seems too obvious to belabor. A steady diet of art that does not nourish but to some degree has a corrupting influence on the soul; and other art does provide important, perhaps essential nourishment to the soul is a fundamental distinction for Tolstoy as it was for Plato.

      Every kind of art involves communication of a special kind and thus a relationship between makers and users of art, or as Tolstoy put it: “Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression.” Not communication in the sense that I tell my son I am going out for a walk. Not all communication is art. But all art is communication. The essential feature of the communication that is art is that I express feelings (experiences, meanings) that another can somehow come to share them. If one person laughs, others will laugh: the laughter is infectious. If my one cries, I am full of compassion and concern: again the feelings are somehow infectious (that is Tolstoy’s metaphor). This phenomenon for Tolstoy is the root of art.

     Art goes beyond these spontaneous bodily gestures (laughing, crying) and makes conscious signs – words, pictures, musical notes – to produce the feelings (meanings, experiences) and the possibility of sharing them. Art is the conscious making of works that evoke the infectious sharing of feelings – Tolstoy sticks to feelings; I would add meanings, experiences, understandings, thoughts, insights. Tolstoy himself made Anna Karenina such that her fate evoked compassion and a judgment against the false society that was as a prison to her, for example. We feel what Ivan Ilych feels when he realizes that his whole life had been devoted to apparent goods that were not really good at all. Art transforms subjective states of mind into conscious, intersubjectively experienceable emotions, feelings, judgments, or insights.

      Tolstoy sees art primarily rooted in everyday life:

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theatres, concerts, and exhibitions; together with buildings, statues, poems, novels.... But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind—from cradle-song, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

So following Tolstoy, imagine two boys encounter a wolf in the woods and were terrified. The first arrives and, obviously upset, not very coherently, informs others of the encounter with the wolf. The second boy arrives and not only confirms the encounter but makes his experience of it come to life by means of the story he tells. And the others by means of the story come to share in his experience, an experience they themselves did not have. He didn’t just tell people what happened – the first boy did that. He re-created the experience for others. Here is a primitive, everyday experience of art. The genuine artist can re-create events we have never experienced at all. Thus Tolstoy understands art:

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself then, by means of movements, lines, colours, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.

Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them (Emphasis Tolstoy). Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious Idea of beauty, or God; it is not, as the æsthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man’s emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress towards well-being of individuals and of humanity (emphasis mine).

 

(Tolstoy cannot fully share Plato’s view but is sympathetic to it and prefers it to modern conceptions precisely because Plato at least realized that art is a serious matter.)

     Art is not purely instrumental. While we are listening to a story we are interested in the story itself, not what usefulness it has to us. Nevertheless Tolstoy maintains art has an essential role to play in our humanity. Well, good art anyway. How does he distinguish good from bad art? Well, it is not strictly true that all art unites everyone. Some art – propaganda films, for example – incite hatred based on the demeaning of others. If art is to accomplish its role for good, it must be judged not only in aesthetic but moral terms. A propaganda film, even if as well-done as one of Leni Riefenstahl’s – is bad art because it does not unify but divide men. Good art generates harmony and well-being, compassion and understanding. To quote from Iris Murdoch, who was influenced by Tolstoy:

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. 

To portray people, even wretches like Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov (of Dostoevsky’s Brother Karamazov) or the shallow Count Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin in a way that includes them in our pity is to see them in the light of love. This I believe was a feature of good art for Tolstoy; its absence a mark of bad art.

      Art is so important because it allows us to imagine the inner lives of other people, making them as real to us are we are to ourselves: a foundation of the experience of a common humanity. Good art educates our feelings, allowing us to see others in the light of love and compassion. Through art our minds and hearts somehow include the experience of people from different times and places, and are thus enriched. It is perhaps the antidote to Grimm’s fairy tales, which I also love and which I believe children need. But there to learn good from evil, hope from despair, we find pure archetypical expressions of innocence or wickedness in human beings and supernatural beings. If this were taken out of Fairy and imported into the human world, we get the kind of bad art that reduces human beings to essentially good or wicked. We need to learn to see even the wicked and shallow as “one of us.” Without thusly educated emotions, barbarism threatens, as Tolstoy explicitly writes:

As, thanks to man’s capacity to express thoughts by words, every man may know all that has been done for him in the realms of thought by all humanity before his day, and can, in the present, thanks to this capacity to understand the thoughts of others, become a sharer in their activity, and can himself hand on to his contemporaries and descendants the thoughts he has assimilated from others, as well as those which have arisen within himself; so, thanks to man’s capacity to be infected with the feelings of others by means of art, all that is being lived through by his contemporaries is accessible to him, as well as the feelings experienced by men thousands of years ago, and he has also the possibility of transmitting his own feelings to others.

If people lacked this capacity to receive the thoughts conceived by the men who preceded them, and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts, or like Kaspar Hauser.

And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people might be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from, and more hostile to, one another.

And therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself, and as generally diffused.