Art in the light of conscience and responsibility to life, as well as in the mirror of own nature (a virtual dialogue)

Rozin Vadim Markovich Doctor of Philosophy Chief Scientific Associate, Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences  109240, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Goncharnaya, 12 str.1, kab. 310 rozinvm@gmail.com Other publications by this author

In December, the last two meetings of the seminar in 2021 were held, the general theme of which is devoted to the psychology of art (head of the Ph.D., senior lecturer of the Department of Personality Psychology of Moscow State University, head and teacher of the "Center for Musical and Plastic Development "Heptahor" named after S.D. Rudneva" Aida Aylamazyan). First, Ekaterina Taskeeva, an active participant of the Center, spoke, then Aida Melikovna. Two topics were discussed ? the origins of artistic creativity and the relation of art to life. If Taskeeva took the point of view of Mikhail Bakhtin, insisting on the direct responsibility of art to life, then Aylamazyan, on the one hand, agreed with Ekaterina, saying that art should spiritualize and transform life, making it authentic, therefore art is always "a mystery and a miracle", but on the other hand, she rather suggested understanding the attitude art to life as mediated, passed through the prism of the artist's creativity. Life events, Aida said, initiate the initial creative impulse and artistic intent, and, of course, are somehow expressed in the content of the work. Anyway, that's how I understood the speakers' positions.

Thinking over the controversy that unfolded at the meetings after the seminars, I remembered Bakhtin's early article "Art and Responsibility", and Marina Tsvetaeva's article "Art in the Light of Conscience", as if directly directed against her, and an interview in the magazine "Lehaim" by the famous Israeli writer Meir Shalev, whom I liked. It seemed that these authors unwittingly entered into a dialogue with each other. I decided to articulate it and continue by adding my voice to it. So, I present to the readers an imaginary virtual dialogue. It was started by Meir Shalev, whom some readers accused, firstly, of praising deviant forms of sexual experiences (for example, masturbation), and secondly, in one of the last novels "Two bears Came Out of the Forest" justifies revenge.           

Meir Shalev. (Interviewer of the magazine "Lehaim" Anna Solovey asks Shalev a question: "In your novel there is another plot that remains behind the scenes, but is invisibly present all the time. It is indicated in the title: “Two bears came out of the forest.” This is a direct quote from the biblical story of the prophet Elisha, who cursed the children who mocked him. After his curse, “two bears came out of the forest and mauled forty-two children.” This, as I understand it, is the key to the whole book?").

"In the story of Elisha and the bears," Shalev replies, "G?d behaves the same way as the inhabitants of this village. He sits on the sidelines, watches and even supports the murder. If you, say, curse someone, then no bears will come out of the forest. When the prophet Elisha curses, bears come out and tear the children apart. G?d stands aside at the same time. You could even say he supports the killing of children, releases bears from the forest. In both cases, we are talking about completely arbitrary cruelty that could have been prevented, but it did not happen <...> I have friends who, after the book was published, began to wonder if I was all right. Maybe I went through some kind of crisis or a disaster happened to me? They did not understand where this novel came from... Indeed, I included cases of extreme cruelty in it, although it was not easy for me to write about them myself. But this is not my personal experience that needs to be thrown out. I am very interested in revenge as a literary idea. It turns me on. The desire for revenge, in my eyes, is much stronger than jealousy or some religious feelings. Its consequences are tragic. There are three murders in the novel: in the thirtieth year, grandfather Zeev, then still young, kills his wife's lover, then the girl who is born to her, and seventy years later, Eitan, the husband of his granddaughter, takes blood revenge and destroys the bandits who killed grandfather Zeev. Revenge turns out to be healing for Eitan, heals him from the mental coma in which he remains for many years after the death of his son. Yes, the only thing that pulls him out of his illness is blood feud. And this angered some of my Israeli readers, they said: it is immoral to write that murder has a therapeutic effect, murder cannot cure! Well, you say, “impossible.” But the fact is that it is possible for certain people, as happened in my novel" ^[16].

(And here is Shalev's explanation about the first accusation). "I would call it not eroticism, but sensuality. I do not give detailed physiological descriptions of sexual contacts anywhere. But I am a sensual person, I appreciate sensations – taste, smell, touch, variety of colors – and share them with the reader…

As for homosexuality, I do not find it a perversion or a disease, it is a variant of normal personal and sexual relations of consenting adults. As, by the way, what is called “adultery”, and the relationship of two men and one woman, two women and one man, two couples. It's their own business…

As for the prohibition of "distribution" – no one can and should forbid a writer to describe life in all its manifestations. Following the logic of those who forbid novels about perversions, it is necessary to prohibit the printing of “Crime and Punishment” Dostoevsky as propaganda of murder and prostitution" ^[17].

Interestingly, speaking to teachers recently, I heard from one of them a similar accusation that Shalev propagandizes almost pedophilia. Specifically, she was referring to Meir Shalev's novel Fontanella. There are two episodes that, indeed, could provoke such an accusation from our teacher: one telling about the love of a young woman, Anya, who saved the hero during a fire when he was still five years old, and the other about the hero's short–lived love for his cousin Adelaide.  

The first episode. "Blessed be the sense of smell, which remembers better than all other senses. Damn the language that didn't provide the smell with the adjectives it needed. In the fields of other senses there is blue, and blurry, and delicious, and salty, and high, and low, and rough. But smells, like pains, have no names and names. Both of them have only borrowed words, and both of them are forced to memorize and compare: themselves ? with previous pains and smells, or with ancient words, the mysterious sound of which fills me with a deceptive sense of accuracy. I extract from my memory myrrh and nard, nahoat and lot, and most importantly, Akhalot, and I feel that they all came into the world to predict Anya for me. And since even a dictionary definition may be useful in the absence of a name, I will only say that akhalot is a fragrant plant from the Bible, and metaphorically it is a fragrance emanating from the loins of a young woman with disheveled hair and tall stature, while a young man whom she saved from death and who just she has shaved her head, lies close to her, and she touches herself, and then him, to anoint him as a king or a prophet. Is there another language in the world in which all this is meant by the same word? If there is, then this is my language. If there is a nation in the world that speaks it, then it is my people, its god is my God, its country is my country. But in the language of my people there are words only for memory, and for madness, and for stupidity, and in the language of my mother ? only the names of “poisons”, and the colors of all kinds of death.

Anya's hand has returned from the abyss, and her scent is the supposed smell of molten gold and the familiar scent of flowering broom and burnt sage. Her fingers passed over my face, slid across my forehead, rounded over the bare fontanelle, circling around it, as if outlining a bouquet of cornflowers or a royal crown, converged over it and consecrated it too. I remember: my face in front of her face and my chest in front of her chest, legs bent against the mirror of her legs, stomach pressed against the reflection of her stomach. Her hand returned to my loins again, took a full palm, rose again and anointed my eyes and forehead, descended and anointed my lips, and the angel's kiss rose to my nose. My eyelashes stuck together. The nostrils flared. The forehead dissolved. Every breath filled the voids in my body. I was young and old at that moment, I knew what action she was performing, but I did not know its meaning.

"You're mine now, Fontanella. Wherever we go, me or you, you will always be mine.

And she stroked me again, my cheek and my nose, my parted lips, and my licking tongue, and my glued eyelashes. Her head is bent towards me, the ear of her neck is bent, the snake is crawling across the wheat field" ^{[18, p. 114]}.

The second episode. "I spent five exhausting weeks in the company of my cousin and began to understand both Amuma's love for Apupa and her complaints about his body. My rib broke in her embrace, and my body was covered with blue, yellow, and black spots, the color of which testified to the different age of their appearance.

– Tell her that you just got out of the hospital a year ago!  Gabriel laughed, but I endured my torments heroically. I loved her strength, her height, her weight and her passion, which I could not always satisfy, and the unrestrained anger that seized her when she did not come. And when one day she got up, took the white dress of her German aunt Bertha from Gabriel, folded the photos she brought from there and the ones she took here, and said she had to go home, I was sincerely saddened. I knew that she would not come back and that I would not go to her, but next to sadness, relief smiled in me. So it's me, not everyone in our family.

In the first months after leaving, she sent me a photo of some part of her body every few weeks: shoulder, top of her chest, rounded knee, “muscle and head”, venus hill, left eye on a generous scale, but closed, chin and half of her mouth, and a bunch of navels - each time in a different corner of the photo. I kept them so that someday I could assemble a whole Adelaide from them, but she never sent me any palms, no feet, no whole mouth, or right eye. But it was “enough for me” that she sent me to get into oblivion, and every time I wanted her, she immediately appeared in my memory: the serpentine curls of her hair, the bright endless plains of her back, the well of her navel, the wheat mound of her belly, the dunes of her thighs. Like a seagull flying into its nest, I remember the cliff of its ribs, I spread my wings before landing..." ^{[18, p. 75, 109]}.

Probably, our teacher could turn to Bakhtin in support of his reading of "Fontanella".

Mikhail Bakhtin. "Art is too bold, self-confident, too pathetic, because he has nothing to answer for life, which, of course, will not be able to keep up with such art. “And where are we,— says life, "art, and we have everyday prose.” When a person is in art, he is not in life, and vice versa. There is no unity between them and the interpenetration of the inner in the unity of personality. What guarantees the internal connection of personality elements? Only unity of responsibility. For what I have experienced and understood in art, I must answer with my life, so that everything I have experienced and understood does not remain inactive in it. But there is also guilt associated with responsibility. Life and art should not only bear mutual responsibility, but also blame for each other. The poet must remember that his poetry is to blame for the vulgar prose of life, and let the man of life know that his undemanding and frivolity of his life questions is to blame for the sterility of art. A person should become entirely responsible: all her moments should not only fit side by side in the time series of her life, but penetrate each other in the unity of guilt and responsibility" ^[2].

I must say that this statement of Bakhtin is ambiguous. What kind of life does Bakhtin write about? At first glance, it seems that we are talking about the life that the artist describes and expresses ("poetry is to blame for vulgar life"), and then Bakhtin could join our teacher: yes, Shalev is almost a sexual maniac, and moreover, he sings his desires in works of art. But at the same time Bakhtin speaks about the life of the artist himself ("When a person is in art, he is not in life, and vice versa"; "For what I have experienced and understood in art, I must answer with my life so that everything experienced and understood does not remain inactive in it"). It turns out a complex picture, which still needs to be understood.          But Tsvetaeva seems to strongly object to Bakhtin. She is convinced that art should not be responsible for life, and the artist should not be responsible for morality and goodness.

Marina Tsvetaeva. "Artistic creativity in other cases is a kind of atrophy of conscience, I will say more: a necessary atrophy of conscience, that moral flaw without which it, art, cannot be. In order to be good (not to tempt these little ones), art would have to give up a good half of itself. The only way for art to be obviously good is not to be. It will end with the life of the planet <...> “An exception in favor of genius.” Our whole attitude to art is an exception in favor of genius. Art itself is the genius in favor of which we are excluded (turned off) from the moral law." "The state of creativity is the state of dreaming, when you suddenly, obeying an unknown necessity, set fire to a house or push a friend down a mountain. Is this your act? Clearly yours (you're sleeping, you're sleeping!). Yours is in full freedom, your act is without conscience, you are of nature." "The poet is often compared to a child by the assumption of innocence alone. I would compare them on the assumption of one irresponsibility. Irresponsibility in everything except the game" ^[15].

(However, an artist is not a scientist, he does not have to be consistent and consistent in his statements. So Tsvetaeva easily refutes herself).

"So, a work of art is the same work of nature, but it should be enlightened by the light of reason and conscience. Then it serves good, as a stream that turns a mill wheel serves good. But to say about any work of art is a blessing, the same as to say about any stream is a benefit. When is the benefit, and when is the harm, and how much more often is the harm!..." "If my things detach, enlighten, purify – yes, if they seduce — no, and it would be better for me to hang a stone around my neck" ^[15].

Shalev agrees that revenge has no place in the modern world, but at the same time says that "it is possible for certain people, as happened in my novel."         

I assume that in addition to differences in positions (Bakhtin is a literary critic and a philosopher of art, Tsvetaeva is a poet, in this case reflecting on art, Shalev is a writer, an artist), our virtual interlocutors understand the nature of art and its attitude to life differently. It is worth starting with Bakhtin. I would call his understanding of art "artistic platonism." What does the artist's responsibility to life mean?  This can be understood in such a way that art should dictate life, spiritualize it, that art is the real life, and ordinary, as Plato would say, exists "by familiarization with art." Art, Bakhtin writes, "gathers the world scattered in the sense and condenses it into a complete and self–sufficient image" (Compare with the statement of Martin Heidegger, who claims that it is in art that the "truth of being" is revealed, revealed and retained: "an artistic work," he writes, "reveals the existence of being in its inherent way. In creation, this revelation is accomplished-the discovery, that is, the truth of what exists") ^{[14, p. 72]}. At the same time, probably, Bakhtin is not talking about any art, but about the genuine one. Based on this concept, he also asserts a number of important provisions that many do not understand, for example, art completes ordinary life, "when a person is in art, he is not in life, and vice versa," a necessary condition for an aesthetic attitude is the position of non–necessity and "non-semantic activity," etc.

Mikhail Bakhtin. "An aesthetically creative attitude towards the hero and his world is an attitude towards him as having to die (moriturus), opposing his semantic tension of saving completion; for this, it is clearly necessary to see in a person and his world exactly what he does not see in himself in principle, remaining in himself and seriously experiencing his life, the ability to approach it not from the point of view of life, but from another — out-of-life active. The artist is able to be out of life active, not only from the inside involved in life (practical, social, political, moral, religious) and understanding it from the inside, but also loving it from the outside ? where it is not for itself, where it is turned outside of itself and needs extra-ordinary and extra-semantic activity. The divinity of the artist is in his communion with the supreme being. But this non-involvement in the event of other people's lives and the world of this life is, of course, a special and justified kind of involvement in the event of being. Finding an essential approach to life from the outside is the task of the artist. In this way, the artist and art in general create a completely new vision of the world, an image of the world, the reality of the mortal flesh of the world, which none of the other cultural and creative activities knows. And this external (and internal-external) definiteness of the world, which finds its highest expression and consolidation in art, always accompanies our emotional thinking about the world and about life. Aesthetic activity gathers the world scattered in the sense and condenses it into a complete and self-sufficient image, finds an emotional equivalent for the transitory in the world (for its present, past, its existence), animating and protecting it, finds a value position from which the transitory of the world acquires value event weight, receives significance and stable certainty. An aesthetic act gives birth to being in a new value plan of the world, a new person and a new value context will be born – a plan of thinking about the human world" ^{[3, p. 65]}.

  I would agree with Bakhtin's concept of art, but with amendments. Yes, art influences ordinary life and even constitutes it, but not always, but under certain conditions. These include the state of culture, as well as the type and upbringing of a person. For example, in ancient culture, art played a significant role, and in medieval culture it played a smaller role, since it worked for the Christian faith and the church. Similarly, the romantic personality was more inclined to art than the average modernist person of that time. "In the artistic and figurative structure of the Romantics," the literary critic L. Achkasova writes, "the traditional-romantic "duality" is aesthetically accentuated: the world of real being, the vulgar scum of life from which the heroes seek to alienate themselves, and the "world" of being ideal, corresponding to their romantically exalted ideals and personified in timeless "eternal" values ? Love, Nature, Art. Moreover, art has a special place, because it itself has the ability to create an ideal (desired) world, independent of the surrounding reality" ^{[1, p. 132]}.

If for Plato, being was set by ideas to which consistency, order and good were attributed, then for Bakhtin, their equivalent was artistic form and language.

Mikhail Bakhtin. "To enter into the visible, audible, pronounced by the creator and thereby overcome the material extra-creative-definite character of the form... when reading and listening to a poetic work, I do not leave it outside of myself as another's utterance... but to a certain extent I make it my own utterance about another, I assimilate the rhythm, intonation, articulatory tension, internal gesticulation... as an adequate expression of my own value attitude to the content… I become active in the form and in the form I take a value position outside the content ? as a cognitive-poetic orientation" ^{[4, pp. 58-59]}.

Marina Tsvetaeva. "The shyness of the artist before the thing. He forgets that he is not writing. Vyacheslav Ivanov's word to me is “Just start! Already from the third page you will see that there is no freedom,” that is: I will be at the mercy of things, that is, at the mercy of a demon, that is, only a humble servant <...> And the share of will in all this? Oh, huge. At least not to despair when you are waiting for the weather by the sea<...> My will is hearing, not to get tired of listening until you hear, and not to bring in anything that you haven't heard" ^[15].

I think for Tsvetaeva, art forms an independent world, parallel to the usual one, and the artist does not influence this world, so he often looks like a loser.         

Marina Tsvetaeva (from the diaries)

"I am despised – (and have the right to despise) – by everyone.

Employees for not serving, writers for not printing, servants for not being a lady, ladies for wearing peasant boots (servants and ladies!).

In addition, everything is for lack of money.

1/2 despises, 1/4 despises and pities, 1/4 – pities. (1/2 + 1/4 + 1/4 = 1)

And what is already outside the unit – Poets! – they admire" ^[15].

Now Meir Shalev. He doesn't have a direct discussion of what art is. But from his books and interviews, something like this picture emerges. On the one hand, Shalev considers art as a world created by the artist, in which it is possible to comprehend and develop an attitude to existential problems that concern the artist (and the potential reader). For example, Shalev thinks over the problems of revenge and universal egoism of modern man and artistically comprehends them in the novel "Two bears Came Out of the forest". Some of his readers are also acutely experiencing these problems.

Panda007. Don't kill? Kill, kill! "A powerful, beautiful and scary novel. Once again, I am convinced that it is not the essence of what the writer is talking about: the plot of Shalev can be retold in a few sentences. And the story will be the most banal, especially if you remove the bloody details. And it's impossible to break away. I strongly suspect that the point here is emotional persuasiveness. The novel is written as if in one breath. You get into this whirlpool of strong emotions... the current picks you up, carries you, and you can't cope with it anymore. And I don't want to cope. The author's persuasiveness is such that while you are reading, you perceive the family story being told simply as a fact – “it was like that.” And only after reading it, you fall into a kind of stupor. The story is about the fact that (according to the apt expression of Lars von Trier) “all shits”. Or, as the heroine of the famous movie said: “Gentlemen, you are animals.” Actually, after that, the question is “How was the Holocaust possible?” it is removed from the agenda. Here you have the real destruction in one absolutely beautiful Jewish village. Two brutal and targeted murders. Everyone knows everything, everyone is silent. And here's the killer's granddaughter, who also knows everything, but continues to live with her beloved grandfather until his death. All so thin, sonorous, transparent, Bialika quotes every now and then. And he doesn't even sleep with a student (although he wants to) – he waits until he grows up enough. Well, just the epitome of morality. The husband became a murderer? Yes, it's okay, the main thing came to life, began to speak and perform marital duties. Incredible adaptability, amazing double morality. A friend died – a tragedy, a stranger was killed – a new one will grow up" ^[6].

On the other hand, art for Shalev is a world, again created by the artist, which allows you to actualize (see, hear, feel, experience?live) ideals and other higher and ordinary (but inaccessible in ordinary life) realities and values. For example, the ideal of female beauty, as in the novel "Fontanella" (the scene in Schuster's house, where Pnina looked in ten mirrors).

Meir Shalev.  "Old Schuster sighed. His knees were buckling, his hands were looking for support. Ten Pnins looked at each other and immediately began to spin around in place to see each other from all sides, and when each of them completed the turn, they all laughed at once, pulled out ten hairpins and let their hair down at once. The old Schuster whispered: "No, Pninele..." ? and again "No..." ? but it was too late: a high, even sound, clear and prolonged, was heard, and before the real Pnina had time to understand what had happened, the mirror opposite her split in two, and its fragments fell to the floor. And immediately after him, the mirrors behind her burst, and the reflections on the side walls also crumbled into sparkling fragments. For a moment Pnina was afraid that she, too, was going to crumble, but then one of the fragments bit into her ankle. She screamed, tore out a glass splinter, looked at it and saw a fragment of herself in it.

At the exit from the synagogue, many of the villagers were waiting for her, who heard the loud sound of broken mirrors and the sorrowful cries of the old Schuster and ran to see what happened there. She passed between them and again saw her beauty in their eyes [her reflection flashing in their eyes], who for the first time saw and realized her beauty. Only now did the men understand why lately, wherever they went, their feet carried them through the school yard and always before the start of classes, or at their end, or at the big break. And the women understood why they were overtaken by abdominal and head pains at exactly the same hours. As for the Yofe family, where this girl was conceived, born and grew up, it, as always, understood what was happening after everyone and, as always, only with the help of a visual demonstration, because Pnina, returning home, went straight to the closet, opened it, and the hoodie that she once bought Hirsch Landau suddenly became elegant and elegant to her, joyfully shone towards her and, as if sliding, embraced her body" ^{[18, p. 43]}.

By the way, the fragment of the novel "Fontanella" quoted above about the love of the hero and Anya still needs to be understood correctly. After all, Anya is not represented visually here, the world of smells is presented. And the smells, especially of wild flowers and fields, in Shalev's novels embody, on the one hand, nature and beauty, on the other ? the world opposed to the city and civilization. Shavlev hints that the hero's love for Anya is akin to love for nature itself.

In the artistic world of his works, Shalev actualizes and also lives many other realities ? biblical plots and events, the history of the creation of Israel, the problems and vicissitudes of love in the family, the exhaustion of the heroic beginning of the creation of a new world ? I will not continue, it's worth reading his novels. I will now give my voice to your humble servant.

Author. First, what do I understand when talking about art ^{[7; 8; 9; 10]}. I will only tell you what I came to in my recent research ^{[11; 12; 13]}. The world of art is a second parallel world in relation to the ordinary world and life. As a special reality (the reality of art), it is created by a person (artist and viewer). It is created on the basis of semiosis (words, sounds, colors. schemes, metaphors, narratives, etc.), which allows the subjects included in it to live fully. The reality of art is in certain relations to the ordinary world and its realities; these relations are set by aesthetic concepts and concepts of art.

Depending on these concepts, art somehow affects ordinary life. In the history of European culture , three polar relations of art to life can be distinguished: 1) an attitude that works for culture and man (so to speak, humanistically oriented, let's call it conditionally "authentic", respectively, art is "authentic"), 2) deconstructing the reality of ordinary life and art ("postmodern" art), and 3) relations of a different nature, not directly focused on the first and second case ("traditional art" is the imitation of life, the expression of its realities, the identification of the sublime and beautiful, the creation of another reality, etc.). Socially, art develops and exists in a special space and communication ? leisure, free attitude (communication, observation, reflection, reflection, discussion). In society, language and works of art are used in two ways: in art itself and in various practices (politics, treatment, entertainment, etc.), in other words, it is "applied art".   

 From the point of view of these distinctions, Bakhtin's position can be attributed to genuine art, and Shalev's position partly to genuine, partly to traditional, and perhaps even partly to postmodern art (where his works deconstruct familiar psychological and social realities).

At the seminar mentioned at the beginning of the article, a dispute broke out over what should be considered art: one point of view is that only traditional and authentic art, and postmodern and applied art is not art, the other is that all of the listed types of art form modern art. My position in this dialogue is as follows. The artist as a representative of culture, creating his works, simultaneously solves the problems of culture. But they are different and in different ways depending on their understanding of art. Some artists work for authentic art, others for postmodern and applied art, and others do not go beyond traditional art. On the one hand, the artist acts and creates in the space of freedom, and therefore is unlikely to agree to take responsibility for life (Bakhtin). On the other hand, since art affects a person and ordinary life, the artist cannot help but think about his possible responsibility. Everything solves this dilemma in its own way and uniquely, it is hardly possible to formulate recipes and rules here. But in all cases, the role of the philosophy of art and art studies is clear, within which concepts of art are created, as well as samples of analysis and understanding of works of art.