Abstract: My objective in this paper is a limited and modest one: to illumine the suggestive analogy Michel Foucault proposed between life and works of art. This analogy presupposes that ethics and aesthetics have much in common than what is conventionally believed or assumed. My suggestion is that any attempt to unravel the true import of this analogy should clarify on two aspects of the human conduct, namely freedom and understanding.
Keywords: ethics, aesthetics, Michel Foucault, normativity, freedom, understanding
What did Michel Foucault intend to address by raising the following questions? He asks in an interview: “But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” (The Foucault Reader 351). These questions could be posed against the backdrop of a broad-based agreement that aesthetics and ethics have something in common at least. This agreement might appear tendentious, for there is a great deal of indefiniteness and imprecision over the assumed common ground between aesthetics and ethics. Although both of them are normative subjects and deal in values, one is prescriptive and customary while the other is non-prescriptive and individualist. To complicate the matters further, Foucault forcefully recommends later in the same interview that the problem of ethics must be construed as “an aesthetics of existence” (Ibid 354). Vague as it is, one implication is at least evident here that what Foucault was seeking was an ethics which is modelled upon aesthetics; an ethics that is non- prescriptive, non-normalised and unsparingly individualist. Would it be possible to have such an ethics?
In general, the manifest form of ethics means a code of conduct, a set of rules and prescriptions that are binding on practicing individuals, groups and communities. Ethics is for life in that it gives us a policy for living. Aesthetics, in contrast, is the domain of principles, rules and values meant for creating perceiving, judging and understanding objects of beauty and pleasure, either of art or of any other ordinary sort, rather than living a life. Despite a clear consensus that both these domains deal in values, and that the affinities one finds between them are suggested by this common characteristic, they are found to be too divergent from each other in terms of their purposes, functions and uses. Stuart Hampshire, the Oxford philosopher, provides some of the most telling contrasts in his article “Logic and Appreciation.” His central argument is that there is in fact such kind of a thing called a value judgement which is the genus for forms of judgement we later distinguish as aesthetic and ethical. However, he writes, “aesthetic judgements are not comparable in purpose with moral judgements, and that there are no problems of aesthetics comparable with the problems of ethics” (Hampshire 162). He maintains, quite perceptively, that in the sphere of ethics the movement of thought is from particular to general, i.e. to frame generalisable principles from the examples of particular instances; while in aesthetics any such move amounts to travelling in the wrong direction. The corresponding contrast he builds up is between a moralist and a spectator-critic; and how each in his/ her capacity employs different means, like the former using arguments, generalisable principles and judgements while the latter using perceptual judgements alone, to substantiate their respective views. Foucault might forthwith advocate the abolition of ethics construed along Hampshire’s lines, and he would also perhaps add that the particulars can very well take care of themselves. But Hampshire in his turn would resist only to declare that “everyone needs a morality to make exclusions in conduct; but neither an artist nor a critical spectator unavoidably needs an aesthetic” (Hampshire 165). This dispensability of the aesthetic, though not understood in a pejorative sense, is only one side of the problem. But, more urgently, the menace Hampshire’s arguments pose to what Foucault is hinting at through his cryptic remarks is of a very serious nature. If we go with Hampshire, then we would have something like a science, or perhaps a prescribed mode of practice, or a calculus of sorts, the aim of which would be to formulate principles binding on human conduct, or at least to harness some intuitions into the shape of a set of rules, which will guide human action in all situations involving moral choices. Oddly enough, Foucault could not advocate a view which will require that ethics be modelled upon aesthetics while still agreeing with Hampshire. We seem to have hit upon what appears like an irreconcilable deadlock.
The idea is not to set Hampshire and Foucault as polar opponents who simply hold what appears to be the two horns of a dilemma. In fact, Hampshire, although a philosopher, was a man of sharp literary sensibilities with an impressionistic temperament and a natural instinct for the life of mind. If pushed hard, he might well agree with Foucault. And for Foucault, he never addressed the topic of “life as a work of art” deeply enough, at least with a view to develop some well worked out relationship between ethics and aesthetics. Most of his remarks were concise, rhetorical and unsystematic. However, that does not make these remarks lose their force and suggestiveness. And he did not utter these as a philosopher who was motivated to give a coherent and systematic account of aestheticised ethics. He chose to adopt the analogy of art and life to describe what his genealogical inquiries succeeded in revealing about the formative conditions of the ethics of ancient Greeks and Romans. What he openly claimed was that he was only giving genealogical accounts of what in antiquity was taken to be ethics in order to retrieve certain assumptions, unfamiliar to modern sensibilities, about sexuality in antiquity. One can only speculate what Foucault may have had to say about ethics in general, and so much so, how ethics may be aestheticised. As it happens, the ethics-aesthetics divide, in particular as it was drawn up by Hampshire, falls far short of what can be fruitfully and legitimately said on this topic. In my view, Hampshire arrives at his conclusions because he was willing to build only on the basis of what is prima facie evident about ethics and aesthetics and not on the basis of any notion or an intimation of a stronger affinity between them.
My objective in this paper is a limited and modest one: to illumine Foucault’s suggestive and striking analogy between works of art and life. My suggestion is that any attempt to unravel the true import of this analogy should clarify on two aspects of the human conduct, namely freedom and understanding. In due course, to build the necessary ground, I will examine the contours of the ethics-aesthetics divide, as explicitly drawn by Hampshire, in view of Foucault’s scepticism about such a division.
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There is something very peculiar about the nature of modern art, as we inherit it, and as it is practiced now. If Arthur C. Danto is right, modern art is what it is because its practitioners know how to pick objects which can become art, of course with a serious intention of creating art, sometimes from the most unusual, considered to be almost art-unworthy places of the world. This is to make art objects blatantly bear on their appearances, most visibly, the stance that the purpose of being called art is not to align with the rest of the reality. The status of art, as mark of distinction, is earned by certain kinds of objects by virtue of an advertent withdrawal from the sphere of ordinary objects and practical interests. It is something that is there, to be contemplated, to be viewed with utter disinterestedness and to be meditated upon. Here contemplation, as an act of closely attending to an object, is an utterly de-contextualised activity.
Artworks appear as objects apparently disengaged from their surroundings, though still admitting very complex relationships with the world that embeds them. This account holds good for the general analytic patterning that sets art and its viewers (aesthete/connoisseur) in a certain relational scheme. This scheme decides in advance on a number of issues ranging over the questions pertaining to the value of art and the competence required for understanding works of art. Likewise, the development of aesthetics, roughly in the last two hundred years or so, did a great service of clarifying the schematic relationship between art and the aesthete and, in due course, evolved varied and highly nuanced models of aesthetic perception and reception. Indeed, aesthetics is as much an apologist enterprise for art after the eighteenth century as positivism is for a certain view of modern science. And the core of this enterprise is to defend the view that the availability of art to acts of understanding presupposes certain forms of attention which foster something called an aesthetic attitude.
For Stuart Hampshire a conception of the aesthetic would be along these lines, even if we construe it rather narrowly. What Hampshire fails to recognise is that there is a diachronic aspect to art; that one of the key assumptions is that art undergoes shifts of incommensurable kinds across history even as its presuppositions vary from culture to culture.1 And these changes spring from a variety of sources, beginning from those of sensibility and taste to politics and economy. However, in the course of it, the artist retains the sovereign self-image of someone who can imaginatively reconfigure the territory of art and redefine its nature. And none of his/her activities are gratuitous. This is irrespective of how the image of the artist survives in any particular culture, either as a nameless entity or as a juridical and legal fiction. Besides, there is no one static model of mere spectatorship, as Hampshire assumes, about the relationship between art and its connoisseurship. If we take aesthetics in the broadest possible sense it aims to explain all the concepts, feelings and attitudes that form our experience of beautiful objects, not necessarily of art. This explanation is not just in terms of a model of spectatorship or connoisseurship, but in terms of a diachronic view of the shifts that the world of art sustains across a timescale. One may also object that Hampshire’s views can be held true only of post-romantic art in the Western world. Art in times earlier to Romanticism was a feature of objects embedded in broadly non-secular contexts of ritual, worship, liturgy and theological imagination. What is important here is the kind of value that art as an institution in society represents, and the self-images it propagates. And this value of art should not just reflect a value that is generalised from any particular period in the history of letters. And aesthetics, liberally construed, stands for an experience of a sense of sovereignty an artist, or any active individual, enjoys over what he could create, alter and re-envision at will. This is a much amplified definition of the aesthetic than Hampshire would perhaps be willing to admit.
One can note that Hampshire is unwilling to view ethics from a broader perspective than what is conventionally sanctioned. For him the issue is a simple one: starting from an affinity view of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics he sets out to seek the differences between them. He concludes that they are too far apart that the initial affinity is overridden by an increasing litany of differences.
In Hampshire’s scheme of things, ethics is a guide for conduct in real life situations; an issue of policy and what informs it in a particular situation. It is hardly of concern whether the individual seeking this guidance is untutored, or informed and wise, but what counts at the end is the decision taken and its rightness or wrongness, which stands justified by the moral thinking employed. Thus, taking a few sample moral problems and their proposed or adopted solutions into account, one could construct a calculus of sorts to create an apparatus for moral thinking, including hypothetical problems and their solutions. Obviously for Foucault this view commits all the flaws – normalisation, prescription, erasure of the individual and so on – that he so relentlessly campaigned against throughout his life, while advocating his hallmark contribution to critical thought, namely the “resistance.” As it appears, since he recommends “an aesthetics of existence,” Foucault is only affirming what Hampshire straightaway negates about ethics. There is a temptation to argue that one of these positions should be the right one, but the danger lies in actually seeing a position in Foucault. We do not know what Foucault’s position would be like, for he did not develop any explicit and sustained position on ethics.
There is always an unresolved ambiguity about Foucault’s intellectual position, whether to treat him as a historian or as a philosopher. However, Foucault’s work, to take a positive view of the matter, is doubly qualified to be called both history and philosophy. Although it is a complementary view, there are certain problems. On the one hand, Foucault was writing intellectual histories; and on the other hand, there was always a meta-stance at work, scathingly vigilant in fact, unearthing the hidden handiwork of some invisible design that constitutes the status of ideas, representations, and knowledge in history. What he wrote were no doubt works of history albeit understood in a qualified sense, as histories of thought as they took shape under the influence of complex enabling historical conditions (The Use of Pleasure 9). As a result, our task of classifying Foucault becomes much more complex, and there is no easy way any such historian could actually escape the ambit of pure thought into only considering empirical matters for pure thinking is always attended by normative presuppositions. In addition, he was one such philosopher who kept changing his methods of investigation – structuralism, archaeology and genealogy – not just issues, from time to time.2
Towards the end of his career, Foucault brought his earlier innovations to bear on his latest interest: sexuality. The fruits of this effort are the three volumes of The History of Sexuality. While the first one addresses modern age, the latter two volumes exclusively concern the ancient Greek and the Hellenistic periods. Although his primary interest was sexuality and how it was understood at different points in history, he could have worked his way into his research only by interpreting a variety of textual sources of antiquity dealing with diet, medicine, food, moral conduct and cosmetics in view of their direct or indirect concern with sexual behaviour. Here he donned the role of a cultural historian. But that is not where he wanted to stop; his motive was to shed the habitual familiarity we normally assume about sexuality, in the wake of its recent history. This can happen only if there were contrastive assumptions about sexuality. Now, by extracting the ‘theoretical’ and ‘practical’ contexts in which sexual behaviour was understood in the ancient world, one can construct such a contrast. Foucault was deeply aware that ‘our’ notion of ‘sexuality’ is only of much recent provenance, including the very term, in the known history of several thousands of western civilisation.3 Hence, standing at a great historical remove, the task of ascertaining what ancient sources meant about ‘sexuality’ amounts to extracting views and attitudes which make no explicit reference to sexuality, either directly or obliquely. His task then would amount to making explicit what was only implicitly available in the various textual sources of medicine, psychology, and ethics of that time which concern and address human conduct in general.
Consequently, Foucault’s work naturally involved an interpretation of ancient ethics, even if only to throw light on how the Greeks understood sexuality. More precisely, it was about how ethics in antiquity understood sexual behaviour, ‘problematised’ in Foucault’s terms, as a sphere of experience that was subject to ethical precepts. However, one cannot address this question without recuperating a larger scheme of values – like eudaimonia, pleasure, phronesis – that were a part of the ethical life envisioned by the Greeks. The question now would be whether Foucault’s probing into ethics should be construed as that of a historian or as that of a philosopher? The historical analyses of ethics, so called because of “the domain they deal with and the references they appeal to” (The Use of Pleasure 9), then, quite frequently get intercepted by Foucault’s philosophically motivated interpretive stances. He wrote: the “object is to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently” (Ibid.). If historicising Greek ethics could unravel what is being silently thought about it, then this ‘unthought’ would make it possible to go beyond what is now being thought. In Foucault’s work this amounts to showing us that one could think about Greek ethics, and the ethics of any other culture for that matter, in ways which go beyond what they apparently mean or intend. For example, it is conventional to view ethics in relation to what it has to offer for leading a good life or a moral life. But, Foucault would ask, what is it to probe into matters of moral conduct from the standpoint of sexual desire? What is the way in which desire adapts itself to the conditions of norms? How do habits shape action in response to the rules of conduct? Or, how does one look at a moral regulation in view of a natural desire or propensity which prompts him/her to break it? More specifically, how should one evaluate the ethical significance of austerity, celibacy and abstinence?4 What interests Foucault is the emotional and deliberative complex that enables a person to acquiesce something as a rule, and come to terms with it; and the ethical culture premised on the assumption that individuals work within themselves, i.e. manage their emotional-deliberative lives, to lead a moral life. These questions are quite novel and spring from a very different perspective in that they sidestep the normative significance of ethical concepts in favour of a rather fluid view of human nature that adapts itself to different normative codes. So, what interests Foucault is not the code per se but the psychological complex of emotions and attitudes that enables an individual to mould his behaviour to suit a particular code. For instance, one of Foucault’s objectives was to understand the moral value of sexual pleasure in antiquity, thus making it appear that any interest in ethics per se is only of derivative significance. 5
As it happens, when Foucault celebrates the Greek ideals of moderation and sophrosyne, as exemplifying a certain kind of management of bodily desires, his perspective is dependent on the conventional picture of ethics. The conventional picture of ethics suggests that there are impersonal patterns and relations, of power, of state, and of authority, of religion and politics, which create conditions for an individual to understand and judge what is right, wrong, good and bad. But his intention was not to buy Greek ethics at its face value. Instead it was to ascertain the extent to which the ideal of, say, moderation was instrumental in mediating the relationship between these impersonal patterns of norm and law and individuals. From the standpoint of his genealogical inquiries, what attracted him to the Greek and Roman views of ethics was that there was in them an “absence of normalisation,” at least in the sense in which normalisation became a part of modern social life. Besides, ethics in the ancient world was construed more along the lines of what pattern of behaviour is suitable for an individual with a given position in society and a corresponding psychological endowment than in terms of “giving a pattern of behaviour for everybody” (The Foucault Reader 341). And Greek reflections on human conduct, as he interprets them, stand for this non- normalised ethics. Therefore he descriptively characterises them in terms of “stylisation of desire” and “aestheticising ethics.” And he calls them personal ethics. In any case, notwithstanding Foucault’s sympathies for moving through and beyond normalisation through practice, all this is a very far cry from what for him a systematic and well worked out non- normalised conception of ethics for modern conditions of life would be like. However, what can be generally inferred is that the idea personal ethics—the view that ethics must enclose all that activity which corresponds to different forms of self-relation as self-cultivation, care of the self, hedonism etc. – would offer a way of seeing affinities between ethics and aesthetics. But the problem again would be to creatively imagine such a form of ethics which is not burdened by normativity. The Greco-Roman ethics might give us an opening. But the insurmountable difficulty lies in the fact that we live in highly normalised and bureaucratised societies and not in city states sustained by a closed civic life, slavery and pastoral economy.
The aim of this paper is not to develop a systematic conception of ethics which entails a theory of aesthetics, nor vice versa. Such an enterprise would be ambitious and grand and probably would require a more elaborate treatment. My goal thus far has only been to demonstrate that the grounds on which ethics is conventionally separated from aesthetics, as indeed Hampshire captures them, do not hold; and that one can at least see an opening of sorts in Foucault’s genealogical inquiries.
Now, what is it to say that the lives we lead can be modelled after the works of art? Here there are two issues which need an extended gloss since they play a crucial role in strengthening our hand in search of the affinities between ethics and aesthetics even as they help us unpack the suggestiveness and intimations of this analogy. They are freedom and understanding. Hampshire does not envisage a role for these two concepts in his framework. Although Foucault would have a lot to do with them, he does not talk in terms of these concepts.
First, freedom. One of the apparent contrasts in this analogy is between life and art, and how, in the course of dealing with both these we rework our assumptions about what is real and what is unreal. But the difficulty lies in capturing the moment when this contrast is at its sharpest point. Besides, one lives a life, but one does not live art. In contrast, one makes art, and it is not fanciful to assume that one could make one’s life. Thus, what is common between art and life, and that is when we could perhaps talk about the freedom in art and life in comparable terms, is that both of them admit the idea of making in different proportions, and also allow different degrees of effort and imagination involved in such acts of making. Then the idea of making, poieisis, is a sort of bridge between art and life. Living a life towards the goal of happiness and fulfilment could very well entail making choices and decisions, responsibly, whose ultimate objective is to live according to one’s ideas and purposes. The acts of deliberation that precede these choices, and the effort involved in living according to the choices made is very much the domain of the ethical. This is much like making a work of art in accordance with one’s own ideas, intentions, wishes, objectives and vision.6 Indeed, the formal character of a work of art, as an object that is designed and executed purposively, merits comparison with the scrupulousness one shows while attending to one’s life. In a sense, the idea of freedom must correspond to the idea of making, wherever it is employed. Therefore, the analogy of the freedom an artist enjoys while indulging in creative acts could help one imagine or vicariously experience the freedom that he/she might enjoy or want to enjoy as a moral agent.
Second, understanding. The artist’s capacity to make is in some way rooted in the order of understanding he/she develops over a period of time. In a sense the impetus to create is as much governed by laws of understanding relative to a person, which in turn remain aligned with the background principles of understanding in general that enable a work art to be communicated at all. Likewise, the idea of freedom implicit in the idea of ‘creating oneself as a work of art’, accompanied with an unreserved antipathy towards whatever the factor be that scuttles it, is anchored in a certain order of understanding oneself with a view to inform a person on how to manage his/her moral ends. Thus for anyone indulging in the creation of art, involving a certain order of execution in so far as to deliver something as a work of art, the decisions and choices he/she makes are not arbitrary, nor of course rudely conditioned by some crass form of determinism or overdetermination. Those who are free enough to create their life have their strategies, choices and decisions rooted in the manner in which they construe the world around them; in the way in which the general principles of understanding enable them to transform their sense of life, as they view and understand it. This transformation need not be of the kind that could be specified in advance, for the details of one’s life need not fit into a patterning already evolved, and there begins one’s tryst with ethics which does not take the form of either a covenant or an instance of rule-following. Thinking about morality need not be rigorously squared to some model of practical rationality that would justify the means employed to realize certain ends – political, moral, social and aesthetic – which sustain relations among themselves as it happens in a matrix.7 This does not mean that one has no scope to think in terms of ends, both public and personal, and principles which govern the achievement of these ends. As it seems, the personal ends are crucial and they determine the trajectory of a self-transformation one would want to follow.
Broadly these are the two concepts, along with the assumptions about action and knowledge they contain, implicit in seeking an analogy between a work of art and life, and derivatively between ethics and aesthetics, particularly of the sort that Foucault tacitly invoked and Hampshire overtly negated. Hampshire maintains that ethics and aesthetics are two separate spheres of human activity, with independent expressions; that they appeal to two different types of sensibilities, values and forms of human conduct. Contrastively, what merits a closer scrutiny is the nature of the activity involved in both of these spheres. It is the same kind of activity whether employed on an easel or on the life of an individual, in that only the kind of constraints which apply on an artist in creating art must apply to an individual who, as he faces his life, is urged to shape it. The word “kind” here refers to activities which exhibit similarities in intent and structure, rather than substance; it is that, say, one can construe moral activity – the practical sphere – on the analogy of a productive activity – poieisis. This analogy becomes more telling if we examine models of ethics which give a pride of place to some determinate idea of self-constitution, either as will and its coordinates, or an order within the soul or a command structure that coordinates the relationship between the soul and the body. In these models much depends on how the constitution of the soul is construed as a dynamic activity comparable to a productive enterprise. This ‘ethic of poieisis’ (131), to use Charles Taylor’s telling expression, sustains the analogy between ethics and aesthetics in terms of the similar kind of activity involved.8 Thus, if ethics is understood to have the dimension of relating to oneself, as opposed to some rule-bound moralism, then this must be the kind of an activity that is geared to self-constitution, which one could describe in terms of a moral psychology.
Ethics stands much to gain by seeking a description of its activity with the terms, categories and values which lie at the heart of aesthetics. The old story about ethics, of being a policy for conduct, should be rehabilitated if we see in ethics the expansiveness necessary to capture more complex dimensions of life. And this must be done by enlarging the scope of what we are prepared to count as ethical; that is, ethics must enclose, as much as aesthetics, among other things, all that activity which corresponds to the diverse forms we follow in relating to ourselves; that in contexts of self-relation ethics and aesthetics engage in a similar kind of activity in that it is possible to characterise them in each other’s terms. And one perhaps could do this without encroaching upon each other’s territory. This liaison could be achieved only if we are prepared to grant that ethics is something that exceeds the conventional characterisation of simply being a guide for conduct. In characterising thus we are subjecting ethics to a certain demand to scale down its emphasis on rules and prescriptions, even as we seem to grant aesthetics a free run into beauty and delight. To put the point sharply, we are in no mood to give up aesthetics and the notion of freedom it champions, but we want ethics to be much more than rules. This is because I take the category ‘aesthetic’ to be fundamentally descriptive of the very nature of human existence. To be is to be capable of being what one is by virtue of being able to shape up and design how we understand and respond to the world around.
NOTES
1 I use the term art to refer in general to all kinds of plastic and non-plastic art forms. Art, in a sense, refers to the general condition of expressive art, whether it is literature or painting or music.
2 I refer the reader to Ian Hacking’s review essay in the New York Review of Books for a fair review of the value, scope and innovativeness of Foucault’s methods of investigation.
3 The first volume, The Will to Knowledge deals with this issue.
4 It is appropriate to mention here that Michel Foucault was a major influence on the historian Peter Brown’s celebrated work The Body and Society, devoted the sexual practices of early Christians in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East.
5 Davidson’s work is particularly useful in this regard.
6 There are other proposals and insights nearly equivalent to this, from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; more recently, Alexander Nehamas, following Nietzsche, appealed to aestheticize one’s life (Nehamas, Nietzsche). At any rate, one cannot turn a blind eye to how much Foucault himself owed to Nietzsche.
7 It is hoped that this matrix would function in such a manner as to further the basic interests of a society. I have in mind an entire host of theories, from the early modern contractarianism to the latter day consequentialism, which broadly aim to do moral philosophy in this manner. Most of these theories view the possibility of moral philosophy only in terms of bridging private means with public ends, in the interests of a commonweal.
8 In his recent A Secular Age Charles Taylor characterizes a few seventeenth century neo-stoic conceptions of ethics using the analogy of poieisis.
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Contributor:
BHARANI KOLLIPARA. Bharani Kollipara currently works as an Assistant Professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Gandinagar. He teaches courses in philosophy and political theory.
