The Lessons of Art

[A]rt always aims at what is individual. What the artist fixes on his canvas is something he has seen at a certain spot, on a certain day, at a certain hour, with a colouring that will never be seen again. What the poet sings of is a certain mood which was his, and his alone, and which will never return. What the dramatist unfolds before us is the life-history of a soul, a living tissue of feelings and events — something, in short, which has once happened and can never be repeated. We may, indeed, give general names to these feelings, but they cannot be the same thing in another soul. They are individualized (49b).

If the pragmatic is all there is, then the individual is always relative to utility, a function of the general. But there is a subject-matter that is traditionally considered as standing beyond the useful, and this is art. The classicist claim of the autonomy of art is exactly its refusal to be useful — ornamental or entertaining alike. Bergson stands in this line of tradition, following one of his predecessors, Maine de Biran, who also considered art as a means to break habitual ways of seeing (in the 20th century, this view was reaffirmed by Russian Formalists and later on by Adorno). Most importantly though, Bergson understands this as an authentic way of perception, where the “veil” of the pragmatic is pierced. Actually every sunrise is unique and he is a great artist, who is able to capture it in its nuanced way. The artist who probably illustrates this idea the best, is Cézanne, whose repeated depictions of the landscapes of Aix-en-Provence deal with exactly this struggle, namely of capturing the unique way the landscape presents itself at the moment of depiction. To do so, the artist needs to detach himself from the urgencies and necessities of life — in contrast, for example, to someone who’s witnessing a sunrise while driving a car — and hence manages to relativize the seemingly absolute utility, which now itself becomes a function — namely a function of Life.

Individuation Beyond Utility

Mostly, however, we perceive nothing but the outward display of our mental state. We catch only the impersonal aspect of our feelings, that aspect which speech has set down once for all because it is almost the same, in the same conditions, for all men. Thus, even in our own individual, individuality escapes our ken (47b).

While instincts are great at preserving us from wild animals and simplifying our day-to-day life, they are not only hindering us from seeing the others, the things, and the world ‘as they are’ but they also hinder us from seeing ourselves. A baby learns that its stomach ache is not a harmful pain, but hunger and learns to communicate it accordingly. It learns to generalize said feeling as to be part of a communicative community. At the same time, though, the baby detaches itself from its own internal condition and from now on only recognizes it as the general state of hunger. And indeed, we grown-ups can (usually) differentiate the feeling of hunger from stomach ache easily, and don’t even perceive it as the latter anymore. The more something becomes useful, the more it becomes depersonalized. We can clearly see that it is a trade-off, where the useful is inversely proportional to the personal; a total communicability of our self seems to amount to its total loss. So is the answer to individualization to become ‘secretive’ and ‘taciturn’ (here, we can witness an interesting point of contact with Kierkegaard, for whom the aesthetic and the demonic consist in the incommunicability by choice, instead of by necessity, as it is for the religious paradox)?

Nothing could be more unique than the character of Hamlet. Though he may resemble other men in some respects, it is clearly not on that account that he interests us most. But he is universally accepted and regarded as a living character. In this sense only is he universally true. The same holds good of all the other products of art. Each of them is unique, and yet, if it bears the stamp of genius, it will come to be accepted by everybody. Why will it be accepted? And if it is unique of its kind, by what sign do we know it to be genuine? Evidently, by the very effort [!] it forces us to make against our predispositions in order to see sincerely. Sincerity is contagious. What the artist has seen we shall probably never see again, or at least never see in exactly the same way; but if he has actually seen it, the attempt he has made to lift the veil compels our imitation. His work is an example which we take as a lesson. And the efficacy of the lesson is the exact standard of the genuineness of the work. Consequently, truth bears within itself a power of conviction, nay, of conversion, which is the sign that enables us to recognise it (50a).

Hamlet, as Bergson says, is both unique and true. Or, more precisely, Hamlet is true because he is unique. Without explicitly stating so, he is breaking away from the philosophical tradition that claims otherwise, namely that truth is that which can be formulated in general terms and reconstructed by argument. An argument convinces by consistency, but Hamlet converts by sincerity — and this is not an aesthetic insight, as it is the sincerity of any subject that makes it become truthful. But sincerity is attained by individuation, while individuation is only possible through sincerity. For the artist, it means that only a canvas that sincerely portrays — or at least tries to portray — the unique colours and forms of a particular instance can become a real artwork; for the individual it means that only by being sincere towards itself and towards others, it can really become a real individual. But as sincerity is here inherently connected with authenticity, it also needs to break away from the “veil” of utility that blurs its relation towards the other and towards itself. It means loving the other for what he is and loving oneself for what one is, just as the painter “loves colour for colour and form for form, since he perceives them for their sake and not for his own” (48a).