I just had the pleasure of sitting through another of Wes Anderson’s films, Moonrise Kingdom. As is the case with all art, I believe it is best to merely recommend that others seek it out for themselves if they should be so inclined; it is certainly worth a viewing (or perhaps a few), but it is impossible to say precisely why. When the credits began to roll, I was put into something of a theoretical mood as my general sense was that I had not gained anything from the movie—there is no purpose, no core message, no knowledge won—and yet I am beyond content to have spent the ninety minutes engaged with it. Why would that be?
I was put in mind of two works of a philosophic nature that I have previously discussed on the blog: Plato’s Phaedo and Michael Oakeshott’s “The voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind.” Both deal with stories, in one manner or another; the former in the sense of myth and the latter in a sense of poetry. I believe, however, that both could be understood as dealing with art as a whole or something we may be inclined to call ‘an aesthetic mode.’ It is something I believe to be worth discussing as it is, in my view, one of the sweet joys to be found in life yet one which we are often lacking.
It is often thought that Plato is against art in some manner, that he sees artists as dangerous in our search for the Good; this is something of a half-truth in my reading. In The Republic, Plato expresses concern that in the city-state run by a philosopher who possesses complete knowledge, the artists will only disseminate confusion or partial truths that are not conducive to the Good life as the philosopher has been able to determine. Thus, in the state run by the perfect philosopher-king, art is nothing but a danger to men. Now, the problem is that the philosopher king is nowhere to be found, and it seems to me that Plato was well aware of this. It should also be noted that there are several other Platonic dialogues where Plato’s character of Socrates uses elaborate myths and artistic images to make his points (see his Phaedrus for the most elegant example of this).
In his Phaedo particularly, Plato’s Socrates is seen writing poetry of his own and reordering poetry from other famous poets—poetry being a task that he neglected for nearly his entire life but was drawn to shortly before he died because he had a dream which instructed him to pursue poetry. The poetry he writes himself is in dedication of Apollo who is likely invoked as a symbol of Truth, a common trope within Greek mythology; the poetry he was reordering from other poets, however, was of various topics. I understand this to mean that, even though Socrates is writing poetry, he is still aiming toward notions of Truth and Goodness. His own poetry is specifically aimed at Truth and Goodness, and he feels that he must reorder or reconstruct the work of other writers so that they may be directed toward Truth and Goodness as well (assuming they are not presently doing so). We may then ask a question: what is the categorical difference between what he is writing in his own poetry as opposed to work of other writers such as Aesop?
I believe Oakeshott offers us an answer to this in his essay on aesthetics. Oakeshott refers to the aesthetic sensibility as the “poetic voice,” as opposed to the other voices present in humanity’s conversation of life such as “science,” “history,” “practice,” and “philosophy.” I wish to briefly review these other voices to contrast with the poetic voice so as to better elucidate what is unique about art in Oakeshott’s view. I will make these points in haste, and you would be well to read Oakeshott’s work for yourself, but this will have to suffice for now.
Oakeshott conceptualizes all forms of human activity as kinds of engagement; there is always a self, being the thing that is engaging, and images, being the things with which the agent engages. It should be clear that there is no clear distinction between self and images; they are mutually definitive and dependent, however conceptualizing this distinction is of utility for our understanding of the various forms of engagement. The engagements themselves indeed redefine both the self and images, which is crucial to understanding Oakeshott’s position.
The main engagement, in Oakeshott’s view, is the voice of practice. This is a voice that is properly concerned with moral considerations; it is based upon what the self needs and desires while also acknowledging that there are other selves engaged in a similar activity. Morality is the development that emerges from these various selves procuring their necessary ends in conjunction with one another; rules of engagement will emerge that we may think of as ‘moral facts,’ and this is fundamentally the realm of ‘good and evil.’ It is within this engagement that humans gain the necessities of life, through constant work and negotiation; it is, by its nature, however, a perpetual engagement that can never be entirely satisfied. There will always be another need for us creatures to fulfill, another conflict to overcome, another desire that will need to be discussed. In Oakeshott’s view, this leads to a splitting into two poles that may allow for an escape from the practical voice; two ways of leaving the moral life and its constant demands to the side for just a moment.
This first pole consists of engagements such as history and science. The purpose of these endeavours is to attempt to limit ourselves to something akin to “neutral” observers; this allows for the world of image we inhabit to become a less complex of set of images which we call ‘facts,’ though not moral facts such as those of practical activity. There is no question that this is a difficult if not impossible engagement, but it is worth pursuing as a way to stabilize the world of images in some limited way. To perform this, however, the method of engagement itself needs to negate the subject of the self so that the images produced ought to be consistent for anyone properly engaged in the scientific or historical activity. We need only think of the scientific method to understand this: there is a set of regulations and guidelines inherent in the activity of scientific study that are necessary in order to produce scientific ‘facts.’ The engagements and its fruits are mutually productive; we gain scientific knowledge through scientific activity and scientific activity is understood by its produced knowledge (the same going for history). Now, this is not to say that there cannot be revisions, corrections, or flat out erasure of what has been ‘discovered’ before, but this is an ideal understanding of the engagement. In short, the first form of escape from practical activity is the negation of the self in order to create a limited but more stable world of images.
If this first pole is the negation of self for a stable world of images, the second pole is just the opposite. This is Oakeshott’s poetic voice. The world of images is left in a deeply unstable condition and it is instead the self that is focused upon. No image is isolated upon in the manner of scientific or historical activity; the mediation of selves present in moral activity is abated for just a moment. In poetic experience, we merely contemplate the unstable world of images in a dream-like fashion; “poetry is a sort of truancy, a dream within the dream of life.” The poetic voice is merely the engagement of a single self in the world of images collecting them like a bouquet of flowers, not in accord with some moral dictates or prescribed method, but as seems fit to the self engaged in the poetic activity itself.
The poetic voice is sought for its own sake. It is a delightful reprieve from the world of morals, allowing a self to simply enjoy its own being for a brief moment. There is no right and wrong, no true or false, there is merely the qualification that the engagement be worth contemplating for its own sake and invoking some form of delight in the self embedded in the activity. This is perhaps the mark of good art; good not in the sense of good and evil, but in the sense of achieving art’s end of being something contemplated for the sake of its delightfulness. Perhaps Wes Anderson’s work is just one good example. Moonrise Kingdom may provoke in some a consideration of the whimsical nature of childhood, or perhaps the delight of one’s first confrontation with true love, or perhaps the difficulty experienced by a parent in trying to understand a child who does not yet even understand herself. No one interpretation is correct, but the beauty of the art emerges in the way it captures how we experience the world as subjects and distills it into something we can delight in together.
In the hustle and bustle of our present condition, it is important that we allow for the poetic voice to present itself in our own lives, that we engage in activity which tells us, ‘I know you are here, and your delight in this moment is its own justification.’ The poetic voice, an aesthetic mode, a need for art is born out a desire to understand oneself in a genuine engagement with the world as it presents itself, but not in a way in which we may define the world but rather define ourselves. We will, of course, need to collapse back into the voice of practical activity, but we should aim to hold onto those moments for as long as we possibly can. In a world which constantly defines us through ‘psychological study,’ government direction aiming for more productivity, or great social upheavals that make the apocalypse seem just over the horizon, it is important that we have these brief enchantments of self-exploration.
“Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paw,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet’st,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime—
Oh carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow
Nor draw lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.”
-William Shakespeare, Sonnet XIX
Hoping for Clarity 