Art as Ethics

This essay was written in 1953.

Ethics is about, or concerns, the best way an individual may have of seeing himself and all that is besides himself and with himself. Ethics occurs when in some situation a person gives entire justice to himself by giving entire justice to something he meets. Since art results from justice to an individual and an object at the same time, art is ethics.

It is inevitable that persons try to be just to what is themselves and what seems not to be themselves. If we are not just to ourselves, we are angry; if we are not just to other things, we are ashamed. It is only, then, by being just to ourselves as we are just to what we have met, or what we are thinking of, that we can be pleased.

The Purpose of Titian

The purpose of Titian was to be just to certain phenomena he met in sixteenth-century Venice. He, as artist, felt he could be just to these phenomena or objects by seeing them as well and as richly as he could; and by putting what he saw down as well and as richly as he could. That was ethics in sixteenth-century Venice; it was also art in sixteenth-century Venice. And certainly, while Titian was being abundantly and subtly just to draperies, women, skies, dogs, light in the Venice of once, he was also being just to himself: being just to an individual in time we call Titian. It is this being accurate and fair to things seen and the person who saw and expressed and showed, that makes Titian’s works ethical and artistic happenings at once. Where Titian did not see all that he could see, where he did not evoke from himself all that he could evoke, there was both ethical and artistic incompleteness. However, since Titian is notable in art, we must also see him as notable in ethics: artistically and ethically praiseworthy and enjoyable.

A Beautiful State of Mind

A beautiful work arises out of a beautiful state of mind; and a beautiful state of mind is a good state of mind, for a beautiful state of mind is just to truth. When we think of a person thinking to himself, however unconsciously, and we can see that person right as to his very self, and right as to the objects he is thinking about, we can say that person is thinking beautifully. He is also thinking well; and since he is being just to external things, there is truth in his thought, too.

Both the creation of art and the appreciation or criticism of it, are strict ethics, uncorrupted, undiluted ethics, where this creation, appreciation or criticism begin. The artist is impelled to see something in a new, but just way. He abandons his acquisitive, protective, grudging self to see reality more courageously, generously, fully than usual. Art is an original way of doing justice to things. The artist then wants to see sincerely, as something deserves. He wants to get down what he sees; what has been called his “vision.” It is then that his “artistic conscience,” as it has been termed, comes into play. After having been, it can be assumed, just to the thing seen, he now must be just to how he saw. So, if there is perceptive due given to the subject, and due given to the subject as it comes to exist in one’s individual mind, ethics is carried on, as the artistic process continues.

In seeing a painting, a person likewise has the obligation to see the painting as it is, and to see what happens to him as it truly happens. A critic is one more disposed and more able to see what a painting truly has, and more disposed and more able to see what occurs in his mind. The best critic is one who is just most “brilliantly,” that is, most radiantly, luminously. As the purpose of the artist is to do splendid justice to visual facts, the purpose of the critic is to do splendid justice to the painter’s work.

When it is said of someone that he has the “painter’s eye,” this means that with this eye more justice is done to reality as sight. Technique is a way of continuing to give what reality deserves.

The Artist Goes Deeper

An old idea of a good man is one who “gave every man his due.” The Village Blacksmith, or Jonathan Strong of Biddeford, Maine, 1840, was a good man because he could “look every man in the eye” since he had been “just to every man.” The way Jonathan Strong was in the field of social or business life, is the way an artist is in relation to reality, in relation to permanent, underlying reality, older than the reality of appointments kept, neighbors not slandered, bills paid. The artist goes deeper than Jonathan Strong: does not contradict him; just as the eternal continues the daily or yearly: does not contradict it. The artist feels he owes something to things as such. He can look at reality fearlessly because he has been just to it, and wants to be.

Indeed, whenever any reality is in our minds in a way that does not skimp it, distort it, make it burdensome; and in a way that brings out the true particularity of the mind itself, something like art is taking place. Anything which lessens or hurts an individual is bad; anything making the world less meaningful than it is, is bad; anything which makes an individual more of what he wants to be and honors the truth of the world, is good; and in conscious form, is art. The appreciation or judgment of art, then, goes after that form which is ethics; a form made up of personal sincerity and objective adequacy; of particular emotion and external adequacy.

There ls Greatness

In every artist we can feel a desire to be just to his material and to reality as such. Where an artist is just to specific material and what we take to be large, uncurtailed reality, we think that artist has greatness. Phidias we can see as careful, scrupulous, bold. He saw reality—using Zeus—in some grand way. We also can feel that he wanted to be exact, equitable, with his material. His personality, also, was not absent. So Phidias’ Zeus in its formal rightness and impressiveness has implicit ethics. Where there is greatness in the art, there is greatness in the ethics.

In Fragonard, we can see a scrupulosity, a desire to do a pink cheek justice, a blue eye, an airy landscape. A cheerful eighteenth-century face was reality for Fragonard; and he was impelled to do justice to a beamingly alluring duchess as Phidias was impelled to do justice to Zeus. Fragonard has been lately rising in critical esteem as a painter of reality in its largest sense; yet, even now, Phidias’ sense of reality is seen as definitely larger, deeper than that of Fragonard. What I’m getting at is this: there has been a disposition for criticism to judge an artist in keeping with how much of reality the artist has seen, or been just to.

We feel that the world of Michelangelo is a greater world than that of Watteau. So Michelangelo has been more just to uncircumscribed reality, to the infinite. To see a larger world is to be more ethical; to see more subtly is to see more ethically; to see more delicately is to see more ethically. We are fair to the world in proportion to how much beauty we see in it.

The reason in the past that art was seen as contrary to ethics, or separate from it, was ethics’ being seen as concerned principally with how many women you married or didn’t marry, whether you were good to lend money to, whether you were proper in conversation, whether you drank indiscreetly, and so on. All these matters still have to do with ethics. However, ethics begins with how you see. A just man is one who sees justly, or wants to see justly. A “good act” without a desire to see what is deserved, what is just, is a good act by accident; that is, is not wholly a good act.

The Highest Kind of Morals

I have quoted Clive Bell at the beginning of this writing. The work from which I have taken a sentence has hardly the glittering authority it used to have; yet it must be remembered that Bell’s Art, published in 1914, was a precursor of the criticism of art as form still prevailing. Whether Bell is as much of the moment as others may be, is not the chief consideration: what is important is, that Bell, while deprecating, disapproving the tendency to find a transitory or incomplete “morals” in art, goes far towards saying that art is the highest kind of morals. Bell says that what is essential in good art is the “good state of mind.” Hardly a critic or writer on art has not in some way, even if inadvertently, brought art and ethics into amiable relation. Ruskin went further than Whistler, say, in seeing art as ethical, but Whistler, with all his gaiety, color, and white, somewhere saw art as discipline, as formal virtue. Tributes to both art and ethics can be found in Plato, Cennini, Vasari, Du Fresnoy, Diderot, Hazlitt. It is true that they have often been combined badly; but a bad combination doesn’t mean that some true oneness does not exist. Bell’s sentences, however, are more than ever worth meditating on:

Art is not only a means to good states of mind, but, perhaps, the most direct and potent that we possess….Always it is the end in view that gives value to action; and, ultimately, the end of all good actions must be to create or encourage or make possible good states of mind….Creating works of art is as direct a means to good as a human being can practise.

I believe that in these sentences there is an indication that art may be ethics after all.

Man’s True Desire

However, what shows art to be ethics is the relation there has always been between the desire of man, the obligation of man, and reality. Man’s true desire is his obligation. His obligation is to see reality as fully as possible and be what he can be as much as possible. When this occurs, he is artistic because he is ethical; ethical because he is artistic.